Transcription
I spent $45,000 on a full business audit from Alex and Leila, of the acquisition.com team, as you can see in this picture and in this video. I'm going to distill every single thing I learned at the event—every gold nugget, every framework—that I'm walking away with, so you can get all the benefits without having to pay or attend. Let's get right into it.
All right, so what we're going to cover in this video is first a very short overview of the VAM event and where it falls in their advisory model. So VAM stands for Value Acceleration Method, and it's part of their framework for taking businesses from $3 to $5 million to $500 million and beyond. Then I'm going to walk through three different buckets of frameworks that I emerged from the event with that I'm going to implement in my business going forward: Marketing, Sales, and then General Business Frameworks.
So diving right into the rapid-fire overview: why did we go? Very simply, we're looking for someone to give us direct insight into our business that has scaled this type of business before. There are not too many people that we can go to for advice or expertise right now that both have built businesses like this and work with a ton of businesses like this. And so that was the main reason. Anytime that we can get the ideal scene from someone further ahead of us, it's always a good investment.
Where was it? At their HQ in Vegas, which is sick. I think their entire team works at the HQ, which is pretty cool. And so, uh, seeing them operate in a person space, have the whole team there, that gave us a lot of ideas for what we could potentially do in the future as well. So that was fun, and it's just always cool to go to Vegas. Shout out to the Wynn Hotel where we stayed both times.
How much does it cost? It's $335,000 per business, with an additional $10,000 to bring a business partner. So we did invest $45,000 into this. I already hear the comments right now: "That's a waste of money." And yes, it is 100% a waste of money if you do not have a business where you can see a positive return on that. But for us, there's really so few places right now where we can get this level of tactical insight, so it's a no-brainer investment for us. And we saw—we've already, as I came back and started to put these things into practice—I think this could be a 10, 20, 30X return on investment for us. So very excited about that.
What is included? Two full-day events with their team, spread out during the year. So we went to the first workshop in January; we signed up for the VAM event in January. The first event was in March for us on the VAM method, and then we were going back there in September. So we have about six months to go, implement a lot of the things that we learned. And so basically, what they do is a full bottleneck analysis of the business. We give them a ton of information on our metrics and numbers and things like that, and then they give us a bunch of playbooks to go solve the constraints that will help us go to the next level.
How is the event structured? Two months before the event, we submitted a full report on all of our business metrics. Then they send that to their team, who analyze the main constraint. I'm sure they have some cool models that help them do that pretty quickly. They then pass our account off to one of their subject matter experts who specialize in our individual constraint. So for us, we have a marketing constraint, and therefore we work directly with their marketing director. And then they join us for like a 30-minute call. We ended up doing two 30-minute calls, uh, breaking down some of the potential things they could share with us during the VAM day, all through the lens of: "We want to share these things; if we share these things, would you see the event as a home run?" Uh, and they really over-delivered for us with multiple calls, which was great because we just had a lot to improve, a lot of opportunity sitting in front of us. And so they wanted to make sure that we got plenty of attention, which was very much appreciated.
And then once we get there on VAM day, you get a 30-minute presentation breaking down some of the frameworks that they recommend running, um, and it's like a big deck that they then give you afterward, so you can have the frameworks to show your team and things like that. But I think the coolest part was that we were at a table with five or six other businesses that all had different constraints. Some of them had sales problems; some of them had strategy problems; some of them had people problems. And getting to see the frameworks for other businesses also gave us a bunch of golden nuggets, which is how I put together this report. Right, the frameworks I'm about to share, really only like three or four were included in our deck, but the notes that I took from other people, uh, getting to hear their team talk to these other businesses, uh, those were extremely helpful as well. So I think that was by far the most valuable part of the event for us was just getting to hear other people with different problems and how the Horoi team approaches solving those problems. So that's the overview of the entire VAM event. We'll be back there in September, but we have six months to put these frameworks into practice. So let's dive right into the marketing frameworks, which by far, uh, the biggest thing we were trying to learn from their team.
All right, so on the marketing frameworks, here's a quick background on all the work that we did together with our subject matter expert, Lewis, beforehand. So shout out Lewis, if you're watching this, thanks for all your help. So based on the numbers I submitted, we had plenty of traffic and a great sales process; these numbers were well within KPI. So if anyone's watched my video on how we structure our team, we have Brand, we have Marketing, and we have Sales, all part of the Acquisition Department—different than obviously their acquisition team, like our internal acquisition—and so is the generating of leads and clicks, and then, uh, Sales is converting calls into enrollments. Where we identified the constraint was mostly around the middle-funnel marketing process of turning visitors into calls. And this is more of an ideal scene type of environment where we just need to see what it looks like to improve these pages to, uh, pick the low-hanging fruit on the CRO side, because when we submitted all of our numbers, it became glaringly obvious which ones could be improved by 30%, 40%, 50%. And if we can pluck those fruit on like three or four different small sub-pages within the funnel, we could have potentially 100% more, uh, enrollment opportunities, and then the bottleneck becomes Sales. I'm going to talk about all that throughout this video.
So given this was going to be a relatively straightforward process, they definitely over-delivered in terms of finding us other things to show us that we could then implement during the next six months. The two big ones were on how to structure a media department. So we have big platforms on X and LinkedIn, in, uh, but we are now growing on YouTube, as I'm making this video, and trying to learn on Instagram. And so how they structure a media department to, uh, have enough videos going out, have enough editing capacity, iterate on their content formats, all that kind of stuff, we really wanted to know. And then we also—again, once we can crack this CRO process—so CRO, I'm going to say a lot during this video: conversion rate optimization—once we can crack that, we will then have a better foundation to invest in paid ads, where I painted a long video on that, and I'll talk about that throughout the video of all the things I did wrong during that time too that I learned from this event. But if we had all three of these things, we will have enough new frameworks, new opportunity sets to go and scale our marketing department. And so those were the three that we really wanted to hear from: the CRO process, the media structuring, and then the paid ad rapid creative testing, because we have the ability to do all that.
