Oli Billson's Dramatic Turn Around

Oli and Ryan discuss Oli's business turn around and identify how you can use the same principles to create a dramatic change in your own business.

Transcription of Episode

Ryan: All right, welcome to the Fix Your Funnel interview series podcast. In this episode, I'm talking with Oli Billson of UK and he is going to be talking about one-to-one sales turn around. This is about a business of his, I'll let the introduction kind of get on its own, but this is extremely valuable if you have anybody that is a customer that has a thousand dollars or more lifetime customer value, you're going to want to listen every second of this. With that, let's just get into it.

I'm really excited about what Oli is going to be sharing today because there's a few things that just really [00:01:00] transform your whole business, and one of them is when you understand how to communicate and connect with people. Oli, you can tell me if you think I'm over simplifying this, but when people talk about business, I feel like they overcomplicate it, for the most part. When it comes to business, you got to create something of value that other people say, hey, that's worth more than I'm going to end up spending on it.

So the equation, I know there's a lot of people say no, it's got to be equal exchange. Now you, of course, as the business owner, you have to be happy with the amount of money you're receiving so that you provide stuff with a good heart. But the perceived value for the consumer has to be a multiple, it can't be just equal. If it's just equal then it's probably not going to last long term and for me, when I'm thinking about business, I want it to last long term. I want to be in business, the same business, for a long period of time. I always have to find a new business to be in. [00:02:00] That for me is a characteristic.

So, yeah, you have to create some value, but then it comes down to, you got to be able to communicate that to the market or, in other words, to the people who would find value in what you bring. You have know who those people are, how do you get in front of them, and how do you communicate what it is that you do in a way that's clear enough that they can easily grasp, oh, that's what you do? That's what I want. Here's my money. Give me what I want. That's the long and the short of it. We often overcomplicate it, sometimes it's because of sales people, right? People selling technology or maybe information want to make it sound like there's more to it than that, but at the end of the day, that's really all there is to it, isn't it?

Oli: Yeah, I'd agree. I'd agree totally. I just think, these days, people are always chasing something new that they think is gonna be transformative to their business in some way, shape, or form, because [00:03:00] obviously, there's a lot of people out there that purport a lot of information. There's a lot of reporters out there of other people's stuff and when you trace it back, some of that information, not all of it is always predicated on actual results.

Anyway, so that's one thing, and so people start kind of running around, chasing after the bright shiny object, the Silver Bullet. I like what you said because, yeah, you just kind of simplify it a little more, it's that really, these days we've just got new technology that we can leverage, there's obviously more media that we can leverage as well, and bringing those things together to have more meaningful conversations and, done the right way, using those things, we're [00:04:00] able to crystallize our message in the right way. But, you can also, unfortunately, go the other way and not leverage technology and media. In turn, you have a very messy lead to customer journey. You can have a business that isn't very predictable, isn't very consistent, and the whole experience for people engaging with your business can be quite frustrating because people generally, in our space that we're talking about here, they generally over automate things and they don't always begin with the end in mind which is obviously wrong. Number 19.

Ryan: Right. Marketing rule #19.

Oli: Yeah. There you go. I got it this time.

Ryan: We'll get into that. Yeah, I think that was enough [00:05:00] introduction, but I wanted to just introduce other people to Oli. If you don't know Oli Billson, you'll obviously get familiar with them during this training, but you may have heard him on the stage at TNC. He spoke at GKIC, which used to be a great organization, I think may have a future still. He's recently been featured on a podcast, the Perpetual Traffic podcast that comes out of the digital market organization, great podcast, a lot of good information there. I understand you've got other podcasts you'll be on in the near future. Oli and I actually met a long time ago at an ICON, so Infusionsoft annual conference, and we just started chatting. We had a mutual friend, Dan Bradbury, and we just started talking and we found out that we were on the same wavelength for a lot of really important things and so we [00:06:00] hit it off immediately. It's been fun to watch Oli's career because Oli had his businesses that were really nothing to do with Infusionsoft. He was just using Infusionsoft to grow those businesses. How many businesses do you currently own?

Oli: Four. Four separate ones.

Ryan: And they're very different, too. It's not like they're all similar, you have one that does reprogramming of computer chips, right? For cars to get better efficiency or better performance out of them, which is pretty out there in terms of what we're probably talking about today. You have another one that does a lot of automotive enhancements, like you're showing me that you have M7, was that was down there in the garage?

Oli: Yeah, we have an M5 down there getting wrapped.

Ryan: Great, now I sound like an idiot because there's no M7. So, he's doing all these kind of physical, hands-on businesses. He's been using these concepts that we're gonna be talking about in those businesses in some degree. And then you [00:07:00] have an agency that actually does marketing for businesses, which has been doing phenomenally well. And what's the fourth one?

Oli: Yeah. So with the service business, retail B2C, consumer facing, doing vehicle enhancement, the franchise business, which is the vehicle re-mapping where we sell franchises internationally, we sold 170 in just under four years in doing that. Then we got a business where we train people how to do what we do with the vinyl wrapping and window tinting.

Ryan: So you do it and then you also train people how to do it. That's the fourth business.

Oli: Yeah, that's another business and that's three. And then the fourth is the agency, which is all over the world.

Ryan: Cool. So, Oli's got a good track record [00:08:00] of just getting results. That's why I was excited to have him on the call, besides the fact that we're friends. Even if we're friends and you don't get results, you don't get invited. Oli actually gets results, and that's why I was excited for him to share. We chat periodically, and during one of our chats he was talking about one of those businesses that he hadn't really applied Fix Your Funnel and some of the strategies that you do with Fix Your Funnel too, and so you were thinking about shutting it down because it just wasn't performing up to par.

As you guys know, we have a limited amount of time, so we can only invest in so many things and so it is an important thing, if you do have multiple ventures, to evaluate those ventures from time to time say, hey, should we cut this one off? But before you decide to cut it off, you did something. What I'm hoping today you're going to do, and we talked about this so I know you will, take us through that journey. What was going on in that business beforehand? What was the Epiphany? What was the aha moment? And then, what did you do [00:09:00] specifically? I think that's where people get a lot of value.

Oli: And at the risk of making me sound extremely dull to everybody here, I kind of made a bit of a cardinal sin. Which is that, we weren't actually doing the right things to enable us to get the results that we could actually get from that business. What I mean by that is, as an agency, we do a lot of marketing for a lot of other businesses and we do their marketing for them. We do the consulting and then we do the implementation.

Something that we came across, probably about three years ago now, from you and Trent was what we now call the phone funnel framework.The phone funnel [00:10:00] framework is a very powerful system of being able to move people from Facebook advertising which, back then, you know wasn't as prevalent in our marketing mixes as it is today, but it was still part of it, and move people predictably from Facebook to qualified phone appointments. I've been teaching and sharing that phone funnel framework for probably the past few years to other people outside of our agency that we weren't doing this for. People inside our agency were getting phenomenal results for 9 and up to 11 times return on investment from cold leads.

Ryan: Yeah, it's phenomenal.

Oli: Then I started sharing, getting to different marketing events like you talked about, like marketer and other places like that, and letting people into the mechanics of it all. So that's just the [00:11:00] contexts on some of the things we're going to talk about here.

Ryan: In other words, you're trying to say you knew better.

Oli: Yeah. I know this stuff. I know this stuff. Well. I know it intimately well because we invented some of the things that enabled it to be so successful. So we took the concept and we amplified it into many different industries. It wasn't just one industry, we made it in lots of different industries. In industries where people needed to have a conversation with people, like the phone, in order to sell to them.

Ryan: Can I do a timeout real quick? Because I think some people listening may tune out at this point if they're like, well, I don't want to have conversations over the phone. I don't have conversations over the phone. If you're one of those people, what I would say is this, hold on and hear Oli the all the way through because there is a common myth which, hopefully we'll dispel by the time this is all over, [00:12:00] which I'm not going to state what that myth is yet. If you'll just hold on, we will cover it for sure, but it is probably a myth that's got you making some decisions that are actually really counterproductive to your financial well-being and may honestly be sucking the life out of you. So, just hang on, we'll get to it. But if you are one of those people that's like, yeah, we don't have phone calls, we don't do that kind of stuff, just hear him all the way out because you may be surprised at what you'll discover.

Thanks for that time out, Oli. Go ahead, set the stage for us. What was going on before?

Oli: Well, the truth is, this business which, by the way, I've had for 11 years. So it's not new, this one. 11 years. For those who don't know, I've been in business since I was 15. So, I've been around a bit.

