The Phone Funnel Framework Part 1

In this episode, Ryan and Oli Billson discuss Step 3 of Oli's 4 Steps to Business Success, the Phone Funnel Framework. They introduce how to use interruption-based marketing to actually convert your leads to sales.

Transcription of Episode

[00:00:00] Oli: Hi there, everybody. This is Oli Billson and welcome to this podcast. I'm with Mr. Ryan Chapman, hello Ryan! How are you doing?

Ryan: I'm doing good.

Oli: Well, I'm excited for today because we're going to be talking about a topic that's a little near and dear to my heart by the very fact that I've engineered, reengineered, and spoken on it numerous times all over the world, it seems, now.

I've been lucky enough to do it and really make it what it is as a byproduct of you and Trent. It's a big testament that the technology and the platform that we obviously use behind it that makes it so effective which is, of course, the Phone Funnel Framework.

Ryan: Yeah, I'm excited to talk about this. I think in our last episode we kind of left off saying we were going to cover the four pillars and this is one of the pillars, which pillar is it, three or four?

Oli: This is the third pillar actually.

Ryan: Okay. I hope people don't mind going out of [00:01:00] order, but I thought this was so powerful that it was worth moving to the front of the line.

Oli: Yeah, absolutely.

Ryan: Do you mind restating the pillars too? That way people can have some context. Maybe you're just coming in fresh and didn't catch our last discussion.

Oli: Yeah, sure. So, the first pillar is Vision, really getting clear on the reason why you exist as a business. Sometimes we forget why we're doing what we're doing.

Also, get clarity and crystallize on where you're going as a business. Have a clear mission, having kind of a North Star, and then distilling that down into annual priorities and quarterly goals and dictating, really, the rhythms of the things that you you should be focusing on to move your business forward towards those bigger goals that you have in your business.

You don't really achieve a vision, you need a vision, some milestones, in order to keep you on the right tracking, on the right path.

Every business needs [00:02:00] clarity on that.

Ryan: We'll go more into that in another episode. I think there's a lot there and I was starting to think things, and I bit my tongue.

Oli: Yeah, sure. And just for clarity, in case you think that that's not for you, you wonder, "Well, why would I need a vision?" we will go into it a lot deeper. But, believe me, adopting a solid, strategic, planning framework will guide you whether you're a startup business or you're less than 100 grand in turnover, it will be revolutionary for you.

Ryan: I can attest, it makes everything easier. All your decisions, all your prioritizing, all that seems very simple when you have a clear vision of what you're about and what you do for the market and how you do it. It just makes all the decision making easy.

Oli: Absolutely. Now, the second pillar is building what we call a growth team. And, again, before you people kind of get the wrong idea of what that means, like, "You're telling me to go and build a team?" Well, the fact is, our [00:03:00] growth team can actually be a team of one. It just means that it can't be just you.

Even if you want to keep your organization very lean and very profitable, which I'm also a big fan of, without having to have an office or multiple offices or 5, 10, 15, 20 staff or whatever it is, that's okay. You just need to know the disciplines that you need and what you need help with to create the capability internally to be able to execute on the things that are actually important.

Ryan: Again, I'm really excited to talk about that, but I'm biting my tongue really hard.

Oli: Yeah, yeah, definitely. There's a lot to talk about that.

Ryan: We'll do that another time.

Oli: Yeah, and then the third pillar is what we're going to talk about now, which is building an inbound selling system.

For most people who are, well, really for every type of business, regardless of what stage they're in, this [00:04:00] is fundamental to them actually functioning because the lifeblood of the business is, first of all, getting customers.

There needs to be predictability and consistency of moving people from advertising into sales conversations that lead to money in the bank and cash in the bank.

Ryan: Yeah. I'm really excited that we're going to be talking about this topic because after our last discussion, that concept of how most businesses that are in that, you gave some ranges and we'll probably get into that again, but there is a sales focus that needs to happen. If it doesn't happen, the business won't cash flow sufficiently to survive to get to the next phase.

Oli: Yeah, absolutely.

Ryan: I think some of these organizations want to skip the sales. They want to go just to marketing, you know?

Oli: Yeah.

Ryan: And they don't recognize how critical having a sales-oriented... and that doesn't mean you can't use marketing automation, as we'll get into.

Oli: Right, right.

Ryan: But it [00:05:00] has to be very sales focused, not marketing, long-term nurture, drip focused, which is the tendency I've at least witnessed in most people that get into marketing automation.

Oli: Yeah, I mean the sad fact is that most people don't really understand the concept, and it's not their fault, by the way. When I say most people don't understand it, I don't mean that in a condescending way. I mean it in the fact that genuinely, unfortunately what you've been told up until now from a lot of people quite honestly is not always quite accurate as I've seen things play out.

