From Lead to Sale: Proven Strategies to Shorten Sales Cycles

It's very, very difficult to differentiate because I feel like there's significantly more competition across everything. There's more carmakers now. It used to just be like the big three right now. Now there's multiple choices. You've got Rivian and you've got Tesla and, you know, and all these other carmakers. And they're all making the same claims.

Too, about all of the things that.

Used to be unique, like Tesla could be. We're the electric car now. Everybody's got an electric car. And, you know, and we're growth and scale, but everybody's growth and scale, and everybody's got a book on growth and scale. You know, it's. It's. So I think that the consumer is probably confused a bit. And so because there are more choices to make, more choices always prolong decision making. And so they're just kind of overwhelmed.

And then the second thing is, I.

Think it's very difficult to make a truly compelling offer. Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Business Lunch podcast with your hosts, Ryan Deiss.

And me, Roland Frazier.

Ryan, how are you doing today?

I'm doing really great. Just got back from a family vacation in Colorado, where it's not swelteringly hot like it is here in Austin. And I know you. Yeah. Not skiing. No. It's hard to ski and. But we did do whitewater rafting, which was fun.

Yeah.

Got soaking wet, freezing cold.

Awesome. And you said it before. I did?

Yeah, man. Like 100 years ago, when I was probably a lot closer in age to my oldest son than I am in age to me right now.

So I bet you're very close in age to you right now.

Fair enough. And what about you? You just. You were in Jolly.

Yeah, In London.

We did our.

What I would say is our very best Epic Network live. Basically. We have our mastermind that meets over there and also have a couple people we invite to come. It was. It's always pretty small because the venues are fairly different over there, but we had, I think, about 26 people, and we closed a deal live, which was awesome. One of our Epic board members that had been working on a deal for, I think for two or three meetings was able to close it, and they. They wanted to do it live. So they actually came into the meeting and scheduled it so that during the middle of our meeting, we closed the deal. So everybody got to, you know, high five and clink classes. And that was. That was really cool. And we did an exercise that. That was basically just kind of a reach out to your Network exercise, not asking for anything, just touching base. And one of the people that was there was in the middle of a raise, and she. She raised an extra $200,000 in commitments while she was there just from that exercise. So that was like. It was just really cool. Like, you know, sometimes everything is firing and everybody's into it and on fire, and it just goes, well, that. That was. That was how it was. So I thought it was especially fun because of that.

Very cool. Yeah. I was going to. I was going to ask what made it different, but you answered that. That question. So.

Good, good news, too. For all of you that are listening and watching, we want to thank you. We cracked into the top two, 200 podcasts in the world out of all podcasts, of which there are millions, last week, and that. That couldn't happen without you guys. And so thank you all for listening and watching and tuning in and sharing this with your friends and reviewing. We appreciate all of that stuff. And, Ryan, thank you for. For being, you know, my co host and. And making things happen here. It's, It's. It's really cool. He. Ryan texted me this morning because I sent him a couple ideas, and he's like, I finally have something to contribute. I'm like, that you, like, every week he sends me ideas for stuff. I'm like, you contribute all the time, so.

Well, I appreciate you letting me sidle in those. If you're a newer listener. This was Roland's podcast for what, like, years? Couple years, yeah. You did it just, like, solo and interviewing people, and I was thinking about starting, you know, my own podcast for, you know, just to help support some of the other businesses. And it was like, why just, why don't we focus on one? And that's what we've done and, you know, changed up the format. Instead of it being an interview, it's just us kind of talking about God knows what, whatever's meaningful to us that week. And it's been cool to see people respond and, like, like the format, because I do think there's a lot of interview shows, and, man, it's just. They're kind of all the same. I know I get a little bit bored with it sometimes. I just want to hear somebody else's take on something, even if I disagree with it. It's like, just good to hear somebody's take.

So I think it's really fun. We're going to. We're going to try to step up our interviews so that we have kind of during the week, we've got, you and me. And then we have an interview guest just to kind of add some of that to a little Spice.

