Finding invisible prospects is often the biggest challenge for service businesses.
Today on the More Cheese Less Whiskers podcast, We're talking with Megan Cannon, owner of Back to Balance Counseling and Consulting in the western suburbs of Chicago about an 'I want that' response in people.
Megan specializes in helping high achievers, overwhelmed parents, and anxious teenagers find relief through empirically supported treatments. Her practice is thriving with over a thousand sessions monthly, but she's looking to grow her team and reach more daytime clients.
We explored how to create a "prospect vending machine" by using targeted ways to transform invisible prospects into visible ones. Rather than just positioning to be selected through referrals or social media, we discussed proactively identifying people who need help with anxiety, OCD, and executive burnout within her five-mile radius.
The conversation revealed how offering valuable content like a book can both generate new leads and enhance referrals, turning "refer a friend" into the more powerful "give a friend" approach.
Key Takeaways:
I introduce Megan Cannon, the owner of Back to Balance Counseling and Consulting, who discusses her practice's focus on supporting high achievers, overwhelmed parents, and anxious teenagers in the western suburbs of Chicago.
Megan emphasizes the benefits of in-person therapy sessions and shares her plans to expand her team to meet growing client demand, highlighting the need for more qualified clinicians.
We delve into strategies for attracting daytime therapy clients, particularly focusing on college students, stay-at-home parents, and remote workers. We also address the importance of maintaining a work-life balance for therapists.
Megan discusses the role of indirect referrals in connecting therapists with potential clients and explains her approach to helping clients change their relationship with anxiety.
We explore innovative clinic growth strategies, including the use of social media ads and resources like an anxiety solution book to turn invisible prospects into visible ones.
The episode highlights the effectiveness of using books as lead generation tools, focusing on creating captivating titles and covers to attract potential clients.
Megan shares her experiences with email engagement to nurture relationships with potential clients, demonstrating how to maintain a supportive presence for individuals seeking help now or in the future.
Transcript - More Cheese Less Whiskers 261
Dean: Hi, how are you?
Megan: I'm good. How are you?
Dean: Good, is it Megan or Megan? How do you say your?
Megan: Megan.
Dean: Megan Perfect, okay, well, I am excited about this. I've been we've communicated before by email, so, yeah, I'm interested to hear the whole story, so thanks for coming on yeah thanks for having me. So if you've listened to the podcast you know this is the whole thing. We got an hour and we start from the beginning and we go as far as we can with what's going on. So maybe you could start it out and kind of introduce yourself and what you're doing, what you're up to, what you're hoping we can work on.
Megan: Sure, so my name is Megan Cannon. I'm the owner of Back to Balance Counseling and Consulting. We're located in the western suburbs of Chicago, so one of our locations is in a very affluent area in the western suburbs. So we specialize in helping high achievers, overwhelmed parents, anxious teenagers who are trying to find, you know, balance, confidence in their life. And we specialize in trying to find, you know, balance, confidence in their life. And we specialize in trying to help them find relief. You know, as quickly as possible. There is, you know, anxiety, OCD, perfectionism, executive burnout. You know, postpartum struggles.
You know, our team is trained in empirically supported treatments and we're always here and ready to help.
Dean: That's great. Now do you work with people in person or by Zoom, or we do both. You do both. Your primary focus is bringing people into. You have physical premises that you bring people to. What's the breakdown of the percentage kind of thing of people that come in person versus come by Zoom or on the telephone?
Megan: Yeah, I would say 95% want to come in person.
Dean: Okay, perfect.
Megan: Yeah, that's something that's established during the intake call. One of the first questions that our leads will say is it's not telehealth, is it?
Dean: Right, exactly, they want to come see somebody. Okay, this is great. It's not telehealth, is it Right? Exactly, they want to come see somebody. Yes, this is great. So that really makes it kind of. You know, you've got a closed kind of system. How far, kind of like a five mile radius, is that the ideal For you? How far do people travel If we were to take all of your existing? Do you call them patients or clients or what?
Megan: Yeah, we call them clients.
Dean: Clients. So if you took your existing clients and plotted them on a map, how far kind of flung are they?
Megan: I would say the vast majority would be within three to five miles of our locations.
Dean: That's fantastic.
Megan: Yeah, what's the?
Dean: population within that five mile bubble there.
Megan: Like how would I describe them?
Dean: No well, just the volume, the number. It's pretty densely urban or densely suburban populated, right.
Megan: Yes.
Dean: And so if we know that, you know I always love to take and think about creating a prospect vending machine. That's the main thing that you want. Right is to generate more clients.
