[social_warfare]
Before you get too far into planning your “2020 business goals,” I want to remind you…
Don’t forget to nurture those leads you bring in (and therefore keep them around long-term!).
It’s a massive mistake to focus ONLY on your front-end marketing + sales… if you don’t plan out what happens once those people start paying attention.
If you’re anything like me, you’re impatient.
You want fast results – and you need them! (You’re not sitting on unlimited resources, and I’m not either.)
But you’re here for the long-game, right? Your average customer sales cycle might not be “quick.”
In this episode I’ll explain what to do about that, plus…
- How to regularly nurture (+sell!) to your list
- Why too many entrepreneurs create an ineffective “leaky bucket”…
- And the important questions to ask before diving into the new year
Yes, it’s hard to measure how improving your delivery will help your bottom line… but here’s the truth:
“High quality delivery leads to higher quality referrals… and that matters in 2020!”
Tune into this episode for a quick planning session with action-packed questions to ask yourself right now.
And if you’re ready for done-for-you support with Facebook + Instagram ads, go to HelpMyStrategy.com to apply to work with Team Hirsh!
If you want to hear more about how I recently revamped my marketing team + creating an incredible new resource (called the Marketing Playbook!), listen to episode 135, “The huge epiphany I had managing my team.”
And if you want to hear more about the 90-day nurture sequence we recommend, listen to episode 37, “How to get 15-25% more sales from your webinars.”
Key Points:
[2:39] This is a massive planning mistake (but it’s easy to do)
[3:39] Consider how to improve your delivery + customer experience… not just your front-end sales
[6:31] High quality delivery leads to higher quality referrals – and that matters in 2020
[9:53] “Our average customer sales cycle is 18 months…”
[10:49] If you have the patience for that, you’ll make more money
[12:29] Here’s our weekly nurture sequence (it’s NOT automated)
[14:16] If you only send out a value email every week, people will forget to buy from you!
[social_warfare]
Episode Transcripts:
Hey everyone, welcome back to the podcast. Hope you are all having an amazing first part of your 2020. I love the new year. I usually do a lot of planning, new year planning. I just love the reset of a new year. I think a lot of entrepreneurs do, we like that… getting to set new goals and just resetting ourselves. 2019 was a really incredible year. There were some really difficult parts in my company, if you’ve listened to some episodes [like episode 132], “Seasons in Business,” and [episode 59, “Behind-The-Scenes of My Personal Journey from $1M to $3M”]. It was definitely tough in a lot of areas but also really good.
I was more present with my family than I’ve ever been since, I started my business. I read over 37 books in 2019! Like, what? …a mix of novels and business books. But, I set that goal at the beginning of the year. The first half of the year I didn’t do a lot, but then I got into this groove the last four to six months of the year, where I was reading a book every week. I’m still kind of doing that, and it’s like, I don’t know, it feels so good. I love to read. It’s hard with kids to find time to read, and so I have been crushing it.
I’m on Goodreads if you use that. I deleted all the social media from my phone [hear more about this in episode 127, “Why I (pretty much) quit my personal social media”], so my Goodreads account is like my social media. That’s the other thing is, I took social media off my phone. Now the only app I have is Voxer… I mean, not only app, obviously, on my phone. But like, [the only] communication app is Voxer and text messages. I don’t have any social media. I don’t have email on my phone. It’s just like, I don’t know… I worked out better than I ever have, even through a pregnancy… went for walks every day, we bought our house. It was a good year, I’m really grateful for it! And I’m talking about it right now, and I’m like, “Man, it really was a good year.”
Despite the struggles and stuff, we came out of all of them, and we grew from them, and I feel like there was a lot of growth and a lot of really amazing things that happened in 2019. I just stayed really focused and was able to have just a good year balancing business and “mom” and my marriage and personal life. Anyways, that is not what this episode is all about, but I know you guys like it when I do a little update in the beginning.
I’m super excited about this episode, because it’s actually inspired from conversations that I’ve been having with my team. I also get asked a lot like, “Well what makes your company different? What makes what you guys do different?” We have like a really rigid hiring and training process for ads managers, like really strict. They have to go through a test and like, three different interviews. Then they have a 90-day training. And I’d say about 30% don’t actually make it through the first month. We actually let them go, because once we start working with them we realize it’s not the right fit, mutually.
And it’s about 90 days before [new ads managers] ever touch a client account, unless they’re like a rock star and they move through it faster. Anyways, what’s interesting is, I have people who come from more corporate agencies or the “agency” [style] digital marketing world, and they’ve been in it for years, and they actually don’t do well on my team. I was talking to someone about it, and just overall trying to reflect on, “How have I built this? How do we get amazing results in this industry, for influencers in digital marketing? What are we doing [differently]?” But then also, what I have to constantly do is… When I started my company, and when I started building my ads team, I had that direct access to the ads managers.