A little spice.

But yeah, that's really cool though. So thank, thank you all for doing that. We really, really appreciate that. It means a lot. And this week, I don't know if you saw what I sent you, but we were ranked. We were a little bit lower this.

Week because you go up and down.

But like the screenshot that I took because you can only fit four podcasts on Apple's rankings into your. Into at least what I used to look at it. And it was Business Lunch. Simon Sinek, Tim Ferriss, and Reid Hoffman, masters of scale. And I was like, that's pretty cool. You know, those guys are all people that, whose podcasts we listen to. And so it was really cool. I'm sure that they ravenously consume ours as well. I know Reed especially is always like, hey, send me another podcast. No, he's never done that. But, but it's cool just to be in that little grouping. So that said, let's talk about something that will be actually of interest to people. And I was thinking, do you want to talk about the slow growth thing first or do you want to talk about one of the ones that I sent over? What's your question?

Yeah, because it's fairly new, I think I'm going to have more to share in the coming months. But we've got about 30 days on this test that we've been running and I got enough data this morning to feel comfortable sharing what's, what's going on. So I'll kind of set it up. The. We've been looking at our, at our sales data, not, not just at the scalable company, but really digital marketer across a lot of our portfolio companies. And what we're finding is that conversion rates overall haven't changed that much over the last couple of years. Whether it's direct to consumer and it's online conversion rates or, you know, more of a sales first motion and it's, you know, know people talking to salespeople. Conversion rates haven't really changed. What has changed is the cost of acquisition of a lead and the time to sell, like from when, when somebody becomes a lead to when they finally buy like that. Just, you know, we're seeing those, those get pushed back further and further and further.

And so why do you think that is?

On the, on the cost?

I get it. Supply and demand and plus, you know, let's just say greedy Apple and Mark Zuckerberg and Google. But they, I Mean they do it because they can. More brands came in a lot of, you know, quote unquote dumb money, throwing money at online ads, trying to figure it out. And you know, those guys are in and out all the time. So they artificially push up the, you know, the rates. You've got the loss of the third party cookie, which is definitely, I'm seeing that affect lots and lots of people right now in terms of ad costs. I think that stuff kind of makes sense. What do you think is driving the time to conversion?

Yeah, increased sales cycles in general. I think it is consumers just getting more graspier with their dollars. Just people not wanting to part with the money. And I think a lot of this, we talked about it a hundred times, it's a function of interest rates being higher. It's a function of the government no longer giving out free money to everybody. You're seeing people's net worths go down. You know, in a lot of cases the amount of cash they have in their bank account is going down. Just look at inflation. You know, let's say it's everything is 20% more expensive than it was this time two years ago. Well, unless your income has increased more than 20%, it's just costing you more to live. You have less disposable income. So I think it's higher interest rates, I think it's higher inflation, I think it's people running through some of their savings. I think a lot of people overspent and over invested during the boom times and they didn't see the roi. And so I think a lot of that's just coming home to roost. I think they're just getting more thoughtful.

I think that maybe two other things that. Cause I'm not sure what we can do about that first thing but the other two and I want to get. Because to me these two things that you're talking about to start set everything up. But I think that one of them is that there is significantly more skepticism in marketing because pretty much all marketers are making the same claim. And so like in our space with scalable, it's we show you how to scale and grow your business. It's like, but, but so does everybody else. So it's very, very difficult to differentiate because I feel like there's significantly more competition across everything. There's more carmakers now. It used to just be like the big three right now. Now there's multiple choices. You've got Rivian and you've got Tesla and you know, and all these other car makers and they're all making the same claims too, about all of the things that used to be unique, like Tesla could be. We're the electric car now everybody's got an electric car. And, you know, and we're growth and scale. But everybody's growth and scale. And everybody's got a book on growth and scale. You know, it's. So I think that the consumer is probably confused a bit. And so because there are more choices to make, more choices always prolong decision making. And so they're just kind of overwhelmed.

