Today on the More Cheese Less Whiskers podcast, we're talking with Lawrence Neal, who's calling in from Ireland, where he helps personal trainers grow their business.
He has a nice membership community, and we talked about the difference between growing something organically and growing something with paid advertising.
It really comes down to the velocity you can gain from paid traffic and the access you have to a bigger volume of people, so we talked about how to safely do that in a way that helps you figure out the right way to get people on board.
We talked about the different philosophies of people trying something on a free trial basis, and I think if you're in that kind of situation, where a free trial is a practical way for people to trial your service, you're going to enjoy this episode.
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Transcript - More Cheese Less Whiskers 175
Dean: Lawrence.
Lawrence: Hello Dean.
Dean: How are you?
Lawrence: I am very well, how are you?
Dean: I'm awesome. Where are you calling from?
Lawrence: I am calling you from Galway in Ireland but I'm originally from the UK.
Dean: Wow. Nice. Okay. All the way across the pond. It's amazing, isn't it? Technology, how we can be connected just like this. So good.
Lawrence: Absolutely.
Dean: So tell me what's been going on and what we're going to focus on here today.
Lawrence: Yeah. So I thought I'd just give you some context first.
Dean: Sure.
Lawrence: So obviously big fan of you and your work and came to know you through James Schramko because I'm actually part of super fast business.
Dean: Nice.
Lawrence: And some part of his membership and have listened to some of the podcasts that you and James have been doing together, the series that you guys do which I always -.
Dean: I know yeah. We're five years into the 25 year podcast now. So that's great.
Lawrence: Yeah, I really enjoyed those because it's just two brilliant online marketers just shooting the shit, so can I swear on this or is this not really a sort of PG?
Dean: No, yeah, we can talk about whatever you want.
Lawrence: Okay. So I was obviously really inspired by that and it's funny, I was feeling very unsure about my business direction a few weeks ago and I actually feel a lot more organized focus now and James has really helped with that. And there's probably a lot I can talk to you about and would really value your input on.
Dean: Awesome.
Lawrence: So if I just give you a background on my business and we can go from there.
Dean: That sounds perfect. Yes.
Lawrence: Cool. So I developed a passion for a niche within fitness called High Intensity Training about six or seven years ago. And before that I'd always been passionate about trying to build some kind of online business. I had a - sales person for a long time but I was never really overly passionate about it, same old story and really wanted to build my own business and got really into this niche of fitness and then started to blog about it, started to interview people within the industry who are well known and really being the first to do that within High Intensity Training.
And this was before really - popular now obviously it's huge. And basically that started off just being a passion project, just being like, okay, I'm going to create this online content about High Intensity Training. And as I was doing it, I was obviously growing an audience. I just loved the fact that I could interview someone or create the content. They would then share it with their audience and more often than not in the beginning they had a much bigger audience than me. So it's a way of packing this content and my following. And all the one I'm thinking, how am I going to monetize this eventually? I'd love to do this stuff full time, and I'm trying to keep this quite succinct but I have obviously a passion for business as well.
And what I noticed is there was no one really serving the business operators and owners within High Intensity Training. So there's a lot of people that run personal training studios that really specialize in this. And I started to build a lot of relationships with these people because I'd get emails and good feedback. So I started creating more business centric content, and then fast forward a few years the podcast grew rapidly. I've got it up to sort of 25, 30,000 downloads per month. And I started to see how I could really help these business owners and perhaps start to talk at them with relevant offers, and eventually - about two and a half years ago, I moved to Ireland with my fiance. My fiance is Irish so she took me over it. And I saw that as an opportunity because my cost of living shrunk dramatically because I was living in London previous.
Dean: Oh wow, yeah.
Lawrence: Right. I had all these savings from my sales career and I thought, you know what, I can use this as a cushion and use this to help me really start.
Dean: Use it to go after your passion now, yeah.
Lawrence: Right. But the only way I was making money in the beginning was sponsors which doesn't really work very well. I found for me it wasn't really a reliable or it wasn't really enough income to provide a living. And so I had to pivot and I pivoted a whole bunch of times. And then eventually I landed on this idea of creating - to do it, kind of like he's done it. And I flew to an event in America where all my community and my niche hang out and I just run it past 10 people and nine out of 10 said, "Hell yeah, I'd join that." And then I came home and I invested in, I might've invested in before, I can't remember, but I invested in SuperFastBusiness. James was instrumental in helping me build a membership and basically in a nutshell, I've - in a high intensity business context.
Not quite as good as he's done it, but I'm a work in progress. And that's gone really well. It's a year and a half old, I've got about 61 members, obviously it's B2B, it's generating a middle five figure income and it slowly growing. But I'm under a fair bit of pressure, Dean. I've just had a baby. He's eight weeks old and I'm now effectively sole provider aside from a bit of maternity compensation we get. And so I'm under a bit of pressure to obviously grow this business and make it more successful. My goal at the end of this year is to really break this little six figure barrier in annual revenue. And so that's a bit of background.
Dean: How much do you charge? How much is the membership that you're offering?
Lawrence: So it's currently $79 per month, per user. I started at 47 and I've been hiking it up over time.
