Transcription
I spent $1 million on coaching and got nothing. This is the shocking truth about implementation. You know, while top business coaches pocket their millions, their clients are struggling to implement a single system that drives revenue. So, for me, after investing $500,000 in programs from Grant Cardone, Tony Robbins, and Russell Brunson, I discovered the truth: advice without implementation is just expensive entertainment. And they are entertaining; I love them.
These coaches will tell you, "Promote, promote, promote." But they won't actually set up your CRM or build your sales pipeline for you. So, meanwhile, your competition is quietly implementing while you're distracted by collecting more frameworks. Have you ever gotten stuck like that?
So today, I'm revealing the three implementation shifts that separate thriving businesses from the struggling ones and why practitioners who execute deliver more value than coaches who just talk. I call it the implementation gap. Let me give you a personal story. I was just in this situation last year. So last year, I signed up for coaching from a famous coach, and I love him; he's great. I learned a lot from him, but I got stuck watching his thousands of hours of video and just doing more and more training. It was distracting me from implementing. And you should really learn a little, implement a little.
So even I upgraded my program with my coach because they said they would do it for me. Well, they really don't; they still don't do it for you. They might make a customized deliverable for you, but they still won't stand up your system for you.
Hey, I'm not the only one. I'll give you an example of someone else who fell for this. I talked to a client just this week. He told me, "Hey, I hired three agencies so I can compare which one does the best marketing." And I'm like, "Well, is your CRM set up and all your tracking and analytics?" "No, no systems set up." So I'm like, "How are you going to compare which marketing program or marketing agency does better?" You need to have the systems in place to compare one to the other and see the results.
So here's what I think's going on. There's a psychology behind why we keep seeking advice instead of executing. I kind of call it procrastination, I feel, or analysis paralysis. Maybe you didn't like the answer the coach gave you, and you're just hesitant to drive in there and start promoting, or it's really expensive to buy ads; it's a little scary. And so I think we're a little bit afraid, and/or we just don't like their advice, so we keep looking for more advice. Perhaps, I don't know, but I think there's a reason why people are afraid to execute, but the consequences are fatal.
Listen to these statistics: 50% of businesses fail within 5 years, despite having a good strategy and having a good product and service. The other 45%, they're even—they're just not even growing; they're barely surviving, which means they're really dying. It's only that top 3 to 5% that's actually growing exponentially, and their secret is they're good at implementing and learning by trial and error and learning by doing.
So I'll call it the coaching industry's fatal flaw, but it's really not a flaw; it's by design. Coaches are actually incentivized to teach and not implement, right? Have you ever heard the old adage, you know, "If you can't do it, teach it?" And so they're trying to sell their knowledge and sell it one to many. It's called—and so they think, "If I can codify my knowledge in a course, I could sell that course a thousand times," right? And so they don't have time to do a thousand implementations, and so they codify it into a framework. And then I call that the framework factory problem. They're really just selling templates, PowerPoint slides, ebooks, Word docs. It's not a solution in a business; it's literally just more knowledge, or we call it the framework factory, and you start chasing this framework and that framework and Grant Cardone's framework and Russell Brunson's framework. Before you know it, you've got all these frameworks, and you're confused.
Let me just give you a quick example of what I mean. One of my mentors, and I love him; I buy a lot of stuff from him; he's great—Grant Cardone—he sells sales advice and sales training, and he's an expert in sales, but he is not going to implement your requirements because the implementation is hard. Grant can't scale himself if he has to do everyone's implementation for them; he can't sell for everyone; he's just trying to teach you how to sell. That's because the implementations are harder, but it's the only thing that delivers actual results. So what you have to do is implement or get someone who can implement. I call it the practitioner advantage. A practitioner is someone who's very good, and they practice all day long. That's different than a coach.
Let me give you a football example. Who do you want on your team—another coach on the sidelines or a great quarterback on the field? You need a team on the field—practitioners who practice football day in and day out, and they're excellent at it. Give you another example: who do you want to be your surgeon—some guy who wrote a book about surgery or some guy who does surgeries all day long, in and out? In fact, I picked a surgeon who invented the surgery and did the most and had the highest success rate when I needed knee surgery. That's the practitioner you want helping you.
And let me tell you, once you switch from coaching to implementation, the revenue starts to come almost immediately because if you can set up the systems to drive revenue, you see an immediate impact; you see actual revenue. Isn't that great versus theoretical knowledge? There's no revenue. So if you know something's going well, you'll see revenue there. So that's one way to assess if it's working or not—is it driving revenue? Is there money in the bank because of that?