It was just like, I was managing them, and I was giving feedback to them. There’s a lot of things… and if you’ve started to grow a team, you know this is so true, where… you are telling your team to do something and directing them in this certain way, but you don’t even realize you’re doing it. It’s just kind of like your, if you want to call it “intuition.” I don’t really love using that [term] with team, because you can document everything. But you don’t realize you’re doing it [basically]. It’s like something you do naturally. It’s something you’re skilled at. And it’s probably why you’ve been able to build your business – but you don’t realize you’re doing it.
Then you build your team, and you kind of pull yourself out of the day-to-day, and something might change and be like… There’s times where I’ll come to a meeting or we’ll have a situation, and I’m like, “Wait a second, we never had this problem a year ago! What is happening here?” Usually it’s because, over time, we built team and process, and it kind of made it so that there was gap between that intuition, like what we used to do in the early days, that was very effective, to now as we’ve scaled, if that makes sense.
One of the recent conversations that I’ve been having with my team and with other people is around the concept of urgency in marketing. This actually isn’t what you’re going to think it is, because I know urgency in your own marketing is important, too… [like] having a reason for somebody to take action and buy, I’ve done episodes on that [see episode 31, “4 Ninja Webinar Retargeting Ads that will Multiply Your Results,” and episode 38, “The Importance of Scarcity in Your Marketing + Offers”], but I’m actually not talking about that in this episode. I’m talking about the urgency in your own actions [with] your marketing and in your decisions and in your implementation. If you have an ads team, or you’re running your own ads, or you have an agency who’s running it, this is crucial.
It was a little bit of an epiphany for me, because… it was one of those things that I do very naturally, and I think a lot of CEOs do do this very naturally, because… we basically think things are like a way bigger problem than they really are sometimes. There’s times [when] I’m working on a project, and I’m super stressed about it. Then I’ll talk about it and I’m like, “Why am I even stressed about this? I’m making all these deadlines, I’m making this urgent! It’s not actually urgent.” I think we do this very naturally, but then employees don’t.
If you’re hiring it out to team members, or maybe [for] yourself if you are a different personality type than me, or agencies… because those are probably employees, unless you have just a CEO running your ads, which would be weird. I think that they don’t do this naturally. It’s something that you have to be aware of, which is, the urgency that you make decisions and you make changes in your marketing. I had to have this conversation with my team, because I felt like… my team does a pretty good job at this, but we have to do an excellent job at this.
This is something that makes us different! Because here’s what you’re going to get with a corporate agency or just, people who are corporate, like employees and “regular businesses,” is, everything is so slow. It takes days to get creative back. It takes days to get a new ad launched. It takes days to make a change. I’ve had that frustration working with other companies, and I know, talking to people about their past experience in corporate, it’s like, making a change is such a big deal, it’s ridiculous. A lot of the times it’s because they put so much process, but really don’t have enough process in place, in my opinion.
When I’ve had people come over from agencies that were very corporate, I had to retrain them in this urgency. What do I mean by this urgency? I mean this: if you launch a webinar campaign, and the first two days your cost per lead is too high or your ads aren’t converting… depending on your budget, you’re not getting sales, because that could be normal in the first couple of days. But you don’t just sit there and wait to see what happens. Way too often do I see that with ads teams where… other agencies and other peoples’, even, in-house teams, because they haven’t trained this into them, where like, they go three days…
They’re only working five days a week. So they go three days, they’re letting an ad sit, they’re watching it. Then they’re like, “Oh, we should probably make a change. Okay, we’ll change a few things, but we’ll also get some new creative, and do this.” Then the week’s over! And then, “Next week we’re going to implement it.” By then it’s been a week! It’s been a week [with] the ads aren’t converting, and a week’s gone by. It’s like, every single day you don’t make a change, you are wasting money, because you are spending your money. I am obsessed with that. I realized, I had this epiphany of, that is something that makes us different!
I wanted to tell my team so they saw it from a perspective of not like, “You guys have to be even more urgent!” but they saw it from like, “This is why we’re so awesome at Hirsh Marketing, because we don’t take days and days and weeks to make a change.” If you were to work with a corporate account, they’re so slow that you can do that. In a corporate agency working with another corporate account, they don’t respond. Everything is slow. It’s so irritating. You cannot have that in our world! You could, but you’re going to waste a lot of money. 100% of my clients are clients who are self-starter entrepreneurs.
We don’t have funding. We don’t have all this money that corporations have to start their business and all that stuff. We cannot waste even $100. It is not doable. You have to take action so that that’s not happening. In your own marketing, whoever is doing your marketing, it is crucial that you’re not just sitting on ads for a week, like, “Let me just see how they do.” That is a myth. That’s a myth, I think that like, “It takes a while for Facebook ads to optimize.” Yes, it does, but that doesn’t mean you’re sitting there waiting for them to optimize, and trusting Facebook’s going to do it.
