Transcription
Basically, the only way you grow is if you're in pain. So, if you're not struggling, you're not doing the right thing. This is important because everyone wants to feel good and happy, but if you want to grow, the only way is through pain. That's literally it. So, if you want to know if you're making progress, ask yourself: are you suffering? If you're not in pain, you're not growing. We even have a term for this: growing pains. When you're growing up, you're in pain because your body's growing. It's the same in business, but people don't understand that. Look at any other field, like an athlete—the only way to experience expansion or growth is through pain. You need to find the most painful thing and keep doing it. The second you stop growing is when you stop feeling pain; which is why, when you get to the top, there's no pain. It's contradictory. You're here to grow your business, make more money, and experience growth, but the only way to do that is by finding painful things to do. It's not an easy message, because no one wants to feel pain, but you kind of need to.
Feels similar to Harvey in that regard. He has enough money, is comfortable, and can fly around if he wants to. Where would you suggest looking to find the pain? You're here because you want to grow the business and expand, but you have this comfort. You need to dig into that need for growth, explore it, understand it, talk about it, and sit with it. It's funny because asking that question means being comfortable is slightly painful for you; there's pain in it because you're not growing. Comfort and complacency are shields against pain. You tell yourself, "Oh, I'm good." It's hard to figure out, I don't have a silver bullet answer, but the fact you're here means there's a psychological thread to pull on. If you didn't care, you'd act it out. Explore that; there's no playbook. One thing that works is making a big investment—spending money where you almost have to justify it. We did this with the Gordon thing. We didn't need it, but we made a painful decision, putting a lot of money into something to fuel that urge. I see this with people buying masterminds; it clicks, it turns something on.
Yes, I see that with you. You probably knew what to do, but I saw the click as soon as you made that big mastermind investment. It turned something on. The more money you make, the bigger that investment sometimes has to be, but it works. There's no answer; it's just a struggle. If you're not struggling, you're not growing. We're experiencing this now. We're at eight figures and want to get to multiple eight figures. B and I are used to a certain lifestyle, and we've realized what happens when you plateau and try to break that plateau. At the beginning, you dip down, but then, to get to the next level, you usually have to go down a bit. You'll invest, make less profit, make mistakes costing money. People get used to a certain emotional state—comfort—and as soon as they start dipping, they revert to get back to where they were before. You need to weather this emotional storm. We're spending $10,000 a day on ads, aggressively hiring sales teams, making mistakes, losing more money than we're used to. Revenue can dip slightly, and if we're not careful, we'll aim to seek back to that comfortable zone. You revert to your old behavior, going back to the plateau. For entrepreneurs, this is the safety net, the safe place. To get more food, you've got to go into some danger. You get in all this pain, and then it happens again. You have to learn to do that again. Any expansion requires a lot of pain; the more pain, the more progress.
Any questions on the pain thing? Do you do the same for employees? Do you try to pull out that pain motivator when you start working with them? Yes, because as soon as someone feels comfortable and happy, they're going to drop off a cliff. How do you find that motivator when you hire them or in conversations? You don't necessarily have to understand their intrinsic drives; you just have to create pain for them. A sales rep plateaus and gets comfortable. You need to pull them aside and ask, "Dude, why are you chilling?" You can only do that if you do it yourself. It's a top-down thing. You need to seek pain—find the thing that sucks the most—and everyone under you will start doing the same. If you're just chilling and want an automated business, you'll make $100,000 a month, but you won't expand like that. When trying something new, it sometimes goes down before it goes up. How do you know the difference between learning and doing something stupid? Usually, you're doing something stupid. Let's say there are three things you can try. With ads, we need to try guaranteed less ads, new funnels, new business structures, add more products, etc. You're here, so we make these mistakes and tell you what to avoid. If there are three options, one will be good, but you'll usually miss it at the beginning. The last couple of months haven't been good profit-wise for us. We're making mistakes, trying new things, and experimenting. To break this plateau, you have to restructure incentives, hire more people, and build more systems—costing a lot of money. Profit drops, and you think, "[ __ ] [ __ ] [ __ ]". You have three new team members, profit share is up, and you're making less money, but you need foresight to realize that it will pay off.
Do you find validity in what most business coaches say—operate from abundance, and everything changes? I think the idea of operating from abundance is that you manage your emotions across the three dimensions of time. Abundance is great to think about the future, giving you a promised land, a pleasurable outcome you're moving towards. But if you convince yourself you're wildly abundant now and you're not, you'll believe it even though you're not, stripping yourself of motivation or pain. Use it as a carrot, moving towards it. I don't buy the whole "my life is so abundant" thing, because then you become comfortable, and your business isn't growing. We're paying as much as possible because the last couple of months have been painful. Profit share dips, the company makes less money, and you're spending more, but that's like anything—to experience expansion, sometimes you spike straight up if you have the right decisions and mentorship, but you get to a point where there's no playbook. You make mistakes, learn from them, sell the solution, and get back up. We're going to talk about appointment booking in three parts. You want to talk about setting teams and systems for booking appointments. How many times have you watched Acquisition Genesis? The average is one or two. If you want to build a setting team, you need to know how to sell. If you want to build an operations team, you need to know how to operate. It's the same with setting teams. You can't just hire setters and expect it to work. Easy Grow and DM Sourcer will get some results, but you need to understand how the mechanism works. Easy Grow is our program, teaching marketing agencies, coaches, consultants, and B2B service providers how to get more clients. The reason we're good at acquisition and appointments is because Bo and I have enough competence to teach it.
