Welcome To Business Unscripted

Dave 0:01

Welcome to the Business Inscripted Podcast. We're here to share real life insights, practical strategies, and the added lessons that we have learned from our home states. So whether you need help with operations, accountability, financial analogy, sales, or maybe just getting your mindset right. We are here and it is the right spot for no fluff conversations. So grab your favorite cup of co. Let's jump into the show. Let's jump into the show, ladies and gentlemen. We are here. It's another Friday morning, which means we're here for another live episode of the Business Unscripted Podcast. We hope you are having a wonderful and productive week. Just me today. So, you know, Dwarne has got some stuff going on with some clients. So I hope he's having a good time over there. Well, you know, on the other side of the world. But hey, we're here. We are here every single Friday. So if you're a business owner, aspiring business owner, and you're looking for someplace where you can learn from obstacles, struggles, or maybe get some advice on how to move forward or think a little differently in your business journey, you're in the right spot. We share our experiences combined. Me and Darren have over 30 years of entrepreneurial experience. And then I have another 20 years of corporate world. And I think Darren's got a good 10, 15 years as well in that kind of environment. So we like to share our experiences, things that we've done, ways that we are continuing to sort of evolve and expand the way that we think, because in today's world, ever-changing, it requires us to do things differently and think differently in order to kind of truly stand out and carve our own path. So if that's you, you're in the right spot and welcome. So with that, you know, I think on these solo episodes, one of the things that I like to do is kind of look back as I'm preparing and see any sort of common themes or maybe questions, things that have happened over the last couple weeks

Why Getting Started Feels Overwhelming

Dave 2:10

that might be relevant to uh you all, right? That you're watching or you're listening to this. And so I've heard kind of varying responses or questions around, you know, some things about, you know, hey, we we've we aren't very sure where to start.

unknown 2:27

Right.

Dave 2:28

We have all these different things and different, you know, processes, and we hear all these different, you know, insights, and we don't know where to go. We don't know what to fix first, right? You you probably feel that way in your own business. You probably have eight million things that you need to get done, and you are overwhelmed. You just don't know what to do first. So, what I'm gonna do is on today's episode, I kind of came up with like six sort of questions. We might not get to all of them, but if we do, great, that I've heard over the last two weeks that owners like yourself are experiencing and that we've had great conversations on. So, you know, kind of that that first question, you know, and I'm kind of paraphrasing the question, but it all comes together.

Automation Versus AI

Dave 3:15

So the question is around, you know, I have a dozen or so things that I want AI automation to do. You know, how do I start and where do I start? And I think this is probably the most overwhelming question that I hear or in the theme of a conversation that I'm in. And I think what we want to do is first separate out AI and automation. I hear people use them interchangeably, you know, when they think they need AI, and and maybe a process doesn't need AI, AI, the process just needs some sort of automation. And there's a big difference, and they they work together, but they aren't interchangeable. Automation, right, is maybe setting up a recurring email system that creates your nurturing campaign for you instead of you having to always remember to send that first email to somebody, right? That's an automation. You don't necessarily need AI to do that. Now, AI can complement that process by suggesting you what the flow of that campaign should be, helping you with the copy, things like that, but it's not necessarily needed in order to work and create automation within your business, create efficiency, things like that. So I want to first sort of have that understanding that when we talk AI or we talk automation, it's not the same thing that a lot of times automation can be done without necessarily the use of AI. You may already have processes, forms, documents, things like that that you're doing manually now where you have to remember to I gotta update this template or I can send this out and then follow up. Like those are things that could be done automated, not necessarily with AI. And so that's kind of the first sort of topic that I like to give people because it does change the way that you think about it. You know, just understanding your system and just documenting your process to understand, okay, how do I turn this 12 steps into an automation is a lot different than trying to overcome your hurdle of do I want to have AI help me? And you start to you can start to see how they are different processes in your business. But most owners are having struggles around like their marketing, right? Their scheduling, follow-up, social media content, emails, right, phone calls, bookkeeping, those are all sort of relevant lists that we all have. We all, as a solopreneur or even a smaller business owner, you have those same sort of everyday tasks that you have to do in your business to keep you moving forward, right? And so we've talked about it in the past, the two lists. And this is, I'm gonna say it again because it is the most important thing that for you to do in your business or even in your life. You know, you may not even necessarily, you know, maybe you're an aspiring business owner and you're like, I just want to be more efficient so that maybe I have more time to work on my idea or my new journey. Then you have to create these two lists in order to understand everything that's going on in your world. And and you may be, but I don't have