I can only talk on my personal experiences, but I can tell you, building four fairly successful, four separate successful businesses in different industries, that this has been true to me.

You need to understand the concept that leads don't become customers, prospects do.

Most people think that [00:06:00] prospects are things that you hear about in like a sales pipeline, you know, this is only reserved for people that have sales teams. And I'm a big advocate of actually introducing a sales mechanism to a business that doesn't currently have that capability internally.

Because, when they understands that it can be actually very profitable for them to introduce that, to have somebody inside of the business that's now working with prospects and not leads because these leads have qualified themselves through the marketing that you've been doing so they can have quality conversations and meaningful conversations.

It can really change the dynamic of a business and really accelerates, it can be the catalyst for double-digit growth year on year.

Ryan: What's interesting about that too is, having worked with, directly or indirectly, some very large corporations, there are some of them that are completely sales driven. They don't have the marketing component at [00:07:00] all.

In fact, many of the large companies are so, and that's why sales is such an important component, is they're fully sales driven. Like cold calling, the whole works, they don't really have these mechanisms. If you were to give some of these mechanisms to some of these large corporations, they would go from being good to amazing almost overnight.

But, as a small business, you don't have that luxury, so you really do have to have these mechanisms in place. Otherwise, you won't survive because you don't have the luxury of investment firms and big lines of credit and all these things. And you probably shouldn't, because it would just bury you until you get the sales mechanism down.

Oli: Yeah, definitely. Well, I think the other thing is, there's a misconception that some people think that they can't actually afford to bring in that internally, when in actual fact, in my experience, that's not actually quite true.

There are some things that you [00:08:00] need to consider in the engineering of your business, whether or not it is worthwhile you bringing that in internally. But, the dollar amount that you're bringing people in for is probably a lot less than you may think it would need to be to consider bringing in a salesperson.

You may think, "Well, if I'm selling something that's like $2,000, $5,000, $10,000, then of course it might make sense for me to bring in a sales person. I've met loads of people are selling things for like, $5,000, that think that it's not worth them having a salesperson.

Ryan: Oh, geez. Let's just put that into perspective. I sell something that is $49 a month, and I have a salesperson. In fact, I have two.

Oli: Right.

Ryan: But here's the interesting thing, as we get into the Phone Funnel Framework, I think it will help people to recognize what folly there is in thinking you can't afford salespeople or it's not right for you yet.

The reality is, with the Phone Funnel Framework in place, [00:09:00] you actually don't need a "salesperson".

Oli: Exactly.

Ryan: You almost are getting to the point where you need an order taker, someone that understands your product well enough that they can answer questions about it, a simple framework so that they know how to approach the conversation in a way that's meaningful to the prospect, and then that's it.

It's basically saying, "Okay, you've been prepared, you've been filtered. Now we're at this point that it's time to have a buying decision discussion." And then we're going to participate in that.

In fact, we found (hopefully our sales guys aren't listening) sometimes our support guys are even better than sales guys because they have more of that mentality of, "Let me find out where you are and how do we get you to where you want to be" versus, "How do we get money out of your pocket?"

And the reality is, nobody likes to be sold to, everybody likes to buy so you just have to give them a way that they can do that. The Phone Funnel Framework, I feel like, really exemplifies this process [00:10:00] of preparing, accelerating, and then filtering, which I think you can get into and break down more.

Oli: Yeah, absolutely. So I think really that what we need to do is begin with just putting something into perspective. We've talked there about the value of having somebody internally that can have a conversation with somebody before they buy or to have an appointment set so that they can put them through a process, they can qualify them before the call as well to have a good quality conversation.

Of course, all salespeople, or anybody that's really speaking to anybody, what they want is to be speaking to people who know what you've got to offer, how it can benefit them, and that person has the ability to make a decision. They need to find out whether or not it's definitely for them.

You may also want to know [00:11:00] whether or not they are right for you as well, which is another reason why that is part of the the reason why an appointment, setting a consultation of some sort, is a thing that you'd want to do.

Just so that people think, because a lot of people I've actually moved over into the Phone Funnel Framework previously, whenever even scheduling appointments online through some kind of scheduler, they were hoping that people would actually call them internally in an inbound call, or they would have people fill in the form on the website and then they would have to then reach out.

That's a really wholly inefficient way of orchestrating that whole thing anyway.

Ryan: So when I'm thinking about these kind of processes, I'm always thinking about, what kind of friction am I putting the person through? And I'm a busy person, so I like to think of myself going through that process. What part of this process is attractive to me?

Oli: Yeah

Ryan: There's all this uncertainty that [00:12:00] people build into these process and they don't realize that uncertainty causes people to give up.

Oli: Yeah, absolutely.

Ryan: Like, "Is this person going to get back to me? When am I going to talk to somebody? I want to talk to somebody now. How long is this going to take?" Those types of questions.