The first homework is to watch Acquisition Genesis five times. You've got setters, systems, and foundations or first principles. You want to talk about building the setting team and filling the calendar, but can you define feedback loops? Do you understand inputs and outputs? Do you know how to read a spreadsheet? Watching Acquisition Genesis once or twice isn't enough to understand how to build a ten-person setting team and book 2,000 appointments a month. It's enough to get started, but the foundations are important. You need to understand it well enough to make a video on it and teach it. It sucks and it's painful, which is the point. What's the timeframe? It depends. If booking appointments is the bottleneck, drill this non-stop until you understand it. If appointments start failing again, watch the training again. Jack crushed it, forgot the foundations, and I had to tell him to rewatch the sales training ten times. If you forget the foundations of science, systems, and psychology, you're dead in the water. You can't just hire a setter who already knows what they're doing. You might find someone, but it's unlikely. The foundations are systems, psychology, and science—the iterative scientific method. How many of you have done four or five proper scientific tests for your outbound efforts? Very few. You can't just hire a big setting team. Using Easy Grow will work, but if you want exponential results, build your own thing. Become an expert in it. We find it easy to book appointments because Bo and I have these things as part of our identity. How many of you have actually done scientific testing and applied Acquisition Genesis? It's not enough to watch it at 1.5x speed and take notes; you need to actually do it.
We'll talk about the systems thing quickly. You should be familiar with the diagram I'm about to draw—systems thinking. We have processes, inputs, outputs, feedback, and the environment. If you really understood this, none of you would struggle with appointment booking. If you knew how your market works, how the human brain works, how to write stimuli that triggers the response you want, and how to build systems and do the scientific method, you'd find the answer. For permissioning through cold email, according to the scientific method, you'd change one variable at a time, but the environment changes. You have to introduce enough variability to have good deliverability. How do you test that and not just change one variable at a time? You're thinking too small. You're thinking about a single test. We run five tests at any given time. If you run one test changing one variable, you can only test one thing at a time. But if you build a comprehensive system, you can run eight tests at the same time and find what works eight times faster. Your progress is limited by the volume of testing you do. We are testing four or five things at a time, each with two to three variables, so we can get through the deliverability aspect. What do you mean by deliverability? With cold email, you can't have just one copy. It has to have enough variability in words and sentence structure to pass through the algorithm. Otherwise, you're tanking your deliverability. This is different from a year or two ago when you could have the same copy and change the subject line. Now, the copies themselves have to have enough variability. So, every email you send has to be slightly different? We use spin tax and variability on top. Spin tax wasn't variable enough. We have different variations for a first, second, and third email. It depends what you're variating for. Spin tax is when every cold email uses variations in words. You'll say "the system," "a system," and "system" to get past the algorithms. You have to control how much you're variating each iteration. Instead of a completely customized email, you personalize the first line. They're all slightly different, but you can control it. Cold email is hard; you can't do the standard scientific method. You choose which aspect to control. For example, sign off with a different name. Instead of saying...
Thanks; just say “kind regards,” or, like, put a comma at some different point. Do you know what I mean? Like those, those little, like, when it comes to an experiment, like you know, whether you say “thanks” at the end of an email, or “cheers,” or “all the best,” or “kind regards,” or “warm regards,” that’s not going to change your conversion rate in any way, shape, or form. Maybe by like a 0.1%. Same thing if you sign it off as Par, or Charlie, or Tom, or Josh, or anything like that. It’s not going to make a difference.
No, so we, we do that, like we used to do that, like a year and a half ago. I’m talking about, like, changing, like the first lines itself, and also, like, variability in the offer and how it’s like structured in terms of, like, but I don’t, I’m not convinced that you need to do that. If you, if you personalize the first line and you sign it off differently every time, surely the email looks different enough to everybody.
Well, it depends what you’re customizing. Like, so, for example, if we are going to do a completely different body copy for every single individual person we target, we’re going to make sure we’re, like, we’re mentioning the pain points, right? And the pain point we mention is going to be the same for every single avatar we target, is in the same niche, right? Um, so we control that aspect of it. When we say the offer, that’s always in the same part of the email, right? The main variance that you can pull from a test with cold email is the pain points you speak about and the customization that’s relevant to that specific lead, right? But they’re going to be different for every single lead, but you’re still talking about the same thing, and that’s still going to resonate with that specific type of market in the same way. So instead of changing the whole copy, you’re just changing the pain point you’re speaking about relevant to that specific person. Right? Does that make sense?