The Two-List Exercise

Dave 6:20

time for that. Well, do you have time not to? Because every day, every hour that you go without making this list and understanding your processes and what needs to be done and corrected is another day or another hour that you just lost being inefficient, right? So the two lists, the first one, obviously I say it all the time. Write down every single thing that you're doing right now on a regular basis. What are your processes? What are you what are the responsibilities you do? What is your your scheduling, your steps that you take for outreach or follow-up or whatever it is you do on a daily basis in your business or in your life? Write them down. That's list number one. Write down not in detail, but overall, what is everything that you're doing in your business? You're following up with clients, you're dealing with clients, you're answering clients, like the work that you do for your clients, whatever it is, what are what are all those tasks? And then how much time are you spending right now per week doing those tasks or per month, whatever's easier for you to track? Then once you create the first list of everything you're doing, create your second list. And the second list is all the stuff that you've heard you should be doing, you want to start doing more, or you haven't had a chance to do when you because you started your business, right? Some of that stuff is like, hey, I want to spend more time away. I want to, you know, maybe have my weekends uh back. I want to, you know, not work 13 hours a day. Whatever that is on list number two, so it's everything that is blocked from your life right now or in your processes because of all the time you're spending on list number one. So that could mean for some people, and this is just examples of stuff that I've heard from list number twos, are hey, I want to make more video content, or I want to post more, or I want to think of new innovative projects and spend time on those, but I just don't have time because of all this time I'm doing on all this list number one stuff. Now, once you have your two lists, this is where you start. Right? Not with everything. Don't go, oh my God, this list is 45 things deep. No, you're gonna take the one or two things that are gonna give you back maybe two or three hours a week and start there. Start with two or three things, and that's it. Block off the rest of your list, take them off your list and then put your list away. And then only focus on those two to three things. You're gonna limit your overwhelm. That's how you know where to get started first. Now, some some people it makes more sense as well. Like each person's situation is a little bit different. Some people it may make sense like what's gonna be what off of list number one is going to make the greatest impact to my clients. Maybe it's your employees, like whatever your focus is, your situation in your business is completely different than mine, than John's, than Jane's, right? So that's why you have to create your list. I can't create your list for you. You know, Dan Martell can't create your list for you. You have to go and create your own list for your business, for your daily life of all the stuff you're doing manually. And then from there decide what's my priorities, what's my next 90-day goals, etc. And then you take those one, two, three things off that list and work through those in full to create them. Now, if you're like, hey, I want to get a further jump start, I don't want to do this all myself. I know I need to do more. That's where finding somebody, right, or talking to a partner like we are at Triumph Business Solutions or anybody else that's in your network that you know that you trust with a relationship that you could go to them and say, Hey, I need some help with this. How do we work through it? They're, you know, if they're in it and they're doing it for a long time, they're gonna be able to assist you with that. And you know, there's a few different types of people when it comes to business, right? Break them through, break them down. The first one is the anti-AI, right? The people that literally, the the second you mention it, like shuts you up, like interrupt you, and and they don't want to hear anything about it. Okay, that's group number one. Group number two are individuals that they know they want to do more with AI, they know they want to be more efficient, they know they want to create these automations and these efficiencies and their processes, but you just don't have the time or the knowledge right now to actually make that work. And then you have group number three, and group number three are either people like myself who were business owners that have now found a passion in doing this and learning more and growing and being in it all the time and developing new solutions, or the people that you know have have just they have an entire business around it of just AI, like you know, with Triumph Business Solutions, our business, we do finance and other support services. We don't just do like the AI automation support. But there's people like us that are that are literally using it 13 hours a day, that have been using it since like ChatGPT came out, but have dived even further into it for myself. I speak for myself here, like in the last like six months. And it's I I have a passion for it. I love it. I love it. It's it's what can I what can I create? What can I put together? What problem can we can we solve? What support can we give? And so that's what I love about like being able to do it myself. Now, anything we do, and I say this all the time, we're not teaching you, we're not saying anything that you couldn't go out to your claude or your chat GPT or whatever, your open AI, and do it yourself. So everything that you do, you can totally do yourself. It just really depends on like your again, your priorities. What are you looking to accomplish? Like, what is your passion, you know, and and where do you want to put your attention? So you may not want to take the time to learn. Perfect. I have a couple people in the office are like, I know I need to do this stuff, I just don't want to know the nitty-gritty. I just want to like, what what do I hit? Like, help me, like, and so I love that part is is seeing the time savings. So for yourself, you go back to your list number one, you pick those two or three things that are either gonna have the greatest impact on your clients, greatest impact on your processes, and the time saved. And so two to three hours a week over a year, if you just stopped it that would free up your time to do things from list number two for about three, three and a half weeks. Could you get three could could what could you do with three and a half extra weeks now that you just freed up by freeing up three hours a week? That's what that adds up to. And so it's it's vital that as you start freeing up this time, that you're not just filling it with other filler, which can happen very easy, right? You have to be pointed. It's like, okay, make the plan. I'm gonna take these three things and I'm going to improve them. As soon as that three hours, two hours is taken up, here's how I'm gonna replace it. And I'm gonna fill it with this off of list number two. And now instead of I don't have time for things on list number two, now you're starting to build the time for list number two. And that's how you get started.