Oli: Yeah, that inefficiency breeds a lot of that unfortunately. That's the reason why we have to begin with the end in mind. We have to think about, ultimately, where do we want to take people to?

That's the reason why I want to kind of impress upon anybody that's listening that we want to systemize this process by moving people towards selecting a date and time on your calendar or maybe one of your sales rep's calendars or whomever it may be that may be helping them enroll in and get that contact.

Ryan: A customer support person.

Oli: Whoever it is.

Ryan: Let me inject this real quick. This is a principle that a lot of people may not have grasped that I think is really critical to understand.

This is a [00:13:00] fact, so you can question it, in fact, I think you should because you need to evaluate and see if this is true.

But this is the fact: all sales happen in conversation.

Oli: Yes.

Ryan: Some of these conversations are person to person, some are listening to a podcast. There may be a sale that is occurring in someone's head on this concept, for example. There are also sales that happen with copy. A person is reading copy, they're having a conversation with the written word. These are always conversations that are occurring.

You got to understand, all sales happen in conversation and some of the most effective conversation is person to person, and that's why it's so powerful.

I just wanted to get that principle out there as a framework or foundation on what you're going to begin to lay out.

Oli: Hmm. Well, what you just mentioned, hopefully that's kind of sunk in for people because it's very, very true.

Here's the problem with that reality for a lot of people.

The problem with that reality [00:14:00] is that you simply cannot, unless you've got hundreds, maybe even thousands of sales people, or lead development representatives, or whoever, you can't have conversations with everybody.

Ryan: With every lead, right?

Oli: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you'd love to. We'd love to, but we all know the reality of that.

Not everybody who is inquiring about your services, and especially when it comes to information-first marketing, when you're providing value in advance and you're implementing solid direct response marketing, by the very nature of the fact that you're cultivating, you're capturing people's interest, you're collecting their contact information to follow up with them in exchange for some value that you're promising.

To speak to all of those people would be virtually impossible and they're probably [00:15:00] not yet ready to engage in that conversation.

That's the reason, as we now talk about the Phone Funnel Framework, the reason why this is so powerful because what we're actually doing is we agree now that we need conversations with people in order to better sell to them.

We know ideally, in an ideal world, we'd love to speak to everybody to know how we can help them.

But now, we can kind of flip that on its head and say, "Well, how can we use and how can we leverage technology and media and mechanisms that exist today that previously hadn't existed and be able to use those to let people qualify themselves so that when we do have those conversations, they're going to be quality ones, meaningful ones that are going to ultimately turn into business for us."

Ryan: So let me interject here that commonly, when this is done in the past, it was done at the [00:16:00] expense of the prospect or the lead as opposed to in their interest.

That's what's really powerful about the Phone Funnel Framework in particular is instead of it being at the expense of the person, instead of it making it so they have to jump through all these hoops, it's more like a slide. They get to go down the slide and this slide is useful to them because it helps them not have to interact with somebody.

I don't know if you know this, because you may, if you're listening to this podcast, you're a different type of person than the average bear. Because of that, you may see the world totally different, you may not consider some of the ways that other people see the world.

A lot of people don't like to talk to sales people.

That's not what they want to do on the first step.

Me, I just want to get it out of the way. I want to just go talk to somebody, find out what they offer, what they do. I'll call CEOs, companies, stuff like that just so I can get what I need to make a buying decision.

But, a lot of people are not that way. They don't want to talk to people, they're afraid of being sold.

Giving them a [00:17:00] way to start dipping their toe in that is natural and flows for them is fantastic because then they don't feel like they're being trapped. They feel like they can get information on their terms.

Then, once they're ready to actually have that conversation, they have a way to do that and that's what's really powerful about what you're going to lay out here.

Oli: Yeah, I'm glad we're kind of setting the scene for a little bit, because I think sometimes, including me, you can gloss over this very easily and actually there's a there's a number of layers to the reason why this works so well.

There's absolutely no question what we've implemented, what I'm about to go through, in lots of different types of businesses that sell lots of different types of things. It's really agnostic to the type of business that you're currently in if you need to have a conversation with somebody in order to be able to sell to them.

But what I would say is, I'm glad we've kind of talked about this. Actually, people have [00:18:00] these light epiphanies all the time about the reason why it works so well.

I often hear this in my Mastermind group or on Q&A calls and things because people will just say, "Oh, I get it now! I get why that works." Often I hear this thing that's like, "It just feels natural. It just feels different when you go through it." And that's the experience that they're getting back from their customers, "It was so easy to engage with you."

Ryan: I think that's important for people to recognize, that's not an accident, a happy accident.

Oli: Exactly.

Ryan: It is by design. It's taking an understanding of how people are and what they want, what drives and motivates them. That was all part of the crafting of the Phone Funnel Framework.