I think the, the point that I’m making is, like, Easy Grow, and the systems in Easy Grow, and the, you know, the, the copy and the scripts and stuff, like you can copy your way to multi-six, maybe seven figures, but if you want to get to multi-seven figures, eight figures, you need to build your own thing, and you can’t just use, like, blindly use the same DM Sorcery script, like, in order to get to multi-seven or eight figures, you need advantage, and the only way that you achieve advantage is by building your own thing that no one’s copying. Doing your own thing. It’s kind of like, it’s kind of like people that want to run ads and they just go to my ads library and they just copy my ads. It’s like you’re never going to, you’re never going to get to, like, multi-seven or eight figures doing that. And the only way that you arrive at your own thing is through systems, science, and psychology. So if you understand the foundations, which is just Acquisition, Genesis to a T, then you can build your own thing. Like, you know, I, I know that Easy Grow works, and you can, you can use the, the DM Sorcery scripts and stuff, and you should still follow the same frameworks, like the personalized videos or the Looms and stuff, but the people that crush it and come in are the people that watch Genesis and they understand it really well, and then they build their own thing, and the only reason they have the competence to build their own thing is because they understand the foundations well enough to do it.
But even, even I did that. So when I was running the setting team, um, and I first came on board, Charlie gave me a script to use for outreach. And full transparency, I used that for about two weeks. I used that for two weeks, and then I just started changing things, cuz I watched Access and Genesis, like, I, I would schedule an hour every single morning to just go through the theory side of things and then iterate. And by the time I actually started hiring setters underneath me, I’d gone through, I think, 11 or 12 different variations of, like, an entry opener message to use. And most people, they just use one, see a little bit of success, and then start hiring setters. But I wasn’t, I didn’t feel comfortable in hiring setters until I knew that I had something that was airtight. You know, I think, sorry, mate. Setters aren’t thinkers. They’re not creative. They’re just doers, right? And you need to view your appointment booking system. Well, setters are, like, they’re doers with goals and aspirations. They want to be somewhere in their life. And you need to view your appointment booking system as a vehicle for them to get to where they want to be, right? And you use that by incentivizing them by paying them, right? Um, and if your system is airtight, then the setters can just come in, follow the rules that you set for them, and get to where they want to be in their life. Right? So, it’s like an ecosystem you have to build.
I think what people think is that they, they go into DM Sorcerer, they go into Terminator Looms, and they think that’s the only way to get appointments through cold outbound or cold email. And, like, what I can tell you is, think of, think of it, like, think it really is, like, you’re a scientist trying to discover stuff, because I can guarantee you that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of opening messages, strings of words put together that would crush, but people just haven’t found yet. Mhm. You’re kind of like some [__] like archaeologist just trying to dig it up. And then when you find it, like, there could be a string of, because really all it is is just words. So there could be a string of words for an opening message that you could put together that could get a 20% appointment booking rate. You just have to find it. And the only way you find it is, is through iteration and testing.
For example, we’ve got an R&D test at the moment with cold email. Um, basically reaching out to people with a really simple email. Basically, how is, how does it go? It’s the one where we’re, like, being their friend or something. We just reach out to people via cold email and we say, “Look, we’ve got an appointment booking system. I’m booking five or seven, maybe sometimes 10 or more appointments every single month. Can I explain how it works?” And it’s like, we’re not, like, pitching them. We’re just saying, “Hey, we got this cool thing. It might be a good fit for you.” And we’re more like targeting a specific person rather than trying to talk to the whole market. Because most people, they try and craft, like, a cold email copy or an outreach copy speaking to that whole target avatar, and people can smell that when you, when you reach it to, when you, when they receive that in their emails. So you almost want to speak directly to one person, be their friend, use abbreviations, and actually just try and help that one person. Um, and that’s just crushing for us, to there’s just so many, like, I can just, I can picture in my head, like, all of these pieces, like blurry pieces of copy with, like, question marks on them that would work. It would be like, imagine if you got a cold email from someone saying, like, “Hey man, saw we’re in the same space. Um, I thought I’d help a brother out. I’ve, I’ve got this system that I’ve just found. Um, it’s not perfect, but you know, I’ve booked like six or seven appointments this month. Um, I haven’t closed any of them yet, but I think some of them will. Um, if you want, I can just send you a Loom just explaining how it works and you can check it out. If you don’t want to, no stress, but I thought I might help you up.” No one does that. No, that’s like a new thing, and there’s hundreds of those, like, off top of my head. Maybe you could, I don’t know, put myself on the spot here. Maybe you could reach out to someone and just be like, and just send them, like, a question mark with a point, just “appointments?” Like, this is the thing is that there’s just so many that could work. People could reply being like, “What do you mean appointments?” And then you’d have to, like, think through the next thing. But there’s so many different variables that that could work.
