Overview:

The podcast discusses an opt-in funnel and sales process used by a building company. Prospects are scored after opting in and the top 20% are pursued. A 3-day follow up process of phone, SMS, and email is used to maintain regular contact. Detailed information is gathered from prospects at each stage to qualify leads. Even leads that are years old are still occasionally converted through targeted prospecting campaigns. While conversion rates have dropped recently due to market conditions, leads from the database still account for millions in annual revenue. An emphasis is placed on regular communication, qualifying prospects, maintaining top-of-mind awareness, and using different channels like SMS to improve response and conversion rates.

Takeaways:

• The company uses a 3 by 3 prospecting process of following up opportunities using 3 channels (phone, email, SMS) over 3 consecutive days.
• They gather intelligence from prospects through an opt-in questionnaire to understand priorities and problems before focusing on sales.
• Qualified leads are segmented - 30% are removed, 50% go to email marketing, and 20% receive phone calls.
• They offer a $500 product for free early in the funnel to generate more data on prospects.
• Phone calls, SMS, emails are used in the 3 by 3 process, with the "goodbye" messages on day 3 being most effective.
• They generate new sales years later from prospects in their database through targeted prospecting every 3 months.
• Conversions have decreased recently but prospects in the database still account for over 20% of new sales.
• Salespeople are coached and trained extensively since natural closing ability is rare to find.
• Testing different funnel approaches and questions helps optimize conversion rates.
• Trust and credibility are built by having salespeople located where prospects are.

Automatically-Generated Transcription:

So first up, we, we get, we've got Russ Stevens, and Russ runs one of the largest coaching companies for builders internationally.

And we were talking several months back and he's talking about his targeted prospecting three by three methodology.

And every now and then I'm, I'm chatting with Russ, and he just drops in these things I've never heard of before and I'm like, Hey, come and talk to, talk to elite marketers about that.

So here he is, he's gonna talk about how to use this three by three me methodology to maximize the r o i from your list and why he always gets a mobile number on the initial opt-in.

So it's a tested pro and proven strategy.

He's still getting sales from 11 years ago, people who opted into his list 11 years ago by doing this, and he's gonna be revealing his actual stats as well.

Over to you, Russ.

Thanks, Scott.

How long have I got this?

You've got about, I would say till about 1230.

1230.

1230 ish.

And then we have FAQs and breakouts and that sort of thing.

Okay.

It's quite a simple strategy.

I'll see if I can string it out.

Yep.

Make it sound more interesting than it really is.

So yeah, that's got said, this is what we've imaginatively named the three by three process followed up by, by targeting targeted prospecting, we call it.

So the three by three process is the process of following up opportunities using three channels over three consecutive days.

It's incredibly simple, but there are certain components below the surface that make it effective.

So most importantly, we only follow up M Q Ls.

So a marketing qualified lead for us is a building company that does new homes or large scale renovations within that company.

We only target the decision makers, i e the owner or the director.

Yeah.

Because we're dealing with small companies, that's who they're the only people we target.

And to make this work, we do need the mobile.

So basically we need Intel, Intel in order to discover that kind of information.

And we actually discard 80% of our opt-ins because they're not qualified.

Now, I know there's a lot of marketers kind of wincing whenever I I say that about how we get rid of, uh, so many of our opt-ins, but we, we physically delete about 30% of people that opt in.

And the other 50%, uh, pretty much go on a back burner marketing only, like email only until they self qualify in the background.

But that leaves us with just 20% of the people that opt in.

And the reason that's important is because if we didn't do that, it would take five times more leads to get each sale and the numbers probably wouldn't work for this particular strategy that I'm gonna go through.

So it's important to know those little nuances that, that make this work.

So before I, I go into this, I just wanna very quickly revisit the last training that I did, uh, for you guys where I described the opt-in funnel that we were using.

I'm not gonna go through the, but it's very important to know because rather than go for the low value sale or the trip wire or even straight into a a, a consulting call, we focus on gathering intel.

Um, so I'm gonna whi through a lot of the slides here, but I really just wanna give you guys, uh, a bit of a, a feel for what's going on the backend of our opt-in funnel so that you can understand how this process, this three by three process actually works.

Uh, and I'm sure if you wanted to dig into this in detail, Scott can probably dig out the old recording of, uh, where I go through what we do in a, in a bit more detail.

But really this is, uh, a really a really quick reminder of how we got to this position.

And we were, at the time, we were stuck in a rut.

We were selling trip wires after people opted in.

But what we really discovered was there was no difference in conversion rate between someone that became a customer, i e we changed the relationship and they bought a trip buyer and someone that was still just an opportunity.

The conversion rates for our core offer were identical.

So that kind of said to us, there was no point in doing trip buyers and all we were doing was commoditizing our, our core offer.

That was why we decided to do something pretty dramatic in our funnel.

And we stopped selling trip wise, which were basically splicing up our core offer.

We stopped doing that.

We only sold the core offer and we just switched over to this new strategy.