Dean: And what do you provide? What's involved in the membership that you're offering?
Lawrence: The primary offerings are a community and so it's a private community, much like SFB of business owners in this particular niche where they can communicate with one another privately and feel safe in this tight community and help one another and build connections. Secondly, there's a content which is focused on helping people the High Intensity Training business. So I have categories of generating leads, converting sales, hiring, motivate a team. I should say this, I've not actually built a personal training studio myself and so I've always had a little bit of imposter syndrome going on the background. But what I've done is, because of the podcast, I've built this incredible network. And so what I've done is I've collaborated with the best in my country to create that content and publish that within a membership.
And so you've got those resources and they're 20 minute, 30 minute podcasts and PDF transcripts for each one, that kind of thing. I don't yet do videos/slideshow content like James does, I'm thinking about doing that. There's four pillars really and the third one is monthly Q and A's. So I bring on an expert, sorry every month it will alternate so it will be business month and then personal training techniques the next and it will repeat like that, and I'll just get someone on who's an expert in that in our niche in those one of those fields. And then do a one hour Q and A for members. And in the forefront is private coaching with me. And even though I haven't built my own studio yet, I will be, that's another conversation. I've got so many [inaudible 00:10:29] at this point, so yeah.
Dean: How long do people stay when they join?
Lawrence: Do you know what? I don't know the rough length of time. I just know my churn percentage.
Dean: Okay. Yeah, that'd be the same thing, let's talk about that. Is it relatively sticky that they stay and stay and stay or is it that they come in and you're turning quite a bit?
Lawrence: No, the trends been really low. I had it from the get go. It's been quite good. The first year it was around two percent for the whole year. And then starts with 2020. I had quite a few cancellations and it's risen to around 4.5%.
Dean: It's pretty small numbers to get the big number at 61 members that's going to be, one person leaving is a pretty significant number compared to having bigger numbers, right? Yeah.
Lawrence: Exactly. It was quite stressful in the beginning when that was, rather start of this year I should say it was quite stressful.
Dean: I got it. And how long have you been doing it? How long is the oldest member?
Lawrence: So I started the membership May, 2018 since then.
Dean: Okay. 18 months or so about almost, a little bit more coming up on two years. Right. Okay. And where do you see the opportunity that you have? What's your given engine for acquiring new members? Either do you have particularly a slot machine type of or a vending machine type of system where you can put money in the top and deliver new members? How much does it cost you to acquire a new member?
Lawrence: Yeah, a really good question. In the beginning, and it's quite funny because I was reading your scorecard. I was spelling that out and one of the sections really described how I used to do things, which is I used to manually prospect. Because I got a background in sales, I'm not scared to get on a phone. And I actually acquired about 50% of my members through just Facebook DMs, Instagram DMs, direct emails, cold calling in some case. And obviously I had a network - and so at first, I pitched to people I knew I had best relationships with. However, I've always obviously been determined to build a machine and to help drive sales for me because I don't want to be having too many prospects.
Dean: That's really what you need to give yourself predictability and some sense of calm around it that you know that you're on the right track. So right now that's been your most reliable thing. Do you have anything in place that would be where you're buying a new member? So you say are you running any Facebook ads or any sort of lead generation that is leading into membership?
Lawrence: Yes. So I'm not doing any paid advertising. I've actually never done any paid marketing at all. My sales funnel at the moment is my podcast and I've done 250 episodes so far over the last few years. And it's very similar to James is I say that because I see you probably know his sales funnel very well, and that is I create podcast weekly, one podcast a week at the moment, and I promote that over all my different platforms. I don't have a huge following, maybe 1,000 likes on my Facebook page, things like that. But each episode we'll get around 1,000 downloads. And then I have a call to action.
So I'm driving all these people back to my blog, back to the blog post of the podcast. And then I have a call to action link in every blog post that says something contextual to the episode like, proven systems to build your High Intensity Training fitness inside hit business membership and then I link it straight to the sales page. And the South page converts currently at 12%, and then a car I think convert to like 8.2%. But the problem I think I was having Dean is I really have been relying on a podcast to be my main traffic source for a long, long time.
Dean: Yeah, and there's the challenge. I look at it that the challenge or the podcast, the role of the podcast if we're overlaying the eight profit activators that we talk about on this, that the podcast is a profit activators three vehicle. It's a educate and motivate tool, and I use it more for lead conversion than for lead generation. Because my model is very podcast heavy as well but I'm using the podcast as a longterm lead conversion tool as opposed to a lead generation tool. It's a very unpredictable lead generation tool. So I do front end advertising like profit activator number two is about getting people to raise their hands so I separate the two. When you look at it, how many opt ins are you generating each week from the methods you're using right now? How quickly is your list of new prospects growing?
Lawrence: Are you talking about my email list opt ins?
Dean: Yeah, your email list.
Lawrence: Yeah. So I've just started really over the last few weeks making sure that I'm transcribing every podcast and then putting a lead magnet on each post, and I'm getting in the region of, in fact, I can just check because I do the whole traction thing, the EOS -, that's what I'm doing at the moment. I'm just going to bring that up. So yeah I - 10 emails a week at the moment.