Ryan: And he's now 17, so he started this business when he was 2.

Oli: Yeah, [00:13:00] so, this business, which was near and dear to my heart, which I used to operate, had predominantly gone from human sales process, meaning, I used to sell over the phone to people that inquired, through to advancements with automation, through to us automating a lot of the marketing and automating for selling. Just to be clear, 10, 11 years ago, I went from people calling us, us speaking to people and selling to them, through to us generating leads and then putting them through an automated system.

Ryan: Real quick, to give context, so is that where you first started using Infusionsoft?

Oli: That's right. Yeah, that's right.

Ryan: So you had been running this business, it had been successful obviously because you were still doing it and getting some money [00:14:00] from it, but you're like, hey, maybe I could gain some leverage by utilizing automation. So you did that, and did you get any leverage from that initially?

Oli: Yeah, because one of the foundational principles that I began to learn above marketing automation was direct response marketing. I discovered direct response about 12 years ago and I realized the power of information first marketing. So, giving value in advance to people to build a relationship with them to create a system of acquiring leads, acquiring contact information, and being able to then follow up with those people to a point where they were going to buy. That's where my future self came in, because once I learned direct response marketing, I was able to add rocket fuel to that because I was then able to keep up with the number of leads that I was generating, where as [00:15:00] before, more brand based advertising. There was a small number of people coming into us that we were then dealing with variably. So that's really where Infusionsoft came in.

Ryan: I want to just, real quick, point out for everybody that's watching this that that is a Common Thread that I hear throughout. Unfortunately, I mean, it wasn't on purpose, was accidental for me, but that's how I got into marketing automation was direct response marketing automation at the same time. I feel like if you don't have those two pieces, you may struggle a little bit more with marketing automation, but pay attention not only to that fact, but as Oli continues with his story, pay attention to the pathway that he goes on in terms of evolution.

What I believe is that it's not a personal discovery, and this isn't unique to Oli and his situation only, but I've seen this pattern so many times with people that are wildly [00:16:00] successful in their businesses with marketing automation that I'm 100% certain that these are key characteristics into gaining the most leverage and creating the most good will with your market so you can have a business that is sustainable.

I'm only 43. But at 43, I'm seeing over the hump, right? There is an end to this life and when it ends, it ends, as far as what we're trying to do here. If I got to work, and I do, and I want it to be useful, and if I'm going to do all that, it might as well be something that's sustainable and is going to grow over time, I'm not having to restart in five years, which a lot of people find themselves in. Believe it or not, there are principles, and these are two of them, that can help you create that scenario for yourself where you're not having to restart, not having to reinvent the wheel, and you can actually build on opportunities.

Of course things change, circumstances outside of our purview will come into [00:17:00] play, I know that because we had a different business before we started Fix Your Funnel that was very successful, but then it had an expiration on it. We did have to segway, but the principles allowed us to segway eloquently, in a way that was elegant and didn't hurt as much. Hopefully, we'll build a businesses now that will sustain for a long period of time and create great value for the customer for a long time. That's what you want to be doing too, so pay attention to these principles. Sorry to take such a side line, but I felt like it is really important for people to pick up direct response marketing plus marketing automation is a good foundation for everything else that will happen in Oli's story.

Oli: So, really, when we discovered this, we're obviously doing everything very manual, we figured out our response, and we applied our response to online paid traffic which, at the time, was Google AdWords. We were very early into Google AdWords. Now, Google AdWords is very different to [00:18:00] Facebook advertising, in the first that, Google AdWords is intentional searches versus interruption based marketing. We're going to come back on to that in a second, it's really important.

So, we were doing Google AdWords with direct response and we were using marketing automation to do the heavy lifting of the marketing for us. But then, we still had a manual sales process. So we managed that, now we were generating more leads because we were doing information first lead generation marketing, and we had a follow-up system.

We then funneled those people into speaking to them. What happened was we ended up then creating a situation now because we were doing direct response. We had a lot more leads that we were intentionally looking for, we had to offer, we had to follow up on them, and I don't mean through email. We actually then adopted our old approach of [00:19:00] calling everybody and getting through to some people and not getting through to others. It was always a numbers game. How many people can we call, how many people can we speak to, and how they many people can we sell? Of course, there was some people that called us as well, and we'd always have those people, they were the low-hanging fruit.

But, because of the way that we went about our marketing meant we were generating all these leads, that we just naturally thought, well, we need to follow up with all these leads. That was like the second phase of what we did. We went from all manual to heavy lifting with marketing automation and direct response, but manual sales follow-up.

Then, our third phase was where I figured that, if we diversify our traffic channel, which at the time was just Google AdWords, into what was very, very early into Facebook advertising, like very early, we could actually [00:20:00] start to automate the sales process. That was really where, back in 2011, I started playing around with automated webinars, and webinars in general, because before what people were doing in America, people were doing instant tele-seminar and things like that where you call into a number. We were very, very early into it.

In fact, I remember when we met in 2012 at ICON, I remember saying to somebody that we're doing these automated webinars and we have sales on auto-pilot, so to speaking, they couldn't believe that that was a real thing, but that's how we were doing it. The third phase was this. Now we're getting more leads, let's automate, not just the marketing, but also the sales. I put together a webinar and we started funneling all our [00:21:00] leads into this webinar. Then, at the end of the webinar, we made them an offer and that was them to go make a commitment, a financial commitment, to one of our training courses. I even wrote an article about this many years ago called, Ka-ching, Somebody Bought.

Ryan: Right, Infusionsoft emails.

Oli: Yeah. That was the Legacy template notification, whenever somebody bought in it. Of course, back then things were, I was almost like, well, this is like the automated dream because, wow, people are buying all this stuff. That's cool, and we did get some results from doing that. There's no question of that. [00:22:00]

But, what we found was that they would rate, with Google Adwords, because people were intentionally looking for what we wanted, but the moment we diversified our traffic channel to more interruption based marketing with Facebook, things didn't work out so well. Conversion rates of that webinar started to go down because we were interrupting people. We were using a slightly different message to get in front of them in the first place. They weren't seeking us out, the bait that we were using with bringing them directly into the webinar, rather than our information care tool, something like that.

Quite honestly, at this point we had already created a fairly successful and significant business. In fact, it was into seven figures. We do over a million dollars in turn over from doing this in what was a very automated business. [00:23:00] I thought I had it sorted out, but as Google AdWords started to get more expensive to run, because if you were running AdWords back then, you will know what I'm talking about, not the same anymore and we started to spend money on other traffic sources, the profitability started to come down and the conversions were coming down. It kind of led me into a situation of, is this business possible to scale? I didn't want to build a sales team. I didn't want to go back to, we could never deal with all these leads like we had before, I didn't wanted to go back.

Ryan: So you know all the pain points that that entailed and so you're like, yeah, I just don't want that. That's not going to be worth it. I already know what kind of results I'm going to get from that.

Oli: Yeah, I know I got so used to this, ka-ching, somebody sold to me, and had that every single Tuesday, Thursday when I ran the webinar at half past eight, at nine, I would get my money, [00:24:00] it came in right?

Ryan: Yeah.

Oli: And that was it, and I got used to that and became very complacent with that. So much so that I allowed that business to continue, but more importantly, one thing that came out of it was that I really honed our craft in that business in terms of being very effective with online marketing and adopting direct response online and leveraging marketing automation, which was my pathway into helping other people do that. I'm very thankful for that journey, but what transpired was the growth, the antithesis of the business we have today, which is beyond that marketing business as an agency, that people are wowed by the results. I mean GKIC and [00:25:00] those guys were like, I can't believe this guy's selling all this stuff through webinar. Nobody's getting results like this. How is he doing it? And I started helping people like that, all the gurus and those people.

Ryan: Let's take a quick pause right here, because what we're seeing here, for those that weren't picking up maybe on these little details that Oli was dropping in here, is that he had followed the natural progression a lot of people do which is, okay, I've got my marketing automation working well, I've got these headaches with sales going on, so I'm going to now transform this to a fully automated business, and you actually did it successfully, which was awesome.

So, this is the big myth. The big myth is that it's an either or situation. You either have a great sales organization or you have a great marketing organization. Rarely do we see people that want to sustain having both. The reason [00:26:00] why is because there's a disconnect in those approaches that they're actually working against each other instead of together, right? Frequently, like you're saying, you had the marketing automation automated, but you didn't have any of the sales process really tight into that. There were sales over here on this side, and then we have a line down the middle with marking over here. Marketing did all its stuff and then sales is supposed to do all its stuff, but never would the two come together. That's a very typical scenario.