And at that point when we decided that we had two options as to how we self liquidate our opt-ins from paid advertising, what do we go for?

Is it gonna be like a webinar, A A V S L, whatever strategy?

But we went along the information route and we decided that information was more valuable than gold.

And rather than having any attempt to self liquidate the funnel, we gave up on that completely and decided to gather Intel instead.

And what I wanna quickly share with you, I'll get whiz through this pretty quick, but on the, on the back end of an opt-in, the first question we ask you is a nice simple close question.

Are you the builder or, yeah, because a lot of builders don't understand, or people that own building companies don't even understand that question.

Are you the owner of a building company?

Yeah, that's what really, or do you work in a building company?

'cause we're trying to understand that key criteria for us because the ones that answer no, obviously you get s e o companies opting in, that kind of thing.

We just delete them straight away and that accounts for 30%.

But what was interesting was 85% of people that were presented with this screen answered that question.

I was quite shocked at that.

The next question is, we have to dig deeper.

We have to know what type of builder they are because we don't deal with commercial builders, anything like that.

88% of people answered this question, which further helped us to, uh, qualify a database for us to dig deeper.

We asked for their website, 86%, yeah, responded to that question.

36% even put a domain in when they had a generic email address, like a Gmail, which, uh, again, more and more people are, are using Gmail addresses when they initially opt in.

And if you can't understand if they're qualified or not, they end up in a general funnel, a general pot rather than a, a targeted pot.

So that was gold, uh, as well.

Um, and then we're asking some simple questions about their turnover.

And, and then this is a key one as well.

This is the perceived priority, get more leads, close more sales.

That's obviously marketing sales increase margins is financials, systemize the business.

This tells us what their perceived priority is, which is very rarely the real problem in their building company, but it's a, a very important bit of intel for later.

Next, we wanted something big.

We wanted their mobile phone.

So we basically, this point, there were a few steps into the funnel.

We offered something that was worth $500 for free.

All they had to do was put in their mobile number so that we could s m s the discount code to them.

Now, obviously there's no reason why we needed to ss m s the code to them, but we just wanted their mobile number, 66%.

The people give us their mobiles at this stage, which was vital information, but very interesting as well.

Then we wanna know their one, their number one challenge that they're facing, important for later.

And, and we wanna know their goal.

So we, we personalize it.

So Scott, where would you like to be in, in terms of, of your perceived getting more leads, whatever it is, so we can understand their goal.

And then, and then when we got the all that info, we then put them into the, what would've come a lot earlier in the funnel into a demo.

Now we give 'em a, an A or a B, like they can watch a demo or they can opt in for a webinar, which is information based.

But that kind of gives you a feel for what we're doing in the background to get the kind of intel that we need to make this work.

And like I say, we delete 30%, 50% go on the back burner and if they don't open emails or click on them, we delete them after six months as well.

Anyway, keeping our database really targeted and and refined, but we focus on the 20% that are qualified.

And I probably add, we use LinkedIn in the background as well.

So we have LinkedIn hooked up to HubSpot so that we can quickly identify decision makers and even a building company as well.

And we have admins working in the background.

So every single opt-in, they'll actually go onto their website, verify that they are a marketing qualified lead so that sales team don't waste their time following up people that aren't.

We even look up their postal address now as well so that we can do our live events where we've got the most, uh, m qls.

But really what this has done, it's allowed the sales team to focus on the best, uh, opportunities.

So now we've got around 10,000, uh, active marketing, uh, qualified leads.

We delete opt-outs, um, do not calls.

And we focus on building relationship with the ones that are most likely to proceed.

And I think this comes back to something I heard from Ryan Dice a few years ago, which really makes sense for our business.

And that's the conversations of the new leads because we can see a direct correlation between the conversations our team has and sales.

And to put that into numbers for you, this was an analysis I did on the length of the conversation.

So if a salesperson ha makes a connection, has a conversation with someone that goes on past a minute, one in five of those will result in a sale, goes up to 30% when they get past the three minute mark, when they go past the hour, two out of three you go forward into a sale.

So there's obviously a direct correlation between the conversation and the actual sales.

So now you know how or why we've got so many mobile phone numbers on our database and also how we maintain the, the quality of our database.

The next step is the follow up process, which always follows, uh, an opt-in or an action that, uh, lands them on our hot list.

And this typically applies to every new marketing qualified lead on the database that's performed some kind of action like watching a demo, maybe buying our book or buying our industry report, viewing a page that shows binding intent like a sales page or an order page or maybe their lead score reaches a certain level, uh, through viewing, uh, a number of blog articles, excuse me, and performing, uh, other actions.

The process for these guys is three channels over three days.

And obviously the unsaid rule on this, uh, is speed because you guys all know that seconds count and accountability is required in order to make the sales team maintain a standard.

Uh, because success in sales, that's measured in seconds, not hours, and certainly not days.

So speed of the first outreach is absolutely critical because that kind of sets the scene.