Megan: Yeah, especially ones that can come in during the day.
Dean: I got it Okay. How much excess capacity do you think you have? Like if, what, could you? How much capacity do you have, you know, given your existing infrastructure kind of thing? How many patients or clients are we looking to add?
Megan: So I think there's a couple of components to that right, because I'm still in the process of growing my team, you know. So I would still like to be able to hire probably five you know five more full-time clinicians. I also have the office space currently to support that. I would like to be able to maximize, you know, our office space, so we do have room to to grow. You know, but cause I'm trying to do the math like real quick like you know, on a on any given month, you know we're running more than a thousand sessions.
Dean: That's fantastic Good for you.
Megan: And there's room to grow in that.
Dean: So if we look at and I love that, you know that if we were to overlay of a before unit during unit after unit on your business, if we were to say, of all of the people that you've helped in the last 12 months, how much of the sessions let's call it, because that would be a great way to find somebody who's an active, active client is how many of the sessions are with people who are already clients and continuing to come back or are referred by somebody who's an existing patient versus new patients that you found in the before unit in the last 12 months.
Megan: Sure. So I would say, and again, it's likely dependent upon whether or not we have a new team member.
Dean: If we have a new team member.
Megan: I'm pushing really hard to get them as many new leads as possible. Right now, we're in this spot of I've been searching for the latest team member for quite a few months now. I haven't found it. So we're in this spot right now where not many of us really have many openings, as is so we are, you know, currently. You know, on a given week, we might only have two brand new clients. If we had more clinicians on our team, we would potentially have an opportunity to have, you know, 20, 30 new clients in a week, which is what I'm trying to get us to.
Dean: Yeah, perfect. And is it difficult to find people to work with you, I mean in terms of getting new? Do you call them counselors? Is that? Your yeah, so is it difficult to find counselors.
Megan: It is what ones that you know have the appropriate soft skills and knowledge to be able to be in front of a person for an hour at a time and that have, you know, the clinical foundation and clinical skillset to be able to navigate that you know in a way that matches, you know, our brand and our reputation within the community. That has been challenging.
Dean: Because you're not hiring like new people, right, like you're hiring people with some proven track record experience. So if we were to look at your before unit and say what's the most predictable thing that you do to generate new clients, have you got something that you know? We can just run this, turn this on and it works just run this, turn this on and it works Well.
Megan: I guess, if we look at where most of it's coming from, you know, most of it is coming from, you know, probably a combination of four things people naturally finding our website. Referrals from current or past clients. Social media, as well as our referral partners.
Dean: And you're saying like formal referral partners would be other professionals that are referring.
Megan: Yes, it could be other people in our field or other people that are in, I guess, just what I call adjacent fields, who might be people that need help.
Dean: Who would be the best kind of referral partners in the fourth category there, right yeah?
Megan: yeah, probably doctors and psychiatrists.
Dean: Got it. I'm very curious about the referrals. I read when you filled out your scorecard you were mentioning about the referrals from patients, like you kind of mentioned, that you're their best kept secret kind of thing. That people are not publicizing it on social media or they're not inclined likely to talk about it, but they probably, you know, is that a viable? Is that a viable avenue that people refer somebody in confidence or their closest friend or their inner circle, type of things? You know you should talk to Megan or you know?
Megan: Yeah, because we'll pull that information during an intake call. Yes, you know, we'll find out. You know who referred you and I have a phenomenal admin team, you know, and they'll push a little bit further.
Dean: Like oh who specifically you know referred you.
Megan: And then and we do like we'll get, we'll get a lot from that. You know we're very fortunate in certain clinicians on the team, they'll create a lot of self-generated some more so than others, you know. And then some people might say on a call oh, my neighbor's son sees this person and it sounds like that person could be a good fit for my daughter. That's why I'm calling. You know that.
Dean: Perfect, and that's probably a lot of it right is loved ones, referring to other people who are trying to get help for a loved one. Yes, more than it's the direct person. Yes, you know what I mean. Yeah, so somebody, one mother telling another mother, rather than one actual client telling another client, I get it, but it's once removed from the thing. That's a very interesting point.
One of the things that I noticed of the four that you mentioned, they're all sort of, you know, profit activator. Number one in the before is to select a single target market and that's a proactive. You know, the distinction is that you're doing the selecting rather than positioning to be selected and a lot of these things like social media, the organic stuff, is all sort of doing the things, putting yourself out there so that you potentially, can be selected by people when they find you right. So if I were to add this proactive mix to it, to say, if we could pick the specific types of people that you can help, what would be kind of the most right in your competency there, right at the things, that that would be your dream client right, yeah, yeah, and this I always love this question because I do feel like this daytime component of it makes it a little tricky.