Dean: Okay. So when you look at that, that's a low volume list building strategy, right? You don't feel as predictable in that. It's roughly one percent of your audience kind of thing. So 1,000 people are listening to the podcast and you get 10 people who come and opt in, hopefully opting in for the first time. It is what it is but that's 500 people a year. That's not that high volume. So when you look at the economics of it, if your membership is at $79 a month, they're going to spend $860 a year with you or so, right? That you look at the predictability of how much could you afford to pay to get somebody to join your list kind of thing that you then convert them into membership. This is what it all comes down to, if you were to say, let's say roughly $79 a month, let's just do the math. Do you offer a free trial of your membership or for people to come in and see what it's about? Or you are going the other way and offering a way to -.
Lawrence: There's a free trial. I've just done a joint venture. We have an authority in my niche and I'm doing a free trial there. Because it's the benefit that that authority is giving to their audience and it's a 30 day free trial and a membership and obviously then they stay and it converts to the next month. But I don't do a free trial normally and the reason for that is I was concerned that would a free trial attract the right customer. But yeah, it's something I haven't really tested until now.
Dean: See part of the thing is that you do the selecting early on, you do the selecting by how people are opting in. So you're not just talking about strangers, we're talking about you've selected the right audience to invite to the free trial. Let's just do some rough numbers here. If you were to say, and this is completely reasonable, let's say you invite 100 people to take a free trial and 20 of them convert to a paid membership, you convert at 20% let's say. If you take those numbers, if you generate 100 opt ins, let's take it as a cohort here of 100 people.
So you were to generate 100 opt ins and you were to get 20% of them to take you up on a free trial offer and then you were able to get 20% of the people who took the free trial to convert to a paid membership after your 30 days or whatever it is. If you put some numbers to the math of that, so you got 100 opt ins, 20 free trials and four paid memberships. That would be a $320 first month pay. So that group would be worth $320 in 30 days and they would be worth, let's call it $3,000 over the next 12 months. See how I did that math on that?
Lawrence: Yeah, I understand that.
Dean: Okay. So now we back into that and say if you are willing to break even on your first month say that if you could get opt ins for three dollars roughly, you would have invested $300 to get 100 opt ins and you invite those people to take a free trial and you get 20 of them to take a free trial. And of the people who take the free trial, 20% take you up on it and convert to paying members, you would then collect 79 times three. So $320 over the, times four in 30 days from now. That's a reasonable hypothesis for you to work from. And those are reasonable numbers. Wat I'm talking about as a free trial is a truly free, no credit card required kind of trials.
So it's a opt in trial, not a opt out trial where you may get higher conversion numbers on an opt out trial meaning, give me your credit card and try for a dollar and then I'm going to bill you $79 a month if you don't cancel. That's a different psychology and a different vibe than come on in, no credit card required. Take a look around, see what this is about. And then your job becomes to create a 30 day experience that gets people embedded into this world that they couldn't think of leaving, they wouldn't think of leaving, of getting by without it. That would become the goal of it, you know?
Lawrence: Yeah. That's a really good idea.
Dean: Right. And those are pretty reasonable numbers. And if you say that you're willing to wait 60 days or 90 days to recoup your money, you're now in that you could spend six dollars or $10 for an opt in and go through the same thing that you're spending 600, let's say you spend $600 to get 100 of the right opt ins and you invite and get 20% of them to take the free trial and 20% of those to convert, you're way ahead. And then of course, the goal then is to get better at all of those numbers. What if you could get 50% of them to convert, you know?
Lawrence: Yeah.
Dean: I think you've got to start experimenting like that. In order for it to truly grow substantially, you need to be able to control the inputs, you need to be able to say you can fill more people in at the top rather than unpredictably just put out more podcasts, especially as you're growing, right?
Lawrence: Yeah. Well, how would you go about the paying subscribers? What methods are best for that in this context?
Dean: What do you mean? What method is best to get them to pay?
Lawrence: Well no, sorry. You talked about paying for leads.
Dean: Opt ins? Oh yeah. also. Do you have anything right now that that gets people to opt in?
Lawrence: Well at the moment it's the podcast episode so the PDF transcripts. That's the way I do that.
Dean: So do you have a book? The best thing that I use for opt ins in anything that we do is a book. I'll give you the perfect example. So I have a membership program called GoGoAgent, which is a membership and tools for real estate agents and it's also $79 a month, and we have one called GoGo clients, which is for entrepreneurs, $79 a month. Now, on the real estate side, I have a book called Getting Listings because I know that that's what real estate agents want. The outcome that they want is they want to know how to get listings, get people to hire them to help them sell their house.
And so when I offer the book, I get opt ins for two dollars and 20 cents or two dollars and 50 cents, and I can get as many of them as I want. You can predictably spend money and know that every time I spend $2,500, I'm going to get [inaudible 00:29:15] opt ins. And that's a predictable way to grow. Now the good news is that you're going to continue to do your podcast and you're going to continue to educate and motivate people. I have a podcast called the Listing Agent Lifestyle and week after week I'm helping new other real estate agents grow their business, applying the principles that we have in the Listing Agent Lifestyle book.
Lawrence: Right.
