I Grew a Business to $10,000,000 in 4 Months to Show It's Not Luck

[Music] one of our portfolio companies went from stuck to $10 million per year in 4 months and in this video I'm going to walk you through the actual marketing and sales tactics we use so that you can apply those things to your business too so one of the newer companies in our portfolio was doing about 570,000 per month and they had plateaued there month after month after month for about 6 months so let's start with marketing so we had in this business a webinar-based business meaning it's running ads to a video that the founder would get on and basically pitch a call to find out more all right so I'm going to give you current state so our show rate for this webinar was 18% which is really not good you want it to be 25 or kind of higher the schedule rate from the webinar meaning people who booked to then take a sales call I actually don't have that number but we didn't prove it so I'll tell you what we ended up doing and before we made these changes we were getting 58 calls booked per webinar all right so that's where we started so so the problem starting with this was the show rate so the issue is that we were only doing one time per week for the founder so they only wanted to do kind of like one pitch per week and the issue is that means that if somebody books on let's call it Monday and she does the webinar on Sunday then it means all of this time in between is where people could forget about it get busy fall off and essentially just not show up even though we paid to get the opdate so we did four things to actually fix this so number one is that we introduced a long email sequence we had nine emails that we went that went out and these were we just basically improved the email so we uh simplified the language we put it more benefit driven uh and basically sold the reason they should attend and we tried to hit it from different angles so we try to hit from pain we try to hit from speed we try to hit it from ease we try to hit it from being stuck in plateaued because the big thing that you always have to remember is that pain is what drives motivation all right that's what gets people to actually take action the second thing we did is we added an SMS because if people uh aren't showing up then you want to communicate in more places and more ways and so some people me like me specifically I'm way more text responsive than I am email responsive I rarely check my email but I do check my texts the next thing that we did on top of that was within the emails we actually did some sort of behavior response all right so you're like what the hell does that mean and so Behavior response means that if someone engages in any piece of content they click they uh they open it we then sent them behind the scenes content so think about this is exclusive or secret stuff that made it show that we saw what they were doing which is also something every business wants is like oh W this is pretty cool I didn't know they could do something like this just showing kind of some more sophistication in marketing and then the fourth thing that we did was again with more places more ways we had voicemail messages that we sent out to them and so that means that we cover people who like text people who like email people like voicemail and then we also had video essentially for people who took an engagement so we had all four ways that people consume information that we added in prior to the webinar and so one of the other things that you can do obviously besides pain is that you add in proof and so you can alternate between proof and pain but big picture is that you always want to use the value equation which you've got dream which is what's the big thing that they want to have happen you've got risk so you want to decrease the risk this is where proof comes in and you want to uh decrease the time so that's speed and you want to decrease the hard right which is you want to make it easy and so we want to show how easy it is how fast it is how risk-free it is with proof and we want to make sure that we're very accurately describing what they want to have happen yeah if you especially have people who have you know your avatar doesn't respond to email because sometimes there are Industries you know if you're in finance a lot of people respond to emails if you're in painters uh and maybe bluecollar workers you might have fewer responses to emails so that's okay so instead it's like making sure that we have these multiple ways like text for example has a 95 to 99% open rate so people will get the message and so obviously you don't want to abuse it but having just a few strategically placed texts can massively increase the show up rate to things and I would bet that if I had to put between all of these things this would be the biggest one that had the increase in show up rates and so because we had ctas inside the email to get them to engage we also long-term keep the health of our email account because it shows that we're not just spamming people instead people are getting our emails they're opening them they're reading them they're taking an action all those increase the overall health of your uh your email server and your deliver ability and so that way you can continue to get your emails delivered rather than getting into the promo tabs is getting a little bit tactical but you get into a second tab with an email which is like oh no one ever checks the spam folder essentially the big reason that we have to do all this stuff is because no one remembers what they signed up for this morning let alone five days ago and so we do this because you have to remind them and don't worry about quote bothering people now do you want to send five a day no that's probably not smart but if you send one reminder a day between a certain time and an event there's nothing wrong with that and so the most important part of the sequence I'll tell you right now is 24 hours before so you're thinking the night before you have the morning of which is am and then one hour prior these are the three most important reminders that you want to send out these are the ones that you definitely want to have as SMS so you might be wondering well how much did we increase the show up break percentage well we went from 18% to 24% which means that this increase was a 33% increase