But we still need to utilize three different channels in order to get through to people these days.

Because someone might have be on the website, they're on your sales page, the sales person has spotted it because it's come up as an alert, they jump on the phone and they still don't take the call because a lot of people like me, I didn't answer my phone for seven years.

Um, you know, quite deliberately and a lot.

Yeah, there's a lot of people like that.

You know, if you can't get through phone by phone, you've gotta try other channel.

So for us, it's phone, ss m s, email, they're our three primary channels, but we will also try LinkedIn as well through navigator and even Messenger.

Although, yeah, that's quite rare messenger we don't, it's not a strategy we've really, uh, pursued.

And the thing to remember, we need to hit them hard and we need to hit them fast.

And that's why we do it over three consecutive days.

And hence the name, the three by three strategy, which is really imaginative of us.

In order to maximize every new opportunity here, here's the process we use.

And ideally it's t plus 10 seconds.

That would be the goal.

But obviously it's not realistic.

Salespeople are doing other things, but we want to get close to seconds as we possibly can.

So we call them initially.

Uh, if there's, if it goes through to voicemail, don't leave a message, hang up and call back instantly again.

And by doing that simple strategy of called in twice, um, you'll increase your connection rate by 20%.

And about in Australia, New Zealand and Canada, about one in five people, you will have a con a three minute plus conversation with according to like our, in our industry anyway, and our numbers.

And if you're ever worried about someone says, didn't you just call then?

Yeah, that doesn't matter.

You just say, yeah, I dunno what happened there.

But anyway, and then you ask a question to take immediate control of the conversation, it's really not a problem.

You don't do what one of our salespeople did and say, yes, we practice what we preach.

We always call twice and if you don't answer, we call straight back.

And he's like, yes, and that's why you get on my nerves.

Yeah, obviously like you never say that, but it's really, it's never a problem when you handle it.

It's all standard, uh, stuff.

In terms of what we call, Scott asked me to share some scripts and templates.

There's no real magic here.

We use different variations of this at different times.

You obviously use your own scripts, whatever works for you.

But in terms of a voicemail script, this is what we're currently using and it's best to try and keep it topical.

I e go after the news jacking.

Um, otherwise it can go a bit stale, not just for the prospects, but for the sales team as well.

And obviously, by the way, uh, salespeople should be called in from a C R M with call recording, not from their own phone when they, they do this strategy as well.

Step two of strike one is the s m s message.

Uh, this is what we, we use because generally, as you now know, we've got their mobile phone number.

So we can use this really powerful channel in order to get their attention.

What we find is, uh, always like to use something with curiosity at this stage.

Bit of blindness just to get a bit of intrigue.

And again, obviously we're not doing this from our phones.

Gotta be done from the c r m, it's copy and paste.

It's really quick.

And step three is to send an email.

Now, I, I like a closed question here 'cause I'm just trying to get a response, but again, it's whatever works for you.

And, and it's important to note that we know the pressing topics for builders because we ask them what those pressing topics are during the opt-in, which, which I just went through.

And the benefit of that opt-in process that I just showed you is we get data like this.

So by monitoring the current pulse of the industry and understanding what builders currently believe is their biggest priority, it's not necessarily the biggest weakness in their business, but it's their perceived priority.

We can adapt our marketing messages on email, sales conversations, the articles we write, and even the webinars to fit in with those perceived priorities.

Now the reason, uh, I'm showing you this as to why it's so important is look how things have changed just in our industry in the past 18 months.

I'm sure you all aware of what's been happening in the construction industry.

Builders were never busier.

Now they've never been more broke, lost more money.

But what that meant for us is 18 months ago is the only thing builders really cared about was getting more leads.

Because if they got more leads, they'd get more sales, they got more sales, they'd make more revenue, and then they'd be, they'd, everything would be fine.

That was, uh, a myth.

That wasn't the the real problem.

The problem was always their businesses weren't scalable.

So we never started there, but that's what they believe.

So that's what we marketed to them.

Look at how that's changed Now in the last 90 days, no one is interested in sales because sales have never been easier for builders.

Even the crappiest builders out there that haven't got a clue are booked out.

It's so easy being a builder and getting sales.

The key is making money.

And a lot of builders, as you've probably been reading, are losing huge amounts of money, uh, and have lost huge amounts of money.

So pricing and margins is the number one thing.

It's always systems and that's a bit of a, applies to all of them.

But pricing margins and understanding that we switched our marketing from being predominantly sales focused and marketing focused to, we only talk about pricing and margins and it's not the fact that we primarily focus on that.

It's the fact that we are very conscious not to talk about sales to anyone prior to a discovery call where maybe those few people are interested in sales.

But if we talk about sales too early to someone that's not interested, they'll zone out really quickly.

So really important to understand, I think your own industry and how it might change when certain macro events uh, occur.

The other thing that's interesting, look at how many leads we were generating 18 months ago in a 90 day period compared to the last 90 days.