Keep Human Review In Lead Outreach

Dave 13:31

Another question that has come up a lot is not that is um not necessarily like where I get started, but it's you know, what do I what do I automate right in that in that lead to booking process and kind of balancing that with still being human. And you know, so some of this relates to like you know, your lead response, you know, maybe text follow-ups, how are you capturing things in in the CRM, and then your appointments. And so what you want to look for is one, how are you capturing your leads? So I would say, and and I and I suggest this, depending on you know your business, would be you know, automating a lot of that front end sort of like research work, right? Finding the the outreach and and connections and and maybe people on social media. That part could be automated, like because that takes a lot of time to go and search through lists and and see who matches your your ICP and all these different things. So that part automate. Now, the next part it takes it's is where the human comes in, right? And so, you know, we've talked about it on this podcast, Jeremy Minor, seventh level, NEPQ questioning, training, sales. So what you do in the next part, which is the conversation piece, is you can automate some of it, which I've done, but you still make it yourself, right? It's not just, hey, Claude, go create me a message campaign and then just don't read it, don't run, you know, and and just leave it. Like that's that's not what I want you to do. How you could automate this, right, is whatever your sales training is, whatever your ideal conversation focus point is, right? Think about it this way. Right now, in order for you as a solopreneur or a small business owner, maybe a couple employees, you would have to spend all that time going to that person's profile, learning, seeing everything it's got going on, determining how to create a message based on some of that context and some of the stuff that you do in your business to then generate that connection, generate that awareness around a possibility of that individual having a problem that might be able to be supported by what you do with your business. But that takes a lot of time. We're human, a lot of things go off the rails, we feel pressure, right? You you may say something that you didn't mean in terms of you know trying to push too hard because maybe you just lost a big client, or you're hurting for money at home, and you're like, I really need to get this sales, so I need to push harder than ever. And then you say something that pushes somebody away that might have might have you know been a good lead for you. So, what you can do in terms of when I say automating and using AI in the lead space and the conversation space is set up your voice, set up your engine to literally be trained on you, how you talk, how you want it to respond in the different stages of the conversation. And then from there, have it still require you to approve it. Because now what you automate is you automate a lot of that mundane work that doesn't necessarily make or break who you are in servicing a client, right? So going to their profile, finding some of their recent posts, learning about them, researching their company. Those things don't necessarily need your attention, right? You have to start thinking like a CEO, right? CEOs don't go out and do all their research, they have people under them to do that. That is what AI is doing. So, like that kind of stuff, right? Of going to their profile, finding out some of the recent stuff that they've been talking about, customizing your step two message to them based on what they have been talking about and their industry and sharing some educational value. Like, how much time would it take you to do that for one message? 15, 30 minutes to come up with the message properly. Now, can you train yourself to do it the same exact way every single time, no matter what you're facing in your personal life, what client deadlines are coming up, or anything like that? No, we're human, right? We're not it, we're not a computer. So we can't train ourselves to do that kind of stuff the same time every way, but you can train like an AI to do that. It's kind of what we're building in our command center. We're training them to go through the same process, but customized by researching who the person is, understanding the prior conversation, understanding, right, things that they've been talking about, things that they've been posting about, and then customizing an educational situation question to get them to respond. And then when the conversation starts happening, you then can train your engine however you want to involve you, right? So maybe they, you know, you go to a problem awareness question, and now they start to talk about a situation or struggles or frustrations that they have with their current processes that you maybe want to personally step in now because you don't trust your AI to actually give those right answers. Now, there's two different fronts here. You could say, Well, if I'm always approving the messages, I don't care. I still want it to draft for me because it saves me time. Train it on your processes, train it on your steps, train it on the pain points, the struggles, the obstacles, everything that right people might be feeling when they're having a conversation with you, train it on all those things so it has it in the background to pull from. And then you still have to approve the message or ask for a revision if you don't like the way that it sounds. So now you can still stay human while actually saving yourself time. And so as long as you don't take the entire process and you and you have it just go fully automated, give it full autonomy. I don't think that's really good. Long term, short term, it may be fine with the cold prospects. But I would say once you start getting somebody to engage, there should be more of a warmer touch, right? So early stage, automate. You can even like you know, have it just set the process and the steps you want it to do to learn and kind of generate those initial messages until they respond. But then once somebody responds, be more engaged, right? So it can draft for you, give you the history, give you the estimated message, but you need to be more involved with it to make sure that it's still sounding more and more like you as you lead towards the conversation. Now, the biggest thing I say on leads as well is you don't want to sell them. Like the whole goal of DM management of conversations on social media is not to go from completely cold to a sale. The whole goal is to go from cold, maybe warm connection, like through commenting or or connection in a group, etc., to go from there to problem awareness. And so problem awareness is you asking the right questions for them to begin to tell you some of the struggles they're facing, some of their obstacles that are going on in their business right now. Once you get the problem awareness, the next step would be hey, would you be opposed to maybe jumping on a call and diving a little deeper into those? And I can maybe point you in the right direction. You know, I'm not, I don't want to sell you what we might not even be the right choice, but I still want to, you know, help you and maybe point you in the right direction of some things that I've heard in that same situation for other people that I've had conversations with lately. There's no pressure there, and you shouldn't have pressure because you still don't even know if what they're facing is something that you can solve. The idea with that is that you're literally just saying, Hey, let's take this off chat. Let's have a quick 15 minute conversation. I'll give you some one or two points, but I want to dive a little bit deeper. Let's see what you're doing because I don't think we Are the right choice, but I want to point you in the right direction. You keep the sales resistance wall down by doing that. And so now once you kind of get past that sort of outreach process, then the next step should be right, your calendar should be automated. It shouldn't be, hey, tell me some times you have available, or here's some times I have available next week. What works for you? Like