Dean: So what would be the thing that your audience really wants? What would be the title of a book that they would just love to have? If there was such a book they would order it up.
Lawrence: Yeah, it would definitely be something to do about getting more clients, getting more personal training clients, it's the most common challenge in personal business is working out how to drive more people through the door. So not sure what the absolute - would be. I'd have to think about it but something about getting more clients.
Dean: Well there's the thing, and this is part of the thing is getting the title right is 80% of the success of a book project. Now the funny thing is that since we went to E readers like Kindles and Kobos and all that kind of stuff, there was a big article in the New York times about the state of book readership. And what they found was pretty fascinating. They said that 58% of books that are bought are never opened.
Lawrence: Wow.
Dean: Now, isn't that interesting? And I say that to a group of people and everybody's like, mouth drops open and then you ask them, "Have you ever bought a book and never opened it?" And everybody has. You've got a whole, I've heard it called your shelf help section, that you put this up on the shelf and it's supposed to help you but you haven't opened the book. So everybody has those books because there's something about the fact that we can take action now by buying the book and feeling like we've taken some action to move forward on our goals or our hopes or dreams. That I took action, I got that book. Now what we do to trigger that, what we do to get people to raise their hand like that, how we trigger that desire is with the title of the book.
So when you look at this, we've got basic book title formulas that we follow that are based on what are the most successful books. If you say we've got a book title formula called name it and claim it. That's the title of a book that says exactly what it is that you want. A book like The Four Hour Workweek is a name it and claim it title. They're like, "Oh, I want that." And you would get that right. And my book is getting listings. Oh, I want that. Dave Ramsey here in the US has a book called Financial Peace, which if you are someone who's in financial turmoil, if you see a book called Financial Peace, it almost feels like just holding it in your head is going to lower your blood pressure, or you feel like that's moving towards the thing that you want.
Now there's other book formulas but one next to that is what we call just do it titles, which are things like Think and Grow Rich. Yes, that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to think and grow rich. Or I've written a book called stop your divorce. And that's something that they're going to say, "Yes, that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to stop my divorce." And then there's how to, that's another formula, which is I think the most winning this kind of formula because you can use that in conjunction with one of the other book title formulas, but you can't use the words how to without filling in some kind of transformational benefit.
And that's where you get things like how to win friends and influence people is a great book title. It does overtly what it says on the tin. So our how to for getting listings is how to get listings at any market you want without a single phone call or spending a fortune on direct mail. That amplifies the benefit that we have, right? So I know for my audience, I run that book and they want that so they respond. Now I've identified a real estate agent who's interested in getting listings because they downloaded a book called getting listings and now I can start educating them about all the ways that I can help them get listings. So if you think about that for you, what would be the thing that you can help these personal trainers with that is going to benefit them in a way that would be very desirable to them.
Lawrence: And we're going to do that now, yeah?
Dean: Yeah. What do you do that helps people? What's the best thing that you do? Often we end up, you've got this whole suite of things, these methods, the knowledge that you have that we're keeping hidden behind this membership wall but we need to let people know what you can actually do for them. And I'm sure that in your podcast you share some of those things freely, right?
Lawrence: Yeah, absolutely. I think the main thing would be getting and retaining clients by getting and keeping clients.
Dean: Yeah. What's one way that you do that? Give me a specific that if I tasked you with, delivered one personal trailer to you right here in Winter Haven and we brought him on the phone here. What would be the one thing that you know that they could do to get a new client?
Lawrence: A quality workout. So a lot of people in the industry are obsessed with marketing tactics, the paid advertising when really they need to look at the actual service and actually refine the quality of the workout and the whole client experience because that's going to generate referrals because they can remark about it. And referrals in HIT, in High Intensity Training are just everything because referrals beget more referrals and they are the best quality clients that are likely to stay for a long time. Yeah, sorry go on.
Dean: Do you encourage your clients to have their clients refer somebody for a free workout?
Lawrence: Kind of. That is one tactic we talk about. We talk about things like gift cards, but I'd say that's very secondary to just, I interviewed one of my clients clients, so interviewed one of their trainees. And she's one of their best clients. She's been with this particular training company for 13 years and she's referred over 100 clients to them and that's because she's so blown away by her experience every time she has a workout and how hard they push her and their customer service experience. So she's brought in a lot of referrals and she's their target market.
She was a high powered lawyer and their position to a premium level and they target high powered lawyers, executives who have a higher income and their pricing in such services positioned in that way. So she's a perfect client and she's referring all these high quality clients to them who probably beget even more referrals so it's like a compounding effect. And I think that's probably the looked in High Intensity Training. I think people are too obsessed with what paid advertising, what copy do I need in order to drive people through the door.
Dean: Right.
Lawrence: Yeah.
Dean: And you're saying with the personal training, especially if you're doing the is it one on one type of training that they're doing?
Lawrence: Yeah, it's generally one-on-one strength training and sometimes groups. The supervision is a big element of it.
Dean: So there's definitely a situation where they would have a full practice or a full roster of clients, and they don't need many because they only have so many slots available.
Lawrence: Right.
Dean: Yeah.
Lawrence: Exactly, yeah.
