Systems For Business

Hey 👋

Today we’ll talk about how to master marketing and drive more leads into your business. 🙂 

In this edition we’ll take a deeper dive into funnels and ads - this is more of an intermediate strategy - for those who want to go from 6 to 7 figures in yearly revenue.

The perfect place to start is anything beyond $10K/month. If you’re still: relying on referrals, networking, extensive travel or any other form of manual prospecting, outbound or outreach - I’ll teach you how to replace that with an automated system called LeadFLOW.

If you’re still below 6 figures in your business: head back to the last edition of the newsletter and implement those materials - they will help you crack $10K/month. Once you do come back to this edition and keep building.

First let’s outline the problem.

Innovation and marketing are two of the most abstract areas of the business; unfortunately meaning it’s easy to get the wool pulled over your eyes in these areas.

In terms of marketing specifically - there is too much focus on tactics and ‘running ads’ which in reality is a small highly technical part of the business.

Don’t get me wrong, I love tactics, ads and I love technicians but if you let them ‘rule the roost…’ you’ll never make more than an employee.

You’d be surprised how frequently this is occurring ^

I just got off a call with a client who I’ve been helping over the past few months to build a new LeadFLOW funnel. She’s invested €1,200 and has made €6,000 in sales. She’s earning $5 for every one dollar she invests. Not bad.

For now, I want you to imagine something… Let’s imagine you had a machine in the corner of your office where you could put $1 in and $5 comes out…

How often would you play?

How much would that machine be worth?

Here is where 99% of people go wrong with ‘funnels and ads’ - The ‘ads’ are not the machine - they are what drives the machine - the machine is your funnel.

The funnel is what’s valuable. Think of it like this…

Your funnel is like the car you own.

When the car is created, it goes through a period of research and development, you also get to choose the specs - tires, paint, interior - you get to choose the right vehicle that is going to get you from A to B.

Say you eventually want to sell it - sure you can do that. The asset value is held in your funnel - yet unlike a car it doesn’t depreciate. 

In terms of getting from point A to point B - your funnel is the vehicle.

When someone comes to me with a marketing problem - I immediately check their vehicle, and in 99% of cases; What do I find..?

I find the business owner has saddled an old bloody camel, they spend their days whipping the shit out of it, whilst teslas cruise right on by - then, they complain they’re not getting from point A to B in time or in fashion.

Next you have the ads. The ads are like driving the car. Now you could put prime Michael Schumacher in the ‘drivers seat’ of your camel…

What would you expect...?

I think you get the point: I’m hitting this camel angle pretty hard, but I’ve tried many, many times to get this through to business owners in the intention to help but this problem runs so deep that I’ve resorted to make my point both ridiculous and a ridiculous amount of times; I’m just trying to say your ads are and will continue be completely limited by your funnel.

Whilst ‘ad agencies’ will try to convince you they can whip your camel harder and ‘get the most out of it’ - you still have a camel

I’m here to help you build the right vehicle first and then you’ll find it’s much smoother, more efficient and certainly a much more economical ride.

Here is the vehicle I’ve been using for over 5 years now. It’s the same vehicle my clients have used to add $95 million to their businesses over that same period…

I call it LeadFLOW.

LeadFLOW takes strangers and turns them into clients by using a sequential series of tested assets that hit their Key Performance Indicators. (KPI’s)

It involves 4 stages;

ICE COLD - Unaware - Drive Traffic With Ads
COLD - Problem Aware - Get Leads With a Lead Magnet
WARM - Solution Aware - Create Prospects With Content
HOT - Product Aware - Close Sales

Before I dive into the assets and show you how they work - it’s critical to understand what a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is and how they work.

The KPI’s in your funnel are just like a family driving in a car. You can let the kids in the back make the decisions - You’ll quickly find yourself driving over to jimmy’s house, then stopping for ice cream, before stopping again for an undisclosed reason.

Better to let the parents in the front make the decisions.

There is a hierarchy of KPIS: Some are simply wiser and more mature metrics that drive real results.

The two most important numbers are;

1. The Father - What’s the Average Lifetime Value of a Client (ALTV)? If you don’t know you can also step down the hierarchy along the same lines to look at 12 Month Revenue Values or even Average Order Values (AOV) - Essentially, you want to know what will this client bring in - in cash over a time period?