Booking Links And No-Shows

Dave 22:58

that screams unprofessional. Now, once you're meeting with like people you already know, like you don't necessarily need to use a meeting booking if you don't want to. But on DM, you should have a meeting link that gets sent to them that is limited to the next like five to seven business days. That's it. Because you don't want them to try to book something three weeks in advance. You're gonna forget about it, they're gonna forget about it. You want to keep that energy up, you want to keep that emotional right thought process that they just had about telling you about their problem and their situation. You want to keep that up. So your initial call should only be, I would even suggest, could be in the next two to three business days of times that you have available. Because now you're you're still gonna be emotionally connected, they're still gonna be remembering who you are. Because I get that all the time. Like people are like, man, nobody shows up to my the calls. They book it, and we have great conversations, we book it, and then they get to the call and they don't show up. And then I ask, well, just for my knowledge, like what's that time frame? Like, how far in advance are you allowing people to book? And sometimes they're giving it's just unlimited, there's no limit. I said, Okay, and when do typically when do they typically book? And normally it's it's like seven days out because everybody, everybody knows we're human, we know our week, we know our next maybe like start of the next week, and we're like, I don't want to book anything then. I know I got all the stuff I need to do, so I'm gonna book in like seven to ten days. If if you give them the option, they'll do it. But what happens, and I've done this to others. If that's you and I did that to you, I apologize. Where I get closer to the meeting and I don't remember that person, like I don't remember the the the connection, I remember why we wanted to have a conversation, and and I'm too busy to even go into like the social media network to actually like check. So I just like yeah, I'm just gonna cancel. All right, and so I just cancel. Now I hate the no show stuff, so I I I try not to do that like ever, because that's like the worst professionalism that I would say. Like, if you have a meeting on your on your schedule, like you need to book it. Now, the other part of that of your exploratory calls and your show up rate, the question, the follow-up question I ask is, Well, what's your process for reminders and appointment outreach? Well, what do you mean? I don't have one. That's why. So a lot of people, if like you're using like a Callonly or maybe you're using like even your custom domain or you're on Go High level, a lot of those initial requests might end up in trash or spam, not trash, spam or junk, right? Hopefully it doesn't end up in trash when they said they want to book it and they booked it, right? So you, if you're not doing any sort of follow-up, any sort of reminders to your session, they never saw it come through. So it's never on their calendar. So who's to blame at that point? So what you can do is make sure that if you are setting up like a go-high-level calendar or even uncannyly, right? Make sure that you are setting up some sort of reminders that are at least like 24 hours in advance. You know, if it's in person, I would say like a four-hour advance, you know, email. Or if it's a virtual, you could maybe do an hour. And then throw texting in there. Like if you've gotten their phone number, like text them. And then in your system, you could also send a DM on social media about it too. Just wanted you know to confirm our meeting that is on our calendar for 4 p.m., right? The more ways, the more mediums that you can make that connection and reminder, the better off and the better your show rate is going to be for your exploratory calls or any stage that you're looking to fill. Do an honest look. If your no show rate to your exploratory calls is low, really give yourself a, you know, we call it that mirror moment. Do I have a follow-up system? Is it is it going through? Because I, on my end, you know, I would follow up with somebody, because typically I give them five to seven minutes, right? To show up. And then after five to seven minutes, I will either follow up with an email or follow up with you know a message if it's the first time and just say, hey, it looks like, you know, sorry, we, you know, it looks like we missed ourselves during our scheduled meeting. If you want to reschedule, you know, here's here's a link to reschedule. Otherwise, we should best, right? One time. If you do that to me a second time, I don't even bother. So, but the first time, I send that follow-up message, allow them to schedule. Now, I'd say maybe 20 to 30 percent, maybe even higher, but I don't have the exact data, but I'm estimating, let's just say 30% of those. Typically, I get a response of, oh, I didn't even have it on my calendar. What you know, did you send me a meeting? And it was booked from a link, and I could be like, Oh, well, it might have ended up in your junk or spam folder. You know, let's get another one on the books, and we'll just make sure we that it's on it's on your calendar. And so that's the first thing that you have to do is always confirm the meeting, even outside of the confirmation email that automatically goes out from your calendar. And then on your your booking page, like put on there, hey, make sure you check your junk or spam folder. Like, do that reminder that after they book, hey, make sure you you check your junk or spam folder to make sure that you've gotten this meeting, it sends immediately. And then now that prompts the person to actually go and make sure it's on their calendar. Because a lot of times they might book and then they run off and then they do something else or they get a call from a client and then they for even forgot that they booked. And if there's nothing in their email or on their calendar automatically, they're gonna forget about it. We forget about it. So that's what I would say too when you think of like the calendar process, so the booking process, make sure you have automations around follow-ups, texting, and at least have two or three different mediums to actually have those reminders sent out in person, give them a little bit more notice. If it's a virtual, you know, 60-minute notice is fine, and then do maybe like a 48-hour confirmation,