Megan: The world of therapy is largely a 4 pm or later field.
Dean: Yeah, after work or early, yes, and.
Megan: I do know that. You know there is a need, obviously, and there are people that can come during the day and I care, you know, like, very like, deeply and passionately about my team and the people that work here and I want to make sure that they don't have to work a bunch of nights for the rest of their life, right? So we're really trying to figure out how can we acquire more of these, these daytime leads, so they can have more balance in their lives, you know.
I need to see somebody working four evenings a week. They're great at their job. We can't reach these daytime people as much as we would like, so to answer your question, I wish I knew a little bit more of like what is the makeup of a daytime person? Right, it could be a college student, could be somebody that's working from home. It could be a stay at home mom. It could be somebody that's in a C-suite position that's able to sign on during their lunch hour. People with OCD that's a specialized niche that we have, so those people are more likely to bend their schedule to accommodate ours if that's when we're available. Does that answer your question?
Dean: It's getting there. I mean, you're kind of you know you're thinking about the mechanism, kind of you know the daytime appointment is really kind of you know the daytime appointment is really. I think what I was asking was the need or the outcome that people come to you to seek, you know. Yeah, like if you were to say what, regardless of what time of day.
Megan: Yeah.
Dean: But if we do take moms, if we do take, you know, I imagine, if you take that category of moms with kids in school or stay-at-home moms, or there's so many people who work at home, you know there's a lot of that. So I think overlaying would be a good thing. But what I'm very curious about is what would be the trigger that causes somebody to seek you out. Like what is the outcomes that you're most able to help people achieve? You know your dream clients to work with, kind of thing.
Megan: Sure. So I would say many of us on the team right. Our goal is to work with individuals on changing the relationship that they have with their anxiety. Often people think right, I have anxiety, I just want to get rid of it. Somebody tell me how to get rid of it. Give me a pill so I can get rid of it. So part of our approach is really educating that client to come to the point of understanding that they can't get rid of it, but we're going to help them change their relationship with it, and in doing so, we're going to work with the client to identify, all right, what are the things that are actually important to you in your life.
What is it that you value? And we have to begin to work to make sure that the behaviors that you're choosing to engage in every day are actually aligned with your values. Are they misaligned, and do we have this incongruency between what you actually want and value in life?
and what you behaviorally, you know so. So I think that people come to us. I know our approach is slightly different because we're very like nitty gritty and hands on and we'll be writing all and you know really in it. You know with our clients and we're able to present it to them in that different way to them in that different way.
Dean: How long is a typical engagement with you Like? If you get a new client that you start to work with, how long do they typically stay and what's your pricing model and what's the value of a new patient or a new client you get?
Megan: So the length that somebody stays in treatment there is no, it's so different. You know there could be people that are here for three months. There could be people that are here for five years. There could be people that go to therapy for their entire life. You know so we, you know we do accept. You know insurance and we're all. You know we have a self pay model as well. You know each session is paid for as the client, you know, comes, but the length of therapy is so wildly dependent on the individual, you know and their circumstances, their presentation when they come in.
Dean: But it's also knowable from your last 12 months, like it's also. I know you can't it's hard to say predict what is going to happen with a new patient that comes in, but it's also equally easy to see what did happen with the current roster, right, if you look at it.
Megan: Yeah, so to answer that question, every member of our team has an 85% or better retention rate, and I consider retained 12 or more sessions.
Dean: Okay, perfect, yeah, and that per session. Or do you offer block type things, or is it? How do you charge like a per session?
Megan: A fee per session that's charged.
Dean: Okay, great. So if we look at it that, do you if we were able to create a client vending machine for you and say I want an OCD patient who wants to come at 10 am or between you know, during the day between 10 and 3, if that's the case, if you could think that, how much would you cheerfully pay to push the button? You know, if you think about a vending machine, we put the glass and you see an OCD patient up there in 1A. Go over and we see that 1A. If you push that button they're going to pop out and be a client for you. How much would you cheerfully pay to push that button?
Megan: Yeah, so you're talking.
Dean: So per transaction, yeah, I think if you look at it that way, right like you look at, the danger sometimes with the pricing models of professional service is that they base it on overhead and the profit margin, like whatever the labor is, but there's not often a cost of acquisition built into the pricing structure, because all of these things you don't have an actual per se cost of acquisition when you're doing the organic things or referrals or social media or professional referrals, because not only is it not standard, it's forbidden to pay for referral right, so you can't have a cost of a referred thing, so it's all just your cost of delivering. Allow you, or do you have a mindset around that of what you could afford to spend for acquiring new people?