Dean: So I think when you look at this, if you've got a way that you could, or a method or something that you could introduce people to, that would be compelling to them, that would get them to raise their hand. You just need to be able to get their attention. How big is your list right now?
Lawrence: About 1100.
Dean: Okay. So part of that is that we seem to make your pond bigger, get your reach bigger.
Lawrence: One concern I have is, maybe this is just about getting the title of the book right, but the problem is is sometimes when you say to business owners in this industry, we need to get better at the workout or the surveys, they roll their eyes a little bit. There's a bit of arrogance in High Intensity Training where a lot of the business owners in our [inaudible 00:41:23] have been doing this for decades so they feel like they're very good trainers. And they probably are, but it does seem that they would be better served if they actually did refine the workout and ensure that all of their staff carried out consistently to generate these referrals. So my concern is if I have a title of a book that says something to the effect of, how to deliver workouts that drive referrals like crazy or something, that they might look at that and be like, well, I don't want that. I want the marketing tactic, the magic bullet. So that's one thing that came up from it. It'll be curious your thoughts on that.
Dean: Well, so much of the title, you can talk about the benefit without talking about the mechanism right now.
Lawrence: Right.
Dean: In getting listings I'm not talking about the mechanism, I'm talking about the outcome, the benefit, that's what they want. So once they opt in, now I'm sharing about the mechanism.
Lawrence: Right. Could it be as simple as how to drive referrals or how to get referrals?
Dean: It could be. Absolutely.
Lawrence: Right. This is the other thing, I guess we're talking about, I don't know, what platforms you would advertise on but let's say Facebook for argument's sake. Obviously you can tell the exact demographic you want and the psychographics and stuff, which is great. I want to try and obviously appeal to, this is where I guess my advertising knowledge isn't great so I guess I would just select those are interested in High Intensity Training because I don't want to necessarily try and pull in. Because my staff weren't really a necessarily appeal to a generic personal trainer who doesn't understand this particular niche within fitness because it is very -. So I just need to make sure. I don't think whatever title do, I don't know.
Dean: Part of it is that you can select the audience of specifically the people that you want. What would be an indicator that they're your audience? Is there a particular page or association or something that they would be interested in that you could target people who follow this person or this organization or this association?
Lawrence: Yeah. First thing that comes to mind is these particular Facebook groups. There's only a few, there's probably like 10 actually where if people were members of those groups and they would be ideally placed target.
Dean: And so the groups are a little bit difficult in that they aren't typically targetable as Facebook if they're private groups. But are there pages associated with those people that they might like something so that you know that that's what they do or is there some way that they identify themselves as personal trainers in their occupation, however you would find them?
Lawrence: Possibly. I think the problem with the occupation is they'd be very broad then, it'd be a lot of generics or personal trainers. But your first suggestion is, it would definitely work in terms of, I know a number of pages that they might like and I could then obviously target people that like specific pages.
Dean: Perfect. That's fine. So that gives you an opportunity now to get your message in front of the right people. And so if you're targeting people who you know or suspect that the highest level are high intensity personal trainers that you've got now the opportunity to offer them a book and it would be a big win if you could get them to raise their hands for two dollars, three dollars, five dollars even, whatever the lowest amount that you can get would be, that would be a big win.
Lawrence: Yeah. And then you'd have a followup sequence, email sequence on those that opt in for the E book, right? To sell the membership. Yeah. Okay. Would you still continue advocating what I'm currently doing in terms of the podcast and the transcripts and everything?
Dean: Of course, yeah, absolutely. That's a big thing. I do podcasts every week. And the way that we're doing it, like my model for the podcast here is that each week is a new business owner that we're applying the eight profit activators to your business. This whole thing is essentially a real consultation. This is no different than the conversation we would be having if you were paying me $2,500 for a consultation. I'm giving you the best advice that I know right now and then everybody listening is extrapolating from how that might apply to them, you know?
Lawrence: Yeah. And I'm most grateful for the opportunity. Couple of things I -, I just want to run by you as well is, let's take the next step, right? So if I were to then start doing paid advertising. You're famous for who not how, I'm only really a, we've experienced - which is on top of the membership. I probably generate sort of a mid five figure income. So I'm at a stage where it can be quite hard for me to outsource too much. I have to do some of the stuff myself. And I think, because I hear you and James talk a lot about who not how but I feel like that's because you guys are often operating at the six figure plus level and a lot of cases million plus. So do you think that at my level it's perfectly fine for me to be on the toes in some cases, because quite frankly, I don't generate enough revenue to outsource all these things. And so I would have to perhaps learn how to do this, the Facebook ads for instance.
Dean: Well, part of the thing is, and there's nothing wrong with that in the beginning that you've got time. That's the - that you have. And so we look at it that we want to do it in a way that once you figure out what works and how to do it, that you can replace yourself with someone else, right? And you can start at any level too with it. You don't have to spend $100 a day or $1,000 a day on ads. You could start with $20 a day or something that would be manageable. Let's say that you start generating, instead of 10 opt ins a week, let's target that you could get 10 opt ins a day and start to engage with those people, take a more conversational one to one approach to welcoming them.