Reminders And Protecting Your Time

Dave 29:12

you know, and you can even there like say, hey, you know, reply to this email. And I even uh in terms of like when you start getting busier, like you can even, and I've had this happen to other people that I've that I've booked meetings with, and I've done it for a lot of people, like if you in your message can say, if you don't respond to this email, then we're gonna cancel the meeting because our time like is is is booked, and we can use that for somebody else, and we can you know use that slot for somebody else. So please, if you're not gonna be able to make this meeting, either reschedule it or you know, respond and let us know. And if we don't hear back from you in confirmation, then we're gonna go ahead and cancel your session, anyways. And so that protects your time. Now, I get the feedback, Dave. I don't want to do that because then it's it's it just seems like I'm never gonna have my calendar filled because people just respond that they don't want to do it. Why is that? Why do you think that way? Like they booked with you, they took time to go to your link to book with you. They had a reason to book. Your job now is to keep them engaged so that they keep up the excitement, emotional, you know, bond, whatever you want to call it, to still want to keep that meeting with you. That's your job now. Not trying to pay passively until the time comes and then hope they show up. You have to be proactive. We talk about this all the time. You have to be proactive instead of reactive. So setting the system up that prompts them to continue to be engaged is how you want to do it. Now, an even better way, and an even next step, you know, when we say what should I automate, is have some sort of educational value ahead of that session that you can communicate to them. Not in the confirmation with the booking, but maybe you follow up in four hours. Hey, I wanted to send you this ahead of our conversation. It's been impactful for others, and I think it might be impactful for you too. Let me know what you think. Bam, you've already given them value and they haven't even had a 20-minute conversation with you yet. What is it that you can do for people to provide value before they've even spent a moment with you? Now, the next step to that would be if you don't want to like have the hey, respond to this or we're gonna cancel your meeting type of flow. The other way that has worked for a lot of people is you know charging for your exploratory calls. Now, Dave's like

Give Value Before The Call

Dave 31:48

the pushback on that one is well, what do you mean? Like, I would never charge for that. Like, why would I charge for that? Well, because you're charging for your time, right? You say you don't want to have low show up rates. So for the people that actually pay, they are bought in, right? They want to meet with you. And you can offer it to give it back if they feel like they didn't get value or they don't decide to move forward, but they're paying to book their time because if they don't show, they don't get their money back. It's basically you buying your time, right? They're they're they're locking in your slot. And if they show up and they decide not to move forward, refund them their money. If they feel like they didn't get value, refund on their money. No questions asked. Like as long as you make that clear, then you have no problems. And then you you know, they're well, what if I only get 10% of the bookings? Well, you're gonna get 100% of the show-up rate. So you get 10, you know, let's say this. Let's let's say you did 100 exploratory calls scheduled, and right now your show-up rate's maybe 25%, right? So you see 25 people. If you started charging 29, 39, 49 for that 20-minute, 30-minute call, and you got what, maybe still 40 people to show up or 40 people to schedule, and you had to refund all of them, you had a 40, 40 out of 40. You you've increased your show up rate 15, 15. Well, you actually increase your show-up rate 75% because you went from 25 to 100%, but you got 15 more people, right? So it's not necessarily about losing the masses, it's about making sure that you're capturing the ones who are bought in. So that's why I suggest maybe charging $39, $49. You can even charge $100 if you want, depending on how valuable your service is, your level of expertise in the market, and your time capacity. Right. And it might go on your time. So 30 minutes, 60 minutes might have a different, you know, sort of locking cost for you. It's it's up to you. Every person's situation is different, every business is different. It's just these are just kind of ideas to when you think of to answer the question like what should I automate on my lead to booking process? And these are those things. So I hope that was impactful, right? Obviously, you know, automating the front part, the cold part, the research part, automate a lot of that. You know, doesn't even need a lot of human interaction. Just kind of train it, check in on it, have it run audits. And then the conversation piece, you can still automate a lot of that conversation piece, but have your human involved, so yourself or your sales team, to be able to kind of confirm or revise to make sure that the message sounds exactly how you'd want it, but it can still have some sort of automated within there. And then with your calendar and your booking, make sure you have the follow-ups, the reminders, all that stuff is going to help you increase your show up rate. Question number number three, right? And so I guess it's not necessarily like me giving marketing advice because I'm not a marketer. I just want you to know that, right? I'm obviously not a marketer, but a lot of the