2. The Mother - What’s your Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)? Usually just focusing on money is wise however as you scale you’ll need to account more and more for the time it takes you to produce the client also.

These two KPI’s are the input (CPA) and the output (ALTV) function of marketing. If they’re in harmony you’ll scale.

The relationship between these two numbers gives you a Return on Investment (ROI) or Return on Ad Spend (ROAS.)

For example if your ALTV is $10K and your Cost per Acquisition is $500 you have a 20x ROAS.

10x ROAS is amazing by the way - It’s what I shoot for with clients who build LeadFLOW Funnels. * This is a reason why having a ‘higher ticket offer’ and ‘higher value ALTV’ can make your ads much, much easier to scale.

Outside of the mother and father there are more mature metrics such as; cost per lead, landing page conversion rates, sales closures - All of these statistics are very important and will show you exactly what you need to optimise and improve, they’re like well behaved teenagers.

Then there are the children - comments, likes, shares, followers etc… These are low level data points when it comes to your funnel - look in some cases they can help and they’ll provide some value long term but they should never be the goal of the campaign.

The goal is ROI.

Here is the whole thing mapped out…

CLAIM A FREE LEADFLOW FUNNEL AUDIT

X - not hitting a 10X
X - ads underperforming
X - not generating enough leads
X - not converting the leads you have
X - abysmal, offensive, poor sales closing percentages…

Know your funnel could be performing better?

I have something that will help.

As a FREE gift for being a member of this newsletter we’re offering a LeadFLOW marketing audit to you. All you need to do is fill in the form below… Take 5 minutes to tell me about your business. I’ll check in on your website.

If I’m certain I can help I’ll send you a private screen share video where I break down the exact steps for you to take to optimise your funnel and get it scaling. 🙂 

I won’t hold anything back - I’ll even send over paid trainings if I think it will help, and I’ll do it completely for free. All you need to do is fill in the form.

Here is a breakdown of the assets you’ll want to install to turn civilians into leads - leads into prospects - and prospects into clients.

First understand that the ICE and the COLD stage work together as a unit to produce leads. Just as the WARM and the HOT stage work together as a unit to convert leads.

The ICE Phase is the first touch point in your funnel: During the ICE Phase we’ll use social media ads to drive traffic into your funnel. These are people who have never heard of you before - they are at the very top of your funnel. They know nothing… and I mean nothing about you.

For this reason talking head ads here don’t work too well here. (where you speak directly to the person in an ad)

You’ll also need to capture attention as quickly as you can - ideally with a pattern interrupt in the first 3 seconds leading into a maximum ad length of 30 seconds.

Create ads that focus directly on your free lead magnet instead. Like this;

This is the ICE Ad from one of my clients - probably the best example I’ve ever seen of an ICE Cold Lead Magnet Ad - she’s getting subscribers for $1 on Instagram right now which is also the cheapest lead cost I’ve seen in the B2B market.

In the beginning choose one platform and focus on it… If more of your dream clients are on Linkedin go there, if they’re on Facebook set up there, if they’re on Instagram - go there. 

Once you’ve mastered it and you’re driving the right level of traffic you can bring in others, if you need to.

Make sure to create clear ‘call to actions’ into your landing pages…

The ICE and the COLD phase of your LeadFLOW work together as a unit. The ICE is the traffic and the COLD is the landing page & ‘FREE Lead Magnet’ that they download.

They combine together to grow your list!

During the COLD phase we use a Squeeze Page to convert visitors to subscribers by offering them a FREE Lead Magnet. The goal is to convert at least 50% of your page views into subscribers.

You’d probably be surprised to see how simple these pages are.

The offer for this page was a ‘FREE Quick Action Guide’ that could be read in 5 minutes that talked about my LeadFLOW System (the same system I’m talking about now - meta I know.)

I just sent her a recommendation to split test the page and change the copy from 15 minute read to 7 minute read. In alignment with the principles, my guess is that will jump up the conversion rate by another 15% or so.

Your Cold Landing Page (Squeeze Page) is designed with a small handful of elements - It doesn’t have a menu that you can click around - You create a binary situation - do they want the offer or not.