So with all that in mind, here are the main marketing frameworks we emerged with.
All right, the first takeaway is: "Conversion rate issues are hidden problems." This is in quotes because Leo said this directly, and this was by far my biggest takeaway of the entire event. For the last 12 to 18 months, we've chipped away at higher revenue levels, but it has been kind of volatile. We haven't really gone upwards in a straight line, uh, month after month. It's been more jagged on the way up. We have been hitting higher highs and higher lows, which is always great, but we can see that on some of our outlier months, we've had our regression to the mean rather than strong together. And so the reason this is is because we operate an organic business, right? And so we have a certain number of times where we can post per day across every platform, all driving to the same landing page, funnel, etc. The outlier months happen when, like, a video goes viral, or a certain post goes viral, or we do a collaboration with another creator, and there's just like this spike in traffic, but the baseline has stayed relatively the same because you can only generate so much traffic on the platforms that we're on now. You can solve for those and just generate more traffic by going and creating on YouTube and Instagram, which we are doing, but in parallel, we can also start to better convert the attention that we are generating, and that is conversion rate optimization.
So, uh, jumping to here, this is where there was a lot of juice for us. And so we have been generating the same amount of traffic for months, but we spent very little time on the small tweaks to convert more of that traffic. So why didn't we do this? Because it's a hidden problem. And anyone watching this, you likely have a conversion rate optimization problem that will only show up further down the line or if you actually start to dig into it now. Most people start conversion rate optimization too early; they're like, "I've got to fix this, like A/B test this landing page," when I don't even have any visitors. That's a complete waste of time. We're at like $6 to $7 million a year right now and generating a ton of traffic, where the next level is much easier to improve our conversion rates by 50% than to increase our traffic by 50%, given we've already reached a pretty big size. So this entire time that we've been running our business, it's been printing money, and it's awesome, but when that's working, you're less likely to tweak the pipes that are generating all that revenue. And so for us, it's not that we have some perfect funnel; it's we're making money not because of everything we set up, but despite it. And that's a very important framework: you might look at what we have; it's like, "Why would you go mess with the CRO? It's clearly working." Yes, it's working, but not because it's so great; it's working despite that it's not good enough where it could be. So had we spent the last 18 months making very small improvements, we'd be sitting in a much higher revenue level. That sucks to hear, but it's also very exciting because sometimes you have to feel the pain of a mistake or a missed opportunity before you can actually act to change it.
So how do we fix this? The first step is to track data on every single page that receives clicks in the entire funnel. Luckily, we've been doing this; I set this up like six-ish months ago, but we haven't been actually making changes on it. The second step is to compare those numbers of each part of the funnel, each page. And so we run a call funnel: opt-in, opt-in goes to application page, application page goes to call page, call page goes to call. And so our middle-of-funnel process is where we need to improve, specifically on the conversion of someone visiting the application page to applying; the percentage of people who apply and then book a call; those are where we have a lot of, uh, potential tweaks, as well as our overall opt-in landing page; there's big opportunity there. So from there, we identify which part of the funnel has the most opportunity, and then we deploy weekly tests on there anywhere we think we could see a 50% improvement. Now, this, for anyone watching this, is the single most important mathematical understanding you can have as an internet business owner. And so when you look for 50% improvements, it's not that you take a number from 8% to 50%; it's that you take a number from 8% to 12%. And so here's the example, right? If you're at 8% and you go to 12, that is not a 4% increase; that is a 50% increase in the business, and it—you have to stare at that to understand—but if I have 100 people visiting a page right now and eight of them opt in, and then I take that same page and I make it so 12 of them opt in, the difference between 12 and 8 is 50%. So the business quite literally grows by 50% if you take a number from 8 to 12, and that's wild. I've—I've known this; I have a math background; like I understand this, but it's not until you actually feel—because that's a big example—but going from 8 to 10, 8 to 10% is a 25% increase, so also huge. And so we have the biggest opportunity is on our landing page where we currently convert like 30% of people. If we got that to 36%, that's a 20% increase in the business; if we get that from 30 to 42, that's 40%, some big number. And that's the most exciting thing we emerged with is that how many opportunities we have to string together 10 to 15% improvements, right? Because if I take a number from 10 to 12 or 10 to 11%, that's a 10% improvement in the business, and that's exciting. So that's step one: understanding that we have a hidden problem that we can go and solve now.
Step two is realizing there are people who do this full-time who are much better at it than we are. And so I talked about in my last video is that our size right now, it's no longer worth it for us to bootstrap a department that we've never run before. It is better for us to invest in a high-quality agency who has done this type of work time and time again, that are faster at it, better at it, going to do a better job and allow us to do things in parallel with them working on it on their own. And so rather than—and this is what I would have done just six months ago—I'd have said, "Okay, we've got to go learn all CRO and all this stuff." It's like, "No, honestly, we should borrow someone's experience, invest in working with them, and then see if we eventually want to take it in-house, but probably not." So instead, I've reached out to a ton of agencies already to get interviews set up, and that is like the big takeaway from our event: we need someone working around the clock for us to optimize different parts of our funnel because we know that those 5%, 10%, 20% improvements compounded month over month over month over month put us in a completely different spot in a year. And that's—I—I'm just—hopefully you can hear the excitement of my voice as I emerge from this event—like, "Okay, we are so much closer to a big revenue jump than I thought possible," and that is why you invest in this type of advisory and consulting services because once you hear that, I never would have thought that this was our bottleneck until now. And so that, again, next 12 months is going to be awesome. Weekly CRO tests, pair that with explosion and impressions we're going to get from Instagram and YouTube, all at the same time, and we could be in a completely different spot by the end of the year.