Megan: Yeah, I would probably spend. And again, if I'm off, you know, tell me, because I think the way you're phrasing the question is interesting. I never thought about it that way, but I'm thinking, all right, would I pay a hundred bucks for a token to go into that? Yeah, I would.
Dean: Right. And so a good way to think about that is you know, a lot of times people who are starting into running advertising or running marketing to acquire new clients are really they're taking. You know, the distinction that I make is between a slot machine and a vending machine, and a lot of times people put money in the slot machine of, oh, you got to do YouTube videos or you got to do social media, or you got to put in the money and you pull the lever and hope for something to come out Right. And the distinction between a vending machine, of course, is that you put the money in and you get exactly what you were looking for, right, sure, yeah. And so I want another way of kind of approaching that number is, if a let's say that a clinic or some insurance company or some things, that we want your clinic to be the official, you know we're going to send you all of our OCD patients, our clients or all of our insert the thing there and we imagine that we're going to be able to send you, you know, 100 clients over the next 12 months. Let's say, and?
But would you know, if you think about it like that, would you be if it were allowable to offer a discounted service or a bulk pricing model, or because of the certainty, like you know, you're going to get these, these patients. It's a good way to kind of wrap your mind around it. If the referral fees were allowed, would you be willing to pay for a? Because often when you say the $100 token or whatever is kind of a, there's still this tinge of uncertainty around it, like you can see that you can't. You're not wrapping your mind around like the certainty of we're going to send you a hundred, but instead of a hundred percent of the pricing we're going to need you to offer it for 90% of the pricing, or 80% of the pricing or whatever. Which room would you have in your margin or would you be willing to accommodate?
Megan: So are you saying lowering the cost of service to?
Dean: I'm saying if you're, yeah, like not to, as a percentage of the service. If you were saying, like, if I'm able to, if they've removed the law that said you can't get referral fees and I'm a clinic and we need somebody to specifically work with people with OCD, that's outside of our purview or whatever, so we're going to send them to you seamlessly. You're going to get a monopoly on all of our OCD business. But we'd like a 10% referral or a 20% referral, or where would you kind of be able to draw that line? What would that look like? And it just as a thought exercise to help you kind of think it through.
Megan: you know, yeah, I would probably say, I would probably say 8%.
Dean: Okay.
Megan: Yeah, a little less than 10. Okay, I'm going to turn my lamp on here because we have some storms coming in. It's getting a little dark.
Dean: Okay, no problem, there we go, okay, okay. So 8% of the the value right now. This is where the question thing then becomes. The reason that you're willing to spend the 8% is that it's after you get the a hundred percent, right? So you're going to get the client for $100 and you're going to send $8 back to the referent, right? So that kind of is easy to wrap your mind around. Now what I need to get you thinking of is how can we proactively, as a capital investment, make that investment into identifying people who have exactly the need that we're talking about here, right, right? Well, if we were to say, in this five mile bubble of your ideal geography, what would be the top, what would be the top things? That, if we were to isolate the reasons people come to you for counseling, what would be the most common or the ones with the most need?
Megan: So that would be anything under the anxiety umbrella Right. So we have anxiety, social anxiety, phobias, OCD. Panic yeah panic, yeah, all of that. Another one would be teens, anxious teens, perfectionistic teens, high achieving teens and adults executive burnout.
Dean: Executive burnout okay.
Megan: Yeah, executive burnout, that would be a big one, postpartum concerns and OCD.
Dean: I was going to say the same thing. I was wondering because? Wondering because if thinking about your daytime, that could be it right. Postpartum is postpartum, anything parenting related right yeah, and then I don't remember.
Megan: If I said, oh yeah, the OCD would fall under the anxiety umbrella uh-huh, I didn't hear anything about like relationship or marriage counseling type stuff. We don't provide that.
Dean: You don't provide that. Okay, did you say ADHD?
Megan: I did not say that.
Dean: Do you do that or no?
Megan: It's one of those.
It's one of those things that seems to not be anybody's favorite thing, at least on our team, right, because so much of it it's from our experience, you know is kind of contingent upon behavioral change for the individual client is kind of contingent upon behavioral change for the individual client, really kind of needing to have a conversation with their prescriber and really figure out do we need to have medication added into this mix? So sometimes I feel like we can only go as far as we can go, so it's not something that we advertise as being a specialty of ours, but is everybody on the team well-equipped to deal with that? Absolutely.