Oli: Yeah. [00:19:00] Let's kind of dig into that some more.

Ryan: Do you want to give an overview?

Oli: Yeah, let's do that.

Ryan: That way people can follow through because we've alluded to it quite a bit. I'm sure some people are going like, "Okay, quit teasing me. Let's get to it."

Oli: Yeah! Well, first of all, the two primary channels of the advertising that we use is Facebook Advertising and Google AdWords. Of recent times, we've found that Facebook has been the primary lead source that we've used for lots of the reasons around targeting that's been extremely effective to get ourselves in front of our potential customers.

I doubt there's many people on the call that either are not doing Facebook advertising or they've tried it at some point in the past. If you've tried it and you're not doing it for some reason, then this may be another reason to consider getting back onto it for sure. [00:20:00] Or, maybe you're using it and you want to get better results, then you'll want to pay some attention.

You want to meet people where they are. You know that your target market hangs out on Facebook. One of the big distinctions from running literally hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of Facebook advertising spent, I would say, is, when we start to break down some of our most profitable advertising campaigns, we found that a lot of people were on a mobile device.

Now that shouldn't be any surprise, but what was kind of alarming to us was that, in our data, over 85% of our traffic was mobile.

That is the reality of most people online today, given the fact that everybody has a smartphone these days and obviously have the app on their [00:21:00] phone.

We were using some traditional conversion campaigns, like automated webinar campaigns, that had worked for many, many years before it. We'd run live and automated webinars to drive people through to some kind of application.

This was our first kind of foreign discovery that, when was the last time that you watched a webinar on your mobile phone?

I mean, it's a simple question. I don't about you, but I've never watched all of a webinar on a phone, especially if they were like, an hour or two long.

Ryan: Right.

Oli: It's a horrible experience, to do that, to watch a video of that kind of length on your phone. And, the truth is, a lot of webinar platform software as well, we've never found a great solution for that for a number of technical reasons. We found that people were jumping between devices throughout that funnel, which made it quite difficult to [00:22:00] scale those campaigns as well.

Maybe for those of you who are listening that want a little bit more of a technical understanding, you've kind of got it, and it makes sense.

A lot of traffic originated from mobile and people were jumping between different devices and you can imagine that protracted the attention that we had with those leads that were coming through because they were jumping through different devices, we were sending a lot of email, and we were trying to scale their attention.

But, in doing so, we have to send a lot of messages, it really elongated the lead to buyer time as a result, as you would imagine.

Ryan: Yeah. Well, I can't tell you how many webinars that I have come across on my phone and I was like, "Oh, yeah, that's actually interesting to me!" I register, and then I'm told I've got to wait 15 minutes, an hour, or it's three days away. I'm like, "Oh, okay. Yeah," and then what [00:23:00] happens?

Other things in life come in the way and then you never attend. I've probably registered for a hundred webinars that I've never attended.

Oli: Oh, yeah, totally.

Ryan: Not because I wasn't interested in the topic, but because they're putting me through filters. It's interesting, because that whole concept of the timed webinar is built upon somebody telling somebody at some point, "Yeah, if you schedule somebody for a webinar, you're going to get better results in your sales."

Oli: Mmm.

Ryan: That's the basis for it. Someone said that. Now you come get me the proof that that's actually true. I think people try and build it, but they don't actually have it.

Oli: No, I agree.

Ryan: The whole basis for that whole approach was, somebody somewhere at some event said something, and then somebody that wanted to sound smart in some Mastermind repeated it, and then, boom. Next thing you know, everybody's doing it. Not because they know why, but because somebody said somewhere that you should.

If you think about it, though, if you just thought about it for a second, you'd realize [00:24:00] there's a whole lot of friction in that process.

I've got their attention, they're actually interested. I'm asking them to give me information and they give me information and I tell them, "Wait."

Oli: Yeah.

Ryan: That might have worked back in the 80s when people had to wait a week for their show to come on that they really liked. "Oh, I love that show, Knight Rider." That was me as a kid.

Oli: Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

Ryan: I was looking forward to Friday all week.

Oli: You've got on demand Knight Rider now, Mr. Chapman.

Ryan: I know! That's where we live, we live in the Netflix time. So, asking people to live like they were in the 80s when we're in the Netflix Generation is crazy.

Oli: Yeah.

Ryan: And yet, that's what people are doing because they were told to do that. In fact, to this day, I'll get people who get angry at me when I challenge that.

Oli: Yeah, I agree.

Ryan: And they don't know why! It's more of a religion for them than it is a fact. it's not like this is something that they know, it's something that they've been told and they believe it and they don't know why. You've got to question [00:25:00] some of these things.

And I know that kind of was your Genesis as well, then.