The biggest mistake people make with their LeadFLOW funnels in general - they pitch the wrong offer with the wrong time obligation to the wrong person (mindset.)

They make HOT and WARM offers to people who are ICE and COLD towards them. It’s a simple problem yet more than 95% of small business owners are making it.

When someone is COLD towards you they only have a maximum of 5-10 minutes to give to you. Create an asset that can be consumed in 10 minutes or less and you’ll drive more leads into your business for a better price.

From there you can use your thank you page to quickly ascend to the the next offer. Don’t put a call booking offer out in your ads for example.

Stop trying to do too much with your Lead Magnets - no ones cares about your headshot - in fact at this level it may even reduce your conversation rates.

The outcome of THE ICE + THE COLD level is you can now have a steadily growing audience - whether it’s 1,000 or 10,000 people per month you can grow your audience quickly.

Your list is exponentially more valuable than your social media followers.

When it comes to internet business, owning a list is one of the only things you take with you when you leave a platform. If you don’t like facebook and you want to leave, or your instagram, your twitter or any other social media… You don’t take your audience with you.

It’s also getting easier and easier to get cancelled off said platforms. The way to protect yourself from this is to focus on building your list.

30 days ago I decided to leave my CRM because I thought the price was far too high and the service was average - so I took my list here to Beehiiv and have achieved exponentially better results for less than 20% of the cost.

Once you’ve generated your COLD Leads - we can move to the hardest and most nuanced stage of your LeadFLOW… The WARM stage.

The Warm stage is all about Lead Conversion - the person has raised a hand and give some interest - in exchange for their email you gave them a ‘lead magnet.’

Now it’s onto content to deepen the relationship. For most this is what’s standing in the way of getting more clients.

I once heard a study referenced that said the optimal time for someone to commit to doing business with you was after consuming 7 hours of content. This could be advertising materials, regular content, emails, or even conversations.

It’s something like that. Some need less, some need more - however a good rule of thumb is 7 hours - and then setting a goal to make sure new leads into your system are exposed to that.

If your leads consume on average 30 minutes of content from you - within 98 days they will have consumed 7 hours on average.

Interestingly, in a LeadFLOW funnel I tested extensively over a long period - that generated over 25K leads and did over a million dollars in sales - the average length of time from Lead to Sale was 90 days.

There are two sides to the WARM Phase in your business: Something I call the long and the short sword.

The Philosophy of the Two Swords: How to Build a Long Term Aggregate of Trust Whilst Constantly Making Offers and Driving Cash Flow.

About 6 years ago I was experiencing feast of famine cycles in my business. One month I’d have great cash flow (feast) and the next month I would drop by 50% of more and be experiencing a severe famine.

Like most of my problems I feel drawn to books and I started reading a lot around this time. I’d heard of an ‘obscure book’ written in 1645 by a Samurai Warrior called Miyamoto Musashi.

The book was called, ‘The Book of 5 Rings.’

I heard it held business insights… So, I was intrigued. It’s a pretty small book, only 80 pages or so, so I sat down one afternoon and read it cover to cover…

I was shocked to learn that Musashi had fought in over 50 one on one battles to the death with other samurai warriors - he won them all - clearly a pretty intense guy.

I was even more surprised to learn that he considered himself more of a philosopher than a warrior. I could talk about this for hours… But there was one specific thing that stuck out to me in the book. Musashi was unique because he fought with two swords on the belt. A long sword and a short sword.

Now - as I was searching for business insights - for some reason this connected with my problem I had a powerful breakthrough.

I realised that I was going through a cyclical journey of creating content that would warm up my leads and build a lot of trust over the long term - but I wan’t driving cash flow in the short term.

Then I would go through moments where I would convert that trust into clients by making offers to the list… This was great for cash flow in the short term but it held back the long term trust in the long term.

I felt like my long term goals and my short term objectives were in conflict all the time.

I asked myself how I could do both at the same time - how I could build a long term aggregate of trust with my audience whilst also providing simple exit ramps for the hottest leads to do business with me.

My whole philosophy of my Warm Content is based on this principle and it works incredibly well.

The Philosophy of the Two Swords.

