Today on the More Cheese Less Whiskers podcast we're going to be talking with Matty & Stacey Turner from Australia, via Amsterdam, while I'm in Toronto. It's quite an international connection!
The Turners are nutritionists who work with people, helping them build custom nutrition plans, and we talked a lot about the whole of their business, about the different ways they end up helping people, the ways they end up finding people to help.
We really had a great discussion about both the front end of finding new people using the Profit Activator 2 mindset to get people to raise their hands, then we ended by talking about referrals and how to orchestrate referrals from the people that already know them, like them, trust them, and are getting great results with them.
There's a lot here for you, whether you're looking to attract more people, or help the people you work with, make the connection to you at the right time.
Show Links:
ProfitActivatorScore.com
90MinuteBooks.com
BreakthroughDNA.com
EmailMastery.com
More about Matty & Stacey: TheChiefLife.com
Want to be a guest on the show? Simply follow the 'Be a Guest' link on the left & I'll be in touch.
Download a free copy of the Breakthrough DNA book all about the 8 Profit Activators we talk about here on More Cheese, Less Whiskers...
Transcript - More Cheese Less Whiskers 105
Matty: Hello, how are you?
Dean: I am so good. How are you?
Matty: I'm very well. I just want to let you know that my wife is here with us, too, because we're business partners, so you also have Stacey Turner on the line.
Stacey: Hi Dean.
Dean: Stacey, hi, nice to meet you.
Stacey: You, too.
Dean: Now, this is either very late at night for you guys ... Are you in Australia?
Matty: We're traveling, so we're actually…
Stacey: We're currently in Amsterdam.
Dean: Oh, you're in Amsterdam. That's so funny. I'm going to be there in a couple of weeks, yeah.
Stacey: We just miss each other.
Matty: Yeah, we do.
Dean: That's exactly right. I understand we're going to then meet up again in Australia, in Sydney. That'll be exciting
Matty: That's right, yeah. I'm very excited for that, yeah.
Dean: Awesome. Well, tell me about what's going on with Matty and Stacey. What are you guys up to?
Matty: Do you mean for the business, or just what we're doing at the moment?
Dean: Yeah.
Matty: Cool. We run a company called The Chief Life.
Stacey: We're an online nutrition coaching company.
Matty: Exactly. We help people with nutrition through either means of a meal plan, so a personalized meal plan for the individual. We also offer coaching. It's like a personal trainer, but a nutrition coach instead. You have a weekly check-in call, weekly email just to keep you on track.
Dean: How long have you been doing that now?
Stacey: We're into our fourth year now. We started April 2015 and we are, yeah, just over three years.
Matty: Something we also do is we go out to gyms and we'll do a gym nutrition challenge where they'll get papers and 30 of their members on board. We'll deliver a workshop for them as well as a personalized meal plan for each person that is on the program. That's our business to business, whereas the business to consumer is really just an individual one, they come to us. At the moment we're touring Europe because we have a podcast and we're just getting some interviews down. We're also just connecting while we're over here, seeing plenty of gyms. Yeah, that's pretty much it, which is cool.
Dean: Seeing what's going on there. Is the nutrition coaching that you're doing, you're helping people create a meal plan, but you're not providing any of the food or doing any of the preparation. It's not a meal service or anything like that, per se, right?
Stacey: Correct, correct, yeah. We focus more on education. It's like a "teach a man to fish" situation. We personalize the plan by figuring out what they need in terms of their anthropometric ... what their measurements of their body, what their goals are, how much they're training. Then we also cater to food dislikes, food intolerances, allergies, that sort of thing, so we can really cater it to the individual's needs. Then we create a one-week or I guess a seven-day template so that they have ideas that they can use to follow for a four to eight-week period. Then we encourage them to come back and get a new plan so that we can give them some new ideas and tweak the plan if needed.
Dean: I got you. What was that first word you used, that anthro...? I've never heard that one. An anthro-something.
Stacey: Yeah, anthropometrics or anthropometry is the science of measurement of a human.
Matty: You'll remember that, though, because you're a man of wisdom, right? You keep everything on-
Dean: You know what's funny, Matty, is I consider myself a wordsmith and I consider that there's not many words that I haven't heard, but anthropometry just rolls off the tongue.
Stacey: Yeah, Dean Jackson.
Dean: I'm an anthropometrist, that's fantastic. I love it. You measure people. What do somebody's measurements have to do with their nutrition?
Stacey: It's about knowing how much to feed the person based off of where their basal metabolic rate is, so where they are right now in time, but also dependent on their goal. Say for example you had two people who have the same basal metabolic rate because it's based off of their lean body mass, but one of them has a waist circumference, say it was waist circumference might be over 94 centimeters. Therefore, we would encourage them to go for a fat loss or a leaning up goal, effective whereas if somebody has a waist circumference of under 94 centimeters, then maybe they're looking at maybe a performance plan.
They want to just kick off in the gym, or maybe they're actually looking to gain some muscle mass and get stronger. Then we need to figure out their needs based off of their measurements so somebody who's got the same lean body mass might not need exactly the same calorie intake depending on their other measurements like waist circumference, hip circumference. I mean, body mass index is one of those things we don't really use too much because really strong people can be considered obese on that metric.
Matty: The other thing is that people come to us because they might want to have a six-pack, but we're more so focused on the health side of things. We want to get you as healthy as possible and some people might say, "Hey, I want to gain muscle right now," but their waist measurement might be over that 94 centimeters for a guy so it's like, "Hey, for you to actually gain muscle, you need to lose body fat first before we can start to increase your lean muscle mass."
