The Creator Economy, Sales Models, and Privacy Invasion with Roland Frasier and Ryan Deiss

Coming up next on Business Lunch.

And I'm kind of surprised that Apple would be doing this because it seems to go against their big we're keeping your privacy private from everyone. But it seems like what they're actually saying now is we're going to keep your privacy private from everyone that we're legally required to because we think that we're going to get slammed if we don't. And we're protecting you from advertisers, but we're not going to protect you from the government, which to me seems like one of the most dangerous things you could possibly do.

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Hey, everybody. Roland Frazier and Ryan Deiss here with the current edition of Business launch podcast. Welcome to the show, everybody. Good to have you here. Ryan, how are you doing today?

I'm doing great.

I'm doing great.

Spent the weekend at beach house with the family and so I'm a lovely golden glow right now. But yeah, kind of one last trip trip with the kiddos before school starts up.

So that's great. I was thinking a week ago this weekend we were in Napa and I was listening to a very, very high pitched pipe water whining the entire time. And Ryan sent me a video of some guy. How he found it, I don't even know. But what is it called? A mosquito. Some guy that was.

I don't remember, honestly. I think it just showed up in like my Instagram reels or something like that. It was just. It was just the universe conspiring in the perfect way.

Or Mark Zuckerberg listening to your conversation.

Exactly. Who knows? Maybe I wouldn't be surpr. But yeah, no, I'll tell you, I'm ready to get back to work. It's been good. I love summers. I mean, I like travel, I like going on vacation, I like doing family stuff. But man, this has been, I think, like a lot of folks, you know, not traveling at all. Last year we were traveling a lot this summer, kind of making up for a year when we didn't. And it was great. We had a great time. But God dang it, I'm ready to get back to work. I think that's. I think a lot of entrepreneurs I know are like that, right? We don't necessarily. We look forward to Monday.

I think a lot of Sunday scaries here.

Exactly. I think if you are an entrepreneur and you're dreading Monday, you might be doing it wrong. You might want to look something else. But I'm ready to get back. I'm ready to kind of get the kids back in school, ready to get back to work, ready to feel like I know things are still a bit uncertain, a little bit crazy right now with the new delta variant and stuff like that. But in general, I feel like, like it or not, the world is kind of still shifting back more towards normal than what it was in 2020. I for one, am looking forward to it. Yeah, me too.

No kidding. I definitely like. I like traveling again. I like being able to.

I like.

Well, I mean, I guess the cool thing is we can both do our work when we travel. So it's nice to me, it's nice to get to do both of those things. Speaking of which, I saw kind of a cool article that I forwarded over to you that I thought might be interesting. Did you get a chance to check it out?

I did. I didn't get to read. So I read it briefly because, you know, again, I'm trying to. Trying to read on my phone, you know, while also trying to get sunscreen on kids. It's all. It's not always the easiest thing in the world, but. So give me a summary. I think it was. It's a really short article. Yeah, we'll link it up in the show Notes. I'll just.

It was in Automatter, which I think is a newsletter on that that I think we both subscribe to, but it was called the Year that Everyone Became a Creator. Aspiring to be a successful VC isn't any crazier than aspiring to be the next Charli d'. Amelio. Right? That was the article. So, thoughts, feelings, emotions?

Well, summarize the article for those who haven't read it.

So basically they're just saying that we have this creator economy. And as a result of that, from everybody from the new Nil, the name, image, likeness thing that's going on with the NCAA sports to creators everywhere, that creators are people who are able to scale without permission. I thought that was kind of interesting as a comment in there. And they were saying that a lot of these folks, because they have influence through their social media and such, through their creating or their creatoring, they have access to the ability to make investments in things that are outside of themselves, to kind of scale themselves through using influence. And I thought that was kind of interesting. And you get on a giant scale, you get people like Rihanna. Riri is now a $1.7 billion net worth billionaire because of her deal with LVMH, with Fenty, and more and more celebrities, but creators as well who are creating their own brands rather than endorsing other people's, which is kind of interesting. And then all of this leads to this ability for them to have deal flow and make investments in other companies. So they're saying that the new side hustle is being a vc. And then one stat that was with that, that I thought was interesting is that there are 16 million accredited investors in the United States alone. Accredited investors are people that meet certain SEC requirements to be able to invest in private placements and things like that. And only 375,000 of them, I think was the number have invested in an angel project in the last two years. So what's cool is that it seems that the proliferation of these creators with their ability to scale and the deal flow opportunities that they get because of being creators may enable the activation of a lot of these people who are accredited investors now to invest in things other than the traditional investment. So just all of that was, I thought, interesting and because of our own fund endeavors that we are doing, I thought it was particularly kind of relevant.