You are still building new audiences, loading new ad copy and images, and rapidly doing everything you can to see some traction while you’re waiting for it to optimize […] I’ve heard people come to me, and they’re like, “Yeah, we’re with this agency. It’s been a couple months. We haven’t gotten any results. They told me that it takes time.” I’m like, “That is B.S.” Because sure, yes, it takes time – but you can only use that excuse if you’ve literally done everything you can think of to prove that it’s not working.
Meaning, have you used every audience, hundreds of ad sets that you could think of? Have you used 10+ versions of ad creative and copy and images, if it’s not converting? If you start with three and they’re converting, you don’t need 10. Don’t misunderstand me. But if it’s not converting, we have to change things tomorrow, today, tomorrow. While you’re waiting “for things to optimize,” you’re not not taking action. That’s the disconnect, I think, people have is, they’re told, “Facebook ads take a while, Facebook ads take a while.” Yes, they could, they could take a while for you to nail your messaging and nail your targeting and nail your funnel conversions and all of those things. But while you’re working on that, you’re still changing things, and you’re still implementing.
Since I started, it would stress me out if a client’s ads weren’t converting… like, me personally, when I ran our client’s ads a couple of years ago. And so [I would make] massive changes, like new ads, new audiences, new copy… until I saw traction. I’ve passed that over to my team, and I realize how much we have to harp on it, because somebody who comes… employees don’t feel that urgency. They just are not going to feel it as much as an entrepreneur, maybe a CEO spending their own money. They just don’t have that mindset as much. They like to more be in the mindset of “check things off, get things done in my day.” It has to be something you communicate as a leader and build into your process.
It’s built into our training. It’s built into our monthly self assessments with team members. It’s something we audit. It’s a core part of what we’re doing. And I do believe it’s something that makes us different from other agencies, when someone asks me that. It’s like, “You’re going to get a response that day. You’re going to have action by today, tomorrow on something. If something’s not converting, you’re going to know about it before you even realized it’s not converting, because we can see it happening.” What needs to get thrown away is the idea that ads just sit there while they optimize.
Yes, it can take a while for things to become proven, but [while] you’re proving things like your messaging, your offer, your actual funnel steps and funnel conversion, and your targeting, it doesn’t equal not taking any action and just kind of sitting there, even for like four days! Because if your team is working five days a week and they spend four out of five of those days doing nothing… not “doing nothing,” but like, optimizing the ads and just watching them and hoping they get better… it’s going to be like a week until any action’s taken.
That is what you have to be careful of. It’s so crucial. The summary of this episode is, it’s so crucial for you to have urgency in the action you take with your ads and your marketing. You will know within a day or two at least… If you’ve got a $6 cost per click on your ad after 24 hours of running it, there’s a problem. Maybe it’s going to optimize down to $4 cost per click. That’s still too high. We need new creative. We need new audiences, let’s go, let’s move. Let’s do it. That is how you have to look at it. Don’t wait that long to take action, and the action, again, I’ll reiterate, means… usually it’s in the form, at least in the ad space, because you don’t want to make funnel changes every day…
In the ad area, which is what mostly my team is handling, it’s new audiences and new creative, new ad copy, new images. My creative team does actually take two days to turn around creative, like good creative. So my ads managers have to task it out the second they think the ad creative is not working, so that in two days from now we’ve already got back up. We’re already good to go. Same if we’re scaling. We already have backup. You can’t decide now, “Oh I think I need new creative, let me go and get it.” Even [with] your team, that’s not going to work… unless you’re writing your ads, which you shouldn’t be if you’re a CEO. You should have a creative team in some form, whether it’s through an agency or your own team, writing in your voice, because it takes a long time to write ads.
But you need to have it ready to go when you need it or before you even need it! We’re trying to have, and this is what I say to my team all the time, “We want to constantly be proactive instead of reactive.” We should know when things are not converting before they even fully aren’t converting. And we’re taking action on that before we even really need to take action on it, because then we’re mitigating it. And that works so well. And that is something that other people honestly don’t do, and lack, because, I think… they’re just slow! I don’t know.
I just have a crazy sense of urgency in myself, and that gets pushed down into my entire team. Look at your own marketing, and look at if you’re doing this, because you’re probably wasting money if you are doing this or if a team who’s running your marketing is doing this. I wanted you guys to just think about it through this episode. Thanks so much for tuning in. If you want the amazing Team Hirsh on your ad account or working on your marketing strategy, you can go to HelpMyStrategy.com to apply to work with us. I’ll see you all in the next episode.