[social_warfare]
SHOW NOTES
Be careful signing a contract or making a purchase of anything with a “results guarantee” on the price tag – especially if it comes with a timeframe. This should be a huge RED FLAG. Alarm bells should be ringing.
Why?
Especially with a new funnel, results are never guaranteed! And definitely not within a certain period of time. Remember that marketing is always an investment – even if you can make a qualified “best guess,” there’s always a risk, never a guarantee.
In this episode, I’m speaking to the potential clients who want that “90-day guarantee” (or the struggling business owners who *need* results in one month or less…):
The gist? I will not guarantee your results in 90 days – and I caution you to avoid anyone who does. What I can commit to, and what my company does well is, doing everything possible to optimize your results long-term.
IF this episode resonates with you, hop over to Instagram Stories to share your review! Tag @emilyhirsh with questions + comments (I love responding to my podcast listeners!) – and thanks for tuning in!
Listen to episode 88, “Ads AMPLIFY what you have already, not fix what isn’t working,” for more about the importance of buying data.
Key Points:
[4:14] This is a huge red flag from anyone selling anything
[7:42] Because marketing is an investment! You’re not guaranteed “immediate” results
[8:24] But – here’s why Hirsh Marketing gets results for our partners…
[9:12] Now, what about a “results guarantee” for coaching services or an online program?
[10:12] For example, I can’t guarantee your webinar funnel will work if your actual webinar bombs, right?
[11:25] I want the quick fix, too! But it doesn’t exist
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[social_warfare]
Episode Transcripts:
Emily Hirsh: I’m Emily Hirsh, and this is The Hirsh Marketing Underground Podcast. Attention innovators, influencers, creators, and game-changing entrepreneurs: your internet domination begins right here. We are the powerhouse marketers that you’ve been looking for. You’re already making waves in your industry, and we’re here to help amplify those waves of change by creating a connection that cuts through the noise. We take everything you’ve built inside your zone of genius and find its audience. With killer strategy and laser eye for impact, we launch multimillion dollar campaigns and skyrocket your reach online. And now, we are doing the unheard of. We’re unveiling everything we’ve learned, taking you behind-the-scenes with the Hirsh Marketing Team, and giving away the secrets to our clients’ success. Stay tuned for top-converting strategy, ROI reports, and insider knowledge that you won’t find anywhere else. You’re changing the world, and we’re the team to help.
Hello, hello there guys. I am on fire. Let me tell you, we have been through a lot in the last couple of months at Hirsh Marketing, with some team changes. And to be honest, my coach Alex Charfen says everything breaks in threes. So like, at $1 million, everything breaks; at $3 million, everything breaks; and then I think it’s like, next time at $6 million. But anyways, everything broke when we got to $3 million. That’s what it felt like. We had to go fix a bunch of processes and just do some overhauls in our delivery and our process… and really catering to the next level client that we’ve been working with and just making things better. And so I’ve been really deep in that with my team, and it feels like we’re on the other side and everything is just flowing so [smoothly].
Then on top of that, I rearranged my schedule so that I only work three days a week now, and then I have two days where I’m “working,” because I love to work, but it’s totally free. No calls, I don’t have to get anything done [or] do anything. And I’m going to actually spend a lot of [that time] learning and going through material and thinking… That’s a big thing when you get to this level is, just like, letting your brain solve problems and just have the free space to sit down and ask yourself like, “What’s the answer to this problem?” and then brainstorm all the solutions and figure it out. And you need that space…
[especially] if you crowd your calendar… so you don’t have any of that space, especially once you get into the seven figures and multiple seven figures, you’re just going to feel like you’re drowning constantly. And you’ll go through phases where you get back to that and you have to reevaluate. And I just went through the re-evaluation phase. And then my biggest takeaway from the events that I’ve been going to and just hanging out with very, very successful business owners is that my team runs better without me in the day-to-day. I go poke holes and find problems and cause problems, to be honest, more [than help]. And the reason I really realized this is, I’ve spent most of July gone. I have built a company where I really don’t have to be here. I want to be here, and it helps the business grow when I’m here – in terms of marketing and content development and all of that. But in terms of like, our delivery, I do not have to be here. And that’s an amazing thing, but you can really mess it up. You can really screw it up, which is what I kind of started doing.
But my realization when I was away almost all of July on four different trips was, “Wow, my team runs better when I’m not here.” And so I sat down with my leadership team this week, and I said, “You know what guys, I want you to look at yourselves as my board of advisors. You guys are going to tell me what to do in this company and what needs to be changed, because you’re part of the day-to-day, and I’m going to listen to that.”