Yeah, I thought it was a really good article. I do think again, it's the year that everyone became a creator. It's super short. I like some of the points that it makes, I guess. So I want to say at the outset, I think this is a good thing, right? I think it's a good thing that you're having people, individuals beginning to think more like businesses and beginning to think. Because in the past, if you were an individual and you were putting yourself out there, you were basically like a speaker, author, expert kind of person. It was a fairly limited business model. And what a lot of these quote unquote creators and influencers have done is they've shown that like, yes, you can monetize through the sale of like courses, you know, you can build media platforms or maybe sell advertising. You could do events and appearances and these kind of things. Like all that's kind of classic in the. I'm a celebrity, right? Whether you're a niche celebrity, speaker, author, expert or a big time celebrity. And what they're doing is they're broadening out and they're saying, no, no, I can actually own companies, I can make investments, I can start businesses that leverage my platform, but that are unrel the brand. And like I think so. I think all that's good. I kind of have a problem with the definitions and the vocabulary that is being put around it. Like the idea of the creator economy and even creators in general. I wish we would just call it what it is, which is entrepreneurialism. Right.

I mean even.

What was the definition? Like the quoting here, you know, the author is cute, is quoting Hugo Amsalam. It says a creator isn't someone who creates. A creator is an individual who scales without permission. Right. Okay. I would argue that a creator is someone who creates. An entrepreneur is someone who scales without permission. The difference here is that the businesses are a single person, but most of these people who are, they're built around a personal brand. I just don't know how new that is. Right. And I don't know, like, I think that there's more opportunities to do it because of these different social channels opening you know, media in general becoming democratized. So I think there's more opportunities, opportunities for more people do it which means you're going to have more winners. I think that as investments and the ability to invest becomes more democratized with like Angellist creating opportunities for anybody to start a rolling fund or do it like there's more opportunities to do these things. But again businesses have done this forever. Like all businesses.

It's eventually it's definitely nothing new. It's, it's, it is a reskinned version of an age old thing for sure.

And here's. I guess here's my pro. So I think it's cool like as the marketer in me says brilliant renaming is the way that you own a category story. Love it. The the teacher in me when like talking to our audience right now, what I would say is don't make the mistake of thinking this is something new because if you make the mistake of thinking this something new, you lose the opportunity to learn from all the models and those who have gone before us in the past. So I guess that's my. It's not so much I've got a like a problem with it. I just think that I'm seeing a lot of younger people. I don't say like kids because I still feel like I'm young ish. But I'm seeing a lot of people who are coming up who don't remember business pre digital.

And I don't know, I just read your thing saying 20 years ago when I first started I was like ha ha.

Yeah.

But I want to point out towards what you were saying one thing that I think is really interesting and Nassim Taleb said it, the guy that wrote Black Swan and Antifragile that really the classic enduring books. Like he says I don't read a book until it's been on the bestseller list for 10 years because and I know you're a fan of this as am I of reading the classics in business and marketing and finance. And it's because kind of along the Shakespearean assertion that there's only seven plots in the world. Right. For there's like all of this pretty much has been seen before. It's taking a new skin like crypto or NFT or defi or decentralized but. Or creator. But it's just the same kind of thing. We call it business. And so there are great lessons to be learned from that. So I also wouldn't be running out and reading every book on how to monetize as a creator and Things like that. Because the really great lessons are the really great people, not the people who are trying to rank for books right now.