But what happens is people come into, people rightfully so. They come into Easy Grow for the systems, and they just want to blindly copy and paste them, which is more than enough to get them to, you know, to add as, as proof shown by a lot of people in this room, to add six, multi-six, sometimes seven, or multi-seven figures, that if you want to build a sustainable machine, it has to be your own, and the value in Easy Grow is not in the scripts, and it’s not in the, you know, processes and SOPs, it’s in the foundations, because the only reason that we arrived at DM Sorcery or Terminator Loom or the cold calling script is because we knew the foundations. It wasn’t something that we just stumbled across. It took us like 50 tests to find, and we’re still testing stuff now. So, and then yeah, you are ultimately constrained by how many tests you run. People, like, people think, like, and this is my fault because I didn’t say this in Easy Grow and I probably should have changed it, is people think you can only run one test at a time, you know, but if you’ve got, like, four or five, you’re going to find the right thing four or five times fast, it’s like if you were an archaeologist trying to, like, dig something up and you’ve got, like, 10 dig sites, you’ll, you’re 10 times more likely to find something than if you’ve got one, if you’ve got one setter and you’re trying to work out, like, the, the opening hook message, like, how can you run four, five tests at the same time? Well, this is, this is kind of what we’re going to get into this afternoon of, like, I think that if you’re at the point where you’re trying to test things and you don’t know quite what works yet, then you shouldn’t have a setup. You don’t test it with setters. Full stop. Yeah, the setters should ops manager/setter. Well, it’s the same thing. It should be you doing it, but then I haven’t got, it’s like, it’s capacity and, and resources, because we got an inbound system, like, I need to fulfill the sales calls on that. So that’s, like, my priority. So I’ve kind of outsourced the setting to, to Jen, who’s also doing ops, but it’s, so yeah, I don’t, I haven’t run the system, outsourcing that to, like, an assistant isn’t necessarily going to work. It won’t work. She’s not got the pain to want to solve it as quick as you do.
Right. For example, Charlie, right? He was sending personalized Looms for three hours every single morning and doing, then eight sales calls in the afternoon when they were first scaling up here in money. I dude, I was still doing DMs at 100 grand a month for myself. I did it for two weeks. So, I got some understanding of it. This is the thing, man. Like, your ops assistant, she’s not as incentivized as you. She’s not in any pain, and she’s not as smart as you. Like, giving that, like, try and just, just get, having her figure it out. It won’t work. It needs to be you. And I get, you know, you’ve got sales calls and [__], but ultimately, man, like, if, if booking, if, if building an outbound appointment booking system is, like, the biggest thing and the biggest bottleneck for you moving forward, then you have to make time for it. You’re not, you’re not trying to scale it yourself, right? All you need is a proof of concept. Yeah. Like 10 videos a day, 10 emails a day, your own approach. Test that for as, as long as you can until you just find something that’s starting to stick. Then increase the volume ever so slightly. The minute you got proof of concept, hire a setup and, and do all the scale from there. This is the thing, Chris, is, like, you’re, you’re in the stage now where you shouldn’t even be trying to set appointments. You should just be trying to figure out what works. And if you put your attachment on to booking the appointments and then it doesn’t work, now you get all annoyed and frustrated, but you just need to figure it out. So, oh, sorry, Will, when you are looking, when you’re testing new things, you obviously have a setting team now, right? So you’re not the one that is actively sending stuff anymore, right?
I still send Trojans every single day. No, I, um, it, it’s honestly, I’m guilty of it as well, because for, for, for a few months, I didn’t, I stopped doing setting, and then I noticed my skills was going down. So I noticed that I immediately had to start doing appointment setting again. So I started crafting cold emails and sending manually. I’ve started running DM sourcing the program myself the last two weeks, um, just so I can learn and have that feedback loop, because if I’m not on the ground doing it myself, then how can I teach my setters how to, the only reason he has to do that is because of you guys, because it’s an R&D effort. So once you’ve got a system that works that is your own that no one else can copy or can find and isn’t being used by a thousand other people, then the half-life of that system should be a good couple of years. Couple, really. Yeah, because, like, but even then, okay, let’s say we fast forward a couple years later and you’re at whatever you are. I feel like you should be able to, maybe it’s just a belief of mine, which isn’t true, but, like, I feel like you should be able to find someone like Will who can then, like, if, if the system broke, for example, Charlie, right, in a year’s time, DM Source 3 wasn’t working anymore, like, would you be going back to doing the setting? No, because, because, like, the, the setting team, you, the setting team is a springboard to profitability, uh, and cold traffic testing to then run ads. So you shouldn’t have a setting team once you’re at, like, multi-seven or near eight figures. We only have one because of, for R&D purposes. But my point is that you, you find, you build your own thing. You prove it to work. No one else is doing it. It works specifically in your market. You can rinse that thing for a year or two before you see any diminishing returns because no one’s copying it, right? And by that point, it will have made you enough money and given you enough proof of concept for you to start running ads. Then you’re free of it.
