This post is different to most I write. I want to show you the process I went through to take a business, that was a brand new idea, in an industry I’ve never worked in, to $20,000 in 40 days.
Let me explain exactly how this all happened:
So… let’s rewind to November 2017, when this all started with my good friend and coach – Zac Dixon. Zac is an incredible performance and mindset coach. Truly world class.
I highly recommend everyone I know who needs help to work with him. You can actually check his content out here.
At the time, Zac and I were planning on running some events for the 2018 year. He was going to speak about Coaching and I was going to market the events for him.
To plan this out… I met with his girlfriend Angela, who helps Zac plan and manage his business.
We were having coffee late on a November afternoon – at Crown Casino in Melbourne – discussing these events, when she started telling me about her financial planning business – which she was in the process of selling.
During the conversation, we started talking about marketing and she told me that she had purchased $17,000 of leads one month from a lead generation company for financial planners.
I’ll never forget it. It was just a passing comment she made, and my eyes nearly fell out of my head.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa… whoa. Hang on, hang on, hang on. Explain that to me again?
Sorry, did I hear what you said correctly? $17,000 for leads?”
“Yes”. said Ange, “I’ll email you the information about it”.
Now… at the time, I knew nothing about performance, lead generation marketing or what we call “CPL Marketing”… so I was completely dumbfounded.
Ange emailed me a brochure from this Australian company. It outlined their process and how they generated live leads through Facebook.
They were selling leads for between $100 and $300 per lead. And this was for a minimum of 50 leads.
I couldn’t believe it, it was absolutely staggering.
Even now when I think about it… I still remembered being so amazed, despite now knowing that is a small quantity of leads in this industry.
I went home from what was an otherwise successful meeting and just knew I had to look into lead generation marketing. I knew I could generate qualified leads for tons less, and being a self-confessed marketing nerd, I was desperate to build something and test it.
I didn’t know this just a few short months ago, but this was the start of my next business. Now, my main skill set is writing sales copy. And I firmly believe a good copywriter is essentially just a good researcher.
They get deep in a particular niche or industry and they get to know it better than anyone who works in it. They understand the intricacies, especially in the financial sector, of how retirement funds and pensions work, tax laws and wealth creation.
Now… when it comes to creating a great marketing hook, I firmly believe that successful marketing comes down to one main thing:
“Showing someone how they can have a big win, with little to no risk or effort”
In the finance world, this means showing someone how they can make money, save money or reduce tax, without spending money on a planner, taking any risks or evading tax.
It’s that simple. Show someone how they can win without pain or effort, and you have their attention.
The best way to do this, is to take a concept that is already common knowledge, and create awareness around it.
For example: the reason we have financial planners or accountants, is to reduce our tax and risk, while increasing our wealth – amongst other things.
These experts know how to achieve this after many years of study, whilst we do not.
So when I conduct research, I look for any kind of benefit that a financial planner would tell their clients.
It might be the type of investment property to buy, hints on tax savings, bonds, stock or whatever – that the client doesn’t necessarily know – but is common knowledge, and use it as a marketing hook.
I’ll give you an example in just a moment…
When I started researching, I decided to begin with Retirement Planning and Superannuation. If you aren’t from Australia, Superannuation is what we call our retirement or pension fund. Essentially our 401k.
There was no real reason for starting this… but I just decided to pick a finance niche and go for it. I didn’t even know if the funnel would work.
Anyway, I started Googling around and learned the intricacies of our Super system…
A few days later, I decided to go to a news agent and look for something like Money magazine. As they are a news and media source, I knew they would have a better understanding of what people wanted to read about.
Now… I hadn’t been in a news agent for like 3 years, so what happened next was pretty crazy.
When I walked in, the first magazine I saw in the finance section was the Money Magazine Special Edition – Year 2017: Super Guide.
Instantly, I felt it was a really strange coincidence.
So I picked up that guide and spent the whole weekend reading the entire thing front to back.
After reading it, I realised there was almost a loophole that existed in the Australian Super system. It allows certain citizens to only pay 15% tax on their income by putting pre-tax dollars into superannuation – but only if they meet a specific criteria.
Now, it’s not exactly a loophole… because it’s common knowledge. In my marketing however, I called it a loophole because it has far more emotional appeal.
When you talk about a loophole or a secret, it draws people in. Because most people think they’re not rich because rich people have secrets that they hold from them.
Or people that are toned and fit and have 6 pack ab ‘secrets’ or they’ve been lied to about how to be healthy.
People buy into this stuff, it’s called mysticism and it’s really powerful as a copywriter.
So… now that my research had resulted in a hook for my marketing campaign, I knew I had a solid starting point.
The big idea for the campaign was: “Is this Australia’s Biggest Super Secret?”
In terms of the strategy, I created a survey funnel to see if people qualified for this loophole. There was 2 reasons for this:
1) There is a specific criteria people need to meet to qualify. I didn’t want to generate leads that didn’t meet the criteria.
2) Making people qualify is one of the biggest psychological secrets there is. In a world of saturated marketing, people are far too use to being sold absolutely everything. But if you say they can get a benefit, but its only for certain people – it makes them very interested.