Yeah. And let's break it down a little bit, right, Because I mean what does every business need to do? Number one, they've got to have something to sell. So a lot of the creators who are out there on, especially the influencers, right, they're on TikTok and YouTube, they're entertainers, they are selling entertainment. So like in the past they would have been actor, singer, athlete. Yeah, right. We now have this new category, subcategory.

Of an entertainer and there are still Networks.

They're called TikTok.

Exactly.

Yeah.

You used to have to tap into these networks to. You had to get somebody in Hollywood say okay, you're worthy of it. Now we don't have the gatekeepers. The gatekeepers are called everyone. Now you can decide whether or not that's easier or harder. It certainly is more again democratic. I think it's a good thing, I really do. I think it's a good thing. But there still is. You still need to have something that you're selling, whether it's a product, a service. Entertainment is basically a service, right? We are entertaining people, we are extracting boredom. You need to have distribution, right? You need to have some type of distribution medium. In the past that would have been typical traditional advertising. Buying radio, tv, newspaper, magazine ads.

We're now multi channel platform available, non permission required, except we are heavily monitored and the permission is still given or taken away by the way, with no due process, which I'm not sure how that happens here in the United States. But there are single arbiters of whether what we're saying is okay or not. And they'll just literally turn your account off with no ability to talk to them or anything. Which is kind of seems a little anti free speechy to me. But there's all kinds of interesting things like that.

But I think that to get back.

To what the article was saying, it does present a great opportunity to cross monetize your celebrity. So if you've got.

Well, and that's the third category I get. So the first one is something to sell. The second one is you got to have some type of distribution. And the third one is you got to have monetization, right? Advertising, sale of products. But ultimately what every business gets, every business has some type of, you know, they've got some kind of desk where they're buying and selling other businesses, they're making investments. All businesses at some point kind of become Banks, Right, we talked about that before. It's same thing is happening with these, you know, with these creators. But I mean, yeah, you gotta have some kind of monetization and you shouldn't limit the monetization to the quote unquote traditional means of monetization in your brother.

When they do, because then we can buy them for inexpensive amounts of money.

Exactly, exactly. So I think just, I think it's great. I do think it's a good article, I do think it's cool and I think it presents an interesting opportunity both for investors and for business owners for so many people to get into the micro fund and the micro investing deal. Because what happens now is people get, they make a lot of money and it goes into some type of institutional thing that guess what, because it's massive, they have to put in only big companies so it never flows back down to the small businesses. So I know for us like with our fund, like we're planning on putting our own money in it, raising some money, but it's going to go into smaller businesses like ours and we're going to keep it small so that the economics will, by doing that we don't have to necessarily go and do, you know, 50 million dollar deals necessarily. And so I think that's, I think that's a really cool thing that you're seeing with the quote unquote creator economy is you're seeing creators investing in other creators and it kind of keeping it in there and keeping, keeping small alive. I think it's a really positive thing.

Yeah, I think it's a really cool thing. I know networks, there's a big opportunity to create your own network like we're doing with our podcast or Kris Krohn with Uplife and things like that. So there it's, it's really just now made it that you don't have to have this giant infrastructure, infrastructure investment of towers and TV stations to make things happen. And so it has really moved, I think democratization is a great word there, overused, but very appropriate that we've moved from just a few people having the ability to control these resources to unlimited channels and easy access. And so if you are listening or watching and you have any kind of audience, definitely something to consider is to how can you use that audience like RIRI and other people. How can you use that audience to create opportunities to become an investor so that your efforts, your dancing bear business of being. I've got to come on and create content and entertain people and have them come to me to actually leverage that to get into deals and start becoming an investor so that you can build assets that don't require you to dance.

Yeah. I think that is the takeaway. Right. I think if you're going to read something from it, don't limit your monetization. You know, it's cool that there's more opportunities for distribution. Distribution. It's cool that there's, you know, more ways to build different brands. Because that's the other thing. We're just talking about brands. Right. These are personal brands opposed to company brands. The two are not mutually exclusive. You, you know, could and should have both. But when it comes to monetization, don't limit the monetization side to just the traditional side. So if you got a media publishing type thing. Yep. Sell advertising, you know, sell premium content.

Sure.