1. The Long Sword

The long sword strategy in your business is built for your leads to consistently consume 30 minutes of your content every week. The best channels I’ve discovered for this are; Podcasts, Video Blogs and Newsletters.

If you have over 1,000 people in your audience choose one and get to work today on producing at least 30 minutes of consumable content per week via these channels.

Preferably more.

The long sword is about long form content where you get to share more about your character, your philosophies, your beliefs, your personality and your results.

Who are your favourite personalities you haven’t met? I’ll bet you’ve consumed over 7 hours worth of their materials. It seems trivial to make a statement like this - painfully obvious even - yet how many of us have the long sword in place?

Use your email list as the free distribution channel - you can also chop up the content and use it on social media also if you like.

2. The Short Sword

My short sword strategies are all about getting your hottest leads to raise a hand, take a step towards you and start some kind of dialogue.

Over the past 6 years I’ve been testing various different approaches to do this and I currently have 6 strategies that are all ready to deploy with a simple click of a button.

The cool thing… They don’t really change month on month - you just turn them on and off.

The Horse For Sale Ad for example, is a retargeting ad that gets turned on once in every while that targets your subscribers and the people who engage with your content and drives them into a dialogue.

99% don’t have it: It would take me 30 minutes to install it into your business.

Every time I turn it on - It generates clients… So why not leave it on all the time? Because the same offer all the time becomes stale and stops converting.

Hence, I cycle through the offers and have a different one prepared every week.

The Casestudy Campaign is one that I’ve used once per month for 6 years now. It’s simply a piece of copy I learnt from a mentor - The first time I used it it created over $10K in cash flow within 48 hours - I wondered what would happen if I used it again - so I just kept using it and it kept performing… The total is now over 600K generated from that one email used repeatedly.

Pretty wild what can happen when you just stay consistent.

That’s one of the cool things with marketing - once you find something that works there a strong likely hood aspects of it or the whole thing will continue to work.

A lot of business owners spend a lot of time trying to re-invent the wheel when the most powerful question may be; What was the most successful marketing asset I’ve ever created? Just use it again (edited if need be.)

I should mention here also - you can build such a powerful short sword that - this is all you need to drive serious scale and profitability in your business. This could be a webinar, a short VSL (video sales letter) or some other conversion asset.

You don’t need to do both the long and the short sword - however I’ve found you build the most significant asset over the long term when you wield both.

The goal of your WARM asset is to create conversations with qualified prospects. You test and find out how to create 2 qualified conversations for every 100 leads that come in and you’ll probably have an incredibly scalable and profitable LeadFLOW.

This is 3rd grade math we’re working with here.

I mentioned this in the past newsletter - I know I haven’t spoken about about every single piece of my sales systems just yet. (those systems are coming) For now just wing it, show up with high energy and make irresistible offers.

If your sales system closes more than 50% of appointments it’s working and for every sale you just need two dialogues booked.

As a general principle don’t try and make sales through your website - make them through a dialogue. Unless you’re a god tier marketer - remember sales is exponentially easier than marketing - talk to people.

So there you have it… A first insight into the LeadFLOW funnel and how the pieces connect together to produce a 10x ROI.

In my opinion this is one of the most valuable things you can have in the business because it literally works while you sleep. Whether you have 1,000 or 100,000 people inside the funnel the work is steady.

Talk soon 👋

Ben Slater
Creator of These Systems

PS… Whenever you’re ready here are one way I can help with your funnel.

CLAIM A FREE LEADFLOW FUNNEL AUDIT

X - not hitting a 10X
X - ads underperforming
X - not generating enough leads
X - not converting the leads you have
X - abysmal, offensive, poor sales closing percentages…

Know your funnel could be performing better?

I have something that will help.

As a FREE gift for being a member of this newsletter we’re offering a LeadFLOW marketing audit to you. All you need to do is fill in the form below… Take 5 minutes to tell me about your business. I’ll check in on your website.

If I’m certain I can help I’ll send you a private screen share video where I break down the exact steps for you to take to optimise your funnel and get it scaling. 🙂 

I won’t hold anything back - I’ll even send over paid trainings if I think it will help, and I’ll do it completely for free. All you need to do is fill in the form.