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Emily Hirsh:

The way that you make your sales goals,  number one, achievable, and number two, simple is you utilize projections and you plan out your marketing before you spend money on ads. 

You are listening to the Not For Lazy Marketers podcast, episode number 439.

Hello, everybody. Welcome back. We are on episode four of this Behind the Scenes series. Thanks for tuning in. If you listen to all of them, if you haven’t and you’re like, what is going on, this episode will still make sense without the other ones, but you can go back and listen to the previous ones. And basically what I’m doing is laying out the six most critical components, necessary components to a successful marketing strategy, but really a marketing strategy as like an entire business, not just a single funnel or a live launch, like how to look at your entire business’ marketing from a holistic perspective and absolutely nail each one of those components. So I go deep on each component in each one of these episodes. So, all right, we’re gonna dig into this one. This one is about making your sales goals achievable and simple. 

Doing this exercise, and I think this might be my favorite one that I’m gonna talk about because it makes such an impact, and I feel like when I send my client presentations, or whenever I do this, it impresses you guys the most and it’s so simple, and we have calculators for this, but most people don’t do this. And that is projections and planning your goals based on sales goals and planning your ad budget based on sales goals. And so part of my process in onboarding, but then ongoing, like if a client comes to us, it is like, we’re gonna do a live launch, these are the sales goals I want to set. Then it is our rule that we go create projections in onboarding for every funnel, for every live launch. There’s some businesses that have three there, some that have one for visibility ads. I create projections, we create projections.

And what this means is, it sounds fancy, but basically we are projecting. If we spend this much money, here are the results we should get. And sometimes I get to base this off of historical data. Sometimes I have to use industry averages. And so each scenario is different, but basically this is what you wanna do. You wanna start with your sales goals? You wanna ask yourself, and this is something I ask every client I ask in our intake form. And then I confirm it again in the strategy call, what are your goals? How many sales of each offer that you have, or the one offer that you have, do you wanna make each month? What are your goals? And based off of that, I then take that and go create projections, knowing, okay, if we wanna make five sales a month, how many leads do we have to bring in?

How much traffic do we have to generate? What’s the sales conversion that we have to hit. And what you wanna do is project every step of the funnel. So let’s use a relatively simple funnel. As an example, if we had a funnel that went, add Facebook ad to a webinar, and on that webinar, they pitch a offer. They pitched a, you know, a thousand dollars offer. And then that was it, right? That’s our sales funnel. Now how many steps do we have? We have the click on the ad. We have the opt in to the webinar, the conversion percentage there of that lending page conversion. And then we have the percentage of leads who buy on the webinar. And so we wanna set a goal and a projection for every step. So we wanna determine, okay, so what’s the average cost per lead that we’re gonna run.

And what I do is I run five different scenarios of this in our calculator. So I put different cases like if we were to get, you know, $7 cost per lead, here’s how many leads we’d get. If we were to spend 10 here’s how many leads we’d get. And then I put in a projection for the sales conversion. Now, based on that, if we got seven leads and we spent, you know, $700, we’d have 70 leads, or we paid $7 cost per lead, we spent $70, $700. We’d have 70 leads right now, if we converted 1% of those, how many sales would we have? And what you could do is play with different scenarios. So you can say, well, what if I convert 2%? And the coolest thing about this is you can see like the massive difference that 1% makes or that like $1 cost per lead can make.

It’s like, if you just lower your cost per lead by $1, here’s the whole difference. It makes all the way through your funnel. And so the way to simplify this, even further that I love doing, and this is how we set up our projections. And then what we actually do is we take those projections. We put them into a spreadsheet where we, we plug, plug them in as goals. And then our ads manager goes and tracks the actual data that actively compares it to the goals. And it shows up red if it’s not converting. So we can find the first red spot in the funnel. So to simplify this really the metrics that you can control is that very first ad cost, right? So in the, in my example, I use, it’s a webinar you can control, and you can take action and you can pull levers around that cost per webinar, registration.

How do you control that? Copying creative targeting messaging angles, the better you do with that, the more strategic you are with that, the lower your cost per webinar registration is gonna be right. The next conversion that you can control from that is the percentage of people who sign up for your webinar and convert that number is going to dictate how many sales you have. And that number is gonna dictate how much revenue you make, and that’s gonna dictate your return on ad spend. And so when we plug these in the only couple of numbers we’re playing with are that very first ad cost and then any sale, any conversion percentage, let’s use a little bit more complicated of a funnel. Let’s say my funnel is I’ll just use one. I just did for a client optin to a lead magnet, right on the thank you page is the call to action to apply for their mastermind.