Dean: So with the parenting, the relationship stuff you not like, with specific issues, but not with the like family counseling or dynamic, the relationship dynamics.
Megan: So we don't do like couples counseling family counseling.
Dean: Okay, perfect, so that's so. The postpartum is really like something that is different around that, or stress from parenting.
Megan: Yeah. But I think on the flip side of like, like the postpartum one is like we, we equally see a ton of really stressed out dads, you know, that are like the sole breadwinner and like we're in an affluent area.
Dean: you, you know there's like the weight of the world on them you know like that that's a big population that we serve as well yeah, if you think about that right like, so the I mean, you know, I think about the that could be because these are each of audiences right Like, if you think about the high performance executive who's under a lot of pressure and under stress and that kind of thing I think you look at and that's been popularized too. I mean you think about the Sopranos Tony Soprano, you know, went to see the counselor or, in billions, wendy Rhodes they go and do those kinds of things. Is that the kind of thing that some of your counselors would offer, like high performance, like proactive, like not solve a problem but be better?
Megan: Yes, exactly, Many of my clients have referred to me as Wendy Rhodes.
Dean: They're like okay, good, so that I would lean into that in a way, right Like. So the good news is, if we think about and isolate these as the as the potential target audiences, the thing about it is that you have invisible prospects, meaning you can't. It's not like you're targeting chiropractors or you're targeting somebody who's out there and you know you can't tell who's walking around with anxiety. There's not a list of those people, right, and so one of the things that you can, though, is you can get in the neighborhood where they are. In terms of this, social media is the perfect thing, like Facebook and Instagram are the people you know, are the ways to reach just people in that five mile radius, and so, and you can target them by age, by you know, by demographics, whatever would be like you could have a different thing, for you know 40 plus men as a you know, as a thing, and just know that, by virtue of being in a high income area, that many of the men are going to be in that area, right? So one of the things that I always recommend is to start the conversation where they are, and so we look at like if we take anxiety as an example. We look at like if we take anxiety as an example, and that would that applies across the board, to any, all ages and any male or female, right, it's a good, easy one. But if you were to have a, a book that was offering kind of the first step of this, like, so we've done.
I work with a podiatrist in Milwaukee and we created five books that are about the five big things, the reasons somebody would come to a podiatrist. So the first one we did was the plantar fasciitis solution, and so we ran ads five miles around his clinic offering the book the Plantar Fasciitis Solution. So who's going to download that if it's not somebody who is suffering with plantar fasciitis or is sitting beside someone who's suffering with plantar fasciitis, right? So I would look at that same thing here of what would be the title of a book that somebody with anxiety would definitely want to have in their collection.
You know, when you think about this as a way of starting the conversation, right, even if it was of starting the conversation right, even if it was stop your panic attacks or stop anxiety or ending anxiety or the anxiety solution or anything that offers hope and information that somebody could easily accept before they would ever look proactively to go out and search Google for help or to consider it. They're just, you know, and I've got a couple of friends that go through and have panic attacks and they don't know when they're coming on or how, but they haven't done counseling or they haven't done anything about it. But if they saw an ad or saw a book, you don't even think about them as ads, we just think about them as you saw something coming through your newsfeed that offers a solution for this. That is the fastest and easiest way to now get a visible prospect. You've turned an invisible prospect into visible because they're leaning forward right.
Megan: Yeah.
Dean: Yeah, yeah. So you're starting to think that it would be a high probability that somebody who's interested in a book on stop your anxiety would be the right person.
Megan: Yep Motivated.
Dean: Yeah, for you, exactly.
So now you're communicating I love to you know, I think you have so much more opportunity by email and when you have a visible prospect to move people in a direction of getting help, whether it's in the next 100 hours, maybe they're like sick of it, they've had this, they want to do something and get rid of it right now, but maybe it takes 100 days that maybe you know 60 days from now they have another panic attack and that triggers them over the edge and they're going to remember.
Man, I need to reach out to Megan, you know, or maybe it's a hundred weeks, but whatever it is, the odds are that over the next 100 weeks, if we got a hundred people to download a book on stopping anxiety and we got those, for, let's say, we invested $500 to get a hundred people to download a book like that, sure, and then we just nurtured a relationship with them that we've been top of mind. You know we're the one. Now they know that you exist. You know they exist. You're very helpful and engaging and you're sharing stories of you know, even redacted, but stories that are of people who have had this experience or outcome. You know, I think there's some magic to that. You know that would be a very high probability pond to fish in, you know.
Megan: So with the example of the podiatrist that you gave, so then the podiatrist becomes an author.