Oli: It was, because we were just seeing show up rates go down. We were seeing more people that were not making it through the webinar to even see the offer.

And then we were also then seeing that people are at the highest point of momentum and you have their attention the moment that they give you their information in exchange for what you're giving to them.

When you then put them into some sort of countdown sequence, which is kind of a bit of false scarcity anyway to get them to take action by a given time, you've lost their attention and now you're fighting in the inbox with every other person that's also trying to get their attention.

Ryan: Oh, gosh. Let's not even get into that.

Oli: Yeah, that's a whole different thing. That's definitely another whole podcast on it, another episode there.

But the truth was, we were just seeing things decline and it made sense because [00:26:00] we're not living in that time. Now people want to consume information. They want to consume the information they've requested now. And they want to do it in the most convenient way.

So we've kind of established that, first of all, Facebook is where your potential customers are hanging out, number one.

We've also established that majority of people that are there, who are browsing on Facebook and on the platform, are on a mobile device. Certainly, the majority are, from our data that we've seen, over 85%.

So then, now that we've kind of started talking about why there would be an obvious decline in the old way of doing things, now we know that if they're on a mobile device, and we know that there's all of this inconvenience and all of this all these walls we're putting up, all this friction, then we [00:27:00] need now need to think of a better way.

If we know that they're on the mobile device and we're trying to just communicate with email, then we know that there's a better way, don't we?

We know that there's a way that we can connect with the device that's in all of our own pockets through text messaging.

That was our revelation, really, was that we went from seeing text and SMS as the gateway to actually getting the information initially that we needed to continue the conversation with them.

What I mean by that specifically is that, in the past, what we used to try and do was use lead capture forms with first name, email, and then try and get people's phone number on the front end to try and tell them that we'd send them reminders for the webinar or [00:28:00] something like that.

But obviously the more information you ask for, the conversion goes down and there's no real reason. It's a very tepid reason to be able to ask for that information anyway.

Yet, the one piece of information that we actually need at the end of the day is, if we gonna have a conversation with them, even if we're going to reach out to those people at some point in the future, we need their phone number.

That's kind of where than we started to think, "Well, okay, maybe there's a better way here where if we can dovetail the the response mechanism and the delivery mechanism together so we're actually delivering messages and communications through text and SMS, not only is it likely to grab the attention because we're going to have it, we're going to hold it for longer because we're going to deliver it directly to the device that they're already on."

That was a really big thing.

But [00:29:00] also, it means that when they request that information and we deliver it to them through text, they're then going to take the next action and actually engage with the very thing that they actually asked for.

We had seen this be a big factor with email over a long time, not just with webinars, but also asking people to download free guides and people used to have white papers and all of these different kind of lead magnets and video series and mini casters and all this stuff that you can lose on the front end.

We'd seen so much of the open rate drop off because people request stuff all the time, but you lose them. Building these together-

Ryan: And we've all done it, right? I think this is worth exploring just a little bit so people don't brush over this and glaze over it. But you've all requested something by email, then you've gone into your email box and you sat and waited.

[00:30:00] You didn't really want to get into your email inbox in the first place, because you knew there's a bunch of stuff you hadn't taken care of that was in there waiting for you. You know what I mean? It's sort of like when you have somebody that you're responsible to and you've made a commitment to them and then you didn't keep that commitment. How excited are you to see them the next time?

That's the email inbox. There's so many things that you know you have to look at and deal with, but you don't want to because you don't really want to. It's not the top of your list, but you know it's important and so it's a place that people want to avoid. Yet, that's how this thing is getting delivered.

They go and they jump in there and they're jumping in there and they're waiting and they're hoping not to see something else and then maybe there's something actually interesting in there too and they see that and suddenly, boom, they're off on another tangent, they're gone, and then they forget about the thing that they were waiting for.

If you don't think that's how people operate, think about yourself. I guarantee everybody operates in that same way because it's a human nature thing, right?

That's a pretty big deal when you're trying to get someone's attention. That ability for you to go from the mobile phone where [00:31:00] they found your ad and were interested in the first place and then back into a place where there's no competition to speak of.

The text message is pretty critical, but that also, another thing, I don't know what do you call it, I call it Marketing Rule #19. I know you don't call it that because it's kind of my funny deal. It kind of sounds weird. What do you call that concept?

Oli: Well, I think it's becoming, as Dan Kennedy would say, a welcome guest rather than an annoying pest. Email does drive a lot of behavior, but we do more based on relationships than we have ever done before.

Receiving text messages when we've explicitly given permission to text us the information that we're actually requesting then allows us to not only deliver it in the in the most convenient way, but we can then continue the conversation in a non-invasive way that [00:32:00] is more humanized anyway.

Ryan: Right. That's so critical to open that door. Marketing Rule #19 states that before you decide how you're going to lead capture, you got to know how you're going to sell.