That's because we were spending about 80 or 90,000 a month from Facebook, 18 months ago.

Changes with, uh, apple.

More importantly, the fact builders got busy, completely disrupted our business.

And, and it meant that we switched off virtually all our advertising.

It wasn't worth it.

It was no longer viable.

We focused on our database, which made our current strategy even more important.

These things can, can hit you.

Uh, obviously, yeah, we're all well aware that channels can dry up.

But look at that.

We went from 700 leads a month to like less than a a hundred in an 18 month period.

Some major disruption to the business, but we've still grown 50% in that period, probably a hundred percent in that 18 months.

So moving on next day, strike two, not the day after, not the next week, not the next month.

Gotta be the next day.

I would recommend trying for a a different time of day for us because we're B two B, we go, we try and go morning, noon and afternoon.

Our builders who are B two C, they might try morning, afternoon, and evening, but you try and mix it up because if you can't get someone's attention at one time a day, it could work another time a day.

Anyway, we're gonna just repeat the process.

We're gonna call if we get voicemail, we hang up, we call again, if we get voicemail, we leave a message, we send an s m s, we send an email.

Now the one thing I would share is that you will struggle to get your staff to do this and they will not do it consistently no matter what they say.

Um, you'll need accountability in place and you will have to drive them hard to make them call using three channels the very next day.

'cause even though they'll nod their heads and say, yeah, they hate doing it, but they don't hate doing it.

They feel uncomfortable doing it initially, but when they're more afraid of you than they are of uh, anyone else, then they, they do start to do it eventually and it does work.

This is why we insist on it.

And then day three, this is the most powerful part of the strategy because this is where we use what we call the goodbye call and the goodbye Ss m ss and the goodbye email.

Because at this point we are breaking up.

It's, it's not me, it's you, you wanted this, you wanted this breakup.

Now I'm being quite blunt here to convey a point and we're obviously not as blunt as that with the prospect, but that's really what I wanna try and get across.

This is very disciplined, it's a non-negotiable strike three, they don't get any more chances.

And it's really important that we make it clear that we are now assuming that they have solved their problem and no longer speak to us.

So we will not be calling them back and don't say call me back if you're not sorted or I'll check you in three months.

You're just letting steam out the pressure cooker.

You've got to let that pressure build.

This is a breakup and we have to give them a sense of loss and abandonment because that's how this works.

So be very clear, I am never calling you again.

If you wanna speak to me, this is in your call and this is where we use a bit of intel as well.

Yeah, this is the call script.

You know the voicemail we lead, I tried to contact you by phone, ss m s and email.

No luck.

So I'm gonna assume that you've now figured out how to generate more leads for your building company.

I'm not gonna keep pestering you and I wish you all the best.

We're getting to 5 million in the next 12 months as well.

So we've reminded them of their previous action and that is very clear.

We are not calling back.

And the s m s is along the same lines.

It's all very polite.

I've tried calling you, I'm assuming you're not requiring any further help with increasing your margins.

So I'm gonna leave it here.

Yeah, goodbye.

And the email is exactly the same.

Yeah, nothing fancy, but it's really succinct.

And the point is, we don't ever want to hear a prospect say, I didn't hear from you, so I went with someone else or I thought you weren't interested.

And we don't.

Um, but we used to, but we never hear that anymore because we are so clear that we have broken up with the prospect.

Now in terms of how they work, that goodbye sequence gets the most response out of anything.

Plus they, the prospect are apologetic when they reach out because they've been called out.

They've been, they opted in for your help, your expertise, your guide, they're interested in your product and, and then they ghosted you.

So what we find is that a lot of 'em are very apologetic about that, which puts 'em on the back foot.

And, and if they say they're interested, when they do reach out, book them into a meeting and if they won't commit to a meeting, let them go.

Never.

I dunno if this kind of covered it, but I'd never end a call or a meeting without locking in a follow-up meeting because if you don't, you are back to a cold follow-up.

You are back to the three by three, the start of the three by three, which is a complete waste of everyone's time.

If you are on the phone to someone and they can't make a decision and they need to think about it, then book 'em in for another meeting.

And a meeting is an appointment that appears on their calendar in your calendar.

And if they won't commit to that, it's call me next Wednesday afternoon.

It's, no, I'm busy.

I'm a professional.

I will, my day will get booked out.

You know, and, and make it clear that if they're not prepared to book in, then you are not calling them again.

It's in their call.

It's the goodbye again.

So again, that's something we've struggled to train salespeople to do effectively.

We've had to set up all sorts of reporting that triggers an alert to us.

When a salespeople a salesperson doesn't follow that process, i e if they redate a deal and there's not a follow up booking, we'll get an alert.

Why haven't you followed the process?

We make them kill off deals and salespeople don't like doing this because they are scared of missing an opportunity.

And that is why part two of this process is just so important.

And this is the, the bit that we call targeted prospecting.

And this is where we contact every single M Q L on the database that's got a mobile every three months by phone SS m s and email.