Stacey: We often say to people, "It's less about what you look like and more about how you feel. Then as a by-product you get to look frigging hot, too."
Dean: Ah, okay. What are the different kinds of people that you end up working with? Who are your target audience? Is it people who want weight loss as the main thing? Is it people who are really looking for high performance nutrition? What do you tend to attract?
Matty: For us, we actually work with CrossFitters. Are you familiar with CrossFit?
Dean: Very.
Matty: They're excellent. A lot of people are already very into their fitness and willing to, I guess put in the effort to their nutrition because they're focused on performance. Now within saying that, we actually get most people coming to us because they want to lean up or improve their energy. It's a rare state, not a rare state, but we don't get as many people wanting to gain muscle.
Stacey: If they do come saying that they want to gain size, it's often because they've struggled to put on mass over the years. Then, when you question them and say, "Do you actually want to get bigger and look bigger, or do you just want to get stronger in the gym, because those are two different things?" Then they realize they actually want intrinsic strength that allows them to lift more weight. They don't actually care about what they look like.
Dean: I got you, okay.
Stacey: It's much more of, I guess, a holistic approach.
Matty: Yeah, exactly. I guess to answer your question, more so within the fat loss, improve the energy side of things, but we can dial it right down to the very specific type of person if you want as well.
Stacey: I guess of late we've been helping a lot of people with more of a genetic mutation side of things like hormonal imbalances. I studied nutrition at university so my passion was helping people that have autoimmune diseases and genetic disorders.
Dean: Okay, perfect. When you look at this then, it sounds like the people that you are attracting and working with are people who are already on a health and fitness path, not coming to you from a sedentary lifestyle or being more on the obese side than on really trying to fine tune and lean up.
Matty: Yeah, I mean, we have worked with others before, but that seems to be our main clientele. They're coming to us probably because we're known within the CrossFit community within Australia already, so that definitely was just our place where we started selling to.
Stacey: Yeah, I guess the other thing is we do get to work with people who are on the, I guess larger end of the scale, because CrossFit is now much more mainstream, so we're getting lots of people from all different walks of life who have sat at a desk, who are full-time Moms and have unfortunately neglected their health because they've been putting their kids first, and they've ended up a little bit larger than they wanted to be or intended to be.
They've come to the gym first, and then they tend to plateau or they see some of their friends doing different things and then they get on board with the nutrition side after. Even though it can probably, preferably be the other way around, do the nutrition then the fitness, most people find fitness is that easy access. We've left to be able to work with all shapes and sizes, all walks of life.
Dean: How long do you typically work with somebody? How long is your engagement with them?
Matty: This does vary depending on the person. I mean, the minimal engagement we'll have with someone is if they do not choose to get support from us, so they'll literally come in, they'll be a first-time buyer, they'll have the questionnaire come through and our basic email to start with. Then from there that is the contact, so that would be the space of probably seven days, whereas the longest we've had people is from the start over four and a half years.
Stacey: Yeah, it was our first ever member. He's still with us.
Dean: Wow, how much do you charge for what you do, or what's the economic relationship of that?
Matty: Yeah, I guess there's a few layers. To talk about the meal plan itself, it's a one-off payment of $149. That's Australian dollars. Then for support we offer is a $5 a week fee.
Stacey: It's optional.
Matty: It's optional for them. Now, going on to nutrition coaching, there's two levels, which is an email support only
Stacey: Well, we're about to change that.
Matty: We're about to drop that, yeah, it was $30 a week only, so that was a minimum of 13 weeks. Then we had the nutrition coaching calls, which is $50 a week. What we're going to do is drop the email only and have it as an either/or but for the $50 a week.
Stacey: Yeah, so if somebody prefers not to have phone calls, they can stick to emails, but we just have the one flavor of $50. There are not multiple confusing options.
Dean: Right, because that makes sense, right? Often when you have lots of different options, things get confusing. When you're looking at that thing that somebody's going to pay $50 a week for just an ongoing program, how long would you think people will stay with a program like that? Would they do a 13-week program?
Matty: Yeah, at least 13 weeks. We do have people stay on top of that, further than that, but that's just the video program for education that we've created for them is over 13 weeks, so they get that weekly check-in call. We've got people who've stayed with us since we started that, probably a year and a half ago.
Stacey: Yeah, and we found that three months is the minimum period that is required to help people solidify change. Then they can spread their wings and go off and do it on their own without us after that.
Dean: That's what I was wondering. You can rotate the quarter kind of thing, because you've learned the fine-tuning, you learned what you like and you learned what actually works. I mean, good for you. It seems like that would be somebody who is pretty interested in their nutrition to stick with something like that, education I mean, that it's not preparation and it's not any of the food, just the education about the food selection. What would be the outcome that they would experience in that 90 days, because I always ask people, "If somebody would just get out of your way and let you help them for 90 days, what's the outcome? What's the result that they're experiencing or that you could get for them?"
Stacey: Absolutely, so depending on whether they're looking to lean up or gain muscle, we tend to see both happen anyway, but if somebody's looking to lean up a fair bit, then they'll drop a fair bit of mass from following the plan or the program along with the education. We also see sleep improvement, we see skin improve, we see energy improve, we see mood improve. People who are going through anxiety and depression, which is a normal human emotion, but we often see that it can become quite chronic, especially in today's world with everything that's going on around people. We see yeah, that energy uplift, that mood uplift.
Matty: I think the confidence in the person uplifts as well, but I mean, within that period of time, the 13 weeks, we can tend to see people drop five kilos in four weeks, depending on the person.
Dean: I'm embarrassed to say that even as an American, I don't know how many pounds five kilos is. What's that?