Oli: Yeah, usually people figure out how they're going to generate leads instead of worrying about how they're going to sell to them.

Ryan: And then they don't sell and they can't figure out why. This is why the Phone Funnel Framework is so important is because Oli thought from the beginning, "I've got to sell. This is not a sales mechanism. This isn't okay. I've got to generate leads and then I got to sell them."

It's a sales mechanism, starting with the end in mind, thinking, how are we going to sell?

That's why the phone number is so critical to your process, as you said. Hey, look. Everybody has a phone on them now, just about, right?

Oli: Yeah.

Ryan: It's within three feet of them 24/7. 24/7 it's within three feet of them.

If I can get that, now I can call and, if I get their permission, I can text.

Oli: Yeah.

Ryan: I can do those two things. That's installed [00:33:00] on every single phone. Every single person is using the phone and they're texting on their phone.

They're not all using Facebook Messenger, they're not all using other things, but they all are using SMS and phone.

So, if I can get that, now I've got the golden key to the palace. I can get in and I've got a chance to have a conversation now.

Okay, so you've got the phone, you realize that's super critical, where does it go from there?

Oli: Well, so here's the other reality of Facebook advertising is that it's different from intent-based search platforms like Google AdWords.

With AdWords, people are looking for what you've got to offer. They've got a problem and they're looking for a solution and they searched that problem. With Facebook, we're really interrupting them on a social platform.

Here's the things that we found [00:34:00] about this. Albeit you can make some of this work, Facebook wants to provide the best user experience to its customer base, its user base.

What that means is that when you're trying to do off-site conversions, meaning you're trying to drive people from an ad away from Facebook to a landing page to get them to opt in for something, there will be, and just mark my words, this is only going to get more restrictive from a Facebook standpoint.

The reason why it's going to get more restrictive is for a number of reasons around compliance, but it's probably going to get more restrictive because ultimately it's not the most desired way that Facebook believes that advertisers should be using that platform.

So one of the things that they created was, they call it a "Lead Generation Objective", but we call it Facebook Lead Ads.

We'd [00:35:00] seen these arrive on the scene as an advertising objective, which meant that the difference between this and a normal conversion based objective, one where you were driving people away from Facebook, was that Facebook now allowed you to collect the contact information from its users inside of Facebook, rather driving them away and off the platform.

When they did this, it was great because you could see where Facebook was going with it and there definitely seemed in early tests to be a bias almost towards using that objective. Facebook was throwing a lot of traffic your way, there was a high level of Impressions, a good level of impression share.

What that meant was, that was great. Not only was our ads being seen, but also it meant that by the very nature of a Facebook Lead Ad, Facebook was actually pre-populating the users information inside of [00:36:00] that form in Facebook.

A lot of people love that idea. But there's one huge, big problem with that if you were just using Facebook Lead Ads as a way to collect contact information. That is, if you were doing it the old way without the marketing know-how behind it, people were still collecting email.

They were getting loads and loads of leads through Facebook Lead Ads because, as I mentioned, it seemed, I don't know if there was or not, but there seemed to be a bit of a bias towards that. People were still inside of the platform, they were getting leads, they were getting email, they were getting first name, and then they were tryin to follow up with them.

Everybody I spoke to were like, "These lead ads just don't work. They flat out don't work. You get loads of leads, it's rubbish data, rubbish contact information."

I think it took a while [00:37:00] before somebody just said, "Well, of course it is not good contact information. When you signed up to your Facebook account, you used an email which now has probably been changed 10, 15 times, even.

Whatever it is that you used to sign up with, if that's the information that's being provided to these forms, then clearly it's going to be outdated information and you're definitely not going to get a great open rate or great delivery on those emails that you're collecting from Facebook.

I'm not going to go to say that they're completely useless to you, but it's definitely-

Ryan: In fact, they're very valuable, if you know what you're doing.

Oli: Exactly, yeah.

So with the marketing know-how and-

Ryan: It's just not valuable if you're sending email.

Oli: Yeah, absolutely.

This then provide an interesting kind of juncture for us because what we then came to realize was, with a Facebook Lead Ad, we could also ask [00:38:00] for other information. One of those pieces of information that we could ask for is the mobile phone number.

And, guess what?

Facebook will also pre-populate that information if it has it on its user when they enter that form.

Ryan: What's fascinating is that it doesn't say "mobile phone number." It just says "phone number."

Oli: Hmm.

Ryan: But the reality is, the phone number that Facebook collects is the cell phone number, is the mobile number.

Oli: Absolutely. Yeah, and the reason why that is important to us is twofold.

Number one, we've already established that most of our traffic, most of our impressions, are on mobile, number one.

So we know they're on a mobile device.