So if I’ve got the ability to spend, like, $500 a day on ads, which I’m doing, you would recommend just do all that iterative, iterative testing, scientific method, do all that through my ads rather than try and do the other? Well, it depends. It depends entirely on how profitable you are and, like, how well the ads are going and stuff. Because if you’re spending $500 a day on ads and your sales conversion, your show rates north of 60%, your sales conversion rates north of 20%, and you’ve got a great AOV and you’ve got great retention, a low refund rate, then you just go hard on ads. You skip the setting thing because you found proof. The reason you do the setting thing is to find proof of concept so you can run ads. It’s to, it’s to battle test your show rate and your sales system and your product, because the reason you want to do the setting thing before ads and, and figure that out is because as soon as you run ads you enter a very dangerous territory, which is basically, if things don’t work, you start to lose money, and you know, to lose money in an info business is, you’ve got to try really [__] hard to do that, you know, so the setting team thing, it’s not forever, it’s just this, it, it’s this little training ground to then eventually run ads, basically, and you, so the only way it’s going to work at the sort of seven, multi-seven figure level is finding your own thing. Yeah. So, so my, my particular issue with this is that run ads, they do really well. So I’ve got the proof of concept. It’s great. But then when they start to die off, I haven’t got anything to back it up. But I guess I’m not doing testing. That’s the thing though, man. That’s, that’s a media buying issue. Yeah. That’s not, that’s not an ads issue, because if that was true and ads just died off, we’d be [__] Yeah, it’s true. I don’t do nowhere near enough creatives. I don’t do enough testing. So that’s, that’s the focus I should be doing, not, yeah. Cool. Thank you. Yeah. You know, like, you know, I’ll record, like, 25 new hooks every month or two. Yeah. I don’t, yeah. You know, and then, like, Billy’s watching it, like a hawk, and then we’ve got new funnels being tested and stuff, like, um, ads don’t just fall off. Yeah. Unless you do, you know what I mean? Yeah. Thanks. So with testing, you’re just fighting entropy basically of the market. Yeah, pretty much. But, like, you only need to test until you find something that, that works consistently. It’s kind of like a sales script. Like, you know, you’ll build it and it’ll work, and then bang, you’re good. But then after a year or two, like, it might start to stop working because you’ve reached out to everyone, or everyone else starts to use it and stuff like that. But, like, when we found DM Sorcery at the beginning, like DM Sorcery and Terminator Looms were how we got to multi-seven figures. You guys have to realize we got to what, like, 250k a month without outbound. And the reason that they worked so well, like our appointment booking rate on DM Sorcery was, like, 12%, something, and our Terminator Loom appointment booking rate was something like seven or eight%. And that was because we made them ourselves. And the reason we could get to multi-seven figures so quickly and so easily was because, like, no one else was doing this. No, no one else in the market had seen it. And so for basically 18 months we had free reign. Now everyone uses them, and they still work, but they just, you know, less, less effective. If you guys want to learn, like, how did we do it. The only reason it worked is because we built our own thing. It wasn’t because of the things, you know, it was because we built them ourselves. They still work. You can still get to, you know, 100k a month, 200k a month with them. It’s just a lot harder. But you need to build your own thing. And then that’s, if you want to copy us, that’s, that’s what you do. You copy the building. You know, when you see running multiple tests is that in, like, different areas or is it with the same thing?
It would usually be in the same thing. So, like, for example, the, the cool thing that we have is we did all of our testing, the Terminator Loom system, DM Sorcery system, um, we built in the Northflow days, so for our agency, and we were like, oh, let’s just try our luck and see if they work here. But I remember for me to find the DM Sorcery opener and the, the script for the, the VSSL, I think I must have ran, like, in the gym niche specifically, I must have, I, I reached out to every gym owner, like, two or three times and, like, you know, I would run, I’d have, like, I’ve got them on my drive. I had, like, 15 spreadsheets and, like, you know, [__] like 40, 50 iterations and, like, thousand, tens of thousands of messages, and then, like, I was like, oh, [__] this thing works, and then when you find it, like, bang, but fortunately for you guys, like, I didn’t know all of the, like, I knew the acquis, but it took me, like, a couple of years to figure out how to actually do it myself, like, the building it and the foundations and stuff, but you guys don’t have to go through a couple of years because you have the foundations from Genesis. You know how to test, you know how to build systems, you know how to regulate your emotions, you know how to track metrics, you know how to manage metrics, make decisions, etc., etc. That I figured that all out by doing it myself. It took me years, which is then why I was qualified to teach it. So what I’m trying to understand is, like, more tactically, when you’re running multiple tests, how do you know it’s not interfering with each other? Like, oh, you’re not supposed to test one thing at a time. You have to, like, you get [__] off massive lead source and then you segment it and you bucket it and you make sure that there’s no crossover and stuff like that. There’s, like, there’s, like, a lot of infrastructure behind it, but it’s pretty simple to figure out if you think about it. Okay. Yeah. Like there’ll always be some overlap and some interference, but what usually happens is one variable just crushes and it’s so obvious what works. Um, because, like, the first iteration of, um, of the, of the opening message to DM Sorcery, um, because obviously the whole thing was, like, asking permission, being like, hey, have I got your permission to pitch you, and the first variation was something along the lines of, like, um, like, would it be all right if I tried to sell you something, and, and then