And then the second thing is, I.

Think it's very difficult to make a truly compelling offer because how, you know, it goes back to differentiation and all the choices. But if you're, you know, if you're selling water and there's 152 types of water on the shelf in front of you. Why do I pick your water? Well, ours is made from hydrogen and oxygen. Oh, good. So is everybody else. Ours comes in a bottle. Ours comes in a plastic bottle. Ours comes in a box and says death on it. You know, I mean, it's. And that's a great example. Like, like, how do you stand out water, Liquid death, You know, how long does that last? I don't know. But, but it's niching down versus niching up. And so I think, I think those are things we can do something about. And so you're speaking to something we can do something about, I think, which would be that second class. Is it differentiation? Is it sales process? What is it?

It's definitely more on the sales process side because to your point, differentiation from a sales and marketing perspective, it's always going to have limited gains because it's out there for all to see. Right? So let's say you've got a truly unique mechanism. Right? Like that's kind of what you were talking about before. We've got a unique mechanism. We're doing something totally new that nobody's ever done before. Okay, awesome. But it's there for all to see. Unless you truly have some type of defensible IP around it, patent trade, you know, somebody else is going to do it, they're going to knock it off. Even, even if they are, they're going to figure out a way to do it. Messaging is not defensible. Like, they see you doing it, they can say the same thing. Like, so all of these things just get gobbled up.

It goes to a conversation you and I have had several times, and I've watched it out there with, with people that we know that. And it's kind of when I came into your world, you had War Room, which was a mastermind that was a marketing mastermind, was primarily at that time around marketing hacks. And it was awesome and I was new to the world so I, you know, I sucked it all up and I was great and I was like, yeah, we'll, we'll kill it with marketing hacks. And I think it'll be interesting to get your perspective on it too because I think that's where you were as well. But over time I think we saw that marketing hacks, because of what you just said, are only good until as long as they are secret and until they are adopted by enough other people to make them ineffective, which is very few, like maybe three more people adopt it and it becomes ineffective. So if you're building a business based on marketing hacks or you've got a mastermind that's focused on, here's all the latest hacks. You are constantly on a treadmill of readjusting everything. And by the way, not all of them work, not all of them are ethical. You know, once you dive into it, oh no, you can't do that. You can't, you know that, that, that strategy, when I dive into it is not something that I'm comfortable doing. And so we have to build our business on longer term differentiation and, and longer term efficiencies that we can build. And, and I watch, I, I think my son who's over here was sharing something with me and it's, it's like I was watching a group of people that, that are kind of hack focused and it's like the same people in the same place, frozen in time. Their businesses haven't been able to grow significantly. They're making great livings, they're doing, you know, they're that all, that's great. But you're not going to move up into the transferable value column of how do I actually get scalable if that's how you're building your business. So the thing you're talking about is something that isn't a hack, it's actually a long term strategy that can effectively improve efficiency by closing the gap between the time of discovery and the time of conversion. Right?

Yeah. Well, and because it's a long term strategy, I want to just, you know, disclaim. It's not going to, I'm going to share with you, it's not going to be as sexy as you might think because it's not a hack and it's not a trick. Right. And it's a combination of a lot of little things. It's not one thing that makes this whole process work. So, yeah, just to what you said.

Going back, what tool is it and what button do we press that makes everything.

Yeah, it's this brand new software now. So just. I'll tell you what we did because I think it'd be helpful to go through the process. So we realized, okay, people were getting in a lot of leads. Leads are more expensive. We got to figure out how do we turn these leads into buyers faster so that we can get a quicker roi, so we can put it back in there so we can grow and scale. That's the problem that we're solving for. So the first thing that we tried is let's just throw volume at it, let's throw violence at it. Right. What if, when a new lead comes in, let's emphasize speed to lead, let's emphasize outbound call volume. And these are all inbound stuff. These are all. This is not cold calling. These are all people who we have permission to follow up with. But check this out. I just got the data.