That goes to a call booking from there on the call. They sell their mastermind. Okay. So the steps that this person has is opt into the lead magnet. Step one, fill out an application. Step two, book a call, step three, purchase step four. So the very, the very first metric we plug in is how much cost per lead are we gonna pay for that? Opt-In different scenarios. What if I pay $4? What if I pay five? What if I pay six plug in different scenarios? The rest of the conversions are just percentages. What is the percentage of leads who opt in, who are gonna fill out an application? What’s the percentage of applications that are gonna be qualified and book a call. And what’s the percentage of calls that are gonna sell. So all you do is plug in those percentages and that dictates all your numbers.

And so if you say, okay, I’m gonna get a hundred leads. And 10% of those leads are going to fill out an application. Then for every hundred leads, you’re gonna get 10 applications. And if 80% of those applications book a call, then you’re gonna get eight calls. And if 20% of those calls book or buy on the call, then you’re gonna get, you know, one to two sales, one and a half. <Laugh> not really one and a half, but one to two, right? For, for every eight. And so now we just, we know all our numbers. And so what we do in the beginning is we start with that ad cost. That first cost that we can control with on the ads. If you take an eCommerce example, then the cost is gonna be the cost per landing page view, cuz you’re going straight to a sales page.

So we have product based businesses in elite. And the first cost is cost per landing page view. If we pay a dollar cost per landing page view, here’s our conversions. If we pay $2, here it is. And then you move to percentage, the percentage of people who buy once they get to that page. So that very first ad cost and then the rest of the metrics are percentages. And that keeps it really simple. The percentages dictate all the numbers. They dictate the revenue, they dictate the net profit. They dictate the row. As they dictate the number of sales dictate, the number of leads you control that very first cost and the rest is percentages. Okay. Now the component to this that’s so powerful is you take these projections and you never, ever start ads without projections. Because even if you’re guessing, and the cool thing about working with an agency is like, I can do these in 10 minutes because I’ve probably done 150 to 200 versions, like one client on average right now an elite gets three different versions of projections cuz they have like two to three funnels plus their visibility ads.

And so I can do this so quick. I can do it in my sleep, but for a lot of people have never done this before. It’s extremely hard to grasp. Okay. And so that’s one of the massive benefits of having an agency help you. The other thing is, but also side note, most agencies don’t do this. What they do is get on the call with you and they say like, what do you wanna spend? What’s your budget, which is fine to ask what your budget is. But then you need to back that up with, if we spend this much, this is what we’re gonna get. And sometimes as I’ve done this, I have actually many times I’d say about 30% of the time I do this. And I go back to a client and we shift the strategy a little bit because I show them, Hey, if you’re gonna spend a thousand dollars, we’re not gonna get enough volume with this funnel.

We’ve gotta cut down the steps. Because by the end of the SA like the last step of the sale, we don’t have enough people through it doesn’t make sense or we can’t spread your budget across all these different funnels. We need to take the budget and put it all into this funnel to get the volume and the numbers don’t lie. The numbers show us this. And so what you do is you start with these projections and you might have to have industry averages, which it really varies, but somebody who’s an expert should know. Like I can tell you, you know, a $2,000 product is gonna convert all that leads one to 3% of the leads. So I know the industry averages like the back of my hand, but you would be guessing so you can play with numbers or you can hire an expert. You start with this, you have these baseline numbers and then you go actually get data.

So now we run your ads for a week and we say, okay, we projected, we wanted to hit about a $7 cost per webinar registration. We’re at $6. Great. We’re hitting our goal on that. We’ve gotten a hundred webinar registrations and we’ve only had one purchase. So we’re at a 1% purchase conversion. What was our goal? Oh, it was 2%. That’s what we need to hit in order to hit our profitability. Okay. What can we do to get our percentage, our purchase conversion up another percentage? Well, we can look at our sales emails. We can look at everything that impacts that marketing just becomes so simple when you look at it this way. So the, the process goes projections that are related to your goals. Data, then make decisions then repeat. So if you are looking at your marketing, you’re like, I wanna make $20,000 a month.