Dean: Yes, and that's something, and the great news is that you know they're not big books. It's like a 50-page book about a very specific topic right. And so we did the plantar fasciitis solution, we did the toe fungus solution.
Achilles heel you know, and I forget what the fifth is. But there's, you know the big five reasons why somebody would come to a podiatrist right. So imagine that you look at the you know OCD. If somebody like grasping, they see it more than the person more likely that they will seek out to intervene and get help for yeah for them, then they would do it themselves, you know.
Megan: Yeah, because they're tired of dealing with it too.
Dean: Right, exactly, and so I think that's a big. I think that's a big thing, you know, of being able, especially if you pick the avenues, like if that's the entry point into something like that was what I said about the podiatrist was, you know, the number one reason people come to plantar fasciitis is the initial thing, right? So that's why we did that book first yeah, and so I look at that as you know, filling those things, filling those things out as a, you know, as a great way to look at it.
Megan: Yeah, because I'm thinking too, if you do that, then you end up with, you know, kind of some evergreen content as well.
Dean: That's the whole point. That's exactly right. Right that you're building this out, you want to think about it, that you are building, you know, a hundred week kind of nurturing system that the you know I, everything I do, is kind of based on some research and my own personal research that finds that the original study found that just over 50% of people who inquire about anything will buy what they've inquired about within 18 months.
Megan: Okay.
Dean: But only 15% of them will do it in the first 90 days. So 85% of the value of generating inquiries about some are generating leads in 90 days or more. So I think about it as stocking your pond right, like you just get, if we're trying to find people who have anxiety and want help with it, if we could build a list of people who self-identify as interested in anxiety resolution, right, and we stock that pond with a hundred of those people, or a thousand of those people, whatever it is, however many there are in the five mile bubble. We just need to get you five mile famous for that particular, that particular thing.
Megan: Yeah, cause that's what I'm after. I'm after world domination, and in five miles that's right?
Dean: Well, tell me about your clinic goals too, though. Is that are you, do you have goals to replicate that in other five mile bubbles? Are you building this as a model that you can duplicate, or are you just focused and you only want to stay in the western suburbs?
Megan: We also have another location. It's in a very much rural, so I am trying to duplicate what we have in the western burbs out there as well, and obviously a lot of things are very different, if not opposite, you know, because we're dealing with totally different demographics, but I know that there's such a significant need for the service in the more rural areas because there's just such fewer options. So to answer your question, like yes, I am trying to duplicate it in our second location as well, I don't see myself doing more beyond that, yeah.
You know, because I still like doing the client work, you know myself, and it just there's only so many hours in a day. You know, I get it. Yeah, yeah, oh, that's awesome.
Dean: Yeah, that's exciting. I love to see somebody so focused. You know. It's such a nice thing to be so clear of what you want to do and that ultimately, you're helping people you know, and that's the greatest thing, yeah, so people you know and that's the greatest thing. So I look at that, that would be the playbook that I would recommend for you is, you know, looking at that, like, I think that's the easiest thing would be to just become have you ever done any Facebook ads? Or done you have? So?
and what's your experience or what do you advertise?
Megan: So, if I'm going to be fully honest, do I know how to create them properly and optimize them properly? No, I try my best.
Dean: Okay.
Megan: You know, but overall it's been a good experience. I've never written a book, though Deans Right, right right, yeah, so you go.
Dean: So I own a company called 90 Minute Books. Okay, that's exactly what, right. Right, write a thing. What I realized in this thing that books are the number one thing that can get that generate leads. Right, it's the easiest way. Like that, the plantar fasciitis thing gets leads. It's so, it's easy, right, and you get exactly what you're looking for leads. It's so, it's easy, right, and you get exactly what you're looking for.
But what I discovered in this process is that people don't know or care whether the book is 50 pages or 250 pages when you're running an ad for it. They don't care how long it took you to write it or how carefully you slaved over the. You know the third sentence of chapter four, right, and you got it just right. Nobody cares about that. The reality is people are not generally reading books anyway. The most important thing is that it's it's conditioned as a thing that when I read, there was an article in the New York Times about the state of readership and what was fascinating this is when the Kindle and Kobo data was available, so they could see what's actually happening when people buy books. So I may be off by a couple of percent, but directionally. We're in the right ballpark that 58% of the people who buy a book never open it.
Megan: I believe I'm surprised it's not higher.