All right, the second big marketing takeaway is their ad assembly process. I emerged with a ton of new golden nuggets for cold traffic advertising. I've made a video on this; you can find it under "Nine Lessons I Learned Failing to Scale to a Million Dollars a Month," talking about my journey with advertising, and I messed it up because, as with anything, I tried to bootstrap it; I didn't have the ideal scene. And we had a couple of things dramatically wrong: we were not making nearly enough new creative for the amount of money we were spending—roughly $100,000 a month—we were using Facebook. For anyone who's a media buyer, knows that CBO allows Facebook to make the choices for you based on their algorithm of what ads they think will be best; there's actually a better way to do that. And then we let decent ads linger for too long, uh, rather than allocating that spend to a new ad. So since then, we've pivoted our ad strategy to start sending, uh, or start running DM ads and allow our setters to work in there; it's already starting to work quite well, but we know that if we want to scale it up, we're going to have to significantly increase the cadence at which we film and create and produce new ads. So this is where this framework comes in.
So for anyone who's not running paid ads, this is not going to be that relevant for you, but for those who are trying to better establish a paid ad business on top of their organic, uh, this is going to be extremely relevant for you. And so the high-level summary of the framework: it's 70-20-10. And he—I think he got this from Google; I don't really know—but basically, you will start with six angles that will make up the meat of your ad. You'll then bolt on five different hooks to each angle, which gives you 30 different ads to run. And for us, we're going to actually take this a step further and have both me and my co-founder film the ads, and that's going to give us 60 ads to run with each time we run this process. So this would be the first thing we do. Then you run each of these ads in their own ad set—again, I'm getting very granular here; this is far more—again, if it's not—if you're not into paid ads, none of this is going to make sense—but they're in their own ad set, which allows—forces the Meta algorithm to spend money on each of them, and the amount of spend will depend on budget, margin, etc. After I spend enough to validate each ad, I rank them top to bottom on performance from 1 to 30. Of those 30 ads, I take the two best, and then I follow the 70-20-10. The next week—so we have enough data from the first week—we pick two out of those 30; the following week, 70% of my ad tests and budgets will be slight variations of the best two ads. So that's taking the best two and changing—maybe I film them again, but in different clothes, or a different color filter, or I flip the ad horizontally—like very small tweaks that do not really change what is being said. Then 20% of the ads will be quote-unquote "decent" variations of the best two ads. So I could take a different hook; I could have a different person speaking; I could have a different setting entirely—basically changing it in a way that you might have like a hunch that someone would react differently to the ad versus these very little is actually changing. And then the last 10% will be a completely new ad that forces constant new creative retesting. So to summarize: in week two, I'd have 30 ads that look like this: 21—so 70% of 30 are extremely slight variations of the two winning ads; six of them are significant variations of those two ads; and then three ads are completely new tests. So how we would do this—actually, before I show you that—then I just repeat and repeat and repeat that process. So this guarantees that we have a data-driven way to keep my best ads receiving significant amounts of spend. So what happens is because those two ads that work the best then get 20 very subtle variations to them, 70% of our spend the next week is going to be on those ads that were the best from the last week. And if none of them worked, obviously you would do it again, like you would test more angles, but this right away goes, "Okay, we know that each week we are going to pick the best ad and scale it with very slight variations that allow us to scale it in a way that reduces ad fatigue," and then you also are guaranteed to have enough new creative testing where you're launching at least one new angle every single week and comparing it, and they're all getting the same amounts of spend. So that's the—that's the aha moment to me is like, because all 30 ads each week have to compete their way to the top, they are then like each week you have a new chance to have a new angle that pops. And that, again, was something we were not doing. And lastly—enough for your media buyer to constantly turn the ads that aren't working off, scale up the winners, shut down the losers, etc.—on a daily basis rather than a weekly basis. So how this would look is like, let's say I've had six angles; one of them was clearly the winning angle, and then the two variations of that were some of the highest performance; I would then have 21 variations of that best angle, six ads that are slight variations of that same angle, so we're doubling down, but then one ad I would launch—one new angle with three hooks—and that's what we plan on doing. And so the three ads that are completely new tests are really one angle with three new hooks, and that's what you're constantly adding to the algorithm each week. So right now we are not in a season of doing a ton of creative testing, but the most scalable lever in our business right now is getting our DM funnel to work. And so if we can get our DM funnel to work even better by having new creative that gets people to opt in and restarts conversations, that's the most scalable one that we can have a team of four, five, six, seven, 10 setters at certain levels of spend, uh, really working those conversations. And to do that, we would have to have enough creative. And so this is the framework that we will go with once we get there.
All right, my next takeaway was how they structure their media team. So for anyone who follows the Horoi, you know that they're everywhere at all times, on every single platform, blowing up, going viral, tons of educational, actionable information, and I wanted to see how they organized the team that allows them to do that. So over the past few years, we spent a lot of time writing on places like X and LinkedIn and Threads; we are a writing-based business, so that's how we're able to be everywhere because it's only marginally more editing, formatting to repost all these other platforms. But for the last six months, we've started to invest in YouTube, as I'm making this video, and Instagram as well, because they said—and this was off the cuff—that 80% of their opt-ins come from those two channels. So right away, we're like, "Okay, we have huge opportunity to just start building brands on those platforms," and that is going to significantly increase our overall amount of traffic. However, that is difficult to—to do; like you need more human beings involved in the process to build these media-based rather than text—so video media versus text media. And so this is what I was really looking for because you cannot find like a team structure in ChatGPT or some course or anywhere online; you have to go to someone who has iterated on this structure. Like I can only imagine the number of times that they've iterated the media team meeting cadences and like department org structure and incentive structure and comp structure and all these other things. I'm going to go pay someone—which is what we did—to give us that ideal scene, so that when we want to build our media team to that level, we don't have to go do all those mistakes; we can just buy their experience as a one-off purchase. And so that's where we are now. However, for you, my lovely viewer, this is the only part that I'm going to keep fully behind the kimono because they were very clear that they've never released this publicly; they had to…
The our subject matter expert, Lewis, kind of had to pull some strings. And so he said if he could, or if we could, he knew we'd make a video about this. Keep this part, um, off the internet because they haven't publicly talked about it.