People want to qualify, they want to be special. It also game-ify’s the process which makes it more fun for the prospect.
Now – the criteria to qualify for this benefit isn’t super strict, but I wanted to legitimise the process by having a lot of questions. My reason for doing this was I wanted to have lots of data on each person, for the financial planner I intended on selling the lead to.
So I asked a bunch of questions in the survey like:
What is your superannuation balance?
How much unsecured debt do you have?
How many investment properties do you have?
Do you rent or own your own home?
What is your household income?
By collecting all this data, the lead became infinitely more valuable to my end customer – which was my goal.
Strategically, the funnel looked like this:
All of the pages were built in Clickfunnels. However – off the shelf survey software is very average. I found Clickfunnels software element to be buggy – so I ended up settling with Typeform.
Therefore, on the landing page I embedded a Typeform survey and once a prospect filled it out, they were redirected to the Clickfunnels Opt In Page I had built.
Once I built the funnel, it was time to test it.
I just started by spending my own money on ads to see what would happen… and I was amazed.
I was getting people to come right through the funnel and opt in. For cheap too.
After they completed the survey, they then had to enter their name, email and phone number into the funnel to fully opt in.
Finally I understood how the company Angela showed me was selling leads for $100 to $300 per lead. I figured I would trial my leads by selling them for about $100 a lead. That way, if a planner wanted only leads that met a certain criteria – like a minimum amount of income or super – the margin would still be okay.
As it turned out… that is exactly what happened.
Now that I was generating leads and had a product I could sell… it was time to get busy selling it. As always, I went straight to cold email. I’ve written an article on “The Ultimate Guide to Cold Email” that reveals the exact process I went through to generate qualified lead buyers. It’s super, super valuable for anyone that sells B2B.
In short, I went on to LinkedIn. I filtered everyone by my search criteria:
Once I got this list of Australian based Financial Planners, I used Anyleads to extract the data from LinkedIn and get their email addresses.
Now that I had the list, I used Gmass and sent them this email:
It basically said:
“Hey, I’ve got these leads. This is the data I have for them. Let me know if you’d be interested in them.”
When people replied yes, I would explain more about the process and we would organise a time to chat.
An important thing to note here is – I don’t consider sales an overly strong skill of mine. But when I got on the phone with these planners, the leads sold themselves.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, nothing beats having a killer offer.
I also decided that planners had to buy 20 leads as a trial. The reason for this was I wanted to make sure they had a decent sample size to test them.
I didn’t want a planner to buy a small quantity of leads and either, have an awesome experience that wasn’t indicative of a normal batch – or have a bad one, for the same reason.
So, in December 2017, I sent out about 300 emails with the offer above. I got tonnes of replies. Planners wanted to chat and hear more about what I had created. On top of that, I built a buyers marketing funnel advertising the leads I had for sale and ran traffic to it.
I brought on a business partner, Jesse, who handles all of the traffic for the business. The buyers funnel was actually his idea. It worked well and we generated 10 leads from that for about $20 each.
I rang all of the leads I had generated through cold email and Facebook. Most planners said the same thing: “We’re definitely keen, but it’s the end of the year and we are winding up. Ring me in January.”
Before 2017 ended, my calendar was booked out for 2 weeks in advance with sales meetings. I also had a trip scheduled to Sydney where I met with 2 buyers and my software developer – who ended up building me a custom funnel – but more on that in a moment…
I had one buyer from Perth come on in December. He was ready to trial the leads, so we sent him some immediately.
Making your first sale in any business is so important, because it builds your belief. Once you get validated and you know what you are working on is possible, it’s a huge step forward.
In December, we banked just shy of $2,000. And by the end of January, we had surpassed $20,000.
When January rolled around, it was mayhem!
The best kind of mayhem…
Our Perth buyer reordered some leads and I brought on a buyer in Brisbane, Sydney, Adelaide and 2 in Melbourne in about 2 weeks.
We now had 6 buyers and we were only 2 weeks into the year. We had a few more we were speaking with.
After that influx of buyers – I noticed we had issues with our weak infrastructure and the way the funnel was put together.
As I write this now, at the end of January – I’ve slowed down our buyer acquisition and I’m in the process of refining our systems.
As I mentioned earlier in this piece, the initial funnel I built was rough. I only intended to build it as a test and it just happened to take off. When I went to Sydney to meet 2 buyers in early January, I met up with a good friend who is a marketer and developer. He built me a custom coded Funnel that stored all the data in once place.
We also added some crazy features to the new funnel. Instead of multiple choice answers, all our questions had sliders to get the exact value:
The biggest update we made was text verification.
At the end of the funnel, every lead that opted in for a call got sent an SMS. They then entered the verification code from the SMS into the funnel, to verify what they opted in for – which made a huge impact on our lead quality.
So – as you can see. This is the process I went through to come up with a new business idea, validate a concept and bank $20,000. At this stage, I have slowed down our growth and am focused on improving systems and product quality. Just like any business, some of our customers got great results with the leads, and some not so great.
I’m just working on continually improving the lead quality. I want to expand this into a million dollar company in 2018, so join me on this journey.
It’s going to be really exciting.