It's a natural evolution, being in the marketing automation world only for the short period that I have been, a little over a decade or so, what I've noticed is that this is a common pathway. And it's not a bad thing, but it's part of that evolution of growth in terms of understanding, how do I scale and grow this business? How do I have marketing automation to give me leverage? The natural part of it is the tendency to want to automate everything, to eliminate people entirely from the business, [00:27:00] and just put the best foot forward in an automated fashion and let it run. But, that eventually always breaks down.

Oli: Yeah, and I think that for us, not only did I get a little complacent about that, I got distracted. I got distracted in a very good way because I got these businesses that I was using as my personal laboratory for figuring out what was working, so that then, when I went to other business owners as an agency, I could provide proof of concept and case studies for exactly how they could get some results.

But the reality was, while I was away building a multi-million dollar marketing agency, this business back at home just continued to decrease in conversions [00:28:00] and in profitability and in revenue and actually meant that I had some tough decisions that I needed to make because we were still spending money and we are still getting some results. But I knew that there was a better way than the way that we were selling because we were learning more and seeing more than the results that we were getting from that business.

Ryan: So you knew all this, but you still were contemplating, should I just shut it down because it's a distraction at this point? Walk us through real quickly that and then, before you do though, I just want to highlight that other thing you pointed out which is that transition between search based marketing to interruption based marketing. Interruption based marketing is so much more economical [00:29:00] currently that a lot of traffic is shifted there.

This happens all the time, too. You see this all the time, is what happens is, your gurus who are the gurus during one phase, frequently will shift over to be the gurus during another phase. It's very easy to try and use the rules of the other phase in the new phase. If we were in the search based marketing and now we're coming down into this interruption based marketing, what I've noticed is a lot of gurus, a lot of people that are information leaders out there, are still using concepts that they had formulated during the search based marketing phase in the interruption. And they're not quite getting the same results, but because of their sheer mass and their influence, they're still getting results for themselves. But, when other people try to use these techniques, they're not having the same results and they're like, why is that? How come I can't get the same results that X, Y, or Z gurus are [00:30:00] getting because you don't have the sheer mass that you carried over from that previous phase into the new phase, which is compensating for the inappropriate techniques that are being used that were really from the previous phase in this new phase of interruption based marketing.

So, if I'm going to interrupt, I've got to do things very different and that's then what you would come across in your agency, obviously at that point. But that aside, you can add onto it if you want, but then take us to the decision.

Oli: One important thing is that you understand immediately into this that marketing and sales are not the same thing. Advertising and marketing are not the same thing. There's advertising, marketing and sales, and, there are other divisions obviously, but primarily, they are different and in regards to, [00:31:00] specifically Facebook advertising, exactly what you just mentioned, the same approach that we were taking with intentional search based marketing. It got similar results and created this automated business, it actually just didn't work with Facebook.

What we found was, at the point where it was very agonizingly painful for me, was the fact that we are, as an agency, very good at running traffic. Very good at generating leads. Very good at generating very inexpensive leads and leveraging that platform as we do for a lot of other people. We did that, at this point our agency was almost our marketing department, and we were generating the all these leads from Facebook way, way cheaper than the intentional searches from Google, but using the same framework. It was getting to a [00:32:00] point where I'm like, this just doesn't convert anymore, but that's because it's a different audience. It's a different audience. They're in a different moment, knowing a different moment. That's very different.

We had to think about what we were going to do, and honestly, the business was really falling behind our progress in terms of my other businesses. I, quite rightly as you mentioned, contemplated only what, now probably three months ago, just going, you know what? Let's just close this thing down. Because it just doesn't make sense for us to continue this at the velocity that we're going at. Actually, we've got much more profitable clients, you know?

Ryan: Yeah.

Oli: We've got more clients and other businesses, I need to think about where I spend my time and where my team's time is spent on marketing for people. And just the same way if [00:33:00] I had an unprofitable client, I would fire the client, I wanted to fire our own business because...

Ryan: It was a sucking up resources and not producing return.

Oli: Yeah, and it was great at lead generation, crappy at conversion and it was getting worse. And then I was speaking about traffic and conversion and I was speaking about the phone funnel framework, and I was sharing two case studies from different businesses that have got tremendous results with this approach, this phone funnel framework. I came out to my hotel room and I was looking through the matrix of the training business, our own training business back at home.

Ryan: Is that Players Club?

Oli: No. No, [00:34:00] sorry, the training business, the actual business that was...

Ryan: Oh, the one that was underperforming. Okay.

Oli: Yeah, and I was looking at it, and I was like, Oli, if you take the concepts that you've been teaching here, the concepts that you've been implementing for other people that have been getting them amazing results, you don't have to employ your sales team like you used to to get the results that you want. You know there needs to be human interaction. You're trying to automate this. You trying to create a business doesn't involve people because you don't want to hire people like you used to hire them, when you know that you can implement this funnel and it could potentially make a markable difference to this business. So why don't you just do it? Because you can do it, so make it happen.

And what I made a mental commitment to at that point was a kill date. [00:35:00] I said, if by the beginning of April, if we have not significantly increased profitability, not just turn over, but profitability, I'm going to kill this business. That's it. Because I don't need it. We've got other businesses and this is a distraction and instead, I'm going to focus on team. I'm putting the phone funnel framework to work in the business, and let's see what results we get.

Predominantly, at this point now, although we're still doing Google advertising, it was Facebook and, of course, the phone funnel framework, it fits perfectly with Facebook. I implemented it. And I hired a sales person. Now this guy, this is really important, this guy who I hired, I knew that I wanted to bring a salesperson in, I didn't want to build a [00:36:00] big sales team, was very technologically challenged, to put it that way. He was very open with the fact that he was technologically challenged.

Ryan: So he would love getting into Infusionsoft and just working it.

Oli: Yeah, I was just not very concerned by the fact that, even if he could use a mouse and the keyboard or not at this point, but he could sell. He had a high degree of selling. That was important to me. I liked the way that he talked about selling to people. He talked about consultative selling and he talked about a collaborative process of getting people to the point of making a decision. I knew that he was the right first, but I didn't know if he could use the system that we've set up at that point.

We went about, in hours, we used [00:37:00] Sprint Point, we're an agency, which I know is a bit of the Chinese menu of things, but in hours, it probably took nine hours or so, about 21 sprints points to put the phone funnel framework together for the business. That meant the advertising, Fix Your Funnel, Infusionsoft and three main conversion pages. We're going to call them funnel pages. I'm just going to call them web pages. Okay, we've got it all together and we immediately recognized a subtle thing and a side benefit to the phone funnel framework that we didn't expect, that we hadn't seen for other implementations we'd done because we're not in their business. We don't get to see it. But in our own business, we got to see how easy it was to actually onboard somebody that didn't have any previous experience [00:38:00] with this type of technology.

Ryan: And, you're talking about on-boarding a salesperson.

Oli: Exactly.

Ryan: This might be helpful at this point, too. I know you got your iPad in front of you, to maybe draw out a general sketch of the phone framework so people have, because they've been hearing this phrase, but they don't really understand what that is.

Oli: Yeah, absolutely.

Ryan: And then if we can, just walk through that and then you can go ahead and continue to elaborate on how this non-tech salesperson started suddenly having a totally new experience.

Oli: Sure. Let's see that. So the phone looks a little bit like this. First of all, you've got different Facebook ads, easy or different creatives that are in Facebook. Whatever type of creative that you're using, [00:39:00] targeting people. Then there is a what's called a advertising objective in Facebook called Facebook lead ads.

Facebook lead ads is a way to be able for the users information to be pre-populated, like an opportune box, but their information is pre-populated into the lead ad when they click your advert. When they click the advert, the Box pops up and their information is pre-filled. Now, I'm going to come back to a bit of context here in a second, but just to draw out an outline of this. They answer their information into the lead ad box and the information that's on here is their first name, their email, and their mobile phone number.[00:40:00]

Ryan: Oh, just in case you didn't pick up on it, Oli is from New York.

Oli: Yeah. There is also a question that we ask, which is called a custom question, which asks them: would you like the video instantly text to you? That gives us the permission to be able to market to them in the future. I'm going to come back to the context here in a second.