Now it's a very simple approach.

I think I heard about this strategy from Dean Jackson who used or he invented the nine word email.

It's incredibly powerful as a nine word email, but combined with SS m s and phone calls, it's even more effective.

So we do this by phone.

We call again, we send the ss m s and we send me email, but we only do it once.

We don't use the three by three on the targeted prospect, the 90 day follow ups, 'cause that would get a bit intense and a bit weird.

But in order to make this really fly every three months, contacting them, you really need to be top of mind with your prospects or at least on their radar by emailing them at least weekly.

We do it four times a week.

And also popping up on their social media feeds.

'cause that makes it a whole lot easier when you get 'em on the phone six months time or even 11 years later.

Yeah.

Was where Scott mentioned after they'd initially say opted in and they would've otherwise forgotten about you.

And when you implement this strategy, then in our experience it results in around 1.5% of our leads.

Our old leads progressing to a sale, which might not be worth the effort for you if you low ticket, but for us it works as a a filler strategy.

So our primary focus is always new leads coming into the database and hot leads that have, yeah, recently interacted.

But after that the team is then expected to make these outreaches outreaches to every single marketing qualified lead on our database and we manage it.

So the lead allocation, uh, for each uh, sales person we take off, uh, uh, we take a lead off them if they've not contacted them in the last four months.

So bearing in mind we pay commission whether they make the sale or not.

If a lead goes through, uh, an automated funnel and signs up, we still pay full commission to the sales person because we acknowledge they played a part.

Mm-hmm.

But if they don't contact 'em for four months, we take that lead off 'em and give 'em to someone else.

The guys that aren't putting the work in and doing this strategy, their database gets smaller, which means their sales decrease as well.

Now we've actually rolled this strategy out to our builders and their success rate is around about 1% compared to ours, which is about 1.5.

So it's a bit lower.

But when you consider they're making an average sale of about 600,000, it's still very much, uh, worth their while.

Every a hundred leads they've got in their database, they will get a contract out of those leads every quarter.

So it's pretty, pretty phenomenal.

So just to give you an idea of the numbers, and this is for Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

For the US the conversations is about half that.

It's much harder in the US to get a three minute conversation from one in five.

It's more like one in 10.

So for every 1000 marketing qualified leads on our database, we typically end up with 200 conversations.

That's a three minute plus conversation.

About 15% of those will proceed into a follow-up meeting, a booked meeting where they can have a, a more in-depth conversation, which we call an opportunity.

And then round about 50% of them proceed into a sale.

And I think it's really important to give you guys a bit of context as to what a sale is for us.

'cause you know, conversion rates obviously vary with the size of the, the pitch.

For us, it's a 2000 US dollar continuity program.

Just to give you a bit of context.

But most importantly, our lifetime value for each sale is $20,000.

So that's not to say they stayed with us for 10 years, it's because we upsell them into a a higher paying program.

But what that means is our r o i is $300 per M Q L without any additional ad spend at all.

And that works for us just fine.

$300 per M Q L per quarter, say 1200 a year works for us may not work for you.

It really does depend on your numbers.

So you really gotta do these kind of numbers as well to see if it's stacking up.

And the reason it is so important, I think to keep an eye on this, uh, on these numbers is because this year, as I mentioned, it's been very difficult in our industry in the construction industry.

And we are only converting at the moment at no 0.75%, which is half of what we were doing this year.

And it's still worthwhile to us because I checked the numbers before I came on.

And year to date, um, our conversion rate from meeting to sale is down to about 25% instead of 50%.

So it means we're only getting about seven or eight sales per 1000 MQL about no 0.75%.

But because of that still accounts for 20%, or sorry, 22% of all new sales this year, which is about half a million dollars in new business from cold leads on our database that were more active.

Because remember they weren't taking any action at all.

They weren't viewing a demo, they weren't viewing articles, they weren't viewing sales pages, they were completely cold.

We woke them up.

So that's business we would not have had, um, for sure.

And we're pretty confident that our market is starting to come back to us now.

So by the end of the year we reckon we'll be back up to 1.5 or 2% conversion rate.

So yeah, we'll double that, uh, revenue that we're getting from this whole process.

And the other thing, just while I was popping this together, uh, as well, another new sale, I think Scott already mentioned, so one from 11 years ago, but literally when I was putting this yesterday, another one came in and was getting an alert as to when they originally opted in and what the funnel was.

And 2012 they opted in and I look at the deal to see what generated the opportunity and it was targeted prospecting, again, 10 years on database, it keeps doing its thing, but they would've done nothing.

That person if that salesperson hadn't reached out and made it happen.

So hopefully I'm a, I'm about on time now to answer any questions.

That was, that was awesome Russ.

That was really dense and just, yeah, my mind was blowing up with all the different potential applications.

So yeah, thank, thanks for, uh, for going so deep.

With that I'll, I'll throw it out to the audience and see what questions we've, we've got.