This is what I say about the book is that imagine that your opt in page or the lead ad that you use on Facebook. It's very easy to set up. All people have to do this press the button and it carries their name and email into the form for you. So they just press submit to or download to send you their information to get the book. Now imagine the title of your book is just for a lack of a better thing, how to get three new clients in the next seven days for your personal training business. That's a good outcome for somebody. So you offer that as a book and they see that come across their newsfeed. They say, "Oh, I want that book." And then they press submit. And imagine that that is a magic portal that delivers them to your front door.
They poke their head in the door and say, "Hey, I'm here about the how to get three new clients for your personal training business this week." Now, what would you have as a conversation with those people? How would you engage with one person at a time like that? What might you say to somebody who asks for the book like that? If somebody literally knocked on your door to your studio and came in and said, "Hey, I'm here about the book." How would you imagine that conversation going?
Lawrence: I was doing this on the phone when -. I'd be asking about their business. I'd be saying, "Well tell me more about your business. What are you struggling with? What are your challenges? What are your goals?"
Dean: Maybe you start out with an easy question and you ask them an either or question which is very easy for people to reply to if you said, "Do you work with people one on one or to work with groups?" That might be a good opening question to get people to engage. And as they're engaging, maybe you lead everybody to, your method right now is to talk to them one on one so you could lead that into. If 10 people a day are coming into your email by asking for the book and let's say you're spending $50 a day on that and you only do it on the days that say you're going to test this out for 10 days, let's say.
So you're going to allocate $500 for this, and over those 10 days you're going to aim to get 100 new opt ins. And you see who among those 100 individuals, this is the thing when you're doing it at this level, you get the opportunity to pay personal attention to them. You're not just treating them as numbers and shuttling them through a funnel that's going to yield whatever it is. You treat them as individuals. You start to see and treat them like a real person and I love the idea. Jordan Peterson is.
Lawrence: Yeah, very well. I loved his work.
Dean: Me too. So one of the things that I've been thinking about and using as a frame, one of Jordan Peterson's rules is to treat yourself like you're responsible for help. And I've been taking that and transferring that to prospects. So imagine if you treated the person that downloads the book as someone that you're responsible for helping, how would that change the dynamic of the interaction that you have with them? You're starting to think you're coming at it with a real empathy kind of situation. It's kind of an empathy activator for yourself and you start to think, if I was responsible for helping this person, how would I approach it? Knowing that they don't know what you know and they don't know they're dealing with the frustration that they have. You know typically what those frustrations are because you've worked with enough of them to know the things they run into and the things that they struggle with.
And that by and large, it's right that they're all very good at what they do mostly. They're able to get results for people. And if they are that they think that that's enough. They think that being really good is enough to grow their business. But it's just like the situation that you're in right now. The model that you're using you're really good at serving people in your membership group and on your podcast, but 10 new opt ins a week, you're not getting the opportunity to help as many people. You've got this fire hydrant of capability that you could serve and just unleash for people, but you're forced to meter it out through this garden hose of 10 people a week that you come in contact with being able to help.
Lawrence: I guess I also fought that because I don't, it's embarrassing to admit, and as I said on my - scorecard, actually, I did have a lot of automations going on in terms of sales sequences and page abandonment. But they weren't as authentic as I wanted them to be and I felt like I just needed to reset so I switched them all off. And so maybe I need to create those, because currently if someone opts in, they just get an offer once a week which is my weekly podcast email. And then there's your super signature at the bottom, the PS. There's a call to action there, but that's the extent of it. And I guess in my head I thought, enough people come to the website, they'll click the link and then go to the sales page and buy, but you're saying that's probably a bad strategy to rely on that organic traffic.
Dean: Yeah. I think you could optimize it by reaching out to individuals, like reaching out and connecting with people in a dialogue kind of way.
Lawrence: Yeah. And I love doing that. When I send someone an email, sorry, when they get an automated email and they reply and it goes into my personal and I start that dialogue, that's great.
Dean: Right. Now you're going to be able to help someone. You may want a scorecard of your own. You may want a scorecard that's helpful for you too. After having gone through my scorecard, you can see the awareness that that builds just from seeing, oh yeah, there's the opportunity right there that you could see how you're able to help people just by interpreting their scorecard.
Lawrence: Yeah. So would you still have that initial email they get, let's say they download the ebook and they get, you'd still have a sequence, you'd still automate that?
Dean: Yeah.
Lawrence: Okay.
Dean: I would automate it in that, the biggest opportunity you have is this first 24 hours with somebody. That they've never liked you more than the moment they press, send me my book. That's the peak of your relationship so far. And they were in the moment, they want that information. So everything that happens from the time that they press the download button or sending user their information, submit that the book has done its job when that happens. That profit activator two has worked. It's turned an invisible prospect into a visible prospect. And now immediately we're into profit activator three where the job is to identify the five star prospects and educate and motivate people so that whenever it's now, they're ready to take the next step. Now not everybody's going to be ready to do something now.