That's right, because they said that basically, I think after five minutes, your chances of closing a lead that comes in live diminishes by about 85%.

And that's what we've always heard. The data that we're seeing tells me otherwise. So in April, the team made 26,972 outbound dials. Okay, about 27,000 outbound dials to produce 152 sets, like to produce 180 appointments, 27,000 to produce 180 appointments. And then, you know, typically of those 180 appointments, the close rate was only about 10%. Right.

So for every 27,000 people that you talk to, you get 11 sales.

It was 17. Yeah.

You get 17 sales. Okay.

Yeah. So high ticket sales.

They're 40k ish, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, It's a bit. But what we were like, this is awful. And it's not, you know, it's, it's, it just isn't working. So it's not sustainable either.

Because how do you have a market? Like, if you like, you run out of leads pretty quick at 27,000 to get 17. Right. I mean, that's. If your market is, even if your market is a million, it's not many months, right, until you're like, who do I talk to now?

The unsubscribe rate was through the roof. The complaint rate was through the roof. The spam, like every it was also just. It's brand damaging. But we said, let's, let's test it. Let's just see and look, y'.

All.

Sometimes you gotta just try something extreme because, like, you want to be able to say, hey, we tried that. Because this is whatever. It's all about speed to lead. It's all about, you know, more volume. You just gotta follow up. You just gotta throw more. So we're like, you know what? Screw it, let's do it. Let's do it. And we did it and we got the data and it still didn't fricking work. And what we did is we burned out significant amounts of the leads. And when we looked at. Okay, let's look into this, into the people that bought, into the people that bought. How long had they been on the list? The average was still over 300 days. So all of that effort and it didn't actually produce any more sales. It didn't actually shorten the sales cycle at all. All it sought to do was to completely and utterly alienate a lot of these brand new leads that we had. It was easily one of the stupidest things.

Let me ask one data point because I'm not sure we're speaking to exactly the same thing. When we're saying speed to lead, it can mean lots of things. This sounds like it's really a test not of speed to lead as much as it is of volume. Right?

It was both because it was when.

Somebody called in, let's say, how fast till they not set the appointment, but how fast till they talk to an actual salesperson?

The calls were happening basically instantly the lead came in and it's. And the, the reps are there within. Within minute. They were doing. And they were doing a double tap, so no change. So that, so that was there. That was.

I, I know how many people we have. I find it hard to believe that, that we were actually talking to people that fast. I mean, and I'm not, I'm not doubting you. I'm.

They were. The data is there. I mean, that, that month we had 11 setters. So, yeah, trust me, it was happening. It was absolutely. It was absolutely happening. Now here's the thing. What we found is that of the people who actually bought, okay, the people that bought were not these brand new leads, but everything was about, let's try to get them to book an appointment if they didn't call right then and there. So by the way, I'm not saying that there shouldn't be still some speed to lead on some Kind of new point. But we found that the faster that we followed up with them, that wasn't the variable that made the biggest difference. What made the biggest difference is the people who wound up buying had consumed what we would call one of our pieces of pillar content. They had actually consumed some piece of pillar content. So not merely them becoming a lead, but they had consumed some piece of pillar content. So we asked ourselves, and I think this is. Go ahead.

And that goes with what I know at epic, we find too, the average, our best lead gen source or our best conversion source, I guess I should say, is the challenge that we do every month. And it's on average three challenges before somebody buys.

There you go. And so we asked ourselves of the people that bought, let's go back and look at what was, what had they done, what were the actions they took. And you know, we've got, we've got this data, we could go and look at it. And they had either consumed one of our pieces of pillar content, typically from a webinar that we do, or they had come to an event, our live event that we help hold once a year. They had, they had been to that and they had seen it there. And we asked them, like, how'd you know? Well, you know, I saw Ryan give this, or they had seen me give this talk somewhere. Right. But it all came down. And this is the question I think everybody should be asking, what is the one piece of content that I wish everybody saw before we asked them to make a buying decision? And I think this is true for B2B, B2C. I think the only difference is the higher the ask, the longer the content likely needs to be. Because, you know, Google did the Zmod study forever ago, the zero moment of truth study, and they found that before somebody makes a buying decision, typically it's going to be seven hours worth of content over 11 touch points and over four different locations. Right. That's still broadly the same thing that.