Matty: Five kilos is about, I think it's close on 11 pounds.
Stacey: Yeah, 2.2.
Dean: About two pounds per kilo, all right.
Matty: Yeah, the whole goal of the nutrition coaching, that 13 weeks, is to take them through a meal plan that helps them achieve their goals as well as giving them the education to be able to move forward without us if they wanted to.
Stacey: With a more flexible approach.
Dean: Mm-hmm (affirmative), okay. When I look at this, part of the thing that I'm thinking ... I was listening to you talking about the different outcomes, so I'm always looking for how to articulate something, because somebody's who's looking for energy, that's one thing. Sleep is another thing that is a really good outcome for people and that they would be happy to have, even if it was just ... I'm thinking about the different approaches here of selecting some different target audiences, or messaging to attract those people, right? How do you get clients now? How does that work?
Matty: Our biggest platform is through social media or Facebook and Instagram. They're definitely our biggest as well as our word of mouth.
Stacey: We create recipe videos that we film in our own kitchen to show that it can be done in a real person's place.
Matty: Yeah, delivering a heap of content. We also run a podcast and we also, when we go to a gym, it's almost like you infiltrate a gym, which is weird to say, but you were doing a gym workshop with maybe 30 people and the gym might have 100 people.
Stacey: Six weeks later, when they all finish they feel amazing.
Matty: We start to see this flood of people come through.
Dean: Because everybody's talking about, "What are you doing? You look great," or whatever, yeah. I like that.
Matty: Yes, our biggest platform isn't for us advertising, is Instagram and Facebook.
Stacey: We have used our mailing list, I mean, we've got some stuff from you at the time. We've been following you and sent email with you a couple of times this year, and it's been very useful, so thank you.
Dean: That's so great. I like that, yeah, and that's the thing, right, is that it sounds like a lot of the things you're doing on social media are more organic. Are you doing any paid ads on those places?
Matty: Yeah.
Dean: You are.
Stacey: Every month, yeah.
Matty: Every month we advertise, pretty much a thing a week we'll advertise, usually about four videos a month we'll put out now, two cooking and two information or one. Each week we'll pretty much advertise something a little different.
Dean: What kind of results are you getting from that? Are you doing lead generation where somebody will opt in for something?
Matty: Well, we have done in the past and it was also very good for us. I guess we've got a hobby of different tricks up our sleeve that we've learned from you, but at the moment all of that is literally just pointing straight back to the website, like "Hey, this is how you can get your own personalized meal plan."
Stacey: We've got our website redone at the beginning of the year, so that's why we thought, well, we'll point everyone to the website because that's where the information is, but then we still have messages coming through Facebook and just emails via the contact form and people who don't even look at the website, which I get. They're busy, they're in a hurry, so they just send us, "Hey, what do you do? Get back to me." We then have an email template we send out with what we do and how much it'll cost.
Dean: Mm-hmm, that's great. How do they start the engagement with you? What's the first step towards working together?
Stacey: If they've come from word of mouth, they'll usually do what their friend has done. If the friend has done just a meal plan, then the new person will do just a meal plan, where if the friend's done nutrition coaching, then the new person will probably do nutrition coaching. That's how it's been working. If it's a new person completely, then I'll question them. I have been known to make a few phone calls to figure out exactly what they need and then point them in the right direction, based off of, "Hey, I only want to send one payment," versus, "Hey, I've got money to commit to a weekly subscription."
Matty: If they go straight to our website, it pretty much sends them in one of three directions. It's a straight question like "I want to ..." and it says, "Get the foundations right, which is your straight meal planning, get it underway." If they want to receive ongoing support, which is going to be one of the nutrition coaching calls or eat with more variety, which is also going to help with that nutrition.
Stacey: There's a seasonal menu that we've created, that comes out every three months, so people call us with the ... That is our email subscription support, but then they'll get a new meal plan if they stay on for another three months. That's their incentive to go again, and they'll get another meal plan generated for the foods that are seasonal to that three-month period.
Dean: Got you, okay, I'm curious now about this $149 for the one-time meal plan. That includes a consultation with them, or how does that work out?
Matty: It's a straight, online email questionnaire and so they get to fill in all of their details there and obviously we ask for as many details as possible. Now, once we get the questionnaire back we say, "Within the next seven days you'll receive your personalized meal plan." That either goes out to one of us or usually one of our team will create that for us, and we'll send it out. When it gets sent out, it's also got a few other things that come along with the package, so it's not just a meal plan. There's a few other things that come with that, that I guess help educate them straight away, so it's not just, "Here's a meal plan. Now go and get great results." We've built it up over time to help them.
Dean: Now, do you lean towards a specific meal plan? Are you Keto or Paleo or how do you navigate that?
Stacey: Yeah, we definitely follow the "Let's eat real food" kind of standpoint, so not in a packet. It's usually good to go. Then I guess in terms of principles, we would say we start people on the Zone Diet. I don't know if you've heard of it before, Dr. Barry Sears.
Dean: I remember that. That was back in the '90s, yeah. Let's see-
Stacey: Yeah, yeah. He created that from a scientific perspective to help decrease heart issues within his own family, but across the board it re-balances hormones. We've seen fantastic results, like women who've struggled to get pregnant for nine years and they've been on our meal plan for six weeks and conception, so there's been some real cool stuff that we've seen even in the last 10 years since I qualified as a dietician that we've seen using this protocol.
We do definitely personalize it. People come to us and say, "Hey, I want to do Keto," and I'll question it and say, "Have you done it before and it's worked for you, and you're just looking for ideas and support, or are you completely new and you're following a fad?" If it's the latter, I'll encourage them to go into Zone first, and see how they go with that. Keto is so, I guess, restrictive-
Matty: It is. It's hard to be able to do that and be able to go out with friends over a weekend and enjoy yourself or-
Stacey: Have a life.