Most people, if we take it that our come from on lead conversion is that my expectation is that half of the people that inquire about anything are going to buy something to help them reach that objective in the next two years, and that 50% of them are going to do that but only 15% of them are going to do it in the first 90 days. So 85% of the value of a bundle of 100 leads that you generate today is going to be 90 days or more away. And so I treat it like that. That's where the podcast is the most valuable because now that gives you a recurring flagship that is continuing to educate and motivate people and it gives you a carrier for your super signature. That's the catalyst to then people joining you. You look at here we are, you and I, how long have you been in my world here in terms of listening to the podcast or on my list?
Lawrence: Not very long. I don't know, six months, something like that.
Dean: Okay. So six months at some point. So you've heard other podcasts, you've seen my emails, you get three emails a week from me and at some point you decided either to ask to be a guest on the show and then filled out the scorecard and here we are.
Lawrence: Actually it was a long time than six months. I just realized because I was listening to your I love marketing podcast for a long time before that, so that's when I first came across you, I think. And that was like over a year ago. But yeah. And then obviously listened to your stuff with James and then saw the have the opportunity to fill in the form to be on your show and then that was a no brainer really.
Dean: Yeah. That's the same kind of thing that can work for you, that you could do that same thing. We just need to add some zeros, add a zero to the number of people that you're reaching right now. So imagine how things would change for you if everything, now we're talking about instead of 1,000 people, 10,000 people, instead of 60 members, 600 members, that would be a whole different framework for you, right?
Lawrence: Very much so. Yeah.
Dean: You've got it. And it's certainly a big enough audience that there are enough people that you could serve.
Lawrence: Yeah. I've just noticed, have you zeroed in on this as being the main constraint for me, because I notice we haven't talked at all about retaining people or quality of the product because you feel quite comfortable.
Dean: Yeah. It seems like you've got a happy group of people and that you've been doing it a year and a half and you've got people who've stuck around and it seems like you're confident in the offering that you have. But the number one thing, you're not going to retain your way to riches with 61 members. You need to expand your way to riches with 600 members. You need something that adds some velocity to that. And the way to add velocity to it is to find the people first, build the audience, and then use the podcast to educate them and motivate them and expand your relationship with them so that they get to hear week after week after week, all the things and they start to go, that Lawrence really knows what he's talking about. I like him and maybe I'll try his scorecard or maybe I'll take his free trial of his membership, you know?
Lawrence: Yeah. And you think it makes sense that a free trial versus a paid straight away.
Dean: Well listen, it's just my whole thing is that it's almost always less expensive to get somebody a result than it is to convince them to give you money to get that result or experience.
Lawrence: Yeah.
Dean: If you want them to see what you're about and experience it, and if in that experience you're going to convert 20 or 25 or 30% of them to stay, then it's worth it all day long.
Lawrence: Yeah. When you say the math like that, it does make a lot of sense.
Dean: Yeah.
Lawrence: I'm just curious, why do you think some people don't do that? I notice for instance, so we don't necessarily have to comment on James' a strategy but I know he does some -.
Dean: I don't care. I'd love to talk about James' strategy. That's fine.
Lawrence: Well I admire James a lot.
Dean: I do too. Listen, James is one of my closest friends. We have a great relationship and I have the highest level of respect for everything that he's done, and we have really great conversations about these kinds of things, and some of these things we influence each other on some of the things that we do so there's nothing wrong with it. A lot of the things that he does are similar. He may have a philosophical difference on the free trial and that's okay. But for most people, he's got an audience already. It's difficult to be on both. It's almost like you can't have it both ways, right. It's more difficult to be both limiting in the people that you bring in or positioning that way and not have a big audience. You could be more selective when you've got more people clamoring at the door. But I think that the fastest way to grow is to get more people, that confirmation moment that yes, this is great, because if you're going to make a membership program work, you've got to make it so that they would never dream of leaving.
That it's got to be valuable that they see and understand and receive the value that your membership is bringing. And the surest way to do that is to let people experience it. And I don't believe for a second that the people who take a free trial have any less skin in the game, if that's a word that they use. Well, if they pay, they've got skin in the game or people don't appreciate what they don't pay for. In mass that's not true. We're looking at growing the whole numbers. Now certainly your retention rate in the first 30 days would be more if people are paying to join. They've already convinced them to do it and they're going to pay and then more of them would stay than the people who come in and try, but you get far more people who would be willing to try it. So at the end of the day, you're not going to convince more people to pay you the $79, then you would convince the people who you gave the opportunity to experience the first $79 to stay.
Lawrence: Yeah. One last, I know you probably for me to jump off in a sec, Dean.
Dean: Yeah.
Lawrence: I just want one last question really.
Dean: Sure.
Lawrence: At the end of the trial, obviously we're talking about like you said, opt in trial, no credit card and they do -. And then secondly, how would you engage them in the end of that trial to see if they want to subscribe as a member?
Dean: Yeah, so part of the thing the way we do it is when people join, on their dashboard, it has a welcome tile, like on the dashboard, top left is the first thing they see is welcome to GoGoAgent and here's the fast start program. Here's the top things that are going to get them the result, here's what we recommend starting. But there's also a green button with a days remaining in trial. So it starts out. It's 30 days, 29 days, 27 days, 13 days, so that they see it and often they are self select, they go in and upgrade or just activate their membership before the end of the trial.