right off the bat and so one of the things I think is one of the most underutilized ways to make a business more money like a lot of people obsess about close rates and we're going to talk about what we did with sales but you can get a 33% increase in show up rates and have the same result as having a 33% increase in close rates but getting 33% more people to show up is usually way easier and you're able to automate a lot of that to a great degree so it's onetime work to have permanent increases in revenue and profit rather than having to consistently drill a team on how to close which you absolutely should do it just takes more work so the next problem that we had was that people who were actually attending so now we have our 24% of people who are showing up is that they weren't actually choosing to book a call and so problem number two no bookings right and so what we did is we solved a few things inside of how we structured the webinar to get way more people to show up and I'll show you just how many so the first thing that we did is we actually looked at what was and so I think people skip this step but like this is the real work is you look at the webinar you look at the attendance rates you look at the drop off points you look at where there spikes in engagement engagement are going to be the interest points where you're like okay this is something maybe we should expand some of this stuff and where you have huge drop offs then you're like o we need to improve this and so for us we saw we were losing a ton of people right at the beginning of the webinar and so we're like okay this is where we're going to put most of our attention which by the way if you're doing anything content sales webinars whatever the first five minutes and even the first 60 seconds is where you should be obsessing even in a different company we have in our portfolio which does a tremendous amount greater volume than this particular company we rescripted the first five minutes of uh presentation and got a 20% increase in close rates Ju Just redoing 5 minutes and it was on a three-hour presentation so based on the research we did four things the first thing we did is we scripted a faster intro basically getting to the point much faster and being clearer about why they are here and what they're going to get from it and so if you're like well what would that actually look like well it actually follows the exact same format that we use for our content which is proof promise plan so proof is is hey I helped someone just like you and you want them to identify with the proof that you were showing so they can approximate oh this is just like me the promise is clearly defining exactly what they're going to get both from the webinar and potentially after the webinar and then the plan is to set expectations for how the next 60 90 however many minutes your presentation is so they know where they're going and the key Point here with all the faster in stuff is you just want to get to the meet when I look at a beginner sales call or beginner sales presentation or vssl video sales letter often times people spend a minute 2 minutes just like Meandering like trying to figure out what they're saying and they don't know that they're losing like 40% of Their audience in the first two minutes before they figure out what they're going to start saying so get to the point number two is we mention live that this is live so this was a live webinar they were doing and the thing is is that we weren't actually showing so we're incurring the cost of being live but we want to say the date you want to say the time you want to say the weather you want to say any current events right these are all things that give indications that this is happening right now and so for whatever reason and I don't know why this is but when you do live stuff it works better no idea why I just know that it works and so we want to lean into the fact that it's actually happening and so mind you if you do an automated webinar or you do a video SI letter that's recorded there's nothing wrong with that obviously it gives you scale because you can't do a webinar every hour of every day but in general if you are struggling to make something automated convert better I would recommend going live for a while and doing it more frequently live so you get the reping get it tighter and get the benefit of just the magic of liveness so the next thing we did is we had a takeaway all right so you can always you know it's like uh the only guy the girl wants at the bar is the guy who's not chasing them whatever right and so there's two main things that we changed tactically to make this a little bit more of a takeaway so number one is that we were very clear about who our qualifications were so we said listen we only sell people who are this this or this if you are below this or above this or adjacent to this this is not for you and so by clearly stating those things we got to ward off the wrong people and magnetize the right people to be like oh this is actually just for me the next thing we did was we put scarcity in play all right and so this is one of my favorite ways of ethically providing scarcity which is saying we only have this many times to take calls or consults because I only have two guys on my team I only have four guys on my team so we only have this many slots and so typically we will book out of slots within this period of time and so if you say typically then that does excuse you as long as more than half the time that does happen or often times you can say that uh you can preface it in that way not an exact language that it happens often right and then with the scarcity you just say the actual constraint you have and so I see this as one of the most underutilized scarcity strategies in existence if you're an agency and you can only take on five customers because you couldn't take on 100 anyways then say you can only take on five customers if you can only take 20 phone calls then say you can only take 20 and if you know that there's the urgency component which is it's first come first serve then say that and so by doing the qualification and then adding the scarcity and a little bit of urgency around its first Comfort serve and we we can only service so many that though that sounds simple people don't do it and yes it does work so the fourth