it started working, and I was like, oh, [__], like, I’m going to pull on this thread a little bit, and then, like, you know, didn’t work that well, but it worked pretty well, and then I was like, how, how can I ask that in a sort of, because what, what I did is I, I, I, I’d found this, like, little, like, this little gem of psychology, which was basically just permission-based marketing, but no one had done it on DM before, and no one had done it with video before, and I just, I found, like, I was like, okay, I’m combining these things, I’m combining this idea of personalized video, selfie video, which is a pattern interrupt, then I’m taking this, like, permission-based thing and this sort of soft approach and putting them in control, and I was like, how do I, like, shuffle these variables around, and I ended up coming up with this whole, like, like, “Hey John, Charlie here, look, I have got something to pitch you, but I do not want to do it without your permission, and I’d hate to try and sell you something without you being comfortable. So, just send me.” And then the thumbs-up thing was another thing. So, I was like, you know, the first iteration of that was what I, I get, I got it from the cold email thing, just saying, “reply yes with one word if you want more information,” and that worked. Then I tried the thumbs-up thing, but because I was doing DM Sorcery on Facebook, the thumbs-up button was just so available. So, the reply rate just spiked. So it’s all these little things that after, like, a year or two of testing, you, you, you kind of, like, part of the system. Um, yeah, Charlie, when you were doing that, like, so you’re doing that through DMs, you’re, you’re not really doing it scientifically. You’re not necessarily going, like, version one, version two. You’re just kind of iterating as you go.
At the beginning, at the beginning, it was all based off intuition because I didn’t really have the skill or the know-how to do the iterative process and start tracking it and stuff. But then when I found Sam Ovens and the way that he tracked his ads, I then, because no one ever looked at, um, outbound, and because people that ran ads, they had perfect tracking systems, perfect systems for testing, scientific method, etc. But no one ever looked at outbound from that perspective. So I was like, I’m just going to borrow this, like, media buying principle, you know, kind of like a big corporation data. And then when I applied that, that’s when I started making real progress. But I was, I was, like, nearly halfway there. But when I found the data tracking thing, it just clicked. I was like, “Oh, [__] this is what I’ve been.” Yeah. So, like, with, with the DMs though, like when I was doing it for two weeks, like there was some, there was some sort of intuition and I was like, just changing things every, like, five or six or seven, like, DMs and off responses. So, you’re just, for a bit, you’re just doing that. You’re not necessarily writing down every little variation that you change. You’re just
Doing it intuitively till you find something that kind of works, and then do kind of like a system. I mean, if I was, if I had to go back and do it again, I would definitely start with the whole tracking thing and the meticulous science. So, like 10 DMs like this, iterate something. That's version one. 10 is not really enough. Like I would use, like, um, to test the opening hook, I would want to see that 30 people had seen the opening message to then gauge if it was going to work or not, blah blah blah. But I tested so many different opening messages, and the one that stood out was this like, "Hey, can I get your permission to pitch you thing?"
And just going back to this where you're running like four or five tests at the same time, like with where I'm at starting outbound DMs, like you, you can't really do that. Would that be fair to say? That's more for like cold email. Okay. Honestly, like, because running five different test variants yourself for cold DM would be a full-time job, you know, you're not looking to, like, if you, that's yeah, that's the meta that's like going to be optimal for you, guessing what works, but if you don't have those resources, just send a, me, send one blanket message, do it to 30 people, look at the metrics, change one small thing, and do it again, and you'll know after testing that over like 10 or 11 different iterations and actually like analyzing what the market's telling you, you have something that's working unique to you.
The main thing is like you start with a hypothesis. So you, and you get your hypothesis from the niche and from the market because you've done hundreds of sales calls in your market. So you should know, you should be able to create like a hypothesis using your knowledge of Easy Grow and knowledge of the market. You should be able to create your own thing, and then you should be able to create quite a few of them, and then you should just be able to write them out and then test them, and then you'll discover something, and then it might not work perfectly, but you'll be like it's kind of like a sign like you're on the right track, and then what you'll do is you'll create like five new hypothesis or hypotheses around that thing that works, and then one of those will work a little bit better, and then again and again, and then before you know it, you've got like a 10% appointment booking rate, and no one else knows what the [ __ ] you're doing, and you're laughing to the bank because with two setters you can book like 50 to 100 appointments a month.
But I would, I would just, that being said, I would have kind of just stopped once we're in KPI, which we're almost in KPI now. We're almost at that 2% ABR. I'd stop there. Yeah, that's fine. But I, I feel like probably could go further. Well, you, you can always, I mean, there's no end to efficiency, but you know, to be fair to, to what you said as well, like I did this three, four, five years ago, so it's a different game then, you know, like if I did it now, it's not to say that the conversion rates might not have been half because, you know, more people do cold DMs now, and everyone's more familiar with the video opening message and stuff like that. Um, but all, all you're looking to do is just find something that's in KPI. You don't need like a 10% appointment booking rate. If you get like a two or three, and then you get like six or seven setters, now you've got like a, a whole two sales reps filled.
