Transcription
This simple five-step process is exactly how I got my first business to a million bucks a year, even with no sales experience whatsoever. The real secret is learning how to; if you do it, it makes reaching that million-dollar-a-year level way easier. And I'm living proof.
My first couple businesses did so poorly that I had to shut them down. But after I learned this simple process, I not only reached the million-dollar-a-year mark once, but I did it five straight times with five different businesses. And today, I'm now running a business worth over $300 million using the same exact five-step process. And in this video, I'm going to break down that process for you step by step. You're going to learn why the secret to massive revenue isn't getting more customers, the two things that you need to be selling if you want to reach a million dollars a year, and the simple script that I use to reach a million dollars a year when I was 24 and why today it makes me over 40 million bucks a year.
And speaking of that $300 million-a-year business that I'm running right now, it's called Sam Cart. And it's actually an e-commerce platform that I built for myself back in 2014. And today, it's used by some of the top brands, influencers, and creators on the internet because it's the easiest and most powerful platform for increasing your revenue. Let's get right into it.
Step number one here is really understanding where profits actually come from. You see, when we dive into the Sam Cart numbers—this is everyone using this software up on my screen, over 20,000 businesses—when you look at that top upper echelon, the top 1% of 1% of Sam Cart sellers, they actually make the majority of their money from repeat purchases, meaning they make most of their money from selling their current customers other things. And when I mean they make a lot, it's over 80 to 90% of their revenue as a business comes from customers that have already bought something from them in the past.
When you look at the people at the bottom of the Sam Cart seller list, these are folks kind of stuck at that four, five, six-figure mark per year. They make over 80% of their money from brand new customers, which basically means they're just getting new customers in the door and they're never selling them anything else. Either because they don't know how or they don't have anything else to sell them. And the example here is you look at any of the biggest businesses in the world, the Fortune 500 companies. Most of them do this same exact thing. Imagine the company Apple. This phone that I'm holding, this is the 16th iPhone that I've bought. I've bought every single one they've ever come out with. I'm now looking at an Apple computer over here. I probably have five different iPads in my house. And that's not the probably 25 iPads I bought over the last decade. Apple makes their money by selling somebody one of their products once. Then they fall in love with the brand. They fall in love with the products, and they buy tons of other stuff leading to 100, 200, 300 times more revenue from just one buyer. That is where your profits come from as a business. It does not come from getting new customers in the door as fast as possible and only thinking about how many more ads do I need to run, how many more social media posts do I need to make, how many more events do I need to go to to get more customers in the door. You need to be thinking not just about getting new customers in the door, cuz obviously that's a good thing, but it doesn't matter; that will never solve any problems if you don't also think how do I get my customers to become more valuable over time.
Step number two is figuring out, okay, if you're going to sell those customers more things over time, what is that next problem that you're going to solve for them? Because every product that all of us sell, whether it's a one-on-one service, a physical product like an iPhone, or a digital product like an online course, or some kind of coaching program, you're solving a problem. And so, the main problem that you have to figure out is what is the next problem that you're going to solve for that customer. And so, for me, when I think of these kind of—I call them back-end offers or upsells that you're going to sell your current customers—if you're trying to come up with what that next thing for you to sell is, they usually fall into three buckets. Number one, you want to solve the problem that you're already solving more often. Number two, you want to solve it faster and easier. And number three, you want to solve a different problem.
So, if we break this down into a couple examples, imagine you're running a lawn care business. Well, you're going to service somebody once a month. Well, if you want to serve them more often or solve that problem more often, just start offering to mow their lawn every single week instead of once a month. That right there 4xes your business for every customer you get to say yes to that. Or you could solve another problem, and you could offer them irrigation, set up sprinklers for them, set up timers, do everything it takes to actually water their lawn, not just mow it. That's solving a separate problem. If you're running a dance school, like my wife and mother-in-law run a local dance school, the way that we almost 10xed the revenue of that businesses or that business was they sell ballet classes and their average customer was taking one class a week. So we now offer them more than one class a week, and we actually do a dedicated push to get customers to come to more than one class per week. We offer more advanced classes and we offer adult classes. So that's an example of solving the main problem more often. A student taking one class a week is now taking two. We can solve it faster and easier for them. Or we can solve another problem, which is where we now offer all the parents adult classes, solving a different problem than the child classes that they offer as the core part of the dance studio.