The direct mail associ told us even years before that it's, it was seven touches before somebody buys us. Hey, people don't generally just, especially if they're going to spend a significant amount of money. And with all of the research that's available out online now, it's unlikely that you're going to be like, wow, look at that ad. Yes, here's high, you know, here's thousands of dollars.

Yeah, the, the advertising that you do, and I would argue the lead generation that you do, the, the purpose of that is, is not to get somebody on the list so that we can get them into a funnel or into a sales pipeline. The purpose of the initial lead generation, the purpose of the initial advertising is to get somebody on your list so that they can be exposed to your pillar content. Now once somebody had consumed that pillar content, what we found was that the time to close that they bought was, was relative, was very quick, right? In less than 30 days. The difference is some people took forever to see the pillar content. Because in the case of scalable, for example, and we've seen this at Digital Marketer, the pillar content, maybe it only happened once a month, right? There wasn't the ability for somebody to consume it kind of when they, when they wanted to. So did two things. I took our best webinar that we had done and so same thing in Epic. This could be the challenge if, let's say you're, you're, you're dtc, you're selling a lower ticket consumer type product and if you find that you get a lot of referrals, that's fine. What do the people say when they refer you? And has somebody else who would have some kind of authority said this as well? Maybe it's just somebody watching, you know, a news clip that you were on and oh, this would be the ultimate like referral source. If only everybody could see that this person said this awesome thing about us. Like, but what is that? What is that one piece? And this is important, ungated pillar content. So I took the webinar that had done, I got it transcribed, I then rewrote it as a 46 page report. Now that 46 page report is gated, you have to opt in to get access to it. But I recorded a YouTube video of me literally just reading the 47 page report. Now we're gonna, we're getting this video updated and you know, prettied up and you know, and spruced up. But this YouTube video is 120 minutes long. But all other videos that I'm recording point back to that one video. The report points back to that video. The longer video encourages people to opt in for the report. All roads are leading to this one piece of pillar content. So we launched this back in the middle of May, got it out to the world and said, let's only follow up with the people who are on the other side of this number of outbound dials so far in the month of June.

On the other side of it, how did you measure on the other side of it received or was there a way to measure consumption?

There's not really A way to measure consumption on YouTube necessarily down to the individual level. If they opted in for the report then we would start asking them if they want to book a meeting.

Can't you on YouTube tell what percentage of the video they've watched and then basically change the marketing based on the percentage of video watched?

You can, but you don't know who that individual is so you can't expressly follow up with that person. And so we do have retargeting.

Right.

So but in, in just saying we're not even going to ask someone to book a sales meeting until they've gone through and consumed. And this, this one video is just kind of one aspect of it. There's, there's other things that are built in that are a bit more, you know, confusing but not confusing, a bit more complex. But in so far, in the month of June, this month, outbound dials 6739. Number of meetings booked 62. So went from 27,000 down to 606,000, 27,000 down about 7,000. The meetings booked went from 180 down to 62. But so far the close rate is over 40%.

So you have 75% roughly fewer calls and 33% as many leads.

And the show up rate on the meetings is so for first meeting whereas it might have been like 30, 40% now it's 50, 60% for the, and that's with like the initial kind of setter. For the closers it's over 90% which 95, that was always pretty decent but man the close rate is, is through the roof. And so now what we're finding is we can bring in leads onto the list for a lot less money. Because we're not asking for phone numbers for somebody if they're just a lead. We only ask for the phone number if they're signing up for that pillar gated content or deeper into the funnel. So our cost per lead has cut down in half. That's how we're able to generate as many top of funnel leads on half the, half the sales. You have to wait a little bit longer. But the reality is we were having to wait anyway. Yeah, so that's where this just kind.