If you got a services side business. Yep. Sell your services at different levels. You got an E commerce company. Yep. Build out your store, you know, do all that. But think about all of the other categories of monetization, including making semi passive investments in other companies to really kind of broaden out and diversify how you go about frankly making money. So that's, I think that's the takeaway.

I like it. The other thing that was interesting is I don't know if you saw, but Apple has announced that they will be scanning your personal devices to see if you have things on there you shouldn't. The initial thing is when do they.

I didn't see this. Where did they announce this?

This is. I just read. I think it was an Axios. I read it, but. But it's kind of in all the new, like in the New York Times and all of those places now. But basically Apple has said that to help with child trafficking and child abuse, I guess is the broad category. They're doing several initiatives, particularly as iOS 15 rolls out and one of those is that they'll be scanning all of your personal devices and cloud uploads basically from your personal devices to match content against prohibited content, starting with child pornography, which obviously is very noble. To stop that. As a privacy person, and I'm kind of surprised that Apple would be doing this because it seems to go against their big we're keep your privacy private from everyone. But it seems like what they're actually saying now is we're going to keep your privacy private from everyone that we're legally required to because we think that we're going to get slammed if we don't and we're protecting you from advertisers, but we're not Going to protect you from the government, which to me seems like one of the most dangerous things you could possibly do because so just.

So I'm clear, they're saying that they're going to look at everything that you got on your phone. They're basically like, we're looking at it, whatever you want. So yeah, anything you put in the.

Icloud, which is pretty much automatic, like if you take a picture for most people, they have it going straight to the cloud.

And like, so a part of me says, you know, what do I care? I don't obviously I'm not dealing in any kind of gross child abuse, anything like that. So part of me is like, I'm not really worried about it and good. I would hope that they would find these people. But I see where you're coming from, like where does it stop? And I also, like, there's a little bit of, I don't know, the idea that like, we're not going to let anybody see your stuff except us. Except us.

So they said you're going to be.

Looking at literally every. So this isn't one of these things where if somebody is suspected and they get a warrant that they're going to look. They're saying that they're just across the board going to be looking at everybody.

And they can do it.

It's in their terms of service of.

All your stuff done algorithmically, then any flags go to. Sounded like it was an Apple employee panel, a human review panel and then referred to the government for prosecution, which to me goes then is this self incrimination for the people. And I am, obviously it all starts with good intentions. It's just that it's a very slippery slope because it starts with that. And then the people in the system that abuse it say, well, we don't like Ryan Deiss, so we're going to flag Ryan and we're going to refer him and we're going to do it under the os. We're going to look, we're going to say that we're looking for child porn, but we're really looking for anything that might be able to be used against him. And then because people are imperfect, there are people that would potentially be on a panel like that that would have people who approach them and bribe them to use their powers for bad. And so I think it creates a real dangerous precedent. Enough that it would make me, and I was talking with my son about it earlier, enough that it would make me think about leaving Apple because I think that's so dangerous. And again like you, I don't, I'm not, I don't have any child abuse things that I'm concerned about. But when I was in law school, there's an organization called the aclu, the American Civil Liberties Union, which would always file amicus briefs. An amicus brief is an organization that wants to kind of chime in, in a litigated area and they would come in for the most weird things. Like you would see something like this that will clearly be lit, litigated. And the ACLU would file a brief and argue and you'd be like, why the heck do they care? But the reason when you dig into it, is that because most abuses of power start with the concentration of power in the hands of a few, or in this case one company, then a few people who are the human review committee. And it starts with a noble intention, let's stop child abuse. But then ultimately is abused because we are human. And I believe absolute power corrupts absolutely.

So it's just really scary to me.

That that's something that's even being controversial, much less it's going to be rolled out in the next os.

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Yeah, it's wild. You can get anything done. If you're saying in the name of we want to stop pedophiles and Nazis. Yes, yes, right, like and yay. I agree 1000%. I totally, completely agree. But I get your point. Like how many steps from that are you removed to some kind of Orwellian, you know, animal, farmish type, you know, type deal or whatever, you know, Big Brother's watching all the time. And it's one thing, like it's terrifying enough if Big Brother Is our government, who we supposedly reelected them.