Once they've filled in this information, provided us with their information, this information is then synced to Infusionsoft. [00:41:00] Basically their first name, email, and everything else goes in and the custom question goes in as a custom field so that we know whether or not we can continue marketing to them in the future because they've given us permission to text them. That, by the way, isn't quite, and there's a compliance thing around that which we can talk a little bit more about, but I don't want to get too deep in the weeds now.

Basically, what happens here is, that in Infusionsoft, we have a decision guide that says, can we text them, or can we not text them, based upon that field. 80%, in our experiments and data, have shown that 8o% of people will say yes, that we can text them. That means that we can then follow up with them through that [00:42:00] phone, to three messages, through Fix Your Funnel, to get them to the value that we're promising in each one of the ads.

Ryan: I'll add in there too, in Trent's experimentation too, which totaled up to like 70,000 leads or so, I don't know, maybe it's more than that by now, last Trent gave me an update on it, it was the same and then it was about 97% mobile numbers, 99% real numbers. So only 1% of the phone numbers were fake numbers. Email addresses, of course, they were all better emails than typical because they were the Facebook account email versus one they just came up with since its pre-filled. Then you don't have to type it, so it's just easier to get the real stuff as opposed to fake stuff.

Oli: Yeah. Here's the thing that's quite important is that, when you're doing these ads, [00:43:00] you want the ads to be targeting mobile devices only. The reason why we want to do that is because people don't want to have to wait for the information that you're promising in your ads. Clearly, if they're on a mobile device, there's a congruency between the response mechanism and the delivery mechanism. That's very important to remember, that if we're targeting on the mobile device, how do they want to receive that information? What's the most logical way of receiving it? It's going to be to their mobile device.

Ryan: I know there's some people that say, hey, people have their email on their mobile phone too. But what's the big difference between email and text when it comes to delivery?

Oli: Well, email does drive a lot of behavior, but you're fighting against, first of all, if your messages are getting read, even, [00:44:00] in the inbox because, and I'll ask the people watching this, how many things do you request online, like PDFs or chat collections or video, the video series, but then never actually get around to the video or get around to actually opening up your email to go and watch it, that will go and consume that information. If you're like most people, and the truth is it's not how good your subject line is that's helping you get those things open, it's whether they're getting opened at all because people's lives are busy.

Ryan: Well, for me, I use Google inbox. All promotional emails, as well as updates, get get thrown into two things. So it's not like you even get a chance to see the subject line, usually it's swiped off. But the other thing I've noticed, too, when you're doing this phone funnel is, when the the text comes through, that always gets a push notification. When you get the email to come through, you only get push notifications about [00:45:00] what their machine learning has determined as emails you normally would want to open anyway, which is rarely going to be a brand new email coming from a new ad that you just filled out a form for online. You know what I mean?

Oli: Yeah.

Ryan: So I think that's an important concept that you were able to nail down, is that, not only are we starting mobile, but we're keeping the whole experience mobile, making sure that that text, when it comes through, isn't getting lost, in the millions of emails competing for attention in the email app, but we're getting pushed right to the top with the push notification via text message, which always shows up, on your device unless you've turned them off entirely for all text messages. It's not discretionary, like you'll see with email apps.

Oli: Sure. One of the things that I get a lot of questions about and a lot of people hone in on, which is a big mistake here, [00:46:00] is that most people focus on the fact that this is done with me lead ads. The success of this has nothing to do with the fact that, if you do lead ads then it'll work. There are a lot of psychological triggers to do with the reason why this campaign works so well, and not just the fact that it's lead ads.

What lead ads provides the opportunity for is the pre-population of the information. And the reason why lead ads, some people go, I've tried lead ads and they don't work, is because they were mainly focused on email. They were mainly focused on just getting emails, and to be honest, people signed up with Facebook, because the information is pre-populated here, if their user email is a Hotmail address or something that they used to use years ago, people change their email addresses quite regularly.

One of the [00:47:00] things that they don't change very often is, they don't change their mobile phone very often. And the reason why Facebook has your mobile number is because it's often used as a security device. The accuracy, which is really important here, on the mobile number is often a lot better than the accuracy of email. That's the reason why, when people try and do lead ads, sometimes if they're just following up email, they have a problem with that because they don't know that.

Ryan: That's going back to marketing rule number 19, know how you're gonna sell before you decide to going to lead capture. The email alone, and I guess everybody that's going to watch this has probably heard that a million times from us, but I like to beat things until they're really dead.

Oli: The other thing I should mention here, we get asked this a lot, is, what's the best way of [00:48:00] bringing this information? Because it's not natively done through lead ads into Infusionsoft. And what we use is Fix Your Funnel sync to be able to do that, which reaches in to Facebook, grabs the legion formation, and syncs it perfectly over into Infusionsoft so that we can then begin the follow-up process. So if they said that we can text them, then obviously we begin with SMS follow-up, and if one of the minority of people, which in some cases can be higher than most, in our example, this is an aggregation of lots of different things that 80%, but we're actually higher than that. We nearly 90% in our experience.

The other thing that we do here, by the way, is when this comes in, because we use Slack as [00:49:00] the nucleus of our internal system, Fix Your Funnel also pushes a Slack notification into Slack. Now that's quite good, because we get a real time heart beat on the lead generation every day, into what's happening. It's nice to know that, it doesn't clutter up your inbox, and actually, it doesn't take much to look through what's happening.

Ryan: I know that's kind of a side subject, but I would recommend to everybody that you consider Slack as an internal communication channel just because, after over a decade using Infusionsoft, what I learned pretty quick is I'm busy doing what I want to focus on and growing that business, and the last thing I really want to do is be getting into Infusionsoft all the time, [00:50:00] checking how are things working. I'd rather Infusionsoft and my other activities were reporting to me so I can, at a glance, see, are things working. That's a very different paradigm from what a lot of people end up doing, but I can't tell you last time I looked at an actual Infusionsoft report because I've got my data mostly talking to me.

And then I'll use Graphly to go see, like, when I want to see historical perspective. Because, no offense to Infusionsoft, but their reports just suck for getting historical perspective, which is where all the value comes. I'll use Graphly to get historical perspective. I know there's other tools people use, but I do that for historical perspective, but they get the heartbeat. I'm just having Infusionsoft, or this case, like you're saying, Fix Your Funnel sync talking to Slack. I think that's a huge takeaway. If anybody isn't doing that right now, it will change the way that you operate your business because instead of having to search out information, it's coming [00:51:00] to you.

Oli: Now what some people might be wondering is, well, what are you promising in any of these Facebook ads? What we found to work very well is a case study video. I would encourage this because what you'll come to learn is that the webinar that we ran for so long, that was successful, and it generated some millions of dollars, it had to be successful. We're actually using really the same modality that we were using before, but we're getting them in a different way.

We're getting them to a point where they're going to consume it a lot quicker, and that's very, very important because when you're using text messages and they're getting a notification, they're expecting your notification, they opted for us to give [00:52:00] them that information in the convenient way to them to consume it, and it means that when they consume our content, obviously, we're going to start generating the relationship with them.

They've actually consumed it as opposed to them not actually consuming what it is that we want.

Like, registering for a webinar, but not showing up, registering for a webinar and only watching it part way through, it creates a lot of contingencies you end up having to set up that, with this process, you don't necessarily need to do. This is important. Now, if you're a sales business, your case study could be a demo. If you're an information marketing business, it could a case study. If you're a service-based business, it could be any instructional type video. Videos [00:53:00] work extremely well, and the real beauty of this is that there are only three pages that are part of this whole process.

The first page is called your primer video and the second page is called your main event video. Okay, these are the first two ones. And what happens is that this is the first one that you drive people to after they have opted in. They're going to come to this video from a text message or possibly, most of the time that's going to be a text message, and what this video does, I'm not going to go through everything here, but what this video does it pre-frames what they're about to discover. What they're about to watch. You're not just throwing them into a long webinar video.[00:54:00]

Ryan: This is a direct response concept called base hit, which means we're not going for the home run on any single point in this journey. It's all about base hits, and they can go as quickly or as slowly as they need to through them.

Oli: Exactly. So, you build a relationship here. They come here and it will say something like, hey, thanks so much for requesting the video. What you're about to watch is a 50-minute, it's important that you tell them how long it is, and here's the reason why, I think you're going to find this interesting. And then you're going to give them some benefits about what they are going to discover. You're going to also say to them, by the way, when you stick around to the end of the video, you want to give them something that they're gonna get for free. That's going to entice them to get to the next step and this all works around the [00:55:00] commitment and consistency, making commitments, getting them through this, to actually watch the main of a video.