Matty: Yeah, have a life. I mean, people will talk about, "Oh, I drink alcohol." Okay, well, every time you have that drink you're going to go out of ketosis, so yeah, it is a hard thing to maintain
Dean: That's the thing about what I've discovered about ... I know a lot of people who are in this world, a lot of friends that have written all the leading books about all of this stuff, and it's funny how when they're in a room together, it's opposing views on things. I always tell people, "The one thing I've discovered is that nobody's mad at vegetables." Everybody agrees that vegetables are good, right?
Stacey: Definitely, definitely.
Dean: They may have wildly different opinions about fruit or fat, but they're all in agreement on vegetables so you got that going for you.
Stacey: Yeah, and as you probably see, everyone is a unique snowflake, so everybody needs something different anyway. Yeah, we're really big on personalizing it and if something's not working for somebody, we're happy to work with them to find a different way to make it work.
Dean: I love it, mm-hmm (affirmative). Well, I like the idea that you can help people with whatever their objective is. What are you looking for as the thing that you'd love to improve, if we were to say, "What can we focus on here for you today, if you could have an outcome?"
Matty: Well, I think first of all I'd say, if anyone hasn't done your score card yet, they need to go and do that because that was actually very confronting for us.
Stacey: Yeah, it was insightful.
Matty: It was very insightful. I mean, we found that we were pretty good in some parts, but there were some parts where we just really need to make a big change.
Stacey: I think one of the biggest things, because we've grown quite organically since we've started. We've seen that it's just been going and going and going, and now it feels like we've got to this point where we want it to keep growing but we're not sure of the next step to take.
Matty: Yeah, yeah, I mean, the big thing that I think we need help with is around actual marketing, getting marketing results, but also lifetime value of the person. I mean, the thing that really stumped us was "Make an irresistible first offer." We offer them a package but we don't really offer them a special incentive to be on the package. It's like, "Hey, we think our product's amazing."
Stacey: Yeah, we know it works, then just come and do it, do it.
Matty: The other thing was actually figuring out the lifetime cost of a member.
Stacey: Then also referrals. One of the questions that came up was lead generation, can you just get people like a vending machine, coming through. We can't. I'm hoping that they come to us. We're not going out there and actually getting them.
Dean: Yeah, I get it. That's where I was asking about the way that you do the social media stuff and the ads that you're doing because what it sounds like is that you're really strong in Profit Activator-3, which is the education part, where you're doing these videos, where you're showing people, you're demonstrating things, you're educating everybody, but in Profit Activator-2, which is about getting people to raise their hand, getting the new people, turning invisible prospects into visible prospects, that's sounds like where you could use a more magnetic approach kind of thing. Part of that, do you have a book, or do you have any kind of a lead offer that you use to get people to-
Matty: Yeah, we've got a few variations. We've got a consumer guide that we created. We've also got a quiz that we get people to do, so I mean, that's on our front page, where they can go through and they can do the quiz to give them some idea.
Stacey: Matty has created landing pages for these things, but speaking to you now I'm like, "We need to be putting them onto our social platform so that people can see them."
Dean: Well, here's the thing is, that's what I'm saying. I got the impression that the advertising that you're doing on social media, the paid advertising, sounds like what you're doing is paying to send traffic to the existing thing that you're doing, just to get more people to see what you're doing, not specifically outreach to offer something to get people to raise their hands, right?
Stacey: Yeah.
Matty: Mm-hmm, yeah.
Dean: Right, okay. One of the things that, when we look at this, it's like the front half of the before unit, where we're looking on the first two Profit Activators of selecting a specific target audience, and then thinking, "What's the thing that's going to be so compelling that that person would choose to leave their name and their email address for them to get that?" Now they're into your Profit Activator-3 where they're getting all the ongoing education and all the things that you're already doing and doing well, because it sounds like you really embrace social media and you've got a nice rhythm to that.
It's about separating, I call it separating the compelling from the convincing. What I mean by that is that we look at it that the money that we're spending on the advertising, the only measurement that we're using for that right now is how many people did we get to become visible prospects, right? That means that we have their name and their email address as a minimum, so that we can continue to reach out to them or engage them in a dialogue, right? Do you know, would you say that you have a predictable vending machine for that, where you could say, "I want to get people that we can spend this much money and get people to opt in for whatever that fixed cost is," whether it's some dollar amount?
Stacey: I feel like when we do put up a sponsored landing page for the consumer guide or for the quiz that we do get-
Matty: Oh, we definitely do.
Stacey: …an influx of people.
Matty: I couldn't say, "Hey, I'm going to spend this much and get 200 people." I couldn't tell you the exact numbers.
Dean: That's my point, right, because it's all driven by the metrics, right? You've got to know, when I look at it that right now we're I used to run different campaigns, but what I look for is if I'm doing ... We have three ongoing campaigns that we do. One of them is on the real estate side, we have a book called Listing Agent Lifestyle, and that's a lead generation book that I use to get in conversation with real estate agents. I look to get opt-ins for that at about the $3 range. I know that I can go specifically to them, and that every time I spend $3 I can get somebody to leave their name and their email address.
I can get 1,000 new subscribers for $2,500 or $3,500, somewhere in that range. That I know, that 1,000 people over the next 12 months, 24 months, will turn into a multiple of all that, because I'm strongest in Profit Activator-3, with podcasts and weekly emails, and always leading to the next step, right? Every email that I send out has our super signature in it, so it's always driving the engagement with people so that when they're ready, they take the next step. It starts with growing that list in a controlled way. Do you have a sense of how much it might cost you right now for a new subscriber?