Right.

When maybe we didn't get our person in then, but like the collective elected that person. And we can technically remove them if they're doing something shady. But you're talking about a private company. I mean, it was a publicly owned, but a non governmental organization where we have no appointment, we have no firing power. There's nothing we can do over there saying, no, we're going to look at all of it. I guess the only thing you could do, because I will also say they are a private company, they can do what they want. It is their product. And if they want to put in their terms and tell us like, hey, we're going to start looking at all this, then I guess, yeah, the way that we vote is we vote with our wallets. We do, but boy, that's going to be a tough thing to do. And it's basically, I'd say, here's what I think, they're doing this. Here's why they're doing this. They're doing it to keep from getting broken up. Apple, Amazon, I bet they have realized, they have calculated that the only way they're going to keep from getting broken up as the monopolies that frankly they are, is if they cooperate with the government. If they basically get into full cooperation with the government. They're saying, look, government, you don't, you don't want to break us up because look at how much information we have.

Yeah.

You know how hard it would be for you to get this information. But if you let us stay where we are, hey, somebody you want to, you want to look at, we'll slide that across the desk to you.

I think it'll be interesting because to.

Me, it's a scary proposition.

It's very scary. It's no different than if at will Apple could come in here and grab my phone and look through all the pictures. Because it's the same thing, right? It's. And then it's like, I don't, I mean, I don't want, I just don't want people having access to my pictures of my family, you know, or any of that. Because there are people at a stalker last year, right. Remember, there's a reason that we like to keep things private, like the things that are near us that might identify where we live and stuff like that. But now all of that being made available to algorithms to look at specifically to identify things that we flag. That's the concept to me, that that's scary, right? So now we're gonna flag that we don't like people that, let's say maga. We talked about maga a minute ago.

We don't like people ready to get that stuff.

So we're flag everybody that's got pictures of red MAGA hats in their iPhone and then we're gonna run some kind of background check on them or a smear campaign or. I mean, it's really dangerous. So I think for anybody that's watching or listening, I would strongly recommend that you think about how acceptable that is going to be for you. And in something that's allegedly gonna ro next update, it's to me, very, very Orwellian, very dangerous, Very surprisingly unpleasant precedent for a company that's supposed to be interested in your privacy. That will stop you from tracking an app, from being able to track the other apps you look at. I mean, to me, I'd way rather have somebody looking at the apps I look at than going through my pictures on my phone.

Right, yeah. You know what? Yeah, no doubt. I mean, you know what they should.

Also do because voicemails are uploaded to the cloud as well. They should just be able to go through voicemails and search for words that you say that seem like they have criminal intent as well.

Why not just listen to the phone calls in real time? It's going probably pinging through their satellites, not. Yeah, I mean, I get your point. Like, where does it stop? Yeah, right. Where, like, where does it stop? Because it's easy to say we're only looking for pedophiles and Nazis right now.

For now now.

But boy, where does it, you know, where does it stop? Especially when it's not law, when it's not statute. Right. It's not like this is what we're able to do and if we get outside of it, we get in trouble. I guess that's the thing. If they overstep, the only consequence that they would have is, I mean, I guess technically if they overstep too much and it's a violation of privacy, you know, maybe they're getting fined by like ftc, but it's gonna be a fcc. It's gonna be like a slap on the wrist tiny thing, like a rounding error for them. Right. I guess the only thing they have is brand damage. But here's the thing. So you're saying you might leave Apple over this?

Yeah, it'd be annoying.

But you didn't say you would buy Apple products. I know, but you didn't say you would. And as I sit here thinking, even as much as I don't like this, if I'm being honest, I don't see me getting rid of my iPhone and going back to. I mean, it's still. This is me, like, thinking out loud right now. What you do, you know, what you.

Do is that you create an encrypted. You create a new app, you put it on the app Store, and you are an encrypted photo storage cloud application that.

Yeah, but then they're going to shut that down because that's where all the Nazis and pornography.

But they're having a hard time with that right now. Right, right. So it's kind of. It's going to be interesting. Obviously, everything that people do creates entrepreneurial opportunities. Right. So maybe try not to create an.