So I'm presuming that your sales calls are all done by outbound phone call, not Zoom meeting or anything else.

Is that right?

Yeah, that's right.

The initial sales call is done through HubSpot with call recording and transcriptions, making it easy to review and the, the follow-up meetings, they're sometimes on Zoom, sometimes calling as well.

But yeah, we do try to do, we uh, prefer to do 'em on Zoom for face-to-face, but they can be either.

Okay.

And sorry, on the, the front end when people are opting in, what's some, is that some sort of survey funnel software or is it a chat bot or what do you see?

I all built in HubSpot and that's for the tracking because of the deep analytics you get from HubSpot.

We funnel everything through there.

Our main funnels are lead magnets.

Like I say 18 months ago our top lead magnet was uh, a qualifying checklist.

So we gave builders the seven initial qualifying questions, the closed questions they needed to be asking, uh, in a guide.

We also had the sales process for builders mapped out in a blueprint.

Yeah, that worked extremely well.

One that's always worked quite well is how to price your jobs.

But that has been the only one we've been using in the last six months.

But we do an industry survey once a year.

We're about to kick that off uh, in September.

Again, it's the biggest survey in the industry and uh, that gets us, that gets us gold actually because we ask a hundred questions about a builder's business and basically it's like, uh, a consulting call because we go into all their marketing, their sales and all the questions we're asking.

They're giving the builder a realization of the gaps in their business.

And you know, that has a very high conversion rate because when we follow those up, not just into our initial membership but into high level consulting as well because we've basically automatically done all the things that you would normally try and do on a consulting call.

Yeah, that industry survey has been gold for us.

Fantastic.

Thanks.

Yeah, welcome.

Can I just ask a question regarding that person who came back after 10 years?

Did they get calls every three months for 10 years?

Or how long have they been on that recall list?

No, this is um, something we've only really been able to implement in the last probably about two 18 months, I'd say rather than two years.

It's something we'd always would've liked to have done, but we never had the staff to actually do it.

And yeah, two years ago we brought our partner out of the coaching business, which gave us full control to start doing exactly what we wanted.

So we took our sales team up from one person up to 11 in something like a 12 month period.

It scaled back down again because the, with what happened in the industry, yeah, the results weren't there.

So yeah, we pulled it back down.

But yeah, to answer your question, I haven't checked this particular person.

It might have been the first time they've been targeted or they might have been on a, on someone's radar most likely being in Australia, they were on someone's radar for at least the last year.

Doesn't mean they would've actually spoken to 'em each quarter, but that contact, that touch point, leaving a message on the voicemail, put someone on the radar, the ss m s and the email and it plays a big effect when you then put the money behind uh, those leads on Facebook and then they start to see your stuff.

I think attribution, I think we thought it was gonna be so much easier, didn't we a few years ago with the tracking that came in.

But if anything it's got harder because there are so many different channels now that we've gotta try and touch these people.

Thank you.

On those three channels, are you finding yourself, uh, hitting 'em for three days on those channels consecutively each one on three different times on that each different channel or are you doing one per channel?

Uh, one one per channel.

Yeah, one per channel over three days.

So I guess the exception is the phone call when we call twice, but we only leave one voicemail.

But yeah, one s m s on day one, one ss m s on day two one s m s on day three.

So yeah.

Got it.

Single communication on each one.

But it is really hard to get salespeople to, to do that religiously because they feel awkward about it.

It, they're scared of being called out for harassing people, but yeah, that's never a problem.

Yeah, if people don't wanna know or react badly, that's great 'cause we can delete 'em off our database.

Yeah, it's all about honing in on the best possible prospects.

You probably have a really low percentage of angry people at that point anyways, To be honest, we used to get a lot more angry people from what I can remember.

Maybe I get shielded from 'em now 'cause I tend to argue with them.

But I remember getting a lot more angry people years ago.

And to be honest, I think years ago, uh, probably with uh, good reason because when, uh, when actually started this business, it started in 2011 when we had the floods in Brisbane and Master Builders published a list of all the builders in Queensland with their email addresses.

So I, I lifted that list and hence my first marketing campaign was born.

So yeah, I started p**s off people 'cause it was uninvited and obviously you couldn't do that these days.

Anyway, Yeah, That's how I introduced builders to email marketing.

Russ, you were talking about the lifecycle of a client being about eight to 12 months.

Last time you were on has, and you were talking about using video testimonials.

Have you know, have you been doing that or have you noticed any difference in the lifecycle?

Yeah, Probably.

Uh, if, if that was, I can't remember when that was the last time I was on, but it's a really good point because at that time when it was that low we were doing monthly uh, subscriptions.

So they would sign up for 197 US dollars a month.

We scrap that round about the same time that we scrap trip wires and we only sell annual now.

So we do a payment plan where they can spread the payment over six months.

But we're very clear, yeah, this isn't something you can cancel.

You are signing up for a year and that took our lifetime value up to three years.

Go figure.

I think it's because we were given before, we were given them 12 opportunities a year to cancel.