Ryan: Okay, Oli, I'm gonna push you forward, more than maybe you were hoping to go, because I did distract you into going into the funnel. I think people now have a framework for this phone funnel enough. If they want more, you can tell them later how to get more details on that. Let's now jump to what started happening with your sales guy. So you hired one sales guy, concerned about his technology understanding, because I think this is the big deal is you were able to say, okay. I'm going to put the phone work funnel in place, but the real surprises for you were actually in the response of the sales guy to this process. I thought.

Oli: Yeah, exactly. So, that overview is obviously the mechanic. The thing that is extremely important is being able [00:56:00] to get this guy on boarded in the shortest time possible to figure out or not whether or not I was going to keep the business. What amazed me was just how quickly we could get him into Fix Your Funnel because we didn't need Infusionsoft in order for this to work. Instead, he could just use the Fix Your Funnel web portal to be able to work from, every day, to be able to make calls to people that had requested him to speak to them.

Ryan: Now, in his prior experience, had he just picked up the phone and dialed numbers?

Oli: Yeah. His whole concept when he came in was like hey, I've never used anything like this because I'm used to almost just Dialing for Dollars because it's all about the activity [00:57:00] that drives the result. You've got to keep going and churning and churning and churning to get through to somebody initially, then you've got to go through the motions of going through qualification with them and everything else. So this funnel that we talked about did a couple of things. The funnel got the qualified people to a point where I'm going to schedule calls with him and then he was able to have meaningful dialogue with them to move them further down.

Ryan: I think this exemplifies that concept of, we use automation to eliminate human nature but to enhance humanity. What you did is, all the places where a sales guy might get bored and stop doing the things he is supposed to be doing, you let automation cover that part. But it took it to the point of, where do to humans need to connect in order for that relationship to really be taken to a level where there's enough trust where I [00:58:00] say, here's my money.

Oli: Absolutely. And when we look back to phase three of our evolution, one of the things that we found from a lot of customers were they, although the automated webinar took money, we ask for monetary commitment from them at the end of the webinar, we still had to speak to them to get the rest of that money. But, people's feedback was, oh, I love speaking with Donna because she answered some final questions for me that were like niggling me, and I know I made this financial commitment, so it meant that there was a bit of a remorse there in some cases, that they made this commitment, maybe they shouldn't have made the commitment.

Whereas, the phone funnel created the situation where we were saying to them, hey, if you'd like to take the next step, if this sounded interesting to you, if this sounded good, you'll love the fact that we can set up a call, [00:59:00] find out about your personal circumstances, answer any of your questions, and we can then, if it makes sense and it's a good fit, then we can talk about what training courses are going to work for you. It just felt much more of a natural approach and much better experience.

Ryan: This is the myth that we brought up and not really explicitly stated earlier, was this myth that it's either marketing or sales, right?

Oli: Exactly.

Ryan: It's not marketing and sales together, and so what you did here with the phone funnel processes, is you allowed marketing automation to do what it's really good at, which is, getting people, routing them through, delivering information, preparing them for the sales conversation. Now you married up that sales conversation in a way that it was a perfect passing of the baton versus this line that nobody communicates back and forth between. So, [01:00:00] what was the sales guy's experience, now that he's doing something totally different from what he's done before?

Oli: First of all, the contacted rate, the people he was speaking to, was exponentially higher, but the energy levels were high because he's now dealing with people that want to speak to him, not people that didn't want to speak to him. That was one.

We did that by using, as well as the scheduling process, we used the pre-call SMS feature. It meant he could send them a text message to say, hey, it's Mike, I just wanted to introduce myself. We've got a call later today. Just text me back if it's not a convenient time to you. I actually think the wording is slightly different to that, and that's more of a colder one. I think it's like hey, I'll be reaching out soon, and just so you know, you [01:01:00] have my details.

Ryan: So there's a couple different texts there, depending on the context of your situation, then you're going to word it differently. This is interesting because, for a lot of people, this flies in the face of what sales trainers have been saying for years, which is, don't let them know you're coming, sneak up and attack. But the reality is, as technology has advanced, it really has made people hunger more for honesty, up-frontness, and communication.

By doing that pre-call SMS and just stating very clearly, here's who I am, here's why I'm calling, it allows people to then communicate in the same manner, honestly and openly about, fantastic, or not interested. Which, for a salesperson, what drains salesperson energy is not getting a hold of people. Dialing and dialing and dialing pulls the energy level down, it starts to take the mind out of conversation mode and puts it into a [01:02:00] different mode. At an unconscious level, it really destroys the person's effectiveness.

Being able to increase the conversation rate, you can look at it from numbers point, if I make 100 calls and I talked with 10 people, I'm only going to have so many sales based off of those 10 conversations. If I can change that into 20 calls or conversations from 100 calls or 30 conversations, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that we should probably double or triple sales if that occurs. But it actually is better than that isn't it?

Oli: Yeah, it is. Here's the other thing, is that you talk about energy levels. If you want your best sales people, your top producers, getting bogged down with technology, give them something that you know is going to be kind of difficult for them to learn and difficult for them to use and not enjoy using. [01:03:00] Because if people don't enjoy using it, they will cut corners, not complete calls correctly, and they'll only do what they want to do. They'll do that in and abandon it.

So we provided an environment for him where he was able to be very focused on what he needed to get done. We created a call list. We created several call lists for him. The first call list was the calls that he made that were scheduled and were going to be made today. He would come in and he would pre-call SMS all those people. Of course, because people didn't respond to that text platform throughout my whole journey to get that, it felt very normal for them to text back if it wasn't a good time for him to speak to them. That's very important because it's how they got that that was [01:04:00] important that allowed us to be able to do that first.

Ryan: Yeah, he had to open those doors. Otherwise, you couldn't use them.

Oli: You have to open that channel of communication in the first place in order to be able to use it effectively and for it to be effective. That's important. Secondly, the second call list that we had for him is the calls that he spoke to the day before or week before that he'd scheduled to speak to at some point in the future. He'd had a meaningful conversation, and they said, hey, this sounds great. Give me a call back next Thursday. Give me a call back tomorrow. They're the follow-up calls that he needs to make today.

Again, very, very easy for him to know, okay, priority one, I've got to make the scheduled calls. Priority two, these are the people I promised I would follow up with at a specific time in the future. And then, the third list was the people that haven't [01:05:00] necessarily requested us to speak to them, but were the most qualified in the funnel to be able to reach out to.

Ryan: And most qualified based on behavior?

Oli: Based on that behavior through the funnel. So they consumed content and they watched a certain proportion of the video because we could do some video tracking with Fix Your Funnel and Wistia to understand that they've gone so far, but they haven't taken the next step.

Ryan: Yeah. That's fantastic. I want people to also recognize what we're doing for sales people in this scenario that Oli's talking about is we're eliminating everything that's not essential. And yes, Fix Your Funnel, we developed these tools. But we don't do it just so that we can sell something. We're looking at the actual sales process.

What's the psyche of the salesperson? What's the psyche of the consumer, the [01:06:00] perspective customer or customer on the other side of that line? And what should be present, and what absolutely should not be present so that the salesperson can stay totally focused on the one thing that they're really supposed to be doing, which is having conversation?

Effective sales comes from one human connecting with another human. Not from looking at a million different things inside of a Infusionsoft contact record, but rather saying, what's the context of which this conversation is going to be occurring, and then having those conversations.

We want to eliminate all the decisions the sales person has to make. We want to eliminate all distractions, extra information that really is irrelevant to the context of what that conversation needs to be, and let them just focus on connecting with people. What happens is, you can go from having, initially when you first are starting the business and you started to grow how many sales people did you actually get to at your Peak?

Oli: Yeah, well initially we wrote to 6 [01:07:00] people back in the day. We got down then to automated, 0, and then we realized that, guess what? When you're making a $2,000 decision, I wonder how many people want to actually speak to somebody rather than trying to imply false scarcity, and, by the way, you've got a 4 day deadline after the webinar, you showed up for, you didn't buy, you registered, but you didn't show up. You showed up but you didn't see the offer. You know, it's just a bit crappy. Just a bit of a crappy experience for the people.

Ryan: I think Troy Broussard said something like this, because something about him is bouncing around my head and saying this, but in my marketing, if I wouldn't like to go through that experience, I don't do it. If, in [01:08:00] my sales, I don't want to be sold that way, then I say let's not do that. You know what I mean?