Opportunity and opportunity for pedophiles and Nazis, though. Let's try to pass on that one and privacy advocates.

So, anyway. Kind of. Kind of interesting.

I don't think. I don't think I'll give it up, though. I'm not proud to say it. I don't. I don't think I would go to the.

I think that what I would do is, is probably find a different place to do the things. Things that they were poking their nose into just because, you know, we're really easily giving up a lot of our privacy for safety and security. But that is exactly how dictatorships start. And I'm not a conspiracy theorist, and I don't feel like that's in our immediate future, but I know from. As a student of history and law, that is a slippery slope that many, many, many societies trip down.

Right.

Many societies trip down.

And it happens. It's happened for centuries, and it happens in many parts of this world to this day. Yeah. It's not like this is our distant past. Like this is happening now in many countries. So.

So just.

That's a downer. We can't end with that.

No, I'm not.

I got a. I got a thing. I got a thing. I got a thing.

Good, good.

So we've been playing recently with a couple of different models with our stuff, and I didn't even talk to you about this, but I think it'd be fun for us to talk about because I was just asking you. And then I called our director of sales and asked him. But we are playing with webinars to convert people into different programs that we have at the scalable company, Digital Marketer, Epic Network, all of those. And we've tried a few different models and.

And some of them have.

I don't think we found one that we feel absolutely is the greatest. And we've modeled some people that are doing very, very well with webinars and things like that. We've modeled Jason Fladlin and Russ Rufino and a few other folks, Frank Kern, and done a lot of our own experimentation. But I just kind of wanted to share with people for a minute. So we do this either live webinar or Evergreen webinar. And then we go into the close. And the close can be a few different things. Close can be, hey, hey, if you're interested, here's the website, go buy the thing. Here's how much it is. Or it can be, hey, we have this thing for sale. If you're interested in it, go here and apply. And there's all kinds of iterations, but basically it comes down to whether you're selling the thing from the webinar directly or you're going to a salesperson who's going to qualify and then have a consultative sale and close. And I know we haven't found anything that's that great yet. What are your thoughts on the numbers of what you've seen? Because I know we've done it more on over on your side than mine.

Yeah, I mean, I think for. So my background was marketer first. You know, we never really had like when I was starting in my dorm room, I wasn't doing sales. Like I was always fascinated by the whole idea of, you know, online businesses. Man, I didn't have to talk to anybody. Like that was one of the big appeals for me as an introvert. And so everything that I did for the first, frankly two decades of my, you know, career has been get people to a website where they can learn about a product or a service, they can click a button, they can give me money and it can be delivered. Delivered right in the most seamless way possible, ideally with no human touch or interaction. What price points though? Well, that's been across the board over the years. But like in recent years, what we're finding as like, so there's obvious limitations to that. I mean, to your point, while people are getting more and more comfortable buying online above certain price point. And usually that price point is kind of when you get above like two, $3,000. And I get it, people buy cars online and things like that, but people buying houses, sight unseen online line, that I think is still the exception and not the rule.

Yeah, for sure.

In general, if you're going to be spending more than a couple thousand bucks, most people like the big juicy center of the bell curve. They want to Talk to someone about it or they want to go and see it, feel it, touch it. And so I've generally, as a result of that, have avoided, you know, service and product offerings that were much higher ticket. Well, as our business has expanded and as we have explored the top end of the market, we've gone that direction. And so we've gotten more sales drift. Right. And this is now, which is.

Well, that.