I'm going to give Alex the respect there to go talk about their media team structure. I'm sure anyone watching this would be interested in a full breakdown from him. So maybe if he's watching this, we'd love to see this on YouTube as well. Uh, but I'm not going to be the one to break this media structure down when they haven't even done it themselves. So sorry to not be able to share that part. But again, this is why sometimes you pay for all the information. So if there's one takeaway that I'm not going to share publicly, it's going to be that one.
However, I will share a very cool Golden Nugget that we walked away with about how they incentivize their editors on video performance. So they have a two, $250—that might not be the right number—but something in that range whenever someone posts a video that goes viral. Why? Because that's the incentive, or what they're looking for most on their media department, is viral videos. And so this incentivizes the team to do two things: one, look extra hard for clips that could go viral—which means they're going to spend the discretionary effort to go find the clips that, again, could go viral—and then second, they're going to edit them in a way that increases potential virality. And that is usually one to two extra hours of retention-based editing; that's the difference between a video flopping and a video taking off. And so that Golden Nugget was huge. We're going to implement the same thing, and you can also have that for uh any of your text platforms if they have things that go viral. You can give your uh Ghost Riders a bonus, and we plan on doing something similar. So that was the real golden nugget on media. Sorry, I can't give this full breakdown. Uh, if Alex goes ahead, goes ahead and makes a video um on this, I'll talk about it in the future and how we're going to implement it with our, within our team. But for now, got to keep that one under wraps.
All right, next we talked about an ideal page structure for landing pages. This was one of the best practices that they shared with us. Our option rates are decent, like 35% on our main page, but if we get those to 50%, 15 over 35 is a 42% increase in throughput of the funnel. So this is the highest leverage place for us. So the golden nuggets, golden nuggets on page structure: 80% of the optimization should happen above the fold. And so most people consume social media content on their phone, and so we have underinvested in Mobile optimization. And so we would always look at things like this picture—I even took right here—is from desktop, but people opt into stuff on their phone. And so we have not done a good enough job optimizing that of what's above the fold for mobile. This was another like, you can't hear this from anywhere else unless you have people actually in the trenches. So incomplete information bias to get more opt-in. So basically what they, their main funnel is, they have some asset that is blurred, and you have to opt in to see it. So you can almost see like, oh, it's right there, I'm just like right on the other side of the fence here, or they have a video that it's like a free training, and you click on the free training, and you have to opt in to view it. And so in the same way that like your brain hates clicking on something and then not being able to see it, or like being so close to it that is uh what they missed out, or like what they told us to do, and that's how we'll upgrade our, our funnel.
So here's the page we have. You can see there's no like incomplete information; there's too much information; most people are not reading it. And so their structure is headline, uh, blurred video or image, and then testimonials, and that is it. So we have a lot of stuff here; we have some credibility that doesn't matter. This should just be a single page that's easier to scroll. So we are going to run an initial test which has headline, opt-in, but rather than email, it says download the free guide as a button, and then they click it, and that's when the PO, the opt-in pops it, or pops up. So again, it's incomplete information; it's like, okay, I really want this thing, download, oh shoot, now I got to put my email in, okay, then I'm much more likely to, rather than just seeing, hey, my email's right there. And so there's a few things we'll play around with, but the most important part is this one, which is the last takeaway on the marketing side, which is speed, page load time is costing you significant amounts of money. This one, it hurt to hear and see. And so they brought up our funnel and did this little audit, and our landing page takes nine seconds to load. Nine seconds. And so for anyone out there who thinks that's a long time, you would be right. And I didn't know that because I've always been loading the page on my phone that's already has the website cached, and so that makes it 80% faster. So it took like two seconds on mine. I'm like, Ah, that's not too bad. 80% faster if it's already been cached. So you have to go take a new phone or a new computer or a new browser and bring it up, and then that's how you measure, measure your speed page load time. Ours is extremely slow, and he showed us, no, that there's a 7% drop in revenue for just 1 second of more page load delay. And so you can imagine if you extrapolate that out to like 9 seconds, who knows how much money we're leaving on the table. And so that was like, I cannot believe we've gotten to where we are as a business with pages that load that slowly. So great to see people are clearly overcoming some friction to work with us. Now imagine if you can remove that friction, and then who knows when we'll go from there. So again, first step, learning this is a problem, now I know. Second step was learning I can hire either a CRO agency or just a solo developer on Fiverr who can go in and audit the entire funnel and maximize page speed load time, and they do this all the time, and that's their job. So we're going to do that; it's only a couple hundred bucks. And by the end of, by the time this video is live, we will have more than enough of a speed page load optimize optimization that's going to hopefully just make us more money, get us more emails, get us more overall throughput of all the attention that we're generating.
So those are all the marketing nuggets. You can tell that this is where my attention was during the event. I really wanted to learn these because I'm emerging with five, six, seven takeaways to apply in sequence on how to make our entire uh attention generation engine more efficient. From here, we're going to dive into sales Frameworks, which I didn't go into the event thinking I was going to walk away with a ton of takeaways on, but as I'll explain here, one, once marketing is quote unquote solved, you'll just ping-pong back to the other end of the acquisition spectrum, which is sales, and then you kind of just go back and forth. So let's dive into the sales Frameworks.