Oli: Let me tell you something. I'll be honest. I come from a hardcore direct-response background. And when I say hard core, I mean spending a lot of money with offline marketing to make money. You quickly get very good at marketing when you have to do offline marketing. People don't realize how easy is these days with online marketing.

Ryan: Yeah, offline costs money.

Oli: Yeah, you got good at everything.

Ryan: Or you get out entirely.

Oli: Exactly. So there's no question I used those tactics in the past. No question. But, let me tell you something. You get a very different customer. And you customers, remember we're doing business to get customers, but we're also in business to keep [01:09:00] customers.

Ryan: Yes.

Oli: And the experience that people come through when you persuade, cajole, and twist people's arms to make decisions isn't the quality of customer that you may want to create a long-term relationship with.

Ryan: The kind that you get with your phone funnel.

Oli: Exactly.

Ryan: Okay. So the sales guy, now, he is making the calls, he's using these three contact lists to dial from, he's starting to use pre-call SMS. How did he respond to all this? The reason that this is important for anybody that is a business owner, consult, or whatever, they need to understand, there is this belief that every employee goes south. The reason employees go south is because they hate their life. Because the job you're making them do sucks bad. You can make a job suck less by having good systems and processes in place [01:10:00] and not making them do stupid stuff.

You do that and, guess what? People love to be there and they stay long-term. Having employees isn't as bad because you're taking care of them and they're doing good stuff and they feel good about who they are and what they're doing. That person doesn't go south as frequently as the person who's forced to do crappy stuff in a crappy position, dealing with people that they don't really want to deal with. So, how did this salesperson respond? Because obviously he's been selling for a while. This isn't his first rodeo.

Oli: His whole life is being a sales professional. There are two types of people- there are people that try to sell and there's sales people. A salesman. He's not somebody that tries to sell. He's a salesperson. So his whole life, he's been a sales professional and he simply just couldn't quite grasp that, like, hold on, people are responding through text messages to me, and then we're actually [01:11:00] getting on the phone together.

Away from the three contact lists that he's gotten, that daily routine, he's now getting people that are just texting him from automated marketing. The thing is, we didn't just stop with follow-up beyond them watching the video or not. We send automated messages through Fix Your Funnel and Infusionsoft that elicited a conversation. It meant that we were asking the question, that meant people responded to him, and now he's got a fourth contact. And the fourth contact is people now coming back to conversation starters...

Ryan: Wait, you're running conversation starters in your marketing campaigns and people are responding to those and having conversations with your sales guy that he didn't initiate?

Oli: Yeah, could you believe that?

Ryan: I can't believe it. So when that starts happening, what's [01:12:00] his response?He's got to be in a different world.

Oli: Well, yeah! Because he's now getting, like, oh, I got this message from this guy who wants to get on a call. He's texted me. He's not even on one of my other lists! Like, yeah, I know, don't worry. There's some other things that are happening behind the scenes here.

Actually, what I did one day was I had one of my team just show him the inner workings of how this was put together, and he's like, I know how everything gets sold to me, why I buy all this stuff! Like, out in the world, but what he realized was not only how people sell to him, like the big corporations that really get this stuff, but actually he realized, more importantly, the way that we did it felt [01:13:00] natural. It felt human. And he respected the fact that the psychology and the thought process that went into this just made sense. That was proved in the fact that people were coming back to him, saying, hey, Mike, I'd love to jump on the phone and talk about this, now's not a good time. And they're seeking him out to start a conversation.

Ryan: Okay, so we talked about before, marketing, sales, coming together in this way that's organic and natural from the way that people communicate is a game-changer. So if you've been just playing this game, or you've just been playing this game and getting results, you should be super excited. As a guy that I knew as a kid used to say, you should be psyched out of your gourd, because what's happening at this point is you should [01:14:00] be realizing that, hey, if I do what Oli did and I start connecting these two, one, you're going to attract the best talent.

Is this guy going to go work for anybody else? He's a good sales guy, right? Is he going to go work for anybody else? No, because he knows what the crap he's going to go through if he goes to work for somebody else. He's like, I'm gonna have to be dialing forever. I'm gonna be not talking to people and I'm gonna try and convince them to get this system I had with Oli and they're going to give me crap about it.

Oli: And I'm giving you some of these reactions. The other things that he was extremely surprised about was, "When I used to just be calling people, leaving voicemails all the time, I reckon I spent hours leaving voicemails."

I'm like, "Sounds very unproductive. What you need to do, if you can't get through to people, just press this button here and that leaves an automated [01:15:00] voicemail."

He's all, "I don't understand. What do you mean?"

I said, "what we're gonna do, we're just gonna record a voiceover because they're all the same."

He's like, yeah, they're all the same."

"Let's record a voice mail for these people. Okay? Let's record a voice mail for these people."

He's like, "And I can just press it and it just delivers the voicemail to them?"

"Yes, Mike."

He's like, "Oh my God, that's gonna save me so much time. That's amazing!"

And what we do in the voice mail is, we don't just say, "Hey, it's Mike, I tried reaching out to you and you didn't answer our call." We actually say to them, "Hey, thanks, unfortunately I couldn't get through. You've got my number, just text me back and we can organize a different time."

Ryan: Oh, that's brilliant.

Oli: It's very important because the voicemail is being left on that phone number. It's just perfect because [01:16:00] now we can continue the conversation with them through how they initially responded, makes perfect sense. We're not getting them to jump through different contacts or devices or applications. They're just doing it in the easiest way possible.

Ryan: That's brilliant. Okay, now we got his reaction. We got your transformation, we got where you were, how you got here. We're now in June. Did you shut the business down?

Oli: Absolutely not. I know for the past, as I mentioned, 2, 3 years or more, I've been harping on about this thing that we've been doing, fantastic work for clients. I shouldn't be surprised that it worked for our own business. But when it's your own thing, you do have [01:17:00] you have an emotional connection.

You also are very close to your own business, which means you are almost too close to see. You can't see the label from the inside of the bottom sometimes. And I realized that, more so than any other time, when I realized that this business now is on a completely different velocity to where it was because of this process. We've actually improved some of the things as part of the phone funnel framework training that we give to people and we do for clients. Even as part of this process, a lot of the nuances of knowing our business intimately we've been able to improve our process.

We went from doing about $25,000 a month in terms [01:18:00] of revenue for automated stuff to doing nearly $70,000 a month with only one more member of staff, which was the salesperson, and the phone funnel framework. We were not running the automated stuff anymore, which means all of that money, all of that revenue, is only coming through the phone funnel and is only coming through one sales first.

Ryan: I want people to notice how excited Oli is. This is like Christmas morning, and you got exactly what you asked from Santa, but it was ten times better. This is the kind of excitement... this is the reason that we do what we do. That look on Oli's face, and that's why we wanted to organize this call.

I want you to go in more depth in what you're [01:19:00] doing, but we're an hour and 20 minutes in, I'm fine with that. We can keep going as long as we want. People that get what we're talking about the beginning will have stayed, they watched the whole thing because what they'll understand is, these are the kinds of results you should be having.

That's why I wanted Oli to take so much time to go into what was going on before? How did it get to that point? What did he start to change? And then what was the reaction of the salesperson? Because frequently, we don't do things because, why did you not hire sales person before this?

Because you're like, it's gonna be too much work, the results aren't gonna be worth it. If you're on this side of the marketing thing, that's what you're thinking. You're thinking, well crap. I know what this is like because that's what we used to be. Or, I've heard about what that's going to be like, this is not going to be worth it, but I wanted you guys to understand how Oli brought these two together. I know you just kind of touched the surface. There's probably a lot more to it that we could go into for another hour or so if we [01:20:00] wanted, we still wouldn't get it all. Hopefully you got the main concepts, that there are ways to bring these two things together. But, Oli, what else are you thinking that people need to know about what happened?

Oli: Well, the other thing is the lead to buyer time. A lot of people who maybe are not quite so sophisticated with their marketing systems, they may not really measure different times between each milestone in their sales process. It's not necessarily a mistake. It's a slightly more sophisticated thing.

Ryan: It's part of an evolution.

Oli: It is absolutely, and there's no doubt, this is what we do, so we's expect this. What we did was we measured the lead to buyer time, and we always have done, and it went from 28 days as a typical average through the automated process that they registered, they [01:21:00] then went through an on-call webinar, and they went through an offer, etc, etc, 28 days to actually buying in most cases. That was the average. Through to the implementing the phone funnel framework, we brought that down to 13 days the last time I checked our books.