Dean: Exactly, and I thought that's amazing, right, but I say that and it sounds high to people. But then every time I'm in a group of people, like speaking in the audience, I'll say has anybody ever bought a book and not opened it? And every single person has a whole stack of books they bought and never opened. And what I realized in that is that we're not actually buying books to read right now, we're buying books for future. Megan that present Megan is co-opting.
She's getting the squirts of dopamine for having accomplishment, that you did something without having to do anything. That's why webinars don't perform as well as books on a lead generation thing, because I don't have time to watch a webinar right now, right. But if I can get the squirt of dopamine by getting the book for just leaving my name and my email address, that's a good win. And I don't even have to type in my name and email because Facebook has done it for me. I just push the button and say you're offering, you're sending this info, yes, and so that's, it's the biggest win, right? So what I realized does matter is that you've got to have a title that, as soon as your ideal audience sees it, they say that's the book for me, right?
Yes that's key Got to have the book and it doesn't matter if it's 50 pages. I look at that as what's a minimum viable book. You know is the thing it looks. It's a on that Facebook ads. We're doing ebooks, digital PDFs anyway, but we also have physical copies of them which are nice looking. You know paperback books. So that's what you have to have and you have to have a way for them to get it. That are the only three things that matter. So that's why I've focused on helping people, you know, write these kinds of books, and we do it all by interview process. Right, you already know all the info. It's all in your head, but we've just figured out the fastest bandwidth way to get it from your head into a digital format. Is for your mouth. Is you talking about it?
yeah, so we can do it in 90 minutes. We set up a process to kind of do the outline, get the chapter titles and the talking points, and then set up the interview and we treat it like a radio show, like you're a guest on a radio show and everybody in the audience is your ideal client, and we just go through prompting through the whole outline and at the end we end up with enough content to create the, the book, and it works magically. Right, it's very fast.
Megan: Yeah.
Dean: Yeah, so that's a. That's the thing that I would recommend for you is to start stocking your pond with people who reach each of those things. So if it were anxiety as one level of the overriding thing, or OCD or postpartum or you know whatever the words like, part of the thing of picking the book titles is recognizing what would be, what would a you know the direct user have, or what would be the you know the loved one or the parent, what would they respond to of this, you know?
Megan: Yeah, we have to stop the scroll.
Dean: That's exactly it Right.
That's exactly what it is. That's why the format of it is so. We just put the big, you know, we put, we use all the visual anchors of the visual scroll is literally the cover of a book, a 3d book cover, that and we use nice easy to read graphics with a title that is compelling, right? No, immediately, oh, that's because that's the first thing that's going to stop. Then they'll look above to read the caption. They're not starting with the caption, they're starting with the image. Then they read the caption. We just use very few words and the button says download. And that's the best way I've seen it. We have a brain fog book that we're getting leads for 65 cents per week.
I mean it's crazy, but it's such a prevalent thing among 30 plus women, that's who we're talking about.
Megan: Yeah, I guess. How do you know when you need to move on from a strategy, is it just? You know you monitor performance and as soon as something just isn't giving you what you want, you kind of got to go back to the think tank.
Dean: I think I use I always I'm a hundred percent results-based right. So I always look at is it working? And so I look at. The core thing is that the only purpose of the ad for me in most of the cases is to identify an invisible prospect. So get somebody to leave their name and their email address. And so, to the extent that it's not doing that, it's not like we only will test. We'll do a hundred dollar test for $20 a day for five days, a hundred hours. We basically will do that test, a hundred hours, a hundred dollars, and that that's going to get the different time.
You know frequencies that people in your five mile bubble are logging on in your target audience and I'm looking to see. I'm only looking for the winners, right, like you can't hide a winner. It's going to, it's going to be, it's going to work in the first hundred dollars. It's not, and that's so you're either. The greatest thing is that we're, you know, we're looking, you know beyond. We can eliminate an ad if it doesn't work or if nobody responds or the leads are too expensive. Then we move on. Yeah, it's not going to get better typically, but if it's winning in the first hundred dollars, that's typically going to continue to win, you know, over the period of time. And if there, if it's kind of middling, then you can kind of evaluate and look and say how can we make some improvement in it. But that's the general idea, you know, is that I look at that and you can test to see which ones are the best. You know, like I would start out. You could even start out with doing just a TED talk type thing, right, if you just did a 10 minute thing about just the talking points, like basically the outline of feature article about the kind of thing, and you can have the title and the cover and the and see, see whether people are attracted to that message. Even before you go through the process of writing the whole book, you might just record and transcribe a listicle kind of outline of your stuff or suggestions or insights around that thing, because the only thing we're really interested in seeing is are people attracted to? Can you get people with anxiety to raise their hand and tell you they've got anxiety right? Right, and that was an interesting. I had an interesting.