Now we only give them one.

There's that fear of loss plus obviously we've improved what they get over the time, but instantly, pretty much instantly our churn reduced, uh, dramatically and we tripled our lifetime, uh, value And that's that.

That's awesome.

Any, any other questions?

I'll ask one more.

Yeah, go for it.

One of the things I thought was pretty interesting is the longer that you can keep 'em on a conversation, you're able to increase your conversion ratios.

Do you have a script?

Not that I'm asking for, I'm just more curious on how you're, uh, running the rapport through that person.

Are you looping the conversation to try to get back to an issue?

Are you trying to just keep conversation and problems that they already have?

What have you found is kept them on the line?

Yeah, look, the best person to answer that is my daughter Skye, who runs the sales team and is all across this.

I can give you a high level from when we set it up, but uh, she is right across it, but generally I've even forgot what we call it now.

But, uh, we do have a structured process.

Obviously rapport is the, the most important thing, but I forget the acronym we use, but there's about five things that we go after to try and draw out.

So it's very much given the salesperson the freedom rather than a script.

But they've gotta get these core things extracted outta the conversation.

They've gotta establish if they are, uh, the decision maker, obviously, which a lot of time we know, uh, anyway, but they're really trying to extract the pain and, and what they're looking to, what they're looking to achieve.

I've got a question.

Uh, Russ, I like the idea how you've got the questionnaire at the end of all part of your lead magnet or thank you pages.

What kind of software are you using for that?

Is that like convert box or is that like a script you use from HubSpot?

It's HubSpot landing pages.

We painstaking lead built it page by page.

Uh, and that's just so that we have all the analytics sitting inside HubSpot.

But what blew me away were the conversion rates.

I never expected the conversion rates to be as high as you guys saw people giving away that level of information.

And and a lot of it is by analyzing the conversion rates.

We actually moved the questions around as well.

So what you'll see there is the optimized funnel, but it didn't start out like that.

So we were asking the wrong questions early on and losing too many people.

So we moved those further down the funnel.

And would that, and was that ab testing automatic or did you just manually make those?

No, that was, that wasn't AB testing because it would've been quite complex with that many steps.

It was simply looking at the conversion rates on each page and, and then moving the higher ones to the beginning of the funnel.

Yeah, simple as, it's interesting because we're just putting our Facebook a and Google advertising over to a marketing agency and they're telling us that our funnel is too long-winded and it's not gonna work, uh, for what we're trying to achieve.

And they're trying to get us to go straight to booking in a, a call at the, on the league magnet opt-in.

So said more than happy to test that.

Let's get some base data first and then we can test how they think that will work.

So yeah, not widely accepted really or agreed with this strategy, but it it works for us.

Yeah, we'll test both and go back with the results, which I'm sure will be different than they'll expect.

Yeah, We, we have actually tested that, but what we found was we are booking in unqualified people with our sales team taking up their time.

So obviously we're filtering out four fifths of the database that salespeople never even see doing this strategy.

And the other thing is we get, we, well certainly we find we get a lot of no shows that could be the industry we're in with builders.

I know a lot of people tell me like, no, yeah, if you do it right, we can get your show up rate to 80, 90%.

They never can.

We've engaged a lot of independent companies that have these fantastic results with other industries.

And I hate saying our industry is different, but builders are extraordinarily time poor, so it does pose certain challenges.

Sure.

Yeah.

Russ, Russ, I'd just like to say it's a real pleasure to see someone who runs at 110 kilometers an hour.

Right?

It's just fantastic.

When I saw you put the presentation on, I'm thinking, oh, this guy's got it.

You just really have it, you're running it a hundred miles an hour and of course you've got these wonderful systems in place.

So congratulations.

Can I just ask you mate, with regards to sales staff, we're found with our stuff that if you don't pay them retainer, it's really hard to keep them.

It's uh, do you pay a retainer and commission or just commission only?

No retainer?

Definitely.

And we do that for good reason because we are very systemized.

We expect them to follow our process and paying a retainer gives us the right to demand that because our salespeople have to follow up all of them, their members, because their next job is to progress them into, into the next level or set them up to meet with the coach.

So there's a lot of admin we expect our salespeople to do.

So yeah, we give them 48,000 base and then like a decent commission, a decent incentive on top of that to make the sales.

Excellent.

Thanks mate.

Mm-hmm.

Hey, Russ, with with, with regards to uh, getting that uh, show up, right?

The only, the only thing that I found in everything I've done in multiple niches I've worked with other people is like charging for that initial phone call.

Even if it's I charge $21, that's the sweet spot I found.

And you just tell them it's, Hey, this is just to show me that you are serious, not curious.

And if $21 takes you outta the game, the $21 is done its job.

So It's interesting and it's something I must admit I've forgotten about that it's something we used to do back in the day, 20 14, 20 15.

We then switched to the, the free phone call.

But certainly if we were gonna use it on the front end of the funnel, it might be worth considering.