Matty: I mean, the hard thing is, the way that we've set it up, more so like you said, we're paying to show people where to go rather than how to get there. I mean, we've got our clicks, pay-per-click is down really low. I think we pay maybe between three to seven cents per click. It's really quite cheap for us.
Dean: On Facebook and Instagram, you mean?
Matty: Yes, yeah. I'm just looking at our lead pages right now and for our consumer guide we've got a 60% opt-in rate for people who have seen it so far.
Dean: Nice, I mean, you may be getting opt-ins for a very low cost, right? I mean, if we were trying to reverse-engineer the cost right now, what would you think just from what you sell?
Stacey: How much do we spend on that? Give me an example of the month.
Matty: Well, maybe say $300 on Facebook advertising in a month. Then each month, I reckon we'd probably say $10 a person, by per person that are paying each month.
Stacey: That actually puts their name into a contact book.
Matty: Yeah, exactly. Outside of our business to business stuff, outside of everything else, it's like people who are actually signing up, maybe we're paying $10 per person.
Dean: Okay, perfect, for people to get their name and email address, kind of thing.
Stacey: Mm-hmm.
Matty: Yeah.
Dean: Okay, perfect.
Matty: Sorry, that was for a full client.
Dean: Oh, perfect, that's awesome.
Matty: …signed-up person, yeah.
Dean: Okay, all right. I think that we could make this really simple, is what if you spent $3,000? I mean, have you thought that through?
Matty: Not really. We definitely increased it and dropped it back down. We definitely did at one point.
Dean: It's so funny and it's innocent in a way, right, that so many people say, "Well, we have an advertising budget. We spend $300 a month, and it's consistently good," which is a smart thing that it's an important thing to ... People talk about your maximum spend on ads and stuff, but I think it's equally as important to have a minimum spend, that you're minimally committed to spending $10 a day on your ads. Then it's often funny to see that sometimes we just don't make that connection that, well what would happen, what if we spent $3,000 a month instead of $300, especially if you've got something that's working.
Matty: Now, I guess to really clarify it, would it work to say, do a cooking demonstration video like we always do and something that gets a lot of views, and then send it to our Whole Health Handbook instead, which is our consumer guide. Would it be better to send them to that to collect the information rather than sending them straight to our website where they can then purchase?
Dean: Well, I think here's the thing. If you're getting people for $10, and the minimum spend, it's $149 is what they're buying on that $10.?
Stacey: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Matty: Yeah.
Dean: At least, right, of the initial sale, then I would say it makes the most sense to spend as much as you can on that, I mean, driving more people there. Have you experimented with turning up the volume on that?
Matty: We did and we actually didn't see a great increase. We literally doubled it. I think we doubled it for two months. Now the hard thing is because I let go of this side of things. I was doing this and then I've passed it off to one of our employees.
Stacey: Our videographer, yeah.
Matty: Yeah, videographer, and then he does this as well so I don't have the exact numbers on it, but we actually increased it. It was close in the start of the year and we didn't really see a massive increase in sales go up.
Stacey: Education not data collection.
Dean: Yeah, and part of the thing is, what I would look at too is the connecting of everything. Are you making those numbers? Are you reverse-engineering these numbers that we spent $300 and we got 30 new clients, so we'll divide that into the 10 to get $10, but are those 100% attributable to only the people that you paid to get there, or is that of all the visitors that came to your website, whether they came from your organic search or other sources?
Stacey: Yeah, we'd include the organic stuff as well.
Dean: That's where we're going right there.
Stacey: Yeah, building trust over time, because I guess with nutrition, mindset is a barrier to entry, or people not being ready in themselves. Yeah, I guess we do need to have that.
Dean: Well, that's part of it right there, then is that's a different scenario, because yeah, that's why spending more money doesn't one to one increase the revenue, because you were blending all of that. What I was thinking that you were saying was, "We spend $300 to drive people to this site and we track what happens and that money turns into 30 new clients that come from the paid." If you're blending, if it's everybody, all the traffic from all the sources that come to your website, that makes sense.
What we need to focus on is to have a more predictable way to attribute the result that the paid advertising is getting. That's why I always focus on the easiest thing first, which is to compel somebody to leave their name and their email address to get a book or a something that they can opt in for. That way you know that if you were spending $300 and you were able to get 100 new subscribers from that $300, that would be something that would be a measurable result, that we could then track that group through the next 12 months kind of thing and see what happens.
Stacey: Absolutely, yeah. I think we need to go back to using the consumer guide as our click-through.
Matty: Yeah, definitely.
Dean: Then, what's the title of your consumer guide?
Stacey: The Whole Health Handbook.
Dean: The Whole Health Handbook, okay.
Matty: The subtitle is, Your Complete Guide to Eating Smarter, Better and Healthier.
Dean: Perfect, okay. The interesting thing that I might look at is, so much of using a book as a lead generator is the title, right, is having it speak exactly to the audience. One of the things that you can do is target specific things. If you were saying energy is one thing that people really want, then having a book or a report or a download that was speaking to the energy. I did an episode with Yuri Elkaim, who wrote a book called The All Day Energy Diet. That's a great title, right, for somebody? That's what they want, so to be able to get in front of them and have them opt in for that, you now know something about what somebody was attracted by. Same thing if you did that with fat loss or with sleep.
Matty: Yeah, the guide to better sleep through your nutrition.