Two, we know that if we can find a way to connect with the device that's in their pockets using text and leveraging that, then we [00:39:00] can, which is great.

Now we've got a way, we've got a mechanism to collect that mobile phone number inside of Facebook, which is great. Now we need to ask the question, how accurate is that information?

Well, unlike email, which, as I've already explained, for a lot of people they didn't get good results. With their phone, the reason why that would be more accurate is because people don't change their phone number very often, number one.

And number two, Facebook uses that as a security mechanism if you have forgotten your password for some reason.

Facebook has that data, and you have given that data to Facebook. And so now we've got this perfect storm, so to speak, of being able to collect the information that we actually need to open up the [00:40:00] channel of communication that then paves the way for the rest of the sales process.

Ryan: So if you understand what Oli just laid out about how the mobile number is collected and why it's so critical and why everybody's motivations are in the same direction, you'll also understand why collecting the phone number is great for a retargeting as well even if you're not collecting it through a lead ad form.

Facebook has this unique number that's assigned to you with your device. It's probably more unique than Social Security numbers in the United States in some ways. But there you go, you've got this number. Now you've got an identifier that is absolutely unique, absolutely used, and an absolutely great way to connect.

Now all you need that's missing is permission to text them, which is something that you do in your lead ad, right?

Oli: Yeah, because the interesting thing with a lead ad is that as well as collecting the information on the form that you need to deliver the value that you're [00:41:00] promising in your actual ad itself, which I'll come back to in a few moments, you can also ask something called a custom question.

And on that question, and then this is critical, you can simply say, "Would you like me to instantly text you a link to the video?"

And obviously that's a binary option, yes or no, which they're selecting directly on that form.

In case some of you may be wondering, what the ratio of people that say yes to no, we're actually running a campaign at the moment and it's like 90%, just over 90% which is actually pretty high.

Ryan: Wow. I've seen it range from 75 on the low side to 90, which I guess is what you're saying there. I would say the average is probably in that 75-80 range.

This goes back to another concept, and I'm going to give a little preview for people that are listening, we are not going to cover the whole of the Phone Funnel Framework in this episode because we're just about out of time.

Oli: Yeah. Yeah.

Ryan: We [00:42:00] will come back. I think we've set a good framework, so lets, Oli, if you don't mind, in the next episode, let's go into some of the logistics of the things that you've learned going through the Phone Funnel Framework with all of your clients. I'll share some of our insights as well.

So, on topic of getting that question asked and answered, what do you do with the information once you get that?

Oli: Well, what we now have is we have the ability to discern those people that want us to directly deliver that piece of value to their mobile phone versus those that have one traditional way to deliver it through email.

Ryan: You can ask for full name, email address, phone number, and then if they want the video instantly delivered to them via text message.

Oli: Yes, what happens at that point is the information that's collected on that [00:43:00] form is sent directly to Infusionsoft, which is our CRM marketing automation tool.

Ryan: Well, not quite directly.

Oli: Not quite directly, yeah. Well, it almost seems so seamless-

Ryan: That you forget it's there, huh?

Oli: Yeah, that I forget that it's there. In fact, I'll just have a regular flow of Slack messages when we run this campaign internally of alerts of these things coming through every however long the limit is of it refreshing to get as many as possible.

The information is sent, it is synced using FixYourFunnel, and FixYourFunnel ports that information over to Infusionsoft so that we can then facilitate the follow-up process.

Ryan: So we'll stick it in there, and then we'll apply a tag of your choice for that particular lead type. [00:44:00] That way you can start automation knowing the data is in Infusionsoft.

Oli: Yeah, so the great thing about that is we're clearly building our list and using FixYourFunnel to move that information over, but also we're moving that information over of not just the contact info but also the permission as well.

We may want to, in the future, know and discern those people that we have permission to be able to text and those that we don't, as well.

Then we also use FixYourFunnel, this may not matter to some people, but to us, we like to see it, is we use FixYourFunnel, but, in fact actually we have an integration setup now because it's part of your sync platform, of course, which allows us to push that information into Slack.

So actually, my team can actually see the flow of these new leads coming through all of the time and the information that's being collected and [00:45:00] ultimately that being passed over to Infusionsoft.

Ryan: I know that seems like a minor thing, but for me that's been a major part of all my businesses and I take it so for granted that I never hardly mention it. But, having Slack, once we got Slack, which was like as soon as it came out, we heard about it and we were like, "Oh this would be great," and we started utilizing it that way.

Having Slack, having a channel dedicated to all the activity coming off of your ads, is really critical because leads are the lifeblood of the business.

If sales is what moves the business forward because it generates revenue, then this is the food, basically. The leads are the food to sales.

So if the food gets cut off, what happens to sales? It dries up and you die. That business is done. You really want to keep an eye on the food flow into the business.