I have a question. Sorry. Okay. It's kind of R&D related, but it also is with appointments. Um, when you're testing stuff, how do you know that it's going to work in all the different niches, right? Because you're testing in like the agency consulting market. How do you know that it's going to work for like brick and mortar? Because no matter what niche you go to, there's human beings. Yeah. Which is quite simple because I'd argue agency niche is the hardest niche to make work with outreach. Yeah. Any niche is easier than agency because they know all the strategies. They get bombarded with ads and outreach every day already. So if you can make it work for that, and like it doesn't matter if it, if it's a medar owner or a gym owner or an agency owner, like it's all the same. Like it's, it's kind of like it's just people, and there's just different business models put on top of them. The business model doesn't change the person or the way they think or the way they feel. It just means they might respond slightly differently to different types of language. So like a gym owner might respond to members, and um, a HVAC person might respond to um, air conditioning installations. But beyond the nuances of the, the technical things, every, we're all human. We all have the same biases. We all have the same issues and the same stuff. It's, it's not different.
There is variation to this though because if I were still working with gym owners, I would, for example, do DM sorcery in a gym, you know? Well, that's like Denny with his olive oil. Oh, yeah. Literally, it's like, it's like little things, right? Like if I was still working with gym owners, I would record my looms in a gym. I would make the DM sorceries in a gym because there's an immediate connect. Or at least I would do it like in, like fitness equipment or like a dumbbell or something on the, on, on my desk or something cuz there's identification with you. What do electricians use? Is it like a tool or something that they use or something? I'm serious. Yeah. Yeah. Like I mean, around your neck or something, you know? Yeah. You guys laugh, but that works. Of course it does, right? Um, you should do it in like a fuse box or something. Yeah. Like a, like a really ancient rusted fuse box, and you're about to touch it and be like, I got you. Yeah. And Jack, you should get like a hat with like always be closing and some stuff, you know, like it's like, or like something every massive like Wolf of Wall Street thing behind you, like it's, it, there's so much that you can try that would work, you know? Yeah. Like what, what's another like, if let's say that you work with dentists, just like I don't know [ __ ] brushing your teeth whilst doing it or something. Get a lab coat on. Yeah. Simple. Yeah. Literally stethoscope.
People don't think about this because they, for some reason, think that outreach and organic outreach isn't marketing. Like we spend months building our ads in funnels, but for some reason DM sorcerers like, okay, oh Charlie, nice system. And then just start doing it. It's like, what niche am I working with? How am I going to say it? How am I going to look? What is my niche? Uh, what does my niche like? How am I going to put that into, into the videos into that? You could even like include like a joke at the end or something like, you know, what did the electrician say to the plumber, cuz it, but it's, it's this thing is like it's no one [ __ ] does that. So when they receive that, it's this pattern interrupt where suddenly you're not just this dude with a phone, you're like one of them. Yeah. And then when you, when you understand your niche and you get them, and it's easy. Like Josh, you're working with SMAS, right? Everyone knows the Tai Lobas ad, right? So get a DM sourc like a Prius in a garage, and that's here in my garage, you know. Here in my garage, I can get you more appointments. Like it's, it's just think, you know, then whisper knowledge at the end. Yeah, that's my excuse to rent a Lambo. No. Well, if you do it with a Lambo, no one will [ __ ] buy from you, mate. So, no. Get like a Prius or like a golf car, I think. Yeah. You know, get one of those like child toy cars, like one of those little ones, and then record the ad in that. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
Um, yeah. So, quick question. It's a little bit more tactical, but we did build like somewhat our own system. We had like a 10% ABR from cold email and like a 5% close rate on the actual cold emails. Um, now our thing that was like almost, I guess our pattern interrupt was free value. Like we did, it was for a very, very specific YouTube niche, and we did like this really, really like specific audit which we're basically able to automate. Um, it took like five minutes per one. Um, now we run out of like the people in the niche. Uh, so we need to like rethink it. But I was just kind of interested in your philosophy more than anything because a lot of um, Easy Grow is a lot more focused on like the psychology rather than like necessarily anything around free value rather than maybe the inbound systems. Is there a reason, is it just scale, like why you guys don't ever really lean too much into like the actual free value on any of the outbound? We do realize free value is psychology as well, right? Yeah. Yeah. It's also, I guess, why is that not a psychological trigger that you guys lean into a lot, is I guess then I just don't, What did you say your close rate was? Uh, 50%, 50%. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the truth is, man, is that it probably works. We've just never used it. Kind of comes back to that same thing we talked about yesterday where it's like, you know, if we give someone access to the program next day, we know there's no issue. So it's, it's the same thing, like the free value thing and the audit thing, and that probably works as well. But for us, like we've, we've, you know, when you build systems, you've got these things called initial conditions, which basically it's kind of like a way of doing something. It's like a bias, and then all of your future iterations are by, it's called the law of sensitive dependence on initial conditions. It, if you take a, like if you're taking like a transatlantic um, journey or like a big ship from one end of the world to the other, if you're off by like 0.1 degrees, then when you land you're going to be thousands of miles away. So basically, as more time and volume elapses, the initial condition um, bias becomes amplified. So for us, the reason that we're biased against free value is because in the beginning we never did it. In which I was psychologically predisposed to try that at the beginning, and now is all about free value, but we didn't try at the start, we didn't have it at the finish, if that makes sense. And so, you know, I'm not against it, and I don't, I'm not here saying it doesn't work or anything like that, I'm just saying that we found a way that works, and we wouldn't change or test it because I would say Johnny's whole brand is built around free value, yeah, the inbound stuff. Yeah, the inbound stuff is where it definitely makes sense, but I was interested cuz it, I thought you were going to hint at something, and I'm not sure if you were, where when you asked about my close rate. Do you think that free value might decrease close rate? I wasn't sure if that's, No, no. I, I just was curious cuz I thought you said your close rate was 5%. So, I have 5% cold email to close. So, we close one in 20 cold emails. I think it's like it kind of just comes back to what I just said, like, you know, because we, because we never did it. We never do it. Makes sense. And you know, maybe there is a world in which we test it and we try it out. But the thing is with free value is it has to be really [ __ ] good. Yeah. Yeah. You know, and I don't know how scalable it is. I don't know how automatable it is, you know? Like my, I like things that are simple, scalable, predictable, consistent, and that can just be easily automated with as few moving parts as possible. Um, which is how we've built, like it's the reason DM sorcery is video thumbs up video thumbs up calendar link, like there's only five points of friction in that system, and you know, if you've got to be like, you know, which PDF would you like, and you know, what about this and this, and could work, but we've just never tried it.
Sweet, when I first watched a engine something didn't click about the forces of irrationality when you give every bias, and now it just clicked, like, should we just like take one bias and just iterate with the Darwinian? You're talking about the, the cognitive biases. Yes, exactly. Should we just think like, okay, there is this bias. Let's try with the stimuli. Yeah. Well, this is kind of how you create a hypothesis is you, you, you do your like avatar thing. So you know your niche, and you think about your niche, and then you look at all the cognitive biases and the, the flaws of human psychology, and then you sort of fuse them together. Basically, here's the point. Any string of words or any word that you use in your acquisition for your, whether it's ads, whether it's funnels, whether it's VSSLs, whether it's videos, whether it's emails, whether it's cold, any word should serve the purpose of triggering a bias. And this is where people go wrong with email is they just write their emails and think, "Oh, that looks good." But you need to engineer it where every single couple of words strung together in some way, shape or form like tickles a bias. You know, that's what they never use a word that doesn't like, or a string of words that doesn't like, in some way, shape or form, give you some sort of psychological leverage in the acquisition. Makes so much sense. Thank you. Yeah. Like if I'm writing a VSSL, like everything I put in there is, is then reverse engineered. Like, how does that, in some way, shape or form, manipulate someone, which is basically what it is because human psychology is very predictable, and if you understand how people tick and how they work, then you can start putting words in front of them and stimuli in front of them that trigger responses that you want. It's not hard. You just need to understand it.
Yeah. I had a question. So, right now I'm not doing any outbound, and everything's sort of coming from YouTube inbound. Would you have the same philosophy of like testing things with videos and like sort of that side of things? Not really, because like, I to a degree, yes, but not, not anywhere near as much. Okay. Because like there's so many variables that are outside of your control with YouTube that you just can't, it's not a controlled test. And also YouTube is just something that you just get better at because the ultimate variable is the quality of the video and how you deliver it. Yeah. And that's not something that's, just something that improves with time. It's kind of like if you were like a footballer and you're trying to like iterate like taking your penalties. It's like the only way that you get better at penalties is by just doing more. And there'll be feedback and there'll be things that you should listen to, but there's no like spreadsheet for it, if that makes sense. It's, it's more intuitive. I might be wrong there, but I, I think that's, that's how I've done it. Yeah. I guess what I'm wondering is things like, oh, when you call to action at the end versus first 90 seconds, like, well, from a, from an appointment booking perspective, it absolutely, you know, can work, but it's the same thing where like, it, the problem with tracking appointments from YouTube videos is, let's say that you make a video and you put the call to action in the end, uh, and then, like, you know, and let's say that video gets you way more appointments. It could be the call to action, but it could also be the fact your last two videos did well. It could be your recent email blast. It could be the fact that your competitor didn't upload this week. It could be the fact you're in a good mood. It could be the thumbnail. It could be the title. You can't isolate was it? But you can't isolate it because so many things are outside of your control. With email and with DMs and stuff, there's, you can, you can name the variables on one hand. But with something like you, with ads, it's easy as well. But with YouTube specifically, like there's so many things that could lead towards a, an uptick in appointments. You know, is it, is it the fact that you changed the funnel? Is it the headline? Is it the video? Is it the, is it the fact that this week we had more calendar availability?