Five Numbers To Track In Marketing

Dave 35:40

stuff that we talk about are the processes around that, and that's the operations piece. But I have had the question a lot around like, how do I know whether my marketing is working? And the biggest thing, you know, they're they're they're talking about like like what do you what's what's important for you, right? Like, depending on your business. And again, this is where every business situation is gonna be a little different, a little bit different, right? So are you are you trying to grow like a channel? Like, because then views are important, right? And and retention is important, like, or like are you trying to grow your business in terms of a subscription or you know, a professional service? So your situation is going to be different depending on what your outcome is for the marketing. And so the biggest piece that I say around marketing is to make sure that you have your process in place first, and second is make sure you know what your outcome is, not just saying, I want more people, I want more money. Like if you that's how you go into your marketing, it's never gonna work.

unknown 36:56

Right.

Dave 36:57

So when you think about your marketing, right, there's there's some some things that I typically say, and there there's like five five things that you should pay attention to around marketing, and then we'll talk about like the system and all that kind of stuff. But how many people were contacted, right, in your strategy, like whether that's views, impressions, whatever, right? How many of those people engaged? So if you're boosting a post or anything like that, right? How many liked, how many commented, how many, you know, maybe clicked through to a DM, anything like that? Like how many people actually engaged is the second number. From there, how many conversations with qualified people, like your ICP, were held from the people who were engaged? How many closed? And then what was that sort of that gross margin that could be attainable to that marketing method? Those are the five simple numbers to look at, right? How many people were contacted? So if you're doing some sort of like outreach prospecting on a social platform, how many people did you reach out to? How many of those engaged? So that could be as simple as one of two things. If you're if you're doing a prospecting campaign, that could be how many people accepted. And then the secondary one would be how many people actually responded to a message, right? And then from there, how many qualified conversations were had? So when I say qualified conversations, it's not just somebody sent me one or two messages and then ghosted. A qualified conversation is going to be dependent on you, but how I would describe it in our workflows would be they had a conversation online, DM, whatever, or networking event, and then they they booked an exploratory call. That's a qualified conversation. Somebody who maybe sent one or two messages, not a qualified conversation. I wouldn't count it as that. Then how many people closed? And you can even dive even more into your close because, as we talked about previously in your show up rates, this is going to help you understand. So, and your process could be different. So you could have a one-call close where you try, you get everybody in to an exploratory call, and you say, Okay, well, here's you know, some options I might be able to assist you with. You does it make sense to go over them. Boom, right there in the first session. Okay, you you can close or not close. Some people, like in our situation, we have like a I would say like a two or a three call, only because things are more customized for some people's situations. But you know, we have an exploratory call, quick 20, 30 minutes, can be virtual, could be in person. Once we do that, we get into a longer session where we you know go through those initial pain points, dive a little bit deeper in our you know, maybe 45 minute, 60 minute conversation, but then at the end of that, we present options. And and those options are you know the program support, and then they can close right there. So the the question that you need to understand, right, is not just how many people signed, which is the most important, but from the qualified conversations, what's your show-up rate? Right, to your exploratory call. And then from if you are a two-call close, what is your what is your scheduling rate from exploratory call to deep dive? And then what's your show-up rate to your deep dive? And then once you're in the deep dive, what's the closing to a customer or a client? Because those numbers, and with those numbers, you can backtrack based on any sort of growth you want to do, you could backtrack to understand what should the goals be for you or your sales team, right? So let's say, and here's how we'll backtrack this really quick with your marketing. Let's say you want to grow 10,000 MRR, right? And your average client, your