So anyways, this is not even what this podcast episode’s about, but hopefully you get some value out of that. Because I love to share in the beginning just kind of like, updates and what I’m going through, because I’m super transparent in business growth, and I think that we can all learn from that, because most of you are probably entrepreneurs listening to this.
But what I am talking about today is a huge red flag if you ever hear this… whether it’s a course, or a mastermind, or a coach, or an actual service provider that you’re hiring… and that’s guaranteeing results from your ads. And so, I had an experience this week where my sales specialist, who talks to all of our clients before coming on to work with us and actually interviews them as much as they’re interviewing us, and making sure they’re the right fit… [She] reached out to me and said, “You know, I had an interesting scenario.” So somebody came to us and said, “I’m comparing you and another agency, and you guys aren’t saying, ‘I guarantee ad results.'” And this person also has a new funnel. So the funnel hasn’t been tested. She doesn’t have data. Nobody knows exactly how it’s going to convert. We know her product’s good, it’s sold organically, which is a requirement to work with us. But she doesn’t have current ads running and saying like, “Hey this is how it’s converting.” (If that’s the case, you could guarantee results. I mean you could typically, easily say, “Yeah I’ll match those because look, you’ve proven that it works.”) But she doesn’t have a current funnel, doesn’t have current live ads, has a product, it sells – but a lot of it’s been through organic reach and affiliates, in launches, has never run ads.
So she was comparing us to another agency who told her they guarantee she will get results in 90 days, and if she doesn’t, they’ll work for free. That sounds amazing in theory, but in my head alarm bells were going off, because I’m like, “How are they gonna guarantee that?” The problem with it is, it’s a selling point, and who knows what might happen? If they work for free until it works, that’s a pretty bad business model, but also I highly doubt it. They’re just trying to get the sale of the first 90 days… and I don’t even know who these people are, just so you know. I just know what came to me, and my sales person was like, “We can’t do that, right?” I’m like, “No, of course we can’t guarantee it’s going to work within 90 days, because nobody has any idea that it’s going to work. We don’t know how this funnel converts. We don’t know the numbers, and we’re going to get it to work. Like, it will work eventually, because we know she has a good product, but I don’t know how much tweaking and optimizing is going to be required and nobody does!”
So the fact that the other agency’s promising that just tells me they don’t understand the way that marketing works, and the value, and the necessity, and the importance of testing and buying data, which I’ve talked a lot about. Go back and listen to past podcast episodes [episode 88] where I talk about buying data, which is basically the concept of, when you have a new funnel, when you have a new offering, when you have something that has not had traffic run to it… and this is also relevant if you have something that was live launched and now you’re turning it evergreen, because I’ve seen this, and like, it’s going to convert a little bit different. We don’t have the solid data. It doesn’t mean don’t do it. It doesn’t mean that you’re in a bad place. It just means you’re in a place where you have to buy data to then know how it converts.
Buying data means setting aside a budget, saying, “I’m going to spend $3,000 this next month, get as many people through my funnel as possible, and then evaluate all the numbers. I may not get that $3,000 back right away, but that’s okay, because I have to take this step to take my funnel to the place where I could spend $10,000 and get back $20,000 or $30,000 out of it.” The mistake people make is, they never take that first step, because they’re afraid, and because they see marketing as an expense and not an investment. Marketing is an investment, especially in the beginning. And investments, you may not get your return right away, but you will get it, if you’re smart about it, if you have a good product, if you have a legit business. Those are the qualifications.
Sometimes it just takes nailing down your messaging, nailing down your strategy, fixing your webinar, improving your funnel. You don’t know those things until you drive people through it. So I believe it is a huge red flag to hear anyone guarantee results on an unproven funnel and something with no metrics. Let’s flip this and say it’s not a service provider. So in this case… And you know what actually is funny? We went back to this person, and we talked to her about this, and we just talked to her about the fact that, “Here’s our concerns with this, and how could a company guarantee this? And I think it’s just a sales ploy to get your initial payment.” And she’s going to go with us, because she appreciates that and the realness of that. And what we’re saying is absolutely true. So whether you like to hear it or not, if you choose to go with the person who’s going to guarantee you results, they’re not going to do a better job than us. There’s no way, [because] we’re going to do a better job testing it. And so we’re going to get those same results, if not better, probably better. But how could you know what they’re going to be if there’s no data and you’ve never run traffic to a funnel? You can’t.
Let’s flip this and say it’s a coach or a program. If a program says, or somebody says to you, trying to sell something, “I guarantee that you’re going to make your money back if you apply my stuff” but there’s variables that they don’t have control over such as your product, the way your funnel converts, your messaging… those things that… how could they know that through a sales page? It’s a huge red flag. It’s a sales ploy. And what you guys want to hear, if you’re talking about a service provider or talking about a coach, anybody, is that it’s going to take work to get this to go, to get this to work, to get this to convert, to get this to make money, to get this to the next level, to scale. All of it is going to take work.