Ryan: I want to make sure people understand the significance of halving that. In retail, for example, we have inventory, right? We got to buy stuff, put it on the shelf so people can buy it. That takes capital. You have to put so much Capital. In retail, what you're counting is inventory turns. How many times can we turn the inventory? Because that investment and capital to the inventory when it's sold produces a return on investment.

Because you have a limited amount of capital to invest in inventory, how quickly you can turn it ends up creating how much revenue the business can go. If [01:22:00] I could take someone that's doing nine turns a year and get them to do 18 turns a year, they would double their revenue, and most likely more than double their profits because there's not a fixed cost that's elevating with those turns.

If you can take your ad spend money and you can cut the time down in half, what you did is you essentially doubled your number of inventory turns in terms of your marketing capital. You could keep your budget the exact same and sell twice as much stuff with that same marketing capital, or the other option available is say, I'm going to double my market account, because it's really the same now because I split the return on it to half, I can double my marketing capital and not feel any difference in terms of my bank account produce that much more result. Is that what you're going to get to? Sorry to interrupt that. I just want to make sure.

Oli: Yeah, no, absolutely. The other thing that [01:23:00] I think I should mention, in our quest previously to try different funnels in this particular business, try different offers, try different things, you end up kind of getting burnt out by doing all of these different things.

Ryan: It's a lot of work!

Oli: It is a lot of work. And, the more you know, and the more things that you can do, means that you realize that there's lots of things you could do, but only so many things that you should do. When you arrive at that conclusion, you figure out that your business can probably go from where it is now to seven figures and beyond of very simple framework funnel because you will understand the cool fundamentals and the levers between each part [01:24:00] that drive the whole thing forward.

When you arrive at that point, and it is an inevitable point, especially when you need to have a conversation with people in order to sell to them, you will find that you will arrive at the phone call. It's as simple as that. And you will arrive at a very simple process to move people from advertising to marketing, and marketing to sales and also not just sales, but also customer delight and support.

Guess what happens when you sell to people? Where do you continue the conversation? The conversation continues with the customer in the modality that they're happy to communicate with you. So now it means that my sales person is making after sales, up-sales, [01:25:00] cross-sales, cross-fertilization of other services that he wouldn't have been able to probably do before because they can now communicate with him through the same platform, through the same process, in supporting their success as a customer, which is very good.

Ryan: That's phenomenal. So, you're in competition with other businesses that do similar things to what you do. And one of the things you have to understand is that communication ability. It's communicating to the market, what do I do, allowing them to communicate with you. When you get that right, that is a huge distinction from other businesses. If you look at your own experience, you probably spend more than you would need to spend on certain commodities and services because of the ease of that interaction, not because the price.

I think Dan Kennedy said it sometime, [01:26:00] he's done the research on it or whatever, I don't know where he got the research from, but more or less, price is like number eight or nine on the list of things that people use to determine where they're going to spend their money. It is not number one. It's not number two. It's not even the top five. It's way down the list.

However, price becomes an issue whenever those other eight or nine things aren't in play. When you make it easy for people to communicate with your company in the modality that they prefer, which we already know, it's not like we got to guess it. It's a known quantity. You can take informal surveys and you can discover this pretty easy as well. But when you do that, and your business does that, get some of the other businesses are doing that right now? Not very many.

Oli: Well, I use that, every business has competition, right? And I think perhaps what you're referring, to the undercurrent of that is, we don't actually have any competition because nobody is [01:27:00] communicating in the one to many conversations in the way that we are. And the interesting thing is, when you go to Facebook and you're buying leads, you're regenerating leads using interaction based marketing methods, your people... generating traffic, buying traffic is the easiest thing in the world. It's never been any easier than it is today. Converting that traffic into intent, consumption, engagement, and conversation is a very, very, very different playing field.

Ryan: Oli, okay. Do you feel like you're cheating sometimes?

Oli: Well, you're gaming the system...

Ryan: And you're not really doing anything wrong, but you almost feel [01:28:00] like you're cheating compared to a lot of the other people because other people that may be trying to follow in your footsteps are looking at what you're doing and they can't figure out, how can you afford to do that stuff? Because they know, oh, sales people take money and time, you got to train them, you got to get them set up, you got to produce enough leads for them to call. There's no way I can afford to do all that stuff. I'm not going to do it. I'm just going to do automated, right?

Oli: Yeah, sure.

Ryan: And then it's like, what's the newest automated webinar technique? How am I going to do this one to many thing? And, again, they're applying all the techniques that worked in search based marketing and SEO based marketing to interruption traffic and they're going, I can't understand why this isn't working better. It used to work so well, man, all these things go south.

In that report, Death of the Automated Webinar, [01:29:00] I laid it out. The long and the short of it is, you don't have to be very smart. I'm not very smart. I've just observed. I just look around and go, man, when was the last time I sat around and waited until 6 p.m. to watch a show? If I want to watch something, what do I do? Netflix, YouTube, I want it on demand, I want it now. I'm not the only one. If you look at where all the money's going in entertainment, Netflix is putting out new programs all the time because the money is all there because that's where all the attention is flowing.

So, you don't have to be super smart dude, or dudette. All you gotta do is just be a little observant to, what are people doing differently? And then use those concepts with marketing and stuff within that framework and don't follow the crowd just because the crowd is going one direction in terms of the marketing gurus or the automation gurus. Frequently, they're using old rules for new situations.

Oli: Yeah, not [01:30:00] trying to impress anybody here, I know I don't need to do that. But what I would say is, one of the things that I do from time to time is I go in as the hired gun, like the consultant to go into other markets as businesses.

And this year I've done various different things with different people, and been fortunate to work with a lot of cool people. Literally people are astounded by the results of the phone funnel because they have adopted so many different things in the past to try and move that business forward and made things very complicated, things have become, very onerous to [01:31:00] report on. We're now showing them the simplicity of this approach and the results that it brings from it and it is incredible. I just encourage anybody really to be able to take the first step together.

Ryan: Yeah, I think that's really important. I think this is a good point to wrap it up in. If you guys have any questions you go ahead and you know message those in if you want. We'll try to answer some of those real quick, but I think we gave you a lot to chew on in this hour and half. I think we could we could do another one of these very soon and talk more about some of the intricacies and details, but I think the long and the short of it to remember is just understand, keeping it simple is actually going to make a huge difference. [01:32:00] Don't worry about making all this complicated stuff. Be hesitant to listen to the gurus that are telling you got to do all these complicated things. Understand, simplicity does not mean not sophisticated, right Oli?

Oli: Exactly, yeah.

Ryan: It can be very sophisticated and simple at the same time. But simplicity is the direction you want to be going with these things because then you can continue to do them and they don't break down.

My dad is a huge Tesla fan, almost to the point of it being annoying, sorry Dad, but he's like, do you know how many moving parts are in a Tesla compared to a gas engine? All right, point taken, Dad.

But if you can just look at your system and you can refine it down using these principles and concepts Oli was talking about, you'll be better off. It'll be sustainable and people will be much happier to be working with you. One last thing that I'll point [01:33:00] out here, Oli's got an event in San Diego this weekend, like I was telling them before, unfortunately, I can't get on it, but Oli's event is going to be Saturday and Sunday in San Diego. Is there a good way for people to get more information on that? Do you think you could post that in the comments as well?

Oli: Yeah, absolutely.

Ryan: Okay. I really wish that I could be there. I have some family things that are preventing me from getting there. I was trying to figure out a way to get down there because, as you can see, I get a lot from what Oli is teaching, and we've known each other for a long time so I've been able to enjoy that for a while.

But if you went through this conversation and you're like, this is really cool, Oli, do you mind just taking a couple minutes, I know you probably got to go because it's late where you are but would you mind just briefly explaining what the nature of the event is because it's a little bit different than what people typically get when they hear event. They usually think, [01:34:00] talking in front of a room, speaking at people for hours until their brain starts dripping out the ears, and then they want to go hang out in the hall and talk with people because they've had too much.

Oli: We have a product called the Automation Playbook Library. It's a playbook of campaigns, of which the phone funnel framework is actually one of those campaigns, and these campaigns work for virtually any type of business. They're the exact SOP's that we use in our agency for clients that pay us $15,000 a month to do their marketing for them, and we know that they work.

So, I decided to put this event together for the Automation Playbook live and the difference between this event and other events is the fact that you're actually going to be able to get some of these campaigns deployed, in fact not some of [01:35:00] them, you'll actually have all of those campaigns deployed into your business so that you can get the benefit from them. Get the results.