It’s really simple to figure out how you have to do that. And it’s simple to set the goal of, in order to do that, I have to achieve this cost per lead or this cost per landing page view, or this cost per webinar registration. And I have to achieve this sales conversion. And you go until you’re hitting that. And you know, it’s definitely harder if you’re not an expert to try to figure out all the different things you should do and things you should change. And you know, levers, you can pull. But when you do this all day long, like we can do it in our sleep. And, and that’s the benefit of having a talented marketing team. And I’m really not just saying that just for us. I’m just saying as a business, like I see so many people who are really overwhelmed by their marketing when marketing it, it doesn’t have to be overwhelming when you look at it this way and you really know how to look at it this way.

I’ve also witnessed that some people, this comes very naturally to them comes very natural to me, others. It doesn’t like they, it just, it’s too hard for their brain to grasp this level of like numbers and calculations. So the way that you make your sales goals, number one, achievable, and number two is simple is you utilize projections and you plan out your marketing before you spend money on ads. And when I was gonna say a little bit ago is I’m not even exaggerating 95% of the clients who come to work with us in both of our levels, both of our packages, profit high level package, elite mid-level they don’t know their numbers. I ask people, okay, two things. They don’t know their numbers. They also don’t separate their traffic. So their numbers are not accurate. So two things they I’ll say, Hey, okay, so what’s your sales conversion.

And they’re like, what? I’m like, okay. So how many leads did you get in this funnel over the last 30 days? And they’re like, can go find it for me, usually in their CRM. Okay. So how many sales did you get from that? Okay, that’s your sales conversion. And now we can use that to plan. Maybe they haven’t made any sales, but regardless, people who have been running ads or even gotten some form of organic traffic through their funnel, do not know their numbers. 90% or more businesses do not know their numbers. And it will make you so much more money to know your numbers. And it will not only make you more money. It’ll make it feel like you’re not throwing spaghetti at the wall. You’re not guessing you’re not overwhelmed because when we know what to expect, we’re not gonna be overwhelmed. We’re not gonna be confused.

The second thing, this is just a side note, but most businesses don’t follow the process we do, which is we separate ad traffic from all other traffic to guarantee that the sales we report on are coming from ads. We do this by duplicating the funnel. So there’s two versions. Soon. Very soon, I’m gonna have a software that solves this, but most people mix their traffic. And so they really don’t know how their ads have done. And I can tell you, most people think their ads are doing better than they are. And then they come in and we separate the traffic and we get real data and we’re able to make decisions with that. But what that also does is somebody who comes through an ad funnel this month, but buys in five months, we know they originally came through an ad funnel. There’s no way to have that tracking through the Facebook pixel.

So most people mix their traffic and they don’t really know their numbers. And that makes it really hard to make educated decisions. So if you’re like Emily, how could I make a hundred thousand dollars in a month? I will show you, I will do your projections for you. Come and join elite. I’ll show you exactly what you have to do. And if not, you can try and guess and do it. How I explained here, but getting to a sales goal is simple. It’s just numbers. It’s really not magic. It’s not this luck. Yes. You have to have the offer convert. Yes, you have to hit a good cost per lead, but that just comes from tweaking and optimizing and pulling specific levers in your marketing until you get there. And at the foundation, this is where my core value of marketing always works is just a matter of when it comes from is because it’s just numbers and numbers.

Don’t lie numbers. Don’t confuse you, numbers, don’t overwhelm you. They’re just facts. You can’t argue with numbers. And so to set yourself up for success and to make your sales goals feel achievable and feel easy and feel simple and feel doable. You have to start before you spend money on ads with projections. And anytime you go to launch something new, new funnel, live launch, different business, whatever have projections have goals, have a benchmark. And don’t start without that. If you’re like, please make my business projections with a custom strategy and everything you’ve talked about so far, I need so bad. Go to Hersh marketing.com/elite chat with our team. We’ll see if we are a fit. We only work with businesses. We know that we can help. We have a not rigid application process, but just a picky process in the sense that I always wanna over deliver. If you’ve followed me, you know, how important my delivery is to me. So the worst that’s gonna happen is we’ll give you something to go do and come back to work with us, but head over to that link. Otherwise, I’ll talk to you guys tomorrow.

Thanks for listening to the Not for Lazy Marketers podcast. If you loved this episode and want deeper support with your marketing head over to helpmystrategy.com to see how Hirsh Marketing can help take your marketing to the next level, no matter where you’re at today. We help our clients scale faster than ever, find hidden leaks in their funnel, experiment with new creative marketing strategies, and help their business explode and be more profitable than they ever dreamed possible. Head over to helpmystrategy.com and see if you qualify for a free strategy audit with Team Hirsh.

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