thing is we uh I would say this is scarcity on steroids you're like wait I thought you just did scarcity well we just put more scarcity in so we did a couple of things around this but we added proof all right so one is this is theoretical but as soon as people begin to take action we want to show proof that they've done it so the first thing that we did is we said hey as soon as you do book let me know in the chat and so let me know in the chat then shows this proof that's happening in the chat that people are booking all right so that was number one the next thing we did is that by doing this it creates an open loop and so it's like if you were on a sales call say hey I'll wait here and then I'll make sure I can see it on my side then what we did is we did call outs so it says hey I see that Rosie booked hey I see that John booked hey I see that Susan booked right so we can say in real time and it creates this this frenzy around booking and the last thing that we did is that you actually want to call out the soldout times now this is a little bit of language use here but we say the word sold out because it again it creates more buying Behavior and pre-framed the sale and so You' say hey Wednesday is sold out Thursday is sold out Friday is sold out and so as the times are booking out we want to show that even though we said we have a 100 slots we basically chunk it down again and say oh this day is sold the morning is sold out like if you're like getting worried about like you're not even sell just say hey the morning on Wednesday is sold out up the afternoon on Wednesday sold out maybe you only have three slots whatever but you can still basically approximate some sort of mini urgency mini scarcity by just saying what has been taken and it's completely compliant because you're just stating the facts and telling the truth and by the way if you're a business owner and you are doing a million bucks a year and you are looking to scale and either you're not scaling as fast as you want or you just feel like you're stuck I get it either way um and these tactics are helping you out if you want specific help on your specific business we open up dates at our headquarters sporadically to invite people out and so if you want to see if we have availability and you want to see if you qualify you can go to acquisition. comom my team will get on the phone worst case we'll try and set you up with something that could help you in the meantime and best case we see out here in Vegas and I would love to meet you and help you grow so those four tactics that I just outlined for you gave us a 33% increase in our booking rate from the webinar so we got a 33% lift in people who are showing up and of the now greater amount of people we got another 33% lift uh in increased number of people who then booked calls and so our total book costs went from 58 to survey says 102 so nearly a double this was 77% increase in total book calls from the same ADP and if we had only done that that could have just absolutely demolished it for the business we could have done nothing else and we could have rode enough in the sunset but we wanted to make more and so let's talk about sales now so for the sales process all we're really looking at here is Clos rate now technically you could have a drop off between the uh booking webinar and the show up on the sales call that was not a constraint for this business it had super high show up rates I didn't even lift it here because it wasn't worth doing and it didn't change because we didn't really focus there because it wasn't the main thing but we did have a low close rate once people are actually showing up to the sales call and so we focused there too and so the Clos rate before this was 14% so to be really clear this is bad you don't want a 14% close rate that's tough especially after a webinar or some sort of long selling event so we were just missing the ball here and so we took some steps to fix it and we chose to fix it in four ways and so I'm going to start at the front and move backwards so number one the thing that we had was bad framing all right so what a lot of people don't know is just like in the beginning of a video proof promise plan right what you say at the very beginning has a massive uh impact on what people end up doing at the end and so most people do look at the end rather than looking at the beginning and how they got introduced to the sale to begin with and so in the beginning a lot of the team that they had was kind of wasting time trying to like build report like how's your week going great I know we've got limited time here blah blah blah blah blah like no we wanted to fix the theum and get right to the point so let me tell you what the bad intro was before this so it was like hey how's it going my name's so and so how's your week going oh cool great uh I know we have limited time here so ready to jump in you know do you have a pen and paper to take notes with right now that was the old way of doing it and I think that's a fairly common way of doing it but I tend to think that there's a better way to do it and so that's what I'm going to share with you and so what we started with was hey my name's John I'm here from this company and I have a background in ABC which is specific to whatever problem that you want to solve I work closely with so and so edified person that you saw in the webinar and I would love to know what resonated most with you now they're going to then answer because now now we're we're we're reminding them the value that they got on the webinar and kind of getting them back in that state where they took action and we say great so the real purpose of this call is to see if you qualify for our guarantee not everyone does and it's really based on these three factors so if it's B2B you'd be like business size industry and you're being the owner now fundamentally you're going to be going through b which is budget Authority need timing and you want to use those as the qualifications for the guarantee now if you have guarantees obviously this is sexy now instead of a guarantee you could also say hey we want to make sure that you qualify for the bonus or hey I want to make sure that you qualify for starting this time it doesn't really matter what it is but the thing is you're immediately taking it away and saying hey I'm not here to