Dean: Yes, exactly, matching those because all we want to do is start the conversation where somebody is indicating what they are. That way when you start engaging with people by email you've got the chance to speak about exactly what they're most interested in, and then a program that's specifically outcome-based like that. When you rank the desires that people would have when they come to you, would the most popular thing be weight loss, or would it be energy?
Matty: Yeah, I think weight loss.
Stacey: That's what they perceive as their focus, but then when you present them with other options or outcomes, then they're like, "Oh, yeah, that's actually what I want." Superficially they think they want to lose weight, but then when you say, "Okay, but is it that or do you actually want to improve your health?" Then they're like, "Ah."
Dean: It all fits. It's an interesting thing where this Whole Health Handbook, it might be an interesting approach to have a whole health scorecard, just like the way you guys went through the Profit Activator score, where you're indicating people, you get a sense of where they're-
Matty: Sitting at. That's very interesting because we do this with all of our members through something that we call the Seven Pillars Checklist. The seven pillars is the seven things that we think you actually need to be focusing on if you want to be seeing your result. It definitely can tie in with the book to some extent.
Stacey: You just made us realize that we're not offering it to everyone. We're only offering it to people who come on board and are paying for our services already. It makes sense to make it into a quiz that people could do so they can see where we can help them.
Dean: Right, and a scorecard, just the language of it, compared to the quiz versus a scorecard. A scorecard feels like there's something now that I'm setting a baseline score but I can improve in this, whereas a quiz feels like it's testing my knowledge of something as opposed to my outcome of it. The interesting thing, I'll put a link in the show notes about this, but Dan Sullivan has a great book about scorecards that explains the psychology about how the scorecard that we use is.
When you look at the profitactivatorscore.com, the thing about it is, each of the eight points is one of our eight Profit Activators. The score that you give is the score where you are now, but then also right beside it you put the score where you want to be, right, your aspiration there. Let's just talk about a couple or three of the seven pillars that you talk about.
Matty: Yeah, nutrition, sleep, exercise are the first three that come up.
Dean: Okay, when you're saying this, nutrition, sleep and exercise, if you look at it that if somebody were giving themselves a score on each of these, and of course the way the scorecard works is you're just using statements that would resonate with the one that fits the best. For you to know that somebody is struggling with their sleep, that that is going to be a helpful thing, almost like if somebody rates themselves very low on sleep currently, but they want to be at the highest level on sleep, that's the basis for a great conversation.
I think that kind of thing is a really great way to keep this transition, people moving towards you in a way that's going to be actionable rather than just them, the passive engagement of watching your videos and enjoying them and stuff, but it's always got to ... That's why we say Profit Activator-3 is educate and motivate, right? We want to educate and then motivate people to take some action, not just continue to educate and educate and educate.
Matty: Yeah, I don't know if this is a question that you can answer for me, but with your scorecard, do you know what actual software you guys use to collect that data, because we're our CRM. You've got it, okay.
Dean: Yeah, yeah. We've developed a scorecard creator there. It's based on a WordPress platform that we use and I had somebody develop it, but we offer that as well. I can help you with that if you wanted to do that. Then you could have somebody integrate it into through Zapier or something, sending it into your Infusionsoft platform. I have it where it feeds into my Gogo clients platform. That's a very helpful thing because then you get an email when somebody fills it out along with their results, which you can reply to and start the conversation with somebody. It's a really cool tool.
Matty: I'm sorry. I was just saying, do you then create, say for instance, an email automation based off of each seven pillar. Hey we notice you've got some sleep issues, and then the next five days or something maybe give them some tips around what they can do with their sleep, or is that too much?
Stacey: Would you personalize emails straight off?
Dean: Yeah, we just use the email as an engagement, right? It doesn't then trigger some sleep automations. That's a good idea. I like that idea. I think that might be a good thing. Do you send out email announcements about when you put up your social media stuff? How often do you email people?
Matty: We have a thing called Chief Weekly, so it's our weekly email that goes out to our list.
Stacey: As a newsletter.
Matty: As a newsletter, so it covers over the podcast of the week, it covers over a little bit of extra hints and tips, so tips around training, tips around exercise and cooking, but yeah, our blogs and then some of our videos as well.
Stacey: It doesn't directly link into the Facebook one. We upload the same video onto YouTube.
Dean: I got you, yeah. You include it in the thing. Then do you have a super signature on your email, meaning do you know that word when I say that?
Stacey: No, no.
Matty: No.
Dean: In my email-
Matty: Oh, I know what you're talking about, yes I do get them I know exactly what you're saying. It's like do you need help with your email apps for instance.
Dean: Yeah, every email that goes out, and we send out three emails a week, the emails all end with my super signature that says "Plus, whenever you're ready, here are four ways I can help you hatch some evil schemes for your business." I invite people to take the next step where they can be a guest on More Cheese Less Whiskers or try our Profit Activator Scorecard or join our email Mastery Case Study Program, or work with me one on one. I'm always inviting the next steps for people whatever their next step might be.
Every single time you send out that email, people will respond to one of those things because you never know when people are going to be ready. You've both mentioned how you seem to gravitate to the long term, that people get to know you and they understand what you're up to, and then they tend to become clients or ask about what you're doing. This would be a really good thing. I would encourage you to try emailing more frequently, too, because email is just such a simple thing to respond to.
It's another where we're constantly checking our emails and if every time you're sending something it's valuable, then you're going to be welcome. All the emails that I send are either a new podcast or an article, a lesson that's come from the podcast, but it's always adding value, right, a 300 to 500-word article, what would be a blog post. I use my email as a blog in a way, that I'm sending these out, educational, but in the PS I'm always talking about what's going on timely and topical right now.