And that's the whole thing. Right. So now we built out sales teams which kind of going back to what we talked about before. Everything old is new again, right? Marketing and sales probably both should exist. Like they both have, you know, they both have a place. But for the longest time it was still marketing first. It was still buy online first on the webinars it was like, here's the link, you can go and buy if you want to talk to somebody. Here's a link where you can talk to somebody. Then it's kind of shifted to kind of the next iteration that we went to was here's the link you can, you know, apply. And, and we had some basic qualification in there where depending on what they selected it'd be like, congrats, you qualify, you can buy. And they could still schedule a time if they had questions and if there was some other stuff where we need to talk to them. It was like, hey, we want to chat with you. But first, like, let's schedule a time that's kind of a hybrid model. And ultimately what we're coming back to is just, hey, not even mentioning. And so I think the specific tactical aspects of what call to action is working the best right now when it is more of an information based sales motion. Right. So if it's a webinar or a video. And again those kind of those options are the opposite ends of the spectrum are number one, here's the link go by, you know, that's one in the spectrum. The other end of the spectrum is we've got, we've got lots of ways that we can help you. Let's talk. And there's no mention of a program specifically. There's no mention of a price at all. And then somewhere kind of in the middle is we've got this specific program that if you deal with these specific problems, you know, we can help with go, go apply. Let's talk about this program. It's not a fit and something else. So kind of a hybrid. So what we've been doing like so historically it was here's the link, go buy. And what we found is that over time Conversion rates are still. Are still fine. But frankly, the acquisition of leads is so much higher now that we're not generating enough to really make it work at scale. Like, we got to get people talking to trained sales professionals plus so that they can put them in the right program and make sales even when sales weren't there.

But we also have to consider that there's a. About a 20% cost of sales with the sales team that does not exist with an online direct sale.

So, yeah, they got it. They got to close 20% more than they would if it were direct, which so far hasn't been an issue.

Correct. But it's something that could be surprising to people. If you're doing a million dollars a month and suddenly you've got an extra $200,000 in cost. That's. That's like, whoa. Right.

Yeah.

And just so everybody's clear, that's not the 20% commission. So that's like salaries plus, plus commission. That's just general. 15 to 20% is pretty typical.

Yeah.

So we moved it to more of a hybrid where it's. Here's this specific program and what we're finding that is actually working the best. And the scary thing is, is when you do it this way, when you do it kind of to the extreme where it's like, hey, so if this resonated with you, if you've got these things, like, we would love to help, let's talk. No mention of a program or any specific solution. That is what seems to be working the best right now. The trick is the sales cycle is going to be longer because it needs to be a bit more consultative. You also need to have salespeople that are not just like, you know, boiler room folks, closing folks. They need to actually be able to talk to somebody, assess where they are, and then prescribe the best solution for them. So it's harder to get set up, but I think that's where everything is headed. That's certainly where we're headed.

I think so too. And I think with epic, I was just going to pull and see if, if there was a, an update on the sales, but so we just closed last night that program at 253. Right. At 254,000 in sales. And that was done as a challenge. We'll most likely, based on historical stuff, I think end up maybe with another hundred in and follow ups because we follow up after for usually a couple of weeks. And so if we do that, we'll be at about a 3, we're at a 2, a little over a 2.5x ROAS right now will probably end up between 3 and 3.5. And that's with that hybrid model. Do you know roughly what the roas ended up being on any of the. Like a couple of the other ones that we did different ways. This one is, by the way, done as. And I think this might be an important part of the context is that in the epic, which is kind of how to acquire companies with no money out of pocket, it's done as a challenge. So I'm on the calls live with the people for five or six days before. Well, actually for five days before we make an offer, and then a couple of days after. And then they have the ability to go to a webpage. But not a lot of them do. Most of the sales come from saying, hey throughout the program, by the way. And we get sales before we open the cart because people talk to our salespeople and say, hey, I want to get involved. But most of the sales are coming from the conversations with the sales professional. So that, like, for that business, it's. I think, because it's very human to human. Me as a human, to the group of humans that are listening, then for them to go and just buy. Maybe they have more trust to do that. But it is. It's a 3 or $7,000 investment. So I think for them or 25. And so my thinking is, is that because they have human conversations starting, they like buying from another human to just kind of continue that conversation as opposed to. If there was no interaction. Interaction through the whole thing. It was just a video ad to. Here's a page and there's a video explaining the thing. I would think that consistency would cause them to be. This is a theory. I don't have anything to back this up, but you might. I would think it would be easier to have the consistency or congruence of no human involved as opposed to human involved. Take the human out. But that's a. That's my hypothesis. What do you think?