sell I'm here to First make sure that I can even give you something and automatically they're leaning in and they're like o I want something that I'm not immediately having so you're in the driver's seat they're the ones who are on the other side hoping to earn your favor and so then after that you can clarify what it is it's like and to be clear the bonus is X Y andz or hey to be clear you know our guarantee uh we have to be strict it's kind of like college admissions whatever uh and if you don't qualify this is what we're going to set you up with and help you out but if you do do then we'll start buying back some time and make you some more money or and we'll start x y and Zing benefit that we originally promised on the webinar and so the big thing and this is like it's it's everywhere through the entire process from marketing to sales to customer uh success all all the way through is that you want to have congruence all right is you want to have you want to basically have the customer feel like you have this Baton Pass between every single step in the business and so from the ad to what they see as the headline for the webinar once they opt in the first few lines of the webinar should match with the headline that they opted in for once they get on the call it should match what you talked about on the webinar once they get sold the onboarding and success person should be matching what they said on the sales call and this sounds so simple and yet no one does it and literally if you have complete alignment all the way through your process you will make so much more money and this sounds simple and it is simple to understand but hard to do because you have to coordinate multiple parties along the same line but this is what creates streamlined lubricated sales we're talking Diddy Lube so the second part of the sale is where you get in Discovery so in the beginning it's like what what's the frame you're setting what's the agenda we had a much more takeaway version that was still congruent with what was promised on the webinar the next thing is Discovery and so a lot of people waste time in Discovery and this is where they get caught they get caught in traps and I I made a whole video about this you can probably find it on my channel um but they go into traps and so traps are basically where you get too far in the weeds you get too into the details and both you and the prospect forget why why you're there to begin with and so you want to stay chunked up at the highest level humanly possible because when you stay chunked up you can focus on the few things that matter that are going to move the needle that are ultimately going to be tied to the biggest Roi around whatever it is that you sell stop getting cute and sales calls and so a lot of sales people will start doing this as they get a little bit more experience and this is a mistake and so this is why sometimes you have somebody come into your sales team they they you know they quickly ramp up they do well and all of a sudden their sales number starts slipping it's because they get cute they get fancy they start to start saying words that they've heard around and trying to play business consultant or start to play expert but they're not the expert because they're not the ones doing the delivery and so you want to always get out of these very detail oriented questions because as soon as they ask those questions then they're the ones in control of the conversation and not you because the way you answer could to turn them off and say oh actually I didn't want that but now you're the one answering their questions they're in control so during Discovery you ask the questions they give the answers and you stay high level to make sure that you're staying on the line to get to the end once you've gone through Discovery and you've hit on the pain you've clearly defined a reason they should be motivated to take action then we go into the pitch all right now I am a big advocate of a three-pillar framework and I talk about this in the closure process and let me tell you some advanced stuff on this so the more do-it-yourself done with you the product is the more you want it to be simple you want it to be 1 12 3 ABC whatever the more implementation you have the more done for for you it is the more you want to show here's 11 steps 27 steps that we follow because what you want someone to see is oh my God this is so much work and then you say right so they believe that it works but they don't want to do the work and so you're like yeah oh I believe that if I do 38 steps to improve my YouTube videos they'll improve but can you just do it for me and that's where you want them to go and but if you're selling a solution that they're supposed to do a certain percentage of the work or a greater percentage of the work then you want it to be as simple as humanly possible and if you're curious like why is Do-it yourself and done with you more or less same is that I actually see done with you as basically a d do-it-yourself sale plus accountability help troubleshooting getting you unstuck so it's really just that theoretically if you just follow the steps you could do it yourself but just to make sure that you're successful will add this extra help in rather than oh we're going to do it all for you which is a true done for you offer and so instead of the three-pillar pitch what this company was doing was they had a feature pitch or a feature stack so they were making it seem really complicated and having way too many steps and overwhelming the prect but then after the pro prospect's overwhelmed and Confused it was like great you got that so you're going to do it and then you're like uh right and so they're like no thank you now if you're like hey all of that I'll do it different pitch three-pillar pitch if you're not sure stick with that usually crushes and if you're like wait I have six steps in my process you just Chunk Up it means like you just gather two of them together and just make it a larger bucket and one tiny tweak that we added before the pitch was basically getting them to invite us to sell them and so we said hey given everything that you just said and you're doing X and revenue you mean y qualifications uh and the fact that your challenge is this I think that we'll be able to help you out and that you'd be a great fit and our experience