If you're selling a digital product like a course, imagine you're selling a golf course. You could create a 2.0 version of that course. You could offer one-on-one coaching, or you could create an iPhone app that tracks all their scores when they're on the course. If you're selling an e-commerce software like we sell with Sam Cart, you could offer a pro version. You could offer to solve that that problem more often by instead of offering just monthly, you could try to upgrade everybody to a yearly plan or an every-two-years plan to get them to pay upfront, funding your marketing as a business. You could get them to upgrade. You could offer a done-for-you setup. If you sell protein powder, let them buy a six-month supply to solve that problem more often; offer a premium protein powder or a different product line like creatine. These are all examples of offering them solutions to the same problem more often or solving a different problem or making it easier and faster for them to get the benefit or the solution to that main problem that they came to you for in the first place.
Step number three in this process is offer this new solution at the right time. This is one of the main reasons that we built Sam Cart. If you have an online business, Sam Cart is literally built to do this step. And you want to make sure that you're doing this at the right time in your customer journey. And really, there are two primary times that you want to offer these new products or solutions to your brand new customers. And number one is immediately after they buy. Us in the internet marketing world, we call this a one-click upsell page. It's a simple page that as soon as somebody buys your product, they instead of landing on a thank-you page, they hit a one-click upsell page that offers them your next product or the solution to that next problem. And number two is offer it again within that first week. And you can do this with just a simple landing page. And you can use any form of communication that you have access to for them. Most likely if you have customers, you have access to their email, their phone number, and they're in some sort of group. Whether it's a Facebook group or they're in your application or they're in your members area. If you're a brick-and-mortar, they're probably coming into your store, or if you're shipping things, you're a drop shipper, you can get into their mailbox. All of these things are great ways to get their attention and just drive them to a simple landing page where they can buy this next thing.
If you're wondering why—why is this first week and first day so important—we've seen in the numbers that the longer your customer is with you, usually the less likely they are to buy unless they are buying from you frequently. So, if you don't take advantage of that very first moment that they buy or that first week that they're a customer with you, your chances of getting more revenue out of them, even if you have a great product to offer them, decreases over time almost on a daily basis. So take advantage of that hot period. And again, this all makes sense. When all of us are in problem-solving mode and we're going out and looking for a new pair of shoes or a course to solve a problem or any kind of product or service, we're kind of in heat. We're in buyer mode. We're looking for every solution out there and we probably end up buying multiple things. So for you as the business owner, if you don't offer them those solutions to all of their problems right away, all the products that you have, you're most likely going to miss out, and they're just going to go buy them from your competitor. So take advantage of that definitely that first day and at least bare minimum that first week by letting them know about the other things that you have for them to buy.
Step number four is pitch it correctly. So we have something inside SamCart that we call the perfect upsell script. Uh, and I'll break it down here for you in a minute. But the real reason why you need a great sales script is one, all of us have a sales script. Even if yours is terrible, if you just say, "Hey, I have this other product and I think you should buy it," that's a sales script. It's just a really shitty one. Like, the truth is, you can't just ask someone to buy something without explaining why they should buy it or why it's different or better than the thing they just bought from you. And we're now that we're talking about selling to people who have already bought from you in the past. Imagine Apple releasing a new iPhone and saying, "Hey, all of you should go buy it. It'll be in the store next Wednesday, and we're not going to tell you what's inside of it or what it does or why it's different from the previous version." It that just wouldn't work. That's why they spend months putting together a huge keynote presentation that tells us every little piece that's inside this thing, why we should buy it, why our life is going to be better, why it's worth way more than we're paying. That's why they put together these presentations or the commercials that you see or the pamphlets you see inside of the store. There's a reason behind all of that.
So, we have something called the perfect upsell script that's broken down into a couple sections. Number one is the affirmation. Number two is the reason. Number three is the story. Number four is the offer. And the way I'll break these down is number one is the affirmation. This is really where if someone's hitting a landing page for you, whether it's your one-click upsell page, you're using that right after they buy, or just a landing page that you're emailing them to or texting them to, you want to affirm that they're a customer. You want to affirm that they made a good decision to buy that first thing that they bought from you. Way too many people skip this part, and it really crushes your revenue when you don't start off your pitch by saying, "Hey, so and so, it's Brian from Sam Cart. I just wanted to make sure you know you're having a great experience. I want to congratulate you on being a Sam Cart customer. You're going to love this product that you just bought. It's going to deliver such a great result, and you're not going to regret buying it." Just that little step kind of takes their guard down and just reminds them that you appreciate them as a customer and reminds them that they made a great decision working with you in the first place.