Of the wait is only longer for the first pipeline. Like if it takes 30 days to make that happen, that's only one time, like that's one 30 day wait and then you're back, you know, so and.

That'S where like last month it was like when all this was getting built and people were getting put in the pipeline Weren't really seeing the benefits this month. Mega, mega, mega seeing the benefits. So I think tactically, like again, the question we're asking is like, what is that one piece of content that I wish that everybody could see before we ask them for the order, Getting clear on what that is, creating it, and then having a lot more of your marketing strategies instead of just saying, let's get this person to an order form, you know, let's get them to a sales page, let's get them onto a sales call. It's, let's get them to consume this. But I think the biggest shift that we made is we made it ungated. It's just a YouTube video. Anybody can watch it. It's incredibly low friction. And then on the other side of the video, if they're invited to opt in, they're invited to book a meeting. The people that do that, Great. So it is, it's classic. Less but better.

So funnel wise, you're running traffic to the, to the YouTube video.

We are running discovery ads to the YouTube video. I'm now producing additional YouTube videos that are shorter that also point back to that, that we're running traffic to those as well. Just kind of dividing those. So we've allocated, I want to say about 10% of our Facebook spend over to YouTube discovery ads to get that kind of flywheel.

Okay. And then are you driving people from Meta to YouTube though? Because that seems like that could be a problem.

We're not driving From Meta to YouTube, we're driving from meta to very like tactical lead magnets. Like so, for example, the CEO scorecard, right here's a dashboard. Now somebody can opt in for that, but have no interest in working with us at this time. But and so instead of asking them, hey, you got this. Do you want our help implementing it? Book a meeting. The show up rate on that was terrible. The close rate was even worse. So we're not even bothering doing that anymore. Now if somebody's opting for the same.

Why not test driving driving meta ads to that video that's on YouTube except that video on the meta platform.

We will, yeah, taking some of these ads, like in general, we were saying we've got, we got meta going into lead magnets that we know work. So like, let's just keep doing that. And then all this is just a brand new test that started this month. So in the end of, end of last month, first part of this month. But yeah, beginning to test, certainly through retargeting. That's.

So if you were going to anything else that you wanted to share on it?

No, I mean, I would say again, just like tactically, if there was going to be like a step by step to this, step number one I would.

Say would be before you do the step by step because I do want to get to it, but before the step by step. So let's say I have a, an accounting service, I have a service based business. Is it the same? And let's say that I don't have a sales team because right now you're driving to appointment setters to set appointments mostly. Right. So if we're going straight for. Let me. Those are two questions. First, let's say is it the same if I have a service as if I have a product?

Yeah, it is because we're selling services and products. So yes, it's the same. Great.

Is it going to work if I don't have a sales team and I'm sending straight to a buy page after the pillar content.

Yes. Because ultimately the, the purpose of the pillar content is to, I mean it is to do the, it's to do the selling. I mean it's to do a lot of the, a lot of the education, a lot of the nurturing, a lot of the trust that would typically happen.

Abraham would call preeminence or Frank Kern would call indoctrination or what's his nose? Kennedy. What was his term for it? Something similar.

Yeah. And I think that's what I'm saying. It's nothing new, it's nothing all that exciting. The tactical deployment is. I just want this one thing that I know if, because I found if it's one thing and all roads are pointing back to that one thing, that's when it starts to compound and I think the mistake that a lot of marketers have made, especially in entrepreneurs and we've been told like, oh, you need to do content marketing, it's a volume game and it's, oh, I just need to be out there producing something new every week. And the reality is, is that you're probably not that good and you probably don't have something that interesting to talk about every week. So what's that one thing that you know is freaking awesome? If it's a service and you get invited to go and speak at the local chamber of commerce, what's that talk that you're going to give that you just know when you give it, people are like, that was great, here's my card. Like, let's talk. Like most businesses have that, right? We got it. And even if you don't think that you have it. And you're like, well, I'm all referral driven. Cool. What are these people saying about you? Right. They got to be saying something about you that makes you somewhat interesting and differentiated if you have any business whatsoever. So how do we package that up in a way where it's just there, plop it up on YouTube? How can we have a gated version of it? What's some aspect that we can hold, hold back to get them to opt in for, you know, the premium pillar version so that we can get them in funnel. Everybody should have that. And now any other piece of content that you do, instead of it pointing back to something, have all of it point back to that one piece of pillar content. Have all roads lead to that, instead of all roads lead to like, hey, book a meeting or hey, go buy this thing. That's just what we found is working really, really, really well right now.