Ryan: So, do you have these campaign templates that you will push into their app and then they'll just be tailoring them? Is that what you do?

Oli: There's 8 campaigns with all of the copy written, all the sequences done, all of the infrastructure and architecture put around them that are deployable into Infusionsoft applications with all the relevant Integrations ready to run. What's important is, that is a side benefit. Most people, when they go to events, they come away with more information, but lack the abilities to then go and implement stuff.

At this event, I'm extremely focused on [01:36:00] people taking decisive action on what they learn. Not only am I going to give you the context behind these campaigns and why they work and how they work, but also I'm going to actually give them to you. So you're going to learn and they're going to be implemented as well for you.

We've got two days together in sunny San Diego with a small group of people, unfortunately we're limited to only 25 people, I purposely wanted to make it more of a workshop environment where there's an opportunity to ask questions of me. I'm doing virtually all of the sessions and my content writer, he's doing one session, and my head copywriter, Kevin, he wrote for, which also got a copyright for five years, and then my millions of dollars [01:37:00] resales company, he's my head copywriter, he's also doing two sections.

The rest is with me. I think that means I'm doing about 13th sessions for an hour for two days. You're not getting outside speakers selling stuff. That's not what this is about. This is really an event where like-minded people can come together. Whether you're early six figures in revenue or maybe even you're just starting out, or even for those people that have got a significant-sized business and know that they want grow or automate their business.

Ryan: Cool, and you guys now have a little bit of context on Oli's perspective on things which I think is important. I was thinking about this, and I'll say this quick aside, if you're a partner and you're watching this, you should really pay attention to Oli's model in terms of an event like that because it's really effective for helping people. [01:38:00]

But don't steal Oli's stuff. Take your own things and do it.

But the long and the short of it is, what you want to be doing, if you can make it down the San Diego is, if you haven't already, get my book How to Fix Your Funnel and just give that a quick read. It's a 2 hour read just to give you context for which of these campaigns really is going to be the biggest difference for you. Of course, you've also heard about Oli's experience and his evolution of over automating and then coming back into that balance point where we have sales and marketing actually working together. You'll want to, having that context, understand that, when he's giving you some of these things, that's the context he's coming from.

Like you said, through this experience, and it's fairly fresh, you refine some of these campaigns even further with your own experience realizing, oh wow, that's super powerful. You need to make sure that's in there. Oh, that's probably not as important, drop that out.

You've got the [01:39:00] recently refined version, and somebody that's been through this marketing automation journey over 10 years is really helpful for giving context. He's already made all the mistakes that are typical that maybe you're going to make organically if you do things on your own or if you're a new person to Infusionsoft, you're going to make these mistakes. We've seen it.

I mean, Oli, how many people follow the same process? Everyone. It's very rare to see somebody that will lead through that whole process and get right to the right point because it's just a natural part of how humans interact with these parameters. They're naturally going to want to drive too far. The question is, will they learn how to pull back to the right place?

And since Oli has already done that, that's why I feel very confident that if you get the chance to be in San Diego, I think you've only got a few slots and it's not a fake thing, and we weren't planning on promoting that event. I just thought it [01:40:00] would be good for people that carried through this whole conversation if they can make it, to get one of those those spots that are open and be there and just experience that process. I think it'll be really effective and, for those that stuck around for the whole hour and 41 minutes, I know that every second of it is worth it because what we covered here will help you avoid a lot of mistakes, a lot of heartache, a lot of pain.

And if you can apply the principles that Oli was talking about, you're going to do really well in your business. There's a lot of things at stake for that. I just want to point that out. There's the people that you're going to help as a result of doing things more effectively, you're going to help more people. And helping more people, if you're doing something good, is a big deal, so you got to do that.

That all ripples across that other things. You're going to help yourself, which is really important too. You got to help yourself as you're helping other people. Otherwise, you're going to lose energy and burn out. Notice the excitement that Oli had [01:41:00] on his face. If you're not having that in your business right now, you can get it. Just rewatch this video. This would be a video worth watching a couple of times. We don't do that anymore because there's so much crap being thrown at us, but it'd be worth it to watch this a couple times.

There's a lot of nuances that were discussed here that could be really powerful and game-changing for your business and you'll notice, I didn't charge you jack squat for this thing because I want you to get this stuff. I want you to understand it.

My business and my life was totally transformed by a few good people sharing some really good information that I was able to pick up and put into practice. Everything changed for me.

If you saw me and if you've been on any my webinars in the past, you know this, back in 2006, you would have found a highly depressed dude laying in his bed at 3 a.m. going, how am I going to take care of my family? It was tough. I didn't know which way to go. But because a few people shared some really important things with me about marketing and automation, about direct response [01:42:00] marketing, and I got an opportunity that landed in my lap to apply that stuff, everything changed for me.

I'm hoping that we can do the same for you with this broadcast. Rewatch it if you didn't get a chance. If you don't use Infusionsoft, watch it anyways if you got a business, because there's principles and concepts you'll pick up here and maybe Infusionsoft will be right for you. That's fine. This is easier than it looks. These concepts are easier to apply than you think. Yes, there's a lot of nuance, there's a lot of intricacy in the details, but you can get pretty close and I can get you to a point where you can get somebody like Oli to help you to get the rest of the way.

Just start. Use these things the best that you can. I appreciate all you guys jumping on, spending the time and I know we've got a lot of people that watch this on replay. Any questions? I was stalling so you guys can ask questions.

Oli: Yeah!

Ryan: But if there's no [01:43:00] questions, I know that frequently happens with my trainings

Oli: You answered all the questions.

Ryan: I answer all the questions preemptively because I'm always thinking like that. I have you address the concerns before they come up, but if you do have any questions, now's a good time. You got about five seconds. Three, two, one... Any closing thoughts Oli? You're going to put in the comments a way that people can reach out to you if they have questions or anything?

Oli: Yeah, so what I was going to say is, those of you who are listening to this or are going to I watch the replay, if you can't make it to San Diego, can't make it to the event, that's totally cool, and I'm sure there will be an opportunity for us to connect with each other, but the conversation here does not have to stop.

What I's like to do is: I have a my kind of inner circle, kind of coaching thing, that's called Player's Club. And inside Player's Club, we [01:44:00] give you tools, training, coaching, advice, guidance, to help you on your way through your different different phases of business. The phone funnel that we've been talking about here that we help other people implement, is part of Player's Club, you get access to it when you join Player's Club.

You can go through the training, you can have a deployable Infusionsoft campaign pushed into your app with the phone funnel copied for you. You get that as part of Player's Club, but you also get all of the other 8 campaigns of the Automation Playbook Library.

And, you get to jump on a call with me every other week, which hopefully is a good thing for you. You allow me to kind of understand you, your business, and get you past some challenges and [01:45:00] frustrations that that you may be having. That allows me to be connected with our players in our inner circle community. So, if that's of interest and you can't make it to the event, then you definitely should check out Player's Club. I think it would be a good thing for people.

Ryan: Very cool. It is resources like that that changed everything for me back in 2006, 2007. Somebody that was willing to teach me some things that I didn't know, open my mind up to some new possibilities that then started to expose opportunities that were sitting around me that I couldn't see before. I'm a big fan of getting some good mentors who have been down the road further than you and learning from them.

It looks like my buddy, Ted is going to be at your seminar in San Diego. Make sure you reserve for him. Ted and I go away back when I was in San Diego. That'll be good to have them there for you. All right. I [01:46:00] guess no questions, but I appreciate you being on here. I learned a lot, and hopefully other people did as well. I'm confident that they did if they paid close attention.

Oli: Yeah. Absolutely. I just want to say a big thank you to you. And obviously Trent also, by extension. Very grateful for our relationship that we've had for, as you mentioned, quite some time now, going back to 2011-2012.

I think sometimes people don't quite realize that the power of some of the concepts that we talked about and some of the ways that you can deliver, amplify, articulate, crystallize your message, to get that message in the hands of the people that you can make the most difference to and [01:47:00] that's why you want to continue on this journey that you're on to do what you do. You've made a big impact on a lot of people, you made a big impact on me. I appreciate you and everything that you do, as well everybody over at Fix Your Funnel.

Ryan: Thank you. That's very humbling, I'll pass that on to Trent, too. We try and lay some groundwork, we can do better at expressing it. That's why we're doing this training. We want to make sure people get into their hands this information so that they can do the most good with the least amount of effort for other people and themselves and take care of those people that they care about while they're still on this planet.