As each lead comes in, you want to see that those ads are producing leads. If you don't see that, if that's [00:46:00] not constantly in front of you, you can sometimes miss it and then you create a feast or famine type scenario where you start going into famine mode, panic sets in, and you start doing desperate things to try and get that corrected, which usually isn't the best thing.

It's usually the worst thing that you can do is what you'll do when you're in panic, but you'll do that. You'll get some something working, if you're lucky, and then you survive. But then, what will happen is inevitably, you'll get comfortable and you'll forget to check in on that.

Having that come into Slack is really critical because it gives you an open view. I do that with keywords and phone number leads as well. Any lead that is coming into our company is going into a particular channel so everybody can kind of see, is the lead flow happening the way that we expect it to or do we need to make adjustments?

I think that's a critical thing.

Even if you don't use Slack for anything else, you're just a team of one and you're like, "Well, who would I chat with?"

Let Infusionsoft chat with you.

Let your leads, if you're using the Phone Funnel Framework, let those leads [00:47:00] come in there. I would use it even if it was just me working in my team and I had no other humans just so I can have my machines communicating with me on what they're doing.

Oli: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.

Ryan: You'd probably do the same, wouldn't you?

Oli: Yeah, I do. We use Slack really now as the kind of the nucleus of communication internally, but also having these sensors that are working externally to feed those little notifications back to us in pivotal stages of the process.

Ryan: So you're having Infusionsoft doing that through a FixYourFunnel Slack bot as well as-

Oli: Yeah, thats right.

Ryan: Lead ads notifying you that leads are coming in.

You'll do this for your clients, as well, so you can get a feel for how their flow is.

Oli: Yeah, the beautiful thing is what we have with that is I get so much insight because in that channel where we're pushing the lead information into, we also have the Slack bot that you were talking [00:48:00] about there set up as well.

This shows us immediate qualification and disqualification of people that are making applications to have conversations with us as well so that our sales team can actually delete those people from their calendar if they've scheduled with them, but they don't qualify, which is great.

Ryan: Okay, so they'll actually push some button or do something that will apply a tag and then start a sequence that will notify that person, "Sorry, you don't actually qualify, so we're not going to have our appointment."

Oli: Yeah, or another bot that we use is once an appointment is scheduled with a qualified person, we also push that through as well even with the booking day as well so we've got everything there.

It's just coming through and it's just nice to know. As we're talking and having this conversation, right this very second, I can see, looking through the the [00:49:00] Slack history today, even just as a glance, and it is quite a long thread now, but I would imagine that there's probably, without me looking, probably about a hundred leads that have come through.

What I can see in between those is I can see people that have scheduled I can see people that have qualified and disqualified, and really that's the command center for me getting an idea of what's going on.

And as you just said before, you might be thinking, "Well, this is surely just a, more of a vanity." It isn't, because if I saw a hundred FixYourFunnel notifications and zero appointments that had been set that day, even just from notifications, not a dashboard, nothing fancy. Just having this receptor of what's happening, I'd know that there's something that's off or something that's not working.

Ryan: And that's critical for you to know immediately, not after it becomes a [00:50:00] problem, because then you can do something about it.

Okay, we're unfortunately out of time for this episode, but I do want to give people just in like a word, I'm going to just going to walk them through real quick, not a word but very quickly, the end of the Phone Funnel Framework just so they have some full context to wrap their mind around.

We're going to really have to dive in deep on some other stuff in the next episode.

But basically, we're driving, and this is very basic, so don't try and use this information until you listen to the next episode because you'll mess up a lot of stuff. There's a lot to this, but it sounds simple.

After we get the lead ad, we're through the text message or, as a backup, if they don't allow us to text, through the email, we're pushing them to a video.

That video is going to be an introduction, and then that's going to push them to maybe a slightly longer video that will then invite them to set an appointment to see if this is right for them and discuss with a member of our team if the situation is good for them.

That's setting an appointment. They show up to the appointment, you have a discussion, and then they make a buying decision.

So that's very brief, I know [00:51:00] I missed some pieces that you use, Oli, but hopefully that does it enough justice so people get a feel for what this overall framework is.

I'll also add one more thing, which is we've talked about this in the context of Facebook ads right here, but this same Phone Funnel Framework could be initiated off a direct mail piece by having a keyword/phone number call to action, which eliminates the option for, "I don't want to give you my cell phone number," but is just as effective as it follows the flow of everything else that we're going to talk about.

Oli: Certainly. Yeah, looking forward to that.

Ryan: All right. Thanks, Oli, thanks for joining me. Thanks for sharing so much great information.

Hopefully people are starting to get a feel for what the Phone Funnel Framework is, as well as the four pillars to growing a business that actually scales and becomes something amazing that you're happy to be a part of and have started.