All right, diving into the sales framework. So like I said, this was not the exact bottleneck force right now, given CRO uh is our bottleneck and just general marketing throughput. However, there's always going to be, as we continue to scale, a back and forth ping-pong between sales and marketing. So when we make a big CRO upgrade, we'll see a surge call volume, then we'll need to hire more closers and Setters and train them efficiently to handle that new volume. And then once I hire additional closers, it ping-pongs back to marketing to make sure they stay at capacity, and then that's more CRO tweaks. And then once we do that, the calendar is full again, we got to go hire more closures, and you just go back and forth. So after we had our uh brainstorm and presentation with Lewis, we went over to this, their sales department, and I was like, okay, if we go solve this marketing thing, you know we're going to have a sales capacity bottleneck in the next week, two weeks. And so these are all the takeaways I had on that front.
So first, there's a direct correlation between sales performance and the frequency of competition. So I'll say that again: direct correlation between sales performance and the frequency of competition. So over the last few months we've rolled out some bonus incentives for monthly performance based on what we found to be the most important metric for sales performance, which is upfront cash collected. It's been a nice upgrade; we see surges in intensity; it's at the end of each month and have our closers really dial in during the last five, six, seven days so they can hit their next bonus level. However, the gold nugget from the Hormos team was to do the same thing but on a weekly basis rather than monthly. So a few reasons why: first, they have a constant carrot at the end of the stick for them to put in the extra discretionary effort every single week, not just at the end of the month. Since the competition ends on Saturday night, and it incentivizes competition into the weekend. The biggest problem usually is that there's a lot of people in our ecosystem who want to take calls on the weekend, but it's not the best lifestyle thing for our sales team. However, if they have the opportunity to make a lot more money, more likely they are, more likely to do it. And then lastly, it resets the clock each week. So if you're only incentivized on monthly performance and you have just a terrible off week or you take a vacation or something like that, it's more likely that you have a poor month because you're behind. But on a weekly competition, it resets; you get a fresh start, and you can go get after it. So we are going to create the uh weekly incentive structure; this is tiered cash bonuses based on performance each, each week. And so every single week there's a certain amount that if you hit this number you get this bonus, this number you get this bonus, this number you get this bonus. Then that basically says every single week if you can hit those you're going to collect a ton of extra cash throughout the month because you just keep consistent performance going. On top of that, we'll have random rewards for the best closer each week, or just like best show rate, other things that we're trying to optimize; uh, I'll talk about that in a sec, but like swag or stakes or some surprise trip somewhere or something cool that doesn't have to do with money that they also find valuable and just makes a job more fun. On top of that, for things that we're trying to improve, like CRM being up to date or show rate, or hey, we have a stacked calendar today, let's put some kind of competition the day before that says, hey, whoever has the best day tomorrow gets X, Y, and Z thing. And then random QCs for doing like sending morning voice notes or any parts of the sales process that we know are leading indicators for high performance; that's what we want to reward as well. So high-level takeaway: if you only incentivize them on performance, having constant competition and prizes will keep it fresh, make it interesting, and lead to overall more discretionary effort and intensity than if you only do things on a monthly basis.
Our next gold nugget from their sales director: there are three ways to increase the reinforcement level when training someone. So they are a huge culture on positive reinforcement and immediate enforcement on things that they want their team to repeat. And so they said there are three ways you can increase the level of reinforcement a reward provides: first, you do it randomly. So when you reward someone on a consistent basis, the novelty of it wears off; uh, like if I know that after every time I do this certain thing I get a reward, I'm less likely to do that thing to get the reward because I know it's coming. However, if I randomly give a reward, like a slot machine, right? If a slot machine, if you won on the eighth turn every time, it'd be boring. The reason people play is because you have a chance every time, and you know it's going to come at some point, and that's what keeps it exciting. And so having that built into our reward culture gets people to continue to do the behavior because they don't always get the reward, but when they do, the reinforcement is so much stronger that it keeps them going. Second is quickly. So the faster you pair reward with behavior, the stronger the level of reinforcement. I've talked about this one; I hear from them all the time, like if a dog goes to the bathroom in the house, you swat it immediately; they'll be way less likely to do it, but if you come home and 8 hours later you swat them, they're like, I have no clue what you're doing that for; uh, not that you should swat your dog in the first place, but completely different aside there. Uh, the closer you compare a reward with the action that you're trying to reinforce, the stronger the reinforcement. So right away, if someone does something good on a call or they close a deal, if you can reward them immediately, they are going to be more likely to repeat that in the future. And then lastly, you want to reward people publicly. So if you reward someone via DM and you do the same thing in the full team channel, it's far more likely that you get a better response based on uh the one that was in public because you get a little bit of status. When there's a status increase with a reinforcement, it is going to yield a higher result. So I just like little nuggets like this where I hear, I'm like, okay, cool, how can we implement that with our sales team? How can we implement that with our marketing team? How can we implement that with my children one day, right? So these are all just little cool things that I wanted to take away and share with you as well.