Yeah, no, I think so. Context is everything. And there's two contexts exist kind of in two planes here. The first is what's the context? Like, what have you been about. Talking. Talking about? So if you've been talking about a specific program, a specific product, a specific service, like in the case of the epic challenge, you're kind of talking about that one program. So there it is appropriate to essentially sell just that program, as opposed to more of kind of the extreme of we can help you out with stuff. Right? Because you've been talking about that one thing, continue that conversation. So that's kind of one plane, one contextual plane where you want to continue the conversation along the same topic plane. The other aspect of context is medium. Right? To your point, like, and we do know this, like we, I mean, haven't tested in a while because it was silly. But how the difference is, but in general, you, you are going to get the highest conversion rates if you reply or respond in the same medium that they reached out to you, and vice versa. In other words, if somebody texts you, you should text them back, you shouldn't send them an email.

Right.

And this is like fairly obvious stuff, but we'll do this sometimes where somebody will email in and our sales team will say, hey, let's hop on a call. And we've had to tell them like, no, no, no, respond via email. Get the conversation going via email and then ascend it, then transition it. Don't abruptly take it into a new medium.

Right.

So again, context is everything. Continue the tech, the contextual, topical flow of the conversation and from a medium perspective, keep that, keep that going. I think if what you're talking about is if you've got the time, what you do in a challenge, you do in a webinar to really sell the idea of kind of this is the problem, this is the issue, and this is a very specific, practical solution solution, then it can make sense to present on that webinar or during that challenge a specific solution. If you don't, though, if you don't, then I think better to play it safe and say, look, we can help you and, and say, let's talk and let your salespeople do the work. It's like the job of an email is not to sell. The job of the email is to get the click. I think the future of a lot of the digital forms of selling that we all know and love, whether it's selling through videos or launches or challenges or webinars, is going to be, be less about getting the sale and more about driving the conversation. That human to human conversation. I think that's where it's headed. That's what's, that's what's going to be most effective. You asked me a question earlier. How is it working? It's still a bit early, but the early signs are we've already ROI'd, we already have a positive return on ad spend, a positive row ads, and there's a lot more people in the queue. The scary thing is you have to wait. The sales don't come Immediately when you open the thing because it's conversational, it's conversations, it's consultative, it's more at the end. But the end may be, you know, in maybe 30, 60, 90, 120 days out in some of these sales cycles.

Yeah, I like it. And what's funny is that that was, I believe, your keynote, the H2H. Was it 2018?

Yeah, 2018. I said that we need to stop looking like we need to change our definition of CPC cost per click and we need to shift it to cost per conversation.

Yeah.

How many conversations, how many qual. You know, sales qualified conversations, how many qualified conversations can we drive into our sales team? That's where more and more things are headed. Look, I think there's still going to be pure e commerce businesses. I just think, you know, they're going to get more commoditized and even on those people are going to want to communicate via chat and ask some of those questions.

I'd say yeah, they have live chat as a. Is a huge category that didn't even exist before, so.

Exactly.

I think it's interesting. I love that. Speaking of tnc, depending on when you're listening to this, we think we're going to have tnc. We hope we're going to have Traffic and Conversion Summit here. It.

It's happening, it's happening. Get, get your shot. Get vaccinated. Get vaccinated. Come hang with us in, in San Diego.

So a affiliate free plug for traffic and Conversion Summit. Traffic and conversionsummit.com Also, if you're enjoying the podcast, would love for you to subscribe so that you don't miss out on any of the glitches and errors and things that we have as we create this thing for you guys. And you know, hopefully some good tips and information and conversation too. And if you really like it, it'd be great if you would review it and give it a five star review. That helps more people learn about it, discover it and benefit from it. And also we have a couple of cool places that you can find out more about the things that we were just talking about. And if you want to look at how we're marketing, you can look at scalable co and digitalmarketer.com and epicnetwork.com soon. I don't think the site is up there, but that is a whole new thing we're doing. So if you want to kind of see how we're using a lot of the stuff that we talk about here in all of our businesses, those are good places to Check it out too. Thanks for listening or watching and we'll see you next time.

You've been listening to Business Lunch with Roland Frazier. If you're enjoying the show, let us know by subscribing and leaving a review. And for more information, go to businesslunchpodcast.com thank you for listening.

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