Transcript
Joe Troyer: Dan [Curtz] asks … Let’s see here. This is a long one. Let’s see. “What would be the best way to fully automate your pay-per-lead business or your pay-per-call business if you were a one man show?” From prospecting to the sales conversation to the build out and fulfillment and then the incremental upkeep for the entire system. He says, “I have some ideas to make it a reality, but I’d really like your spin on it.” Yeah. Let’s jump in. Guys, for those of you that don’t have a pay-per-lead business, if you have any other type of business, most of this stuff is very, very applicable as well for your business, whether you’re a more traditional agency offering SEO or ad word service or Google Ads now it’s called, or you don’t do any marketing services but you provide some type of B2B service. This is definitely very applicable for you as well.
Joe Troyer: What you wanna do is obviously eliminate the bottlenecks. I just wrote down some of the big bottlenecks that I faced and how I got past them in our very own pay-per-lead business. In terms of sales, I would set up an evergreen cold email sequence that pushes people to a calendar to book a meeting with me. First and foremost, if I was time constricted, that would be the number one thing that I focus on. Okay?
Joe Troyer: The reason that I say … that I word this the way that I do is very important, though. Evergreen cold email sequence, what I mean by that is you’re not using GMass or any of the other free plugins and every day having to send out emails using that plugin and then follow up two days later using that plugin and then three days later, if they still don’t respond, follow up again. That’s just not gonna work. You’re gonna forget. You’re not gonna be able to keep track. It’s just gonna get dropped. The reason that I say evergreen is that’s how we build our sequences. They’re evergreen, meaning I add a lead to our system. They’re automatically gonna get an email day one, day four, and day seven, trying to get them to book into my calendar with me. If they don’t respond from there, they’re going to then go on long term follow up sequence where I’m hitting them every seven to 14 days instead of every three to four days.
Joe Troyer: Whenever that person opts in to the calendar and says, “Yes, Joe. I wanna meet with you,” they book their appointment. They book their time. They’re automatically gonna be yanked from those sequences so I don’t look like an idiot trying to get them to book and appointment with me and they already have. That’s a very important distinction. A lot of people try cold email. “Joe, I’ve tried cold email.” When I really talk to them, that’s what they’ve done. They’ve just taken a bunch of leads that they got one time. They sent out an email blast to 100 or 200 contacts. Nothing came back besides a couple fuck you’s and they stopped it. Guys, that’s no way to build a business. Gotta set up a system. You gotta work on the system. If your messaging isn’t working, then your messaging sucks. You gotta work on making the messaging better. Have a better offer, a more convincing offer. Personalize it.
Joe Troyer: All right. I think I concentrated on that one just enough. All right. Under sales, then, another thing, a big hiccup that I see and people just fall face first on this one all the time. I’ve helped so many people at our live workshops and live events literally close deals while they’re here. Then, they go to actually get the customer to sign the contract and they don’t have it ready. It’s like, “Oh. I gotta go map all these fields and I gotta go fill in the lead price and I gotta do this. I gotta do that before I can even send the contract to the proposal … or to the prospect.” All the while, you just told the prospect 10 minutes ago that you were gonna send it all over like right away.
Joe Troyer: Now, you’re freaking out. You’re sweating bullets. Don’t be doing that. You should be using a system where you can have your contract all set up, ready to go. Any of the information that you need to set up with your … that you need to input into that contract should be as easy as you filling out a form with three or four pieces of information and hitting go. Then it gets sent to your prospect. Have your contracts all ready to go so all that you gotta do is add the prospect’s email and one or two other pieces of information. Don’t let that rely on you going and doing something immediately. Trust me. This sucks. It’s horrible.
Joe Troyer: Once you grow past this, once you grow past just cold email, you got your contracts ready to go, you’re trying to grow past just cold email, what do you do then? Then I would work on having a sales team book appointments on my behalf through my calendar. Then I’d follow the same exact sales process that I’ve been following for however long this took. This is exactly what we’ve done inside our pay-per-lead business. Next up is onboarding. We found that onboarding … most of you guys aren’t even doing onboarding. Can I get a one if you’re not really doing onboarding? A customer signs up and they’re like, “So how’s this work?” You’re like, “Great question. I’m gonna get started and in two or three weeks probably we’re gonna have a phone call and I’ll keep you updated with my progress.” How many of you guys’ onboarding sounds similar to that or maybe not even quite that good. Yeah. Yeah.
Joe Troyer: What I would do if I were you is just, once you start getting the sales flow down, then I would focus on onboarding. The simplest way to do it, folks, is just to run a weekly webinar. It’s like, “Every Wednesday I’m gonna walk you through the platform. I’m gonna show you how this works. I’m gonna answer all your questions.” Guys, you can record that literally one time and then replay it like it’s live every single week on Thursdays or whatever day you wanna do … do it. Then have one of your team members answer the questions. I suggest that you start it. You run the webinar. You get all the questions. You figure out how to ace those questions and answer them really, really well. Make the customers happy. Make them excited for the future. Solve any questions or issues that they have and then hand that off to a VA or some other team member in your business.
Joe Troyer: As the business owner, I believe that you should be very project-focused. You should be jumping in to swoop in to make a new sales process. You get it to work. You vet it. You create the system. You create the process and then you jump in to the onboarding process. Again, you get to be the hero. You get to be the face. You get to do your thing. You get to figure it all out, which is we, as entrepreneurs, are really good at. Doing the day-to-day shit we’re not so great at. We’re just not. Running a new project, that’s fun. That’s exciting. Get in. Figure it out and then get it off of your plate and go on to the next thing.
Joe Troyer: Last, but not least, is billing. Three quick tips for billings. First and foremost, whether a call is qualified in a pay-per-lead business, we listen to all calls in order to understand if a call is qualified. That’s a task from the very start, that if I were you, I wouldn’t touch. It’s just monotonous work that frankly you should be outsourcing. It is a super easy task to outsource. If you think about it, really, you’re only going to be paying somebody if there’s calls for them to actually listen to and then tell you if they’re qualified or not qualified, meaning if they’re billable or they’re not. You’re only going to have to pay for this when you’re making money, i.e. when you’re generating phone calls. It’s a pretty controlled expense as well.
Joe Troyer: Even from the get go, from very start of a pay-per-lead business, I would definitely have this hired out. Next up is always get a pre-payment. We work on retainer. We get paid in advance in everything that we do. You don’t pay me for next month. I’m not starting next month’s work. Always, always, always, as well, have a credit card on file. When they sign my agreement, when my clients sign my agreement, they also sign a credit card authorization form that says that I can charge them on the x day of every month for their amount, whatever their plan is for. Always have a credit card on file.
Joe Troyer: Folks, at the end of the day, I spent a lot of time spinning my wheels, trying to collect money when I first starting building my agency, even to the point where we were doing over $50,000 a month in our agency. I was still spinning my wheels. I basically created a full time job for myself just collecting the revenue every month. Trust me when I say, it was a big pain in the ass. These are the big, big things that I would focus on to automate and to get out of the way, to systematize so that you don’t get hung up growing your pay-per-lead business or any other real type of business.