All right, so with that in mind, the next takeaway was we want to reinforce every sale with as many people as possible. So this is came from Ed. Ed, if you're watching this, thanks for a great event again. And he talked about how he used to work at a gym, or he's been in the gym industry his entire life, and so he's been wearing hoodies basically every day, and he was a little bit reluctant to get into this private equity, I wear a suit every day mode. And so Lila, their CEO, one day had a tailor come in and give him custom-fit suits; uh, like an offer he couldn't refuse, and saying, Ed, it's really time you got to start wearing a suit; it looks more professional; we're dealing with more high-level clients, etc., etc. Then the next day after he got his suits, he came in, and Lila sent a company-wide memo excluding him, basically telling everyone to hype up Ed on how good his new suits look. Ed works very closely with Lila, and so he knew she did something like this and that she was up to something because one by one, every single person throughout the day was like, Ed, nice suit, great suit, great suit, you look great, wow. So I love that color, whatever, whatever, janitor, front desk, security detail, basically every person. And the best part, he knew exactly what was going on, and it still worked because the next day he was like, Wow, last time I wore this suit I felt great all day, and then I repeated that action. And so how I want to take away with our team is like, it shows the power of team-wide praise and reward is that if you're working with a group of people, the level of reinforcement that you can have on a very positive reward is huge if they all do it, all, all the time. And so anytime one of our closers or CSMs bring in a front-end or back-end sale, our goal is to reinforce that with as many people as possible. So that's comes from the executives, comes from the department heads, comes from the individual contributors. We want to create a culture where the most important things in our business are rewarded constantly. And so that was just a great takeaway for us. I love that story, too, of if you want someone to do something, get everyone on the team to say that's a good thing that they're doing or a good job or something like that. And we are going to implement that across the board.
All right, the next sales takeaway is the best way to incentivize speed to lead is a free-for-all setting process. So this was another new ideal scene for me. So we've been circling uh around various ways to come up with systems that better incentivize our Setters to call our applications. Who do not book their team repeated time and time again that the single most important factor is simply how fast you call them, not how often you call them, but how fast after they take an action that they don't complete you call them. Two times. This is not something we've ever done because we haven't had the closer capacity to really take on a whole new opportunity stream, but we have so many qualified leads who are slipping through the cracks because we are not calling them because our Setters are responsible for a ton of different things. So the fix will be for any lead who comes in and does not uh fill out or book a call, but they apply, our goal is to call them within 60 seconds and try and get them locked in. The biggest reason they don't book is cuz there wasn't a time that was available, but after they leave this page and they go back to Instagram or they go back to wherever they were, they're far more likely to actually end up booking it. It goes from something like 70% down to roughly 20, which is huge. So to fix this, we're going to have a free-for-all system: when anytime a lead applies but doesn't book, they become open; whoever calls them first with a double dial claims that lead. And so at any time you're not guaranteed as a Setter to get these super warm, easily setable leads; you have to be on your game claiming those leads and calling them as quickly as possible. And then they stay on your list for 7 days; you contact them daily over those next seven days; uh, if they are not contacted during that window, they are passed off to another Setter who has the opportunity and any time to call those leads. And then what we'll do is because of the bottleneck I mentioned earlier where most people that we call or that don't book because they, you know, you're going on vacation this week and you got to wait till next week to go, um, then we will actually just um create a dummy calendar that has like exceedingly expanded availability so that we can make sure, hey, okay, I can't do till next Tuesday, great, let's book you in. All right, we're all set. So rather than having a round robin that automatically routes leads to Setters, this free-for-all process says, Hey, whoever's on it the most, whoever's the most active, whoever is the most hungry to start to set appointments, you can win all these leads, and that will fix our speed to lead problem. So very excited to roll that, that one out.
All right, another big ideal scene was how to scale a team of closers and Setters. So we currently have four closers, three setters, and over the next few months I see us getting to six and six, which is a lot for one sales manager to handle. So I've talked about how we brought on a killer sales manager recently, and now we have to continue scaling that team. The natural progression here is to elevate one closer and one Setter into closer lead and Setter lead, so they become player-coaches. This frees up time for the sales manager to focus on things like Q&A, recruiting, and training without having to do as much of the maintenance activities that is more of an ongoing process. So how this looks, and for anyone who runs a sales team, this is going to be very valuable for you: the closer lead has three or more closers in his pod that they manage on top of closing full-time. And so the breakdown is roughly 80/20 where they spend 80% of their week taking calls and 20% giving feedback. However, this is not a daily breakdown; it's not like they do four days of closing and then um, sorry, this is not 80/20 each day where they take, you know, morning meetings and then calls all night; it's more like four days of sales calls and one day of management, or three days of sales calls and two days where the morning's management, afternoon sales calls. The context switch of managing and closing every day is just too much, and so the, it's better to segment or batch those management activities into one day and then have the rest of the day they're really still being a closer rather than a closer player-coach. Same thing for Setter leads: 80% of the week spent in the field, 20% spent giving feedback, managing the other Setters. And now how this works is the incentive is you incentivize the leads on the performance of their pods with some kind of additional revenue. So if they're managing a team of three closers, they get like an additional chunk based on the performance of their pod on top of their own closing because when you take away some of their opportunity to close, you have to recompensate them and then some for the management that they are doing. So that was just a, a big like aha moment for us of where we're eventually heading, and not something we're going to be implementing in the next month to three months, but if we continue to keep scaling like I think we can, then this is going to become extremely relevant. And so that's why I was in the, like I, my whole frame after I got the marketing nuggets was like, how can I go gather more information that solves our sequential bottlenecks day in, day in, day out over the next three months so that when we show up in September we're at a completely different spot. And so we'll see where we're at at that point.