Anything different in the post? Like, now they've reached out and they've said, I'm interested. Is there a particular. Are they only able to reach out via telephone or can they reach out via chat and email and other things?

Yeah, all of the above. The medium of outreach or communication doesn't really matter. But I will say one of the.

Things because I got to think phone is going to perform better than the other.

Yeah, phone is always going to perform better from a conversion rate perspective.

But so it's important to me to share with everybody here because that's a lesson, right? That's like, if you don't have the ability to reach out by phone now, because a lot of people don't, a lot of people are just like, yeah, I've got it on the web. You know, it's not the same. The dm, the, the message, the email, the text, the audio phone call, like, those are all different and it makes a difference. And so if you don't have that and you're looking to increase your conversion rates, you might want to think about adding the ability for somebody to do it by a phone. Right?

For sure. Don't swing the pendulum though, as far as some of our sales reps did last month where they basically said, oh, this is a bad phone number. So I'm going to mark the lead as disqualified. Bad number, bad lead. That is not necessarily true. Okay. You've got plenty of people who put in fake numbers because they don't yet know, like, and trust you.

And they put in the landline that our business never answers, of course, for that exact reason. Right. Of Course.

But I'm a great lead and if you reach out to me all you.

Love and respect to the sales team. Holy crap. What a bonehead move that was. I mean, it's like the email address doesn't work. Bad lead, you know. Come on.

So that came up when I was gone last week. Richard And Matt lost 100% of their. You know what it was, it was not a pretty site. There was just. It was pure righteous anger. I believe. So, yeah, that's. That's not a problem anymore. They were like, oh, we. But they were like, oh, we just always been taught that, you know, if I can't follow up, like my deal is like to just dial for dollars. If I can't, if it's a bad number, it's a badly. It's like, no, man. If that's the only.

If that's the only way that you have to get a hold of them, maybe, but correct.

And so I think, yeah, so I think part of the reason I was a little bit dismissive of the dialing is because I'm overreacting to the, to the other overreaction. But you're 1000% correct. Get. You know, our, our thing is that first they're going to call. If they don't answer, then they're going to send a text, hey, I just tried to call you. And they're going to fire off an email. And all that needs to happen, you know, very, very, very quickly. But that happens after they're deeper in, not just when they're a brand new. A brand new lead. So they're, they're marketing.

So let's break it down step by step. Go the step by step. Here is your guaranteed personally by Ryan Dice plan for instant doubling of your conversion process. Go.

Step number one is you got to create that pillar content. This is the thing that you wish people saw and likely you already have it, right? It is out there. But create an ungated version, a video they can go watch on YouTube, a blog post that they can go and read. There is something that is out there that if somebody watches it, you know it's going to get them 90% of the way through, you know, through the buying process. Get that out there, get it posted. Step two would be to create a premium version of that. So a gated version.

Let me ask clarifying question on that. Is there a CTA in that first thing?

Yeah, the call to action in the first thing is to access the premium version of it.

Okay.

So in the case of my. Of the YouTube video that I did. The call to action is go download the 46 page case study report which.