I talk about I'm coming to London, I'm coming to Amsterdam, I'm coming to Sydney. Those kind of things are always present in the PS and then always the super signature, which might be the next thing. If you're thinking about your next steps, if you had your Whole Health score, "Find out your whole health score at wholehealthscore.com" and that went to a scorecard where people could fill out their things. Is your stuff very helpful or conducive to Q and A? Do people want to ask you a lot of questions and stuff like that?
Matty: Once they're on board we tend to get a fair few questions, I think, and that's what the support groups are for.
Stacey: Definitely with face to face, when we go out to gyms and we get a lot more questions then. I think we've started to answer people's questions now before they ask them.
Matty: Yeah, we've got the typical questions, like the frequently asked questions that people are coming to us with. We've put that out a lot to make sure that they're getting answered because it was the things that people were asking often.
Stacey: I guess when our social media post people aren't providing questions.
Matty: Right, often.
Dean: Part of the thing, what I was thinking is, is there any way for you to demonstrate for people the value, right, where people might say, "Oh, wow, they really are sharp. I like the way they think about that," or "I never even thought about it that way," or something where you're demonstrating what it might be like to spend time with you.
Stacey: Yeah, Matty was saying how we have our two food videos. We also do two educational communication videos. One of those was an FAQ show which for a little while, which were questions that had come up from people. I guess we didn't really find that it really took off. It came a little too formal. I think our video will be more of a AskGaryVee type style.
Dean: Ah, okay, so you know.
Stacey: It took formalizing a little bit too much, but now I think we've gone back to, rather than like an FAQ show it's more just like a catch-up on the couch. We sit on the sofa and we just talk.
Matty: It's like a mini podcast.
Dean: Love it, that's awesome. Yeah, and I think that sort of thing, I think what would go a long way for you is really thinking through what is going to get people moving one step closer, the intermediate step to getting a nutrition plan, because if somebody's filling out something with some preference it will be the precursor to getting a custom plan, that would be a good thing to engage more people. Plus it's easy as a referral type of item, if you're able to say to your clients that if they know that whenever they hear people talking about nutrition that they can email you or text you to get something to give to them, to their friends, the people that they're in those conversations with. In the beginning you mentioned that maybe that referrals would be one of the things that could be a good outcome for us to talk about.
Stacey: Yeah, because we tried the cash incentive, and we got a few people but it didn't go as well as we hoped.
Matty: The other thing we do is we offer email support, so every day when someone signs up for a meal plan, for the first 30 days we'll send them an email. In the first week I think we say, "In three weeks’ time we're going to ask you for a referral because we know you're going to be feeling amazing." Then three weeks later we ask them for the referral-
Stacey: We give them a discount card as an incentive for the friend. They've been used once.
Matty: Yeah, we get a lot of word of mouth, though.
Stacey: This scorecard, it could work, because then they'll have something that actually.
Dean: This is often where it's something that is counterintuitive and counterproductive, that often people think that we've incentivized referrals, right, and the underlying belief in that then is that they are doing you a favor, right? That's the whole position of it, but as a society we're completely wired to want to share and add value to those closest to us, right? It goes all the way back to our herding days where if you're coming back to camp and you've found some blueberries over that hill, you would tell somebody, "Hey, there's a really ripe blueberry bush over there."
That's valuable, right? You're adding value to your tribe and we're wired to want to do that, but as soon as you incentivize things you're setting a different psychology into action, right, that especially if they feel like ... Let's just play it all the way through. You rave about something and your friend then signs up for it. Then they find out that the friend that you referred, they find out that you're at the top of the referral contest leaderboard, right?
It feels now like you just sold them out. It feels like there was this bounty on their head. It wasn't that you truly and purely felt like this would be a great thing for them. Now the thing you have going for you especially around nutrition when it's related to weight loss and all of those good things are happening, people are noticing that you're losing weight, people are noticing that your skin looks better, you have more energy, you're more focused.
At some point over the three weeks, people are going to say that to them. If you were to encourage them that if they hear someone talking about this, talking about how great you look, or when you hear someone saying how great you look or how much weight you've lost, feel free to give me a call or text me, and I'll give you a copy of our book to give to them, right? Now you're saying that they get to look like they are offering something of value that is giving, not something that is ... You're not trying to turn them into a sales person for you.
Stacey: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
Matty: It does, yeah.
Dean: That language right there, right, if you're presencing among your community, the people who are paying you especially, your current and existing clients, if you are to use that language around it, just a quick note in case you hear someone talking about some high-probability conversation, right, that they're likely to be in. It could be around energy or sleep or losing weight or coming into bikini season or going on vacation or diabetes. Anything, there's so many conversations that can be nutrition-related. In order for a referral to take place, we have to make sure that three things happen.
They have to notice that the conversation is about nutrition or about something related to that. They have to think about you, and then they have to introduce you to the person that they were having that conversation with. Those conversations are happening far more than you ever know about.
Matty: Yeah, definitely.
Dean: That's the real goal is to try, and encourage those people to reach out to you when they're having those conversations so that they can help out their friend. Somebody's talked about being low-energy and you've got this energy checklist or something that you could give them to give to people, that's a much more organic way that you can orchestrate referrals.
Stacey: Yeah, that's-
Matty: That's beautiful.
Dean: You know what? I mean, we're going to spend some time in Sydney together. I know you're coming to the Breakthrough Blueprint, so we'll spend some time over the three days really orchestrating your 12-month referral plan, because it sounds like you've got really loyal clients, happy clients, people that you're really able to help. If we just engage the conversations that they're already having, that's going to be a big source of growth for you.
Matty: Yeah, I'll look forward to that.