All right, this was a fun one: what it means to be a good listener. So one of their big themes is like operationalizing terms that people throw around without ever defining. So like, what does it mean to be patient? Doing things in the meantime. What does it mean to be consistent? What does it mean to be resilient? Like Lila had a great quote: it's like resilience is just how quickly you can return to baseline, and then reactivity is how far up or down you go from baseline. And so that's cool; it's like if you're a non-reactive, resilient person, you don't react strongly to things, and you come back to baseline very quickly. So a, like I'm just going to go off on a tangent here, like a, a non-resilient person gets rattled and then stays rattled. A resilient person that is reactive gets rattled and then is immediately unrattled. Then you could also have a non-reactive, non-resilient person who doesn't react very much, but they don't come back to baseline; they stay a little bit pissed off all day. And so that's just a cool way to think about is like, all right, if I'm trying to get better at those two things, I need to come back to baseline, and I need to not deviate from baseline very much, and you can work on those. But they had, what does it mean to be a good listener, right? So they're a great listener; what does that actually mean? And they have chunked it down to three behaviors: they nod their head when someone speaks; you go, she, like this; you go proper O's and oo when someone speaks; you go, mhm, ah, mhm, just like that, and people think you're a good listener. And then lastly, you repeat back to them what they said. So it's like, so it sounds like, and correct me if I'm wrong, but you're struggling with this and this and this, and that is leading to this; is that correct? And if you do all those three things, you were a good listener. And so what they do, sounds silly, but everyone on the team role-plays how to do this, how to be a good listener; they practice, and their sales team as a result.
Everyone says they're good listeners—everyone on their team, and they're talking to you. They go like this, and they train these behaviors. And so I'm looking forward to running through experiments like this, but seeing them take a term that is so amorphous, like "good listening," and chunk it down to three behaviors—I love that. So I want to share that with y'all as well. All right.
The last takeaway is to have a closer rubric for them to diagnose their own calls. So he showed us this big spreadsheet that anyone on the team can grade one of their sales calls using—including someone that's on the sales team or not, off on the sales team—that's how straightforward it is. And so one of the bottlenecks that we see is whenever we're doing call reviews, like what part do we actually dig into? Where do they have the most opportunity to improve? And it's hard to see with an hourlong call where that actually is unless you have a checkbox system. So what they have is like a 31-row spreadsheet that grades each extremely specific part of the call with a not quite good or great score. So they can have the closer grade themselves and then pass that graded rubric on to the manager, who can then appropriately coach to the part of the call that they have the most opportunity to improve. You could also have a sales QC whose sole job is to do this. We don't have that; we're not very close to having that, but I thought that was a cool process. And he also has one for off the call that's like, "Hey, how are you taking care of your body, your mind, the small details like CRM being up to date?" Right? If you're off and you're having a bad week, he has them fill out the rubric, and it's like, "Oh, I immediately know what behavior led to this; this I need to stop doing those things and then prevent them from happening in the future." So they have just really done a good job operationalizing the business as much as possible into simple checklists. And that is the meta takeaway from all these sales frameworks: how can you eliminate the variability in the performance of your team? That also allows them to perform much better given the constraints and setups that you provide them with. So that's it on the sales front. Now we're going to dive into general business lessons. These are just things that I started to witness throughout the event that I want to apply to our team that really don't have anything to do with sales or marketing specifically, but are just in general how to operate a great business. So let's dive into that next. All righty.
So we talked marketing, we talked sales; now on to the last part, which are general business lessons and realizations. Aside from sales and marketing, like I said, I emerged with a few things from how they structured the event to some conversations with other business owners, and this is that list: First, to remove yourself from sales and fulfillment, you must edify your team. So we paid $45,000 for this event, and Alex and Ila were not there, which is pretty cool. Like, as a business owner, that my goal is to remove myself from sales and fulfillment; it was really cool to see them be at a place where they could do that. And they did this, or they can do this, for a few reasons: One, they have an extremely qualified team where everyone on their team knows what they're talking about, and they do a great job helping you understand that their team's actually more qualified to talk about some of these things during the initial workshop. So every time, or during the initial workshop, they have team members present a lot of those things, and that helps you go, "Okay, cool; I'm happy to listen to their team because they just demonstrated a ton of expertise on this." And so they do a great job with that. And at the same time, they also, before any of them spoke or before they assigned us to the subject matter expert group, they do this big presentation with like a ton of the accolades that every single one of them have, and you immediately go, "Okay, cool; like this person has status, they have credibility, they have experience such that I'm not going to be sitting here like, 'Oh, I want to talk to Alex and Lea; like your team doesn't know anything.'" Not true, and they do a great job with that. So we are going to implement something similar with our pre-sales emails that hype up the enrollment advisor that they're going to be talking to as well as our success team, saying, "Hey, you're working with so-and-so; here's their experience with so-and-so." Big golden nugget for me is just: If you want to remove yourself, you have to help your customers realize that they're actually getting a better experience talking to these other people than if they talk to you.
All right, another little golden nugget: There are two ways to learn anything: modeling and roleplay. And so Leila has been working with the CEO coach who works with Sam Alman, which is pretty cool, and this golden nugget came from them, which is basically: You can change behavior in two ways: You can watch someone do something, or you do something yourself with a guide. Sounds very simple, but you can use this to change any behavior in the fastest way possible. So if you want to become better at sales, you should watch the best closer modeling and roleplay with the best closer—very easy. If you want to write better emails, you should read all of our best emails, and you should write an email and get immediate feedback from our head copywriter—that's roleplay. And this is: You can do the same thing with any habit or skill. If you want to stop eating late at night, you should talk to people who don't have that behavior, ask how they overcame it, and learn those frameworks, and then practice doing that behavior before you're put in the situation—like the response you'll have, or the question you'll pose yourself, or the replacement behavior you'll turn to. And the hardest part about seeing this framework is how simple it is, and yet everyone thinks there's some big complex way to like get a better habit or learn a skill. And no, you need to watch someone really good at it, and then you need to do it yourself. And hearing those—sometimes one of the things they repeat is that most people need to be reminded more than they need to be taught—and just seeing this reminder of like, "You don't need to overcomplicate training; you don't need to overcomplicate trying to improve yourself or your own personal development." No, watch people who are good at it, and do the thing that you want to do with someone who is good at it as well.