Yeah, yeah.

So I, I found that attracts the best salespeople because I had, I had a couple of salespeople working for me and they, they started telling their friends because obviously it's a hundred percent or virtually a hundred percent show up rate, it's probably about a 95% show up rate 'cause they've paid.

Mm-hmm.

And the quality of the call is excellent.

'cause again, you, you're talking to a customer, not a prospect, they've already got the credit card out so that at this point they're a customer at that point and they've already given you money and mm-hmm.

I, I was finding that my salespeople that, that were working for other people as well, they were working for other big coaches around the world and I, I was getting other salespeople calling me saying, Hey, any chance you can throw me some calls my way as well And that, that attracted the best salespeople as well, that strategy there.

Okay.

Yeah.

Good stuff.

Yeah, good to know.

Yeah, I'll definitely test that.

It's that.

That's awesome.

Yeah.

Actually, before you jump on, so that's just one question.

Unfortunately I caught the end of that, Russ, but I've seen some of your process previously when you are doing voice calls and I have you done a comparison between offshore and onshore staff with a proper Aussie accent as opposed to something else?

We haven't split tested it, but I think we probably didn't need to because yeah, in the general feedback we could tell, we used to do all of our calls to the US and Canada from Australia.

One of the big challenges was the time zone.

But we found that having guys based in the US and Canada being able to say, yeah, hey I'm in Texas as well.

It, it really does build that trust and probably even more so at the next level, having coaches based in Canada and the US has really helped our coaching business take off in the US I get calls all the time.

I had a call from some similarly routed through an island number the other day with a very thick sort of yeah, Filipino accent.

That's a big part of it.

It's not just the accent, it's the, the darling codes.

I know you can fake those things anyway, but yeah, that plays a, a big part in it as well.

And it's hard to fake the from number or like, it's more challenging when they're dealing with multiple countries.

It's much easier to have someone that's focused on North America and they've got that, you know, zero one.

Can I ask a question?

Yep.

Do you have a location?

Might be a question other people might be able to put in the chat box where you actually find the sales closing type of people.

You're not just advertising on normal mainstream channels like Seek or something.

There's a place that you would go to find that person.

I can see a comment's just come up indeed.com.

Yeah, we use Indeed and Seek, it's bloody tough for salespeople, especially at the moment.

You know, we've got this crazy situation where they kept interest rates so low just trying to get unemployment down to a level where productivity is crap and the unemployable are now being employed and the best people are being poached at crazy money.

So yeah, we need a bit of a correction really.

We need a bit of pain in, in the employment sector, I think to get back to normal, but it's extraordinarily tough.

But yeah, to answer your question, we just use the normal channels.

Yeah, I, I had about two sales closes working for me last year and they just were not up to scratch.

So I'm like, ended up canning the whole marketing campaign because I couldn't, I could get the bookings for 'em, but I couldn't get them to do their job properly and I'm just banging my head well, Interesting.

Well, in what aspect wasn't up to scratch?

Was it the process or was it the sales ability?

I think probably their closing ability, like the quality from their end.

We had a pretty good process in place.

Like one month we closed 22 people, but How many calls?

I didn't look at their stats on their calls.

I had a digital marketing firm that were doing all that side of it.

I was just paying them for that whole Did you have ongoing sales training with them?

Yeah, they did.

Yeah, they did.

Who, who with What's that?

Who with, Who was like coaching?

Yeah, I engaged an actual digital marketing team that specialize in funnel building and that they worked with me at a company called The Entourage.

They were a pretty good deal.

So they used to just do all that side of it and they used to just book the calls for me to do the final close component.

Mm-hmm.

But, uh, in the end, I, I just felt that they weren't, the closers weren't good enough, so I just said, look, I need to find the right people, but never was able to really do it.

So that's why my question.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, look, I don't think we, we've probably found one natural closer, I think out of, um, 20 or 30 people that we've employed over the last couple of years.

The rest, it's all about ongoing coaching, uh, listening to their calls and training and accountability.

Because even the good ones, I think Frank Kern says it all the time, it works so well, we stop doing it.

And I find the same with salespeople as well.

You know, they get really good at maybe objection handling and closing and then they stop doing what they're doing.

And the only way you can fix that is through accountability.

Yeah.

It might be something to bear in mind, it might not be the answer, but I think ongoing coaching and accountability, we, before Covid we used to have like salespeople come to the office and we'd play calls.

You, we'd pick a call and that would be very uncomfortable, um, for people.

But we did it.

Yeah.

Even played our own calls as well.

Um, yeah, so it's full transparent, but that really makes people think about what they're saying when they're on a sales call.

And it more important makes 'em prepare properly as well.

I think for each call JD Cody's trick of hitting the space bar, but it, I must've been hitting the right space, so that, that was awesome Russ.

I kept it going with the q and a 'cause there was just some great questions and I think I wanted everyone to really, really soak it up.

I'm gonna go through that recording again and take notes, slow it down and take notes because that was great.