Stacey: Yeah, that sounds really good.
Dean: Yeah, so what's your summary before we've gone... It's flown by. We've been talking for an hour.
Matty: Yeah.
Stacey: It's really crazy.
Matty: I think for us it's going to be definitely going and using our consumer guide more than we have been and working out how we can, I guess, process it from Facebook and integrating it more, I guess, is what I'm trying to look for. Also, we'll definitely be changing around the wording with our referral list right away, because that's something that goes out to every single new member, so that's something that we'd like to definitely adjust.
Stacey: Even if we just did a one-off broadcast right now and said, "Hey, about the conversations. If you've been having those conversations ..." That's definitely something we can-
Dean: Bring it in the present, right? I think you said that you send an email that tells people, "Hey in three weeks we're going to ask you for a referral." It's almost nice to reframe that as you get to predict their future. You start to say, "What you're going to notice is that within a week or two weeks from now, people are going to start noticing how great your skin looks, or how it looks like you are losing weight. If you hear someone talking about that, give me a call or text us and we'll get you a copy of our book to give to them."
Matty: Yeah, I like that. That's cool.
Dean: Everybody feels good about giving something to their friends rather than trying to convince their friends to give you money or do something, right?
Stacey: Yeah, with that, is it best because you said then "Get in touch with me when you have that conversation and I'll give you a book to give to them," or is it better if we can obtain their contact details or have them contact us directly? Could she send our email?
Dean: See, here's the thing, is that you want to have your client contact you, because that's the highest probability. What you don't want is, you don't want them, if you say "Tell them to call me," they may do that and then you'll never know that they told them and you'll run into them at CrossFit and they'll say, "Hey, did my friend John ever give you a call?" No. "Oh I tell people about you all the time." You probably hear people say that, right?
Stacey: On the other side can we say to the friend, "Hey, can you send me their details?"
Matty: No, I guess, could we then-
Dean: You want to have them contact you because if you contact me, then I'm able to say, "Fantastic. Tell me about your friend."
Stacey: Yes, and the friends.
Dean: Yeah, "I can just mail it right to them or I can email it to them, or would you like to write an email that connects both of us?" You know what I mean? You're now in this brainstorming session about the best way to help their friend get the full extent of the help that you can provide for them.
Matty: Then from there is it bad to send a link to our consumer guide in regard to saying the lead page to then sign up so they can get the consumer guide, or is it better for you to just send them the PDF?
Dean: I think you can send them the PDF because you're going to engage in a dialogue with them now, right? Now you know who they are. It’s very personal, right? This way it's between you and your client and their friend. That's really what it's about. We just want to encourage that. It sounds like your clients are already talking about you, and they tell people about you and they love the work that they're doing with you, but now it's a way of you encouraging them to let you know the friends that they're telling about you.
Matty: Yeah, no, I like that.
Stacey: Yeah, that's cool.
Dean: We got so much to work with, I can't wait to meet you.
Matty: We do, yeah, definitely. I've got a lot to do before I meet you in August.
Dean: Yeah, absolutely. Okay, guys, well enjoy Amsterdam.
Matty: Thank you.
Stacey: Thank you.
Dean: We’ll be there in a couple of weeks. When are you back to Australia?
Stacey: We've got a few more stops before we get back to Oz so we've actually just been in Denmark. We went to Copenhagen and then we went across to southern Sweden, and Malmo and-
Matty: Helsingborg.
Stacey: Yeah, and then we went up to Stockholm. Now we're in Amsterdam. Then we go to Paris, London, Manchester, and then
Matty: Spain.
Stacey: Yeah, Majorca, Barcelona and…
Matty: Majorca, Barcelona.
Dean: By next year, I think they're just releasing now planes that will be able to fly from London straight to Sydney. Isn't that amazing to think about that? Yeah, they've got the new planes that have a 25,000 kilometer range, which makes any two points on the Earth direct, accessible.
Matty: Yeah, we're back 5th of July, to answer your original question.
Dean: Love it. Then I will see you at the end of August.
Matty: End of August. I can't wait.
Dean: Well, I enjoyed our conversation. Have a great rest of your trip and I'll talk to you soon.
Matty: Thank you so much, Dean. Really appreciate it.
Stacey: Thank you.
Dean: Bye guys. There we have it. Boy, that was a great conversation. It went very fast. I think at the end here the big thing of realizing how people talk to their friends, the people that they're in conversation with. How important that is that if what you're doing with them, if what you're doing with your clients is producing something that is going to spark a conversation. For instance, if you're helping people lose weight, people are going to comment on "Hey, it looks like you're losing some weight," or if you're going to help people get more energy, people are going to comment on "Wow, you seem like you really have a lot of energy."
If you understand that and you can plan in advance for that, and then have a way to turn that conversation or that event into an opportunity to orchestrate referrals, where you get introduced to the people that are having that conversation, it's really about equipping people to be prepared when they hear those conversations that you know they're going to start hearing. Lots of great conversation there.
We talked a lot about scorecards and you want to see a great example of the scorecard in action, you can try our Profit Activator scorecard at profitactivatorscore.com. When you go through that, you'll see that it will help you identify where the opportunity is for your business as it relates to the Profit Activators. You'll also see where your strength is and you can see how this might fit for your business. Check that out at profitactivatorscore.com. Then if you'd like to continue the conversation here, go to MoreCheeseLessWhiskers.com.
You can download a copy of the More Cheese Less Whiskers book and if you'd like, you can be a guest on the show. Just click on the Be A Guest link and maybe we can have a conversation about your business. That's it for this week. Have a great time, and I'll talk to you next time.