All right, another one for anyone who runs a community: To keep people from leaving, give them status. So this was cool; it's from a conversation I overheard on community retention: People don't want to leave when they have status built up—very simple. If you're a senior level somewhere, you're less likely to leave than if you're a beginner. And so there are several ways you can do this: You can give them titles based on how long they've been a part of the community, so you know, each month they're there, they get like this new prestige title that's cool, or year, whatever. You can give them virtual or physical swag that other people can see that they don't have—so exclusive hats, exclusive t-shirts, exclusive merch, whatever it is. Or you can give them access to things like calls that they only get after they've accomplished something important, and that they only get to attend because they accomplish that thing. So any combination can work, but the most important part is having a clear roadmap for them to unlock that next level of status, so that not only do they have status, but they have the understanding of how they'll get even more of it. And this was just cool to hear, like, "Okay, cool," and we start our digital writing school community that I'm going to be breaking down on this YouTube channel; we're going to implement a lot of these things, and figuring out how to give status in a way that doesn't cheapen the brand but also gets people to stay for a very long time is going to be a cool challenge for us to solve, and I just thought that this was worth sharing.
All right, I really should have put this one earlier on because I think it's one of the most important things I learned, and it's that most young talent is better compensated with life coaching than with the money. And so this came from Ed, one of their workshop—or the operating partner for their workshop division—and he's one of the oldest people on the team at 38, and he told a few stories of how young employees he's been able to get below market rate because he invests in them as people during their one-on-ones. So he undercompensated them financially but overcompensates them in attention and guidance. So on his 1-on-1s, which he holds weekly with any employees he's mentoring, and that's important to see or to recognize, he rarely talks about business; instead, he talks about things they're working on outside of work, like their personal development: so personal finance, productivity, health and fitness habits. He's like, "Yeah, I built finance records for people; I built, you know, to-do list templates for people; I built workout plans for people, nutrition plans—all that kind of stuff"—or eventually where they want to go, so again, not the job that they currently have; it's outside of work, and then where they want to go long-term. Then he helps them unpack the skills that they're lacking or will need—will need to build—along the way for them to get to that next level. So some people do not want to invest so much in their team, and that's fine; you're just going to have less loyalty, and you're going to have to pay above-average salaries as a result. And so this is something I've got to experience where I've been on both ends of the spectrum: I've invested very, very heavily in people, and then I've had periods where I didn't have as much emotional capacity to invest as much, and I felt that. And so this is an area of choice, and it's not that one is right or wrong; it's just understanding the tradeoff. If you're not willing to be the life coach for a younger person, you should expect to not work with young people or have to overcompensate them financially, which kind of, you know, lessens the overall point of having young talent: is that you can pay them a little bit less, and you preserve margin, and then you sell some of your time to help improve them over the long run. So I'm keeping this in mind as I manage more and more; it's like, "Where am I on this spectrum?" Is something I'm reflecting on, and I want to stay on the side of continuing to overinvest. Toed six years ago, that's going to be a really cool moment for me, seeing the type of person that they become and knowing that I played a good role in that. So just a framework that I'm keeping top of mind as we continue to expand our team, and I plan on putting that into practice as well.
All right, getting towards the tail end here; second to last: Referral incentives must be big enough to change behavior. So most people offer 20% for referrals; this does nothing, and no one does anything with it. I'm part of like 20 affiliate programs that offer big kickbacks; I don't go out of my way to do anything, discretionary effort-wise, to unlock that 20%. So the framework is: The reward must be big enough that the person invests their free time or diverts their main time into unlocking that reward. So we have two referral affiliate programs: one internally for our PJ students, and then two internally for our team members to bring other team members to us. So the thought experiment is like, "What if we just tripled the size of what we gave people? Would that be enough? If we gave $5,000 to someone who brings a friend to work here, what would that do? If we gave a 75% affiliate commission once they hit a certain number of referrals, like, would that be worth it? Would they end up bringing a lot more people because of that?" Yeah, probably. So there's a balance here, because if you go too high, then that's all their spend; that's all they'll spend their time on, which will just be too much. So no immediate takeaways here, but I just thought it was cool as a way to structure a referral program: It's like, "Okay, is this going to change the discretionary time usage of the people that I roll this out with? If it's not, I need to increase it; and if it is, cool, I'm in a good spot."
And last but not least: The first moment and last moment in any event is the most important. So I'll finish with a meta takeaway for this video: The two most important parts are the beginning and the end. And at their event, they put this into practice with their event structure. So when we get there, we're greeted outside with a warm welcome and hyper-specific compliment. They complimented my jacket; said they really liked that, and I remember that because I was like, "Oh, that was nice." And this puts us in a good state going into the event because you're like, "Wow, I've received attention; they knew my name; they knew where I was from; they gave me a nice compliment; I'm now in a better mood." And then both times when we left, they revealed some kind of unexpected bonus that we were not expecting and gave us a goodie bag for us to take home. So to be honest, like if I didn't write all these things down, I wouldn't remember quite as much as what happened from the event, but I would 100% remember the things that I went into the event and experienced and then the things that happened right as we left. So those are the big takeaways overall that I'm going to implement for my YouTube videos, for my in-person events, for our team onboarding, for our client onboarding—all of those different parts are all very important. All right, and that's the full breakdown of everything I learned. Spending $45,000 on this experience—would this be worth it for every business owner? Absolutely not. But like I said, at our level, you can only get this type of hyper-tactical information in so many places. So this is exactly what we needed to get to the next level. And that is all we went into the event looking for: was how can we maximize the opportunity—like the chance that we get to the next level—and where can we find that information? We found it here. That's all for this video. If you want to see another video where I talk about my takeaways from the first event at the Horoi workshop, click this button right here, and I'll see you there.