And also a little bit of a warning: almost all software systems and coaches' advice is fairly generic—what we call out-of-the-box solutions. But if you open up a CRM, that's not going to solve your problem and drive business; it's an empty CRM set up in a generic way with their basic templates. So until you tailor that to your exact business and create a solution for competitive advantage and a solution that drives revenue—and so I'll tell you how do you pick a practitioner? I already mentioned it: you want someone who practices the most; they can show you examples; they can have a process usually in place to implement; they're not afraid to give you case studies and examples. So run for the hills if someone won't show you their work or doesn't have a tailored system to your business. If it's just generic, then stay away.
In fact, I was looking at a CRM development partner, and when I talked to them, they're like, "No, no, we set it up like this." I'm like, "Every time?" Like, "That's not my workflow." And they're like, "Yeah, yeah, same for everybody." I'm like, "Same for every company." I've never found two companies the same; there's probably not even two McDonald's that are run the same, honestly. So it has to be tailored to your business.
So I told you at the beginning I was going to give you the three critical system categories that you need to focus on. The first one is a revenue tracking system. Think of it as a revenue command center where you can follow the money all the way through the business—from marketing, you can tie it to revenue; to sales, you can tie it to revenue; to operations and quote to cash and billing, all tied to revenue, and all tidy and aligned in your financial systems and on your financial statement. So that when you have a revenue goal of like hitting a million or 10 million, okay, we need to get $10 million in the bank, but to get that, we can tie that to—well, you need to run so many ads, drive x amount of leads, have this many appointments, have this type of closure rate, land this type of contract, collect the money by billing and invoicing, keep your expenses below this, so we hit our profit targets, and then you'll have $10 million in the bank with a lot of profit. So if you don't have that, you need to focus on building this revenue command center in your business.
The second system you need—called marketing automation—so since so much marketing is digital and online, that's software. So your ads and your social media have to be automated—how you publish it, how you optimize it, how you distribute it, but then how you track it—that's bringing in impressions and clicks and leads—all that has to be automated and tracked with analytics so you can see how your marketing funnels are working. So the second system you need is a marketing automation system. Then it really kind of runs on autopilot. You create your content; it publishes it all month for you automatically. You run your ads, and they run automatically. And that takes that advice from your coach, and it will turn into consistent lead generation, which is brilliant. When our firm finally got consistent lead generation, we were so happy; we cracked the code on SEO, blogging, and YouTube. We had a steady flow of leads that we could bank on. You sleep a lot better at night when you have marketing automation and a steady source of good leads.
The third system is you've got to convert those leads; we call it the sales conversion system. That's where you can build a process that actually closes deals, which brings in revenue. So this sales conversion system, you know, it takes about 50 touch points in the sales cycle before someone knows you, likes you, and trusts you. That's the only time they're going to buy from you—if they know, like, and trust you. That's what the sales conversion system is—it's helping them get to know you. You can tell them your stories; you can send them emails; you can send them extra helpful advice that they're interested in, like free consulting, and then that nurtures them to get to know you, and they'll start to like you. And that's why I'm on camera, so I—hopefully you get to know, like, and trust me. They have to see you out there, and so that's really hard in this digital age. People aren't really meeting face to face; the only way they get to know you is like watching you on social media. And so once they finally trust you, then they'll buy from you. All that's in the sales conversion system, usually wrapped into a CRM, and we'll close real deals, and you'll know when it's working when you're getting money in the bank, and it's great.
These systems really work together; they create predictable growth. By—what's more important—marketing or sales? Well, they really go together because when marketing brings you a lead, they targeted an audience, brought you a lead, made them an offer, and you go try to sell them, but when you might find out they're not qualified—what they call a marketing-qualified lead or a sales-qualified lead—so sales can tell marketing, "Hey, this audience doesn't have enough for our budget, or they're not in our right industry," and so they give feedback back to marketing so they can target new audiences and get smarter about how to target them, so you're talking to people who really need your help. So that's the key—you're just trying to help people. So putting marketing and sales together just helps you help more people.
So let me tell you what—here's your call to action: if your business is stuck in the coaching cycle without seeing results, you don't need another framework; you need implementation help. I've helped businesses from startups to billion-dollar enterprises build systems that actually drive revenue instead of just talking about it. I've helped hundreds of clients build thousands of systems. So please visit the link in the description to book a free 30-minute revenue systems diagnostic. On this call, we will identify your biggest implementation gaps and create a custom road map for fixing them.