There's a guy in Toronto that came to my Breakthrough Blueprint event before Christmas there and he was. It was very interesting things. Does energy work Like? That's primarily his thing and he was. He was interested. We did a thing on the joy of anxiety and his model was that he likes. His order of things that he talks about is you know, energy leads to thoughts, leads to actions, leads to outcomes right that? So when you're promising, like you stop your anxiety is like treating the symptom of the thing, which is a great way and we had the conversation about that's a great way to start the conversation, you know. But going backwards is he looks at it that you know this the conversation of is the glass half full or half empty? He looks at the half empty glass as the opportunity to experience joy that you got, that you could fill this and you're going to feel the joy of it. So it's enough of a counterintuitive thing that it would, you know, get people's attention right, like joy of anxiety. What's this about?
You know, so it gets you the same outcome you know gets you in conversation with somebody who is self-identified as interested in some way about anxiety.
Megan: Yeah, that's a great idea that he came up with. It's a very good idea.
Dean: So I think that is a.
I think that's would be like the easiest next step and, by the way, when you have a book like that's going to be able to increase the referrals that you get, because now you're able to say to people hey, just a quick note in case you hear someone talking about anxiety.
I just finished a new book called Stop your Anxiety. If you hear anybody talking about it or any loved ones that are going through it, give me a call or text me and I'll get you a copy of the book to give them, or text me and I'll get you a copy of the book to give them. And that is a great way to get people rather than them. A lot of times when people think about driving referrals, the instruction to people is you know, don't keep us a secret, like, tell your friends to call us or we're more than happy to help your friends, but it's positioning it as them doing something for you. And the real magic of getting and orchestrating referrals is to position it as something that's going to make them look good, that they're going to get the status and the good feeling of adding value for someone they love as a thoughtful person who got this for them.
Megan: Yeah Right Yep.
Dean: So give a friend is much better than refer a friend, right? So anytime you can kind of lean into that environment. And then, of course, the instruction is they're going to call you or text you, and now you're in conversation. Well, tell me about your friend. Would you like me to send the book to them, or I can send it to you. Would you like the three way introduce us how you know, how can we get Linda the help that she needs? Because now you're working together, because you both want the best outcome for Linda.
Megan: Yeah, I like that idea of give a friend rather than refer a friend. I like that. I haven't thought about it that way before.
Dean: Yeah.
Megan: Yeah, you know your stuff, dean.
Dean: Oh, my Well, do you want to? I'd love to hear you kind of unpack your thoughts or what we. What do you call it clinically? The wrap up or the?
Megan: Oh yeah, the recap here. What did you hear today, megan? Yeah, what's the takeaway for the day? What's your?
Dean: golden nugget. That's what I say to my clients. What's?
Megan: your golden nugget from the day it's. I really like the idea right of being able to have the right tagline right to stop the scroll. I'm going to have to give that quite a bit of thought and not every single bad idea that I have, and hopefully one star, you know, comes out of that. But I think also, like giving right, you got to give you know whether it's the book right or whatever it is you know, to kind of establish that sense of I guess it's a combination of credibility but also being able to normalize the experience for the client, like hey, you're not the only one that's dealing with this so much, so there's an entire book you know, that's exactly right yeah.
It's being pushed out there, and the good news is that there's something we can do about it.
Dean: Yes.
Megan: You know and I I know that I can do this. I just have to structure my you know, day, weeks, months to push this and make this become a top priority, to get this done. I know that I can do it right and, talking it through with you, it seems tangible, yeah, and it would have so many.
Dean: I mean, having the book as a resource has so many great outcomes. Like it gives people a frame, like you must have a framework for it, an approach, an underlying kind of way that you approach anxiety, and so it's a nice way to kind of amplify the thing that you're doing in the sessions, right, like they're able to come to it with this understanding or they're able to go a little deeper. And it also helps you give a contextual frame to the ongoing, the nurturing content that you're.
Megan: Yeah, and many of my clients over the years have asked me to write a book and it would be cool to be like hey, we have this little thing that I can now, you know, now give to you. You know, that would be an added benefit too.
Dean: Yeah, Love it. Yeah, I love it, any last questions or anything that was unclear.
Megan: No, I don't think so it was. I appreciate you and your time. You know you're easy to talk to and I know what I have to do. I just have to do it.
Dean: Awesome. Okay, well, we can help you whenever you're ready All right, thank you.
Megan: Okay, I appreciate that, thanks, thanks.
Dean: Bye.
Megan: Bye.