If any of this was easy, and it just worked right out the gate, and it was like, “Oh, all you have to do is hire this company and then everything will work! We guarantee it,” or, “All you have to do is hire this coach or take this program, and then all your problems will go away, and it’ll all work and convert!” If that were true, then business would not be hard. It’s never true, because there’s always variables, there’s always other factors, there’s things that are out of that person’s control. For example, it’s out of our control as an ads team how our client pitches on a webinar, right? We can give advice, we can tell them, we can give them strategies… but we can’t pitch for them. And so, I can’t guarantee results if the webinar’s going to bomb. But the thing is, if you are willing to show up and do the work and listen to, “Hey, this is not converting. And so here’s our suggestions,” and then you go implement it… or the coach says that, or the program says that, and you’re willing to put in your equal amount of work… it will work. But it’s not guaranteed, because that’s a factor that nobody knows if you’re going to do it until you do it. And also, you can’t guarantee something that has no data to guarantee it with.
And so if you come across this anywhere, I want you to understand, it’s a sales ploy, it’s a big red flag. And instead you’re going to save yourself a lot of stress and probably a lot of wasted money that you spent trying to go with people… there’s a lot of people that… I’ve even done this myself. You think like, “Oh, I just wish there was a quick fix. I wish I could just buy one thing, or hire one person, and they would fix this problem, or they would make this work, and make this into a profitable funnel, or solve this team issue for me.” That doesn’t exist. There’s not quick fixes. And so when you start looking at your marketing realistically and as an investment, especially if you’re early on in your company, you have a new product or a new funnel, you’re going to save yourself so much stress and so much wasted money and just frustration, because you’re going to go into it with the expectation that’s actually going to help you get results.
And I’m just really frustrated when I see people who were promised something and then it didn’t happen because of all the reasons I just explained. And then they think it’s them or their product or Facebook ads won’t work for them or marketing doesn’t work for them, and they just give up and don’t move forward, and that’s not the case. It’s supposed to not work sometimes in the beginning. You want there to be room for improvement. I just recently talked about… I think it was in the last episode or one of the really recent ones [episode 88]. I talked about a funnel that our team was looking at and how we looked at all the numbers. And once we pulled all the numbers, and we had the historical data and the current data and all those numbers, we were able to see the problems loud and clear, “Okay, it’s this and this.” And I was like, “That’s a good thing.”
Be excited if you’re in that place. Be excited if you’ve been able to get that data and invest in that data and getting people through your funnel to the point where now you can actually say, “Here’s where I have some problems, and some places that I can go and improve.” That’s awesome. Because then if you improve that, and when you improve that, you’ll have a converting funnel. And getting a converting funnel is not necessarily an easy thing, but it’s absolutely worth it, because essentially you’re going to be able to create an ATM machine that will produce for you over and over again.
So if you’re thinking about working with Hirsh Marketing, and you want realistic results, realistic projections based on solid, true data, and a team that’s going to be by your side the entire time throughout the process, even when it’s not working, and collaborate and help you come up with those solutions and create that long-term strategy that’s sustainable, that’s the team that we are. I don’t promise results that are not true.
We have an extensive interview process to come on with us as a client. You go through an application, we automatically deny over half of the people that come into that application. Then you get on a call with our team, and we’re denying another half of those people that get on the call, just based on talking to them and realizing they’re not the right fit, they’re not ready for us yet. And so we only accept about 20% of the applications that come in, because I’m that serious, and I’ve learned my lesson about signing the wrong client in the past and it ruining my team. But I’m that serious about… I only take people on if I believe we can help you and if I believe that you have the mindset, and the ability to be a partner with us, and not feel like we’re here to save your business, because nobody can do that. But people promise to do that, and then they ruin their reputation trying to do that, because they promised something that they shouldn’t have promised! And that’s what essentially I believe this agency was doing to this potential client of ours.
So hopefully this helps you, gives you some takeaways. And if you do want to work with Team Hirsh, you can go to HelpMyStrategy.com, go through our application process. If you pass that, talk to our team. And if you pass that, work with us with a pretty deep understanding that we think we can help you and have that partnership with you long-term in your business.
Thanks for listening to The Hirsh Marketing Underground Podcast. Go behind-the-scenes of multimillion dollar ad campaigns and strategies, dive deep into The Hirsh Process, and listen to our most popular episodes over at HirshMarketingUnderground.com. If you loved this episode of the podcast, do me a favor and head over to iTunes to subscribe and leave a review, so we can reach more people and change more lives with this content. That’s all for now, and I’ll catch you next time.