Step number two is the reason. And so most people skip this part as well. And every pitch, every offer or product that you're trying to sell, you need a reason to sell it. A reason just kind of takes people's guard down. And every time we've seen it included in any sales pitch, the conversions are sky-high. And the reason that I typically use and that we see working really well across all 25,000 Sam Cart sellers is we frame it as the number one question I get is fill in the blank. And so imagine if you're the dance studio and someone brings their kid in, they sign them up for kids classes, and we're trying to sell them adult classes. Well, our script for step number two might sound something like this: "Hey, just so you know, the number one question that most parents get or ask us when they bring their child in is, 'Do you guys offer adult classes?' Cuz I was thinking while I'm here with my kid waiting for them to finish their class, like I might as well get some exercise in and I used to dance. Do you guys offer dance classes for adults?" And so you see how that becomes my reason for offering this next product. My reason is, hey, I'm actually getting this question from all these other customers. I'm not just creating another product for you to buy because I just want more money out of you. There's a reason behind this product existing, and it comes from the demand of all these other customers. So that little phrase, the number one question that I get from all of the people who just bought product A is the reason why you created product B. So hopefully that makes sense.
Step number three is the story. And really the quote here is so we decided to. So if we go back to the dance scenario, if I say the number one question that I get from all these new dance parents is, do you have adult classes? And so now I pivot to the story and I just say, "So we decided to launch a new line of adult dance classes, and here's what they include. They're on these days, at these times, at this price with these benefits." That's where you kind of pivot and tell the backstory behind what you decided to do after you saw all these questions coming in. And the what you're getting to is you decided to create this second product for people to actually buy.
Step number four is you just make them a special offer. And so usually when you're selling to current customers, you're going to give them a significant discount, a you're going to lower the price off of the retail and give them a special discount because they're a customer. And when you package all of this stuff up, you congratulate them for making a great decision. You remind them why it was a great decision. You let them know that you get this big question from everyone who buys that product; it led you to create a second product, and you're giving them a special offer on it for being a customer. Those four things combined into one pitch convert like crazy. Meaning you're going to get a lot of customers becoming repeat customers when you use a simple script like that. This script actually works so well that I created a custom AI bot that literally writes this script for you. I call it the ultimate upsell AI bot. And we actually give all of our Sam Cart customers this AI bot. So if you want to try it out to actually write your upsell script, you can try out Sam Cart completely free. Below this video, there should be a link.
Step number five is an easy one. This is just make it easy for them to buy. Whether you're doing direct mail or an email campaign or an SMS campaign or using a one-click upsell page, whatever page you drive people to, you need this page to be a one-click purchase. The best news about selling people who are already customers of yours is you have their credit card information. So the absolute worst thing you can do is tell someone who's already a customer of yours that they have to go back through the registration and checkout process and type in all their information again. Never do that. Even if you're using some archaic platform where you actually have to do that, offer to fill it all out for them because you already have all of their information on record somewhere. The beauty about Sam Cart, if you're selling online, we store all the customers' contact information, all their credit card information, completely PCI compliant, so you don't have to worry about any of the liability. And if you drive someone to a one-click upsell page or even a landing page, if they're already a customer, it will just ask them, hey, if you want to buy this, you can just click this button and we will bill the card that we already have for you on file. It's the same technology that Amazon has spent billions of dollars for. And why do you think they spend billions of dollars figuring out how to store credit cards and do a one-click checkout? It's because it works. And it works incredibly well. This one little thing of having a one-click checkout, it can literally double your conversion rate, meaning double your sales, double your profits, double the effectiveness of every campaign that you do to someone who's already a customer for you. So, do not forget this step; do whatever it takes to make it as easy as possible for somebody to just say yes and the order is completed.
So that's it. That is the five-step process that'll make it incredibly easy for you to get to that million-dollar-a-year mark. Without a process like this in place, if you're just a business, like 99% of the businesses out there, and the only way for you to grow is just get more customers in the door, you're going to make it extremely difficult for you to get to the million-dollar mark. If we go back to the dance studio example, when I started helping my wife and her mother-in-law with their dance studio, they were doing low six figures. This is the exact process that we put in place, and they're going to crack the seven-figure level mark this year by a long shot. It is a massive difference maker for a business. When you maximize the value of your customers, most people don't understand how easy it is to 3 to 5x the revenue of a business just by focusing on getting your customers—people who already know, like, and trust you—to spend a little bit more money. That is way easier than getting a whole lot of new strangers to give you money for the first time. So, if you like this video, leave a comment down below if you have any questions. I'll check those out. And thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next