Is gated or not gated. Are you pixeling it or you require email?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's what I mean. So the premium version is gated. So you've got an ungated version, you got a premium gated version. Any marketing that you do ahead of that again. So right now you're probably, you've got lead magnets, you're running advertising that's designed to get people to, you know, on your list, sign up for your newsletter, whatever, shift it up to where the first week that somebody is on. So now any new subscriber that we have for the first week, every single email is about getting them to first go in, consume the ungated pillar content and then after a couple of days of that it shifts to go download the premium version of that pillar content a couple of weeks after it's for the first week. Like the first. About like 7 to 10 days is.

Question about the gate. What does the gate look like?

Gating. It's just an opt in form.

Yeah, but thank you. But more specifically, what are we asking for to be able to get access to the thing they want access to?

Name, email address, phone number. And then if you're B2B you might ask for company names so that you can get some additional data on that.

Is that required?

Yes.

And are you asking for it sequentially or all at the same time on one form?

We've tested both. It hasn't really mattered that much. So I think we just currently do it all in one form.

I wonder if it would be. What percentage do you get of legit phone. Of phone numbers and legit phone numbers? Well, in other words, what percentage of all the people that fill it out can we call?

I don't know what. I don't have that data off top of my head. I can get it for you.

If you did know, what would it be?

I know when we tested making it optional, because we did test making it optional and we also tested breaking it up over multiple pages, we got the most numbers, we got the best results. If it was all just on one form and it was required, which is not what I thought it would be.

For what it's worth, I wonder if you just got, if you got first name, last name and phone number, didn't take the email and. Or take the same information, but rather than delivering the thing through email, deliver them the access through a text because then they wouldn't get the thing they want unless they Gave you a legit phone number that they actually check and it's likely to be the best phone number because it's going to be a sell. I think that'd be a really interesting test to run.

Yeah, yeah, we haven't tested that, so that. But yeah, so you've got the gated, you got the ungated. It's just there for all the world to see. You want people to see it. All roads are leading to that. That is encouraging people to get the premium version, the gated version. The thing they got to opt in for. When they opt in for that, that's when they're officially in funnel. Right now we're going to start doing proactive follow up. Everything else prior to that is about getting them to consume that. And then all of the other content that we produce is again designed to lead back to the, the premium pillar content.

So how long have you been running it so far this way?

It has been up and running for about six weeks. We've got good. It took like two weeks to start building enough people into it. So call it 30 days.

Okay, so what is the average time to close now between when they make that first, first appointment and when they.

Buy from when the time when they make the first appointment to when they buy is it. That hasn't changed as much. That is still within, you know, 14 days or so when somebody makes the initial appointment. What was taking forever was how long until we get an initial lead to when they book an appointment. That's what was taking so long. And the way that we compress that is to, instead of asking him to book an appointment, book an appointment. Book an appointment. How about now? How about now? How about now? And then being like, no, I don't want to. I don't freaking know who you are. Why on earth would I book a meeting with you now? It's welcome. We're so glad you're here. Go watch this. Go watch this. This is freaking awesome. You should go watch this. Once they've watched that, now they're booking an appointment very, very quickly.

Got it. Very cool. That's awesome. Well, hopefully that will continue to do well there and we'll roll it out across the other, other companies and you guys can take this and use it to improve your process as well. And if nothing else, just the ability to be significantly more effective with the leads. Because burning through 27,000 plus leads, you know, per cohort, if you will, you know, versus 6,000, you got a lot smaller audience that you can go after and still have the ability to not just bang them over the head constantly with this method. So I think that's really cool.

We're going to do the same or a little bit better sales on half of the ad spend. So next month I feel very confident doubling the ad spend and I bet there's a really good chance we do about double the sales.

Love it. Awesome. Well, hope you guys found that helpful and interesting. If you have questions, thoughts or other things you want to share, or if you've got other ways that you've improved the this process of time from initial contact to conversion and close, we would love to hear from you. You can message either of us on socials or you can hit up the business lunch sites and hope you guys enjoyed it. If you like this, please share it with a friend or anybody, even an enemy. I mean it helps us either way. If you might not want to share.

With share with an arch nemesis.

I like it. And we'll see you guys next time on Business Lunch. Thanks. Ever wondered how some people build real.

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