Lawrence: Okay.
Dean: So that's the thing. Your job is to create an amazing experience that embraces them, gets them in, gets them involved, gets them on a path of working on a project that's going to last beyond the 30 days that they're going to say, "I got to stay in here. I got to better activate my membership."
Lawrence: If they didn't upgrade before the end, would you have an automated email that would go out and if so - to try and get them to subscribe?
Dean: Yeah. Well you could ask them. You can engage with them and see what was going on.
Lawrence: Right. How has your membership been or how has your trial been? Something like that.
Dean: That's a little bit that's a, hopefully. Right, exactly. Hopefully you would be engaged with them along the line of something that you know what thing they're working on so that if you've got something that's going to be an ongoing thing that they're testing or that they're trying, you're not talking about how was your membership, you're talking about how is this project going.
Lawrence: Yeah, yes, absolutely. Okay, cool. All right.
Dean: So what's your takeaway? How did all that land? What's your summary notes of what we've talked about?
Lawrence: So firstly, thank you so much. It's very, very valuable -. So I had a little bit of a strategy in place already and I'm sort of going to have to review things, but something I didn't mention to you is obviously I'm doing the podcast and I've talked to you about that whole funnel, but then the other thing I'm doing and just starting to do is the social media short videos that James recommends. And I've just been videoing a whole load of those and sort of working through how to format those and then get those uploaded to the various platforms.
And I quite like that as a format and another traffic generation thing. So I guess I'm just a little bit like, okay, I need to make time to do that, I still need to do my podcast, I still need to do X, Y, and Z. And now I'm like, okay, I've got to potentially write this book although I could probably repurpose something I already have. I guess I just feel a little overwhelmed. I feel like the ideas are amazing but I'm sort of talking about where I'm with with the tasks, the actions. Maybe when I actually put all down on paper won't seem so bad.
Dean: Yeah. Well, I look at one thing, the great thing is you're looking for leverage, right? You're looking for leverage where you can do something once that's going to have ongoing legs. If you were to put the book together and you get an ad that you can toggle on and off as you want or need, that if you've got a way that on demand you can get opt ins for two to five dollars let's say, that you've got something that's an asset that's leverage for you. So now you know that you could turn this on for 10 days and get 100 opt ins and you've got a dialogue, a method of conversationally engaging with these people to bring them in and then you've got a 30 day experience that they go through that 20 or 25 or 30% of them will want to continue. That is a scale ready algorithm because then it's going to be self perpetuating. That's what you really want.
Lawrence: Yeah. So it's just about step-by-step carving out big books, a time to just incrementally get there, isn't it?
Dean: That's right.
Lawrence: Yeah. I just need to do that now. That's just great. And yeah, I guess my summary, I think I need to figure out this book title and then once I'll come up with a title, look at what I can already repurpose because I already have a lot of great content and I think I can repurpose some of that and mash it together, create the ad, learn how to just do the ad on something like Facebook and then test it I suppose.
Dean: That's it.
Lawrence: I guess I would have to create an opt in page as well.
Dean: No you don't even have to do that because you've got the, we use lead ads on Facebook so you don't even need a landing page.
Lawrence: Oh that's good. Okay. So I have that. And then it's just about having a basic sale sequence which treats it like as if they're knocking on my door, like you explained.
Dean: Right.
Lawrence: I think that authenticity is so important, isn't it? And just trying to start a conversation, trying to understand more about their needs and then also they would go into my podcast weekly update as well. And that's it I suppose.
Dean: Yeah. And you're already doing that, you're already doing the podcast, you're already doing all the right moves there. The fastest thing that's going to increase your reach is let's get to 2,000 subscribers and let's get to 5,000 subscribers, and then just watch how it all happens.
Lawrence: Yeah. Cool. Thank you.
Dean: Well it's been delightful.
Lawrence: Likewise. I really appreciate it. This is not what I expected.
Dean: Time flies, doesn't it? This went by fast.
Lawrence: It does. Yeah. Thank you so much Dean for taking the time. This has been so valuable to me. I really appreciate it.
Dean: We'll stay connected and reach out and let me know how it's going because I want to keep seeing how it all works out.
Lawrence: Definitely. I'll keep you posted.
Dean: Okay. Thanks Lawrence.
Lawrence: All right. Take care.
Dean: Okay.
Lawrence: Bye.
Dean: Bye. And there we have it. Another great episode. Thanks for listening in. If you want to continue the conversation, want to go deeper in how the eight profit activators can apply to your business, two things you can do, right now you can go to morecheeselesswhiskers.com and you can download a copy of the More Cheese Less Whiskers book and you can listen to the back episodes of course, if you're just listening here on iTunes. Secondly, the thing that we talk about in applying all of the eight profit activators are part of the breakthrough DNA process. And you can download a book and a scorecard and watch a video all about the eight profit activators at breakthroughdna.com and that's a great place to start the journey in applying this scientific approach to growing your business. That's really the way we think about breakthrough DNA as an operating system that you can overlay on your existing business and immediately look for insights there. So that's it for this week. Have a great week and we will be back next time with another episode of More Cheese Less Whiskers.