Turn Goals Into Daily Outreach

Dave 41:12

a new client is worth 2,000 MRR to your business. So how many clients do you need to sign to increase 10,000 MR? Five, right? So five 10,000 divided by two, five. Simple fun math. And let's say you're giving yourself 90 days to increase that 10,000 MRR. Right? So over the next 90 days, you need to sign five new clients at $2,000 a month. Now, you may be like, okay, what do I do now? Which you may be in this situation. I I don't know what that means. I like I know I gotta sign five clients. But what do I gotta do every week? What do I do every day? Let me break it down. And this is where you gotta have the data. Otherwise, it's just a rough estimate. But let's say, for example, you need five clients over the next 90 days, okay? And your close rate, estimate your close rate. So let's say, and I would be conservative here. Don't try to be like, oh, I close 80% of the people that I do a proposal with. Do you? Do you really? I mean, you might, I'm not saying you don't, but be conservative here because this is gonna be like the the min. Okay. So if you want to close five, right? You want to close five people the next 90 days, and let's just estimate you have a 25% close rate, okay? That means that you need to see what how many people? You need to actually have deep dives with how many people, right? So you take five divided by 0.25, and it tells you you have to see 20 people, right? Five is 25% of 20. So that's just deep dives, right? Now, what's your show up rate to your deep dives? 75, 80, because people are engaged and you continue to sort of involve them. So let's let's be conservative here. Let's do 75%. So now you need to book 27 deep dives to get the 20 people to show up to be able to give you the five that you need to close, right? So now from your exploratory calls, what's the percentage of people that book a deep dive from your exploratory calls? Let's say it's half. Typically, I would say that's a good conservative estimate. So let's we divide that by half. So that means we have to have 54 exploratory calls scheduled from the deep, right? That move on. So we have to have 54 people show up to the exploratory session in order to get the 27 that book a deep dive. And now, here from our beginning conversation, what is the show up rate for the exploratory calls? 40, 50, 60 percent. Let's just say 40. So four out of 10 people that book an exploratory call show up. Now I know that's really low, but we're just gonna I just want to show you how these numbers play together. So now we're gonna divide the 54 by again 0.4. So that's 135 calls, exploratory calls that need to be booked to get the 54 to show up to get you the 27 to book a deep dive to give you the 20 that show up to give you the five that signed as a client, right. So that's 135. Now, the other number that you have to pay attention to, it's not just, oh, okay, 135, that's not hard. Here's the hard part. How many people do you have to outreach and have an initial conversation with to get them to book a call? So if you think of and you don't have the data, this is the biggest number. Over the last 90 days, how many people have you outreached to? How many people have you connected with? How many people have you sent an email to? And how many booked calls have occurred? Right? So I would say that this rate in act in terms of the actual booked call is like under 5% for some people. It may be you. So I'm gonna be very conservative on this. So let's take 135 and we're gonna divide that by 0.05. So this means in the next 90 days, to get you your five clients, you have to outreach 2,700 people. Prospecting, connecting, all that. So 2,700 people to get you down to your five clients that you have a goal of. So this is why it's very important to know your data and how you can backtrack from whatever your goal is of growth or revenue, clients, whatever it is, backtrack through your actual right process to understand the number of people that you need to actually start communicating with in the next 90 days to make that happen. Now, that 27 people, obviously, you're not gonna do that all in a day. So let's say you give yourself two months, so 60 days to outreach those people. So if you do 60 days, right, that's 45 people a day. Let's say we we we we knock out weekends, and and so now let's say, you know, that's even more. So we do 2700. Let's say we knock off what would that be, eight weeks, so 16, so you know, let's just call it 45 days. That means you have to outreach 60 people every single working day of the week. Can you have you done that? Are you close to that? Now it doesn't seem as bad when you break it down by day, does it? No. 60 people, you you should have that. Right? You 60 people a day is not hard. Now, when you try to think, holy shit, 2700, that's a lot of people. That's not that could be more right overwhelming. But when you break it down and you start to break it down, okay, I got 60 people today. This is why I say it's so important that if you are not where you're at, you don't you're not where you want to be revenue-wise, you have to have two, three, four hours a day doing your outreach efforts, building that pipeline. Otherwise, in 60, 90 days, you're never gonna see the results. So I'm interested to hear from you if you're watching this or you're listening, whatever it is, go down and in the comments, put down what is your goal over the next 90 days, and what was the number that you kind of backtracked to of initial first contacts that you need to make? And then in 90 days, I want you to come back here, hold yourself accountable to that, write it down. But that's how so when you think about it, when you backtrack that to go back to the question, how do I know is my marketing working? Right there. Is your marketing giving you those initial conversations that match the number that you need for the revenue growth that you want from your marketing? And if not, something needs to change. Okay, also the other thing that I'd say a lot of people is marketing is is not just advertising, right? Marketing is not, oh, I run smats, I'm good.

unknown 49:53

No.