is in solving this exact problem for your Ty type of person and if you want I can uh walk you through that but where do you want to go from here and so then they have to say no please walk me through that and then basically they're giving you permission to launch into the three pillar pitch now this last step step four was actually execution and so there's a lot of things that we did here and so uh this is not me selling you a done with you solution this is me actually just trying to help you out um so we did many things to improve execution and so we actually had a conversation with the founder um and they said you know uh I watched some of these Discovery recordings and they look pretty bad and we said yeah well when was the last time you roleplayed Discovery with your team and they were like uh I don't we're like hm interesting and so what we did and this is going to be mind-blowing to you is number one is we role played we actually had the team practiced it all right and uh this isn't with wigs and handcuffs we actually had them roleplay it with one another but maybe that increases Stakes so you can do whatever you want on your sales team um the next thing is that there wasn't very good tracking and so we wanted to track kpis more closely and so sometimes if you have two chunked up kpis if you just have Clos rate for example it doesn't give you more kind like double click ability to look more granularly into how a closer is doing and so we want to see okay what percentage of people are you getting to show what percentage of people um when you're on the phone are you actually making the offer to uh what percentage of people are missing because of what specific obstacle are not and so this gives us a lot more insight into how each individual closer is doing and then from there that allows us to personalize the coaching that we have for each of those individual sales guys now if you're still looking at this and you're like man what else was there well sometimes it's a who thing which is do I believe that you can train anyone to sell yes do I think it's worth it to train everyone to sell no some people just start further back on the line is it's not worth the resources for the business and so we ruthlessly prioritize who gets the best calls who gets the best times and we do that by who closes the most and if you eventually get kind of weeded out you can almost manage someone out of sales if they consistently Show Low returns for us giving them and feeding them opportunities and so what we did is if you were below kpi we cut your calendar in half if you're still below kpi you have basically a week or two to prove yourself or you're out and so the next thing that we did is that uh we routed the best leads to the best closers so best to best and this is one of my my favorite ways to uh to increase sales overall like if your best closes get the best leads you'll sell more stuff if your worst closes get the worst leads you'll lose the least and so this is an optimization for any sales process across any business and then finally and this is a big one we incentivize the paid and fo because I think this particular business if I'm not mistaken uh the closur got paid the same if they closed or didn't but I prefer to close off cash collected all right which means that the closers have the same incentive as you and so let's say you have a $110,000 thing that you sell well if if you have a payment plan let's say that's five payments of 2K then the closer is going to get call it $200 for that because they get just 10% of the $2,000 they close and if they get the paid in full then they get $1,000 for that sale so they get paid five times more and so this incentivizes closers to actually close instead of these kind of like limp wristed closes they're rock hard wrecked closes no flaccid closes in this house uh and that way you know uh that the the prospect actually has been sold on it and is more likely to stick with it in the long term which for real is actually an important thing and often times these types of issues come up like these lacks of execution when a Founder gets a little too far away and so I like to say you want to know where the bodies are buried like you want to know in every Department what is going wrong as a founder and if you get too far away from it then you don't know which means you don't really add value because you have no context and I think a lot of people get too far away from sales or especially Revenue generation too quickly because they like want to scale and they want to give you know hand off responsibility to people underneath of them but if when you hand stuff off stats go down you have abdicated not delegated when you delegate stats stay the same or go up because theoretically if you give someone who has equal skill more time to do it because they have more time than you then stat should improve and so when you give it to somebody who has less skill than you and you didn't prepare them and you didn't give them a checklist then it's more likely that stuff's going to go down and that's where you have to stay there and they stay sty side by side with you until they get it all right and so with all of this stuff and you're like holy cow that actually when you think about it bad framing for you know we had to make it congruent we we we chunked up Discovery to make sure they avoided traps and stayed high level we simplified it to a three-pillar pitch with a little bit of a pre pitch and we did all the these things on execution to make sure that the team actually was reading the script and actually saying the words the right way the result of all of this work was we got to a 35% close rate so that was more than a double whatever that is 2. 4 I think 2.

4x increase in close rate monster all right so we're going to talk about the results of this and at the end I'm going to give you the takeaways that I had for this business that you can use so the result of all that work is we took our CA from $ 5,763 to $2,868 so more than or about cut in half what it cost us to get a customer on top of that we went from a 1. 6 2 which is very bad Raz to a 3. 96 Raz much better and we took our revenue from 5 169,000 to 860k per month so we passed our $10 million run rate and we have sustained that since these improvements have occurred and then profit we got to a 30.