Dave 49:56

Marketing is all that stuff. Your website, right? Your social media content, your outreach, your networking, all of that stuff generates your marketing for your business, right? It's it's your it's your brand awareness. And so if you're not doing stuff every single day to build your awareness and do some sort of marketing of yourself, you're putting yourself behind. And it's one of the biggest things that a lot of people struggle with is they don't want to talk about themselves, but they want to be successful, but they don't want to talk about themselves. And I think what you have to do there is you have to shift your mindset from I'm not talking about myself, I'm talking about how to support others. I'm talking about things or strategies that I've seen work that have made impacts. That's what you're talking about. You're not talking about you, you're talking about support and growth for other people and the impact you that you've made, and that hopefully it makes an impact on them as well. That's what you want to focus on. And so the last thing I want to say too is around advertising and marketing, you know, a lot of initial thought processes are run ads, you'll grow. One, I learned a hard way. Don't don't run ads. One, you know, either using an

Build Operations Before Running Ads

Dave 51:22

agency or not to start, like it's not gonna do anything. If you don't have your sales process down, you don't have your system down, you're just wasting money. Because think about it. Like, if you started running ads, and unless it's you're running like a platform or a program or you know, like a product, okay, I get that. Like run ads, you're going to a product, it's not that hard. But even then, like you've got to have your fulfillment system down, otherwise, you're gonna make people angry. But if you're a professional service and you want to run ads to like grow your business build awareness, and you haven't even taken time to think about your onboarding process, your follow-up flow, right? Your proposals, your agreements, your invoicing. What is advertising gonna get you except angry people? Because you're not gonna be able to fulfill for them, and then they feel like they wasted money with you, and then it's like this big old downward spiral, right? Excuse me. The the the biggest thing that you want to put your attention on is developing your system and your processes first, have conversations, go one-on-one, right? Be proactive, talk to people, you know, give some lessons, give some trainings, and anything that you can do to get your your name out there, just not advertising. Because advertising costs a lot of money to reach the number of people that you need to reach with the impact, right? And with advertising, you don't you don't get to have the guarantee that all 2700 people from our example are your ideal client profile, right? They're taking a sample audience that they think might match and show it in front of them, and even then the advertising has to hit them at the same exact moment that they're thinking about the problem that you potentially might be able to solve them for them or with them. And if you're not a marketer, you now have to generate that thought process, scroll stopping marketing material as well, which a lot of people struggle with. So to get started, right, you need to really focus on the process, the support, the actual like service you do, generate that system, and then as you begin to scale, now you can potentially look at like advertising and different things like that. Otherwise, you know, if if you started running ads, and if you think to yourself, if I started running ads, could I take on 10 people right now with no problem? And the answer is like yes, yes, I could, how effectively, how efficiently? And if it's not what you would expect to your level, then you're not ready for ads. And and I hear a lot of people think like, what's your capac? Like, think of what's your capacity? You know, maybe your capacity for onboarding in your business is two people a month. Ads isn't right for you. But but Dave, I could get a bunch of different leads and I can close, like if I get the two, I can just move them to the next month. Yeah, nobody when they're ready to sign up, they don't want to wait 30 days to get started. So ads isn't right for you. Now, if your capacity is is maybe five or 10 and you've got your process down and you run a small ad budget, yeah, maybe that makes sense. But capacity of two per month, maybe one per month, ads isn't you're gonna be wasting money on ads. You can do you can do other things proactively that generate you the same awareness and viewership than than running some ads. So, you know, with that, I know I said there were six questions, we got through three. There's a lot here, I know. I think the biggest thing I love doing these shows, I love doing these sort of conversations. And hopefully you got something from today's episode that puts you in the right

Start Small And Pick Two Wins

Dave 55:36

direction. I know there's a lot of golden nuggets here that that you can take away. If the biggest thing that I would tell you, I tell a lot of people this, is don't think you need to be doing it all right now. If you haven't started yet, if you're just dipping your toes in the cold water, the shallow end, don't dive into the deep end. You don't need to yet. Start slow, right? Put your foot in. Put your other foot in. Right? Get used to the temperature a little bit. And again, we're I I don't any of the processes, the way, like the systems, all this stuff when it comes, like it's not something you can't do yourself, which is why I say, like, I would rather train you, go do it. You can learn it. But if you don't want to learn it, that's the beauty of you know partnering and having relationships and following this podcast, is that right, we could help, we can support. And then once you get in to the shallows, you may feel like, hey, this is where I want to be. Some people don't leave the shallows, but some people, as we talked about the three different types, are gonna dive right into the deep end, and that's me and Dwarne. We're there. But don't try to be everything, don't think like I'm so far behind and I can't get started. No, no, no, no. Think of what's those two or three things off my my list number one that I'm gonna get started on, so that I can start filling that time with this number two things. That's how you take away. That's what I want you to take away today. Don't think you have to do everything. Take away, do one or two processes, work through those, get those automated more efficient, optimize with AI, whatever you want to do with those, but start slow. You don't have to start quick. So, with that, I hope you guys have a wonderful and amazing rest of your week. We are back next Friday, 8 30 a.m. Look forward to seeing y'all. Hope you have a wonderful and amazing week and do all that fun algorithmic stuff. Like, share, comment, do all that fun stuff. All right, guys, have a great weekend. We'll see you in the next one.