Transcript of Why Your Funnel Isn't Converting (It's Not the Funnel)

And we are back on another episode of the Vault Unlocked. And today, I'm actually super excited because we have Alicia Conlin-Herd, who has now known to build over 600 different funnels in 120 different niches, working with billion dollar brands. We are going to learn everything from what makes funnels work all the way into the sales process and why the sales happen. Without further ado, please welcome Alicia. Super excited. How are we doing today?

I'm good. And if anyone starts to think they're having an aneurysm, I just have an Aussie accent, which you guessed straight up. You're American. Not many people guess the accent straight away. They go through British and then Kiwi and slowly get to Aussie.

And then they go through it. Yeah. Well, I think the hate to disappoint you, the reason I probably guessed it is because I'm Canadian.

I did say, Are you American? And that makes more sense because Canadians always get it straight away. Yeah.

But Alicia, for those that are listening right now and they have no idea who you are, what you're all about, please tell us a little bit about your background and where did it come from? 600 different funnels.

Yeah, well, I'll start with my origin story then, but I'll start where I am now. At the moment, I run an agency called Persuasion Experience. All we specialize in is booking qualified calls onto sales teams' calendars that actually show up and they're educated and they're persuaded. Why? Because The sales process starts in the marketing. But how did I learn this? Because marketing is a humbling sport, and it takes a bit of time to learn these things. So fresh out of high school, my first job was cold calling. I was very good at it. Cold I'm still calling energy, like electricity, never paid a bill in my life. Top rep, top 10 rep in a 200 call center every week that I was there. Then I went on and did more like telco sales. And then I went into agency sales, and I started at a company called King Kong. Now, I'm a small town country gal. Under 800 people, there's a pub and a cemetery. You go in, you come out. I didn't even have a concept of what sales was. To me, I was like, Cool, I got this job. I got to help people.

All I got to do is figure out the thing that I'm selling, is it right for them, yes or no? If no, catch and release back into the wild. If yes, it is now my ethical obligation to persuade them to get this thing because I can see how it can fix their life. Anyway, I go to King Kong, one of their first team members, and then I build out their sales funnel and CRO team from scratch, doing hundreds and hundreds of landing pages and funnels. After that, I go to Founder, or you might know it as Founder magazine, and I build out their sales funnel and CRO team, launching seven and eight-figure course funnels onto email and to cold. But at the same time, me and my partner, we have this thing called Operation Freedom. We're really into life design, and we're like, Okay, I never thought I would be a business owner I'm a very good employee, very good student, whatever. But I learned about financial freedom and independence, and I was like, Right, the only way I'm going to hit my income goals is if I do this, if I move into this.

Our side hustles overtook our main income. One day over breakfast, we shook hands. We quit our jobs that day. Then that brings me to the start of the story. We've been running Persuasion Experience, not quite for four years. In that, we sold all our shit and packed our lives into a suitcase and Traveled the world for about two and a half, three years of that and scaled to seven figures. And now we're figuring out what's next. That's the story.

Wow. I love it. It's inspiring. I love the The small town hero coming to the big bad world and not losing, crushing. And the reason why is because it's the same. I grew up in not as small as that, but I grew up in a small town, right? And I grew up in the era where it was like, you're a doctor, you're a lawyer, you're a teacher, you're an accountant, or you're working at the factory or jail. It was like, that was it, right? Then you get in the real world and you see there's a lot more opportunities and you get on the online world and you go, wow, had I unknown? I really I'm interested in diving in here, understanding. I mean, to say you're behind like 620 funnels, safe to say you learn some stuff. I think it's super important for us to understand. Maybe people listening don't even know what a funnel is now I'm thinking about it. So I don't know if you want to give that a good stab, the difference between a website and a funnel. But I really want to start understanding what's the difference when we look at funnels of ones that are converting high and the ones that are not, the reason, why, all that.

Awesome. Let's talk about funnel versus website because it's true. I talk about funnels all the time, but I have this curse of knowledge. Even when Matt, my co founder, and I started dating, I would go to his house, we would drink red wine and watch infomercials and break down their funnel. That's all I'm doing all of the time. I'm obsessed. However, yes, let's touch on that. A website I feel like is more of a sales enablement tool. You should never send traffic, especially paid ads to your homepage as an example, because your homepage is more like your front admin person, whereas your landing page, one of the key parts of the funnel that we talk about, is more like your digital appointment set up or your digital salesperson. So your website is important. It exists in your sphere of influence. But when we talk about a funnel, it's more like a purposely constructed, this is why we call the company Persuasion Experience, where a funnel is not optional. It's just every single touch point somebody's going to have with you. And so the thing that most business owners miss is that each of the touch points in your funnel is a potential revenue leak.

It's just it's all economics. Math is psychology, economics and technology, that's it. Each of these touch points are a potential revenue leak. So when we talk about a funnel, that's all it is. We're crafting an experience we want somebody to go to, understanding that people are batch it and say it and never do the logical step. They're going to go and research you in your sphere of influence, and that's where your content sits, your website sits, your LinkedIn presence, whatever. Those things all sit in that sphere of influence and can impact the ability of your funnel. So now going into, okay, what makes a good funnel and what makes a bad funnel? First, we're going to talk structurally, and then we'll talk ingredients, because marketing is just inputs and outputs. Garbage in, garbage out. So if you can get the structure correct, awesome. But if you can get the ingredients correct, awesomer, I'll pause there just in case you want to touch on anything. Otherwise, I'll monolog at you for another hour.

Yeah, I do. I just I don't want to cut you off, but I do because there's some stuff that you're saying that I think it There is some weight behind it because the concept you just said, shit in, shit out. How come so many market companies that I've seen, they try to optimize the funnel and they try to optimize a message and they try to optimize everything that's in between the shit in and shit out, but not actually addressing. It does not matter how great the funnel is. It does not matter how great the message is. You can add all the tricks you want with it. If it's shit in, it is going to be shit out. That is not even a marketing, it first say, problem and or a sales problem. That's before marketing even begins.

Yeah. So it sounds like the question is people have these funnels and They're trying to fix them and they're trying to fix them right. But some people might call that CRO, conversion rate optimization. But effectively, that functionality optimization, what does that mean? You're fixing something that's working. But most people don't foundationly build a funnel that's worky at all? The other problem that most people have is that they are obsessed with ads. They're just spending and spending and spending, but the ads function is only to get the click. It's everything that happens post-click that makes all the money. When you learn about these touch points, so I'll touch on the structure for now, there is your ad, there is your, let's call it your landing page. Then you might have an application, multi-step form. Every question in that can have a drop off. On your landing page, you need to know, sure, somebody might say to you, Our landing page is converting low. That's quantitative data, not useful. You need the qualitative data, the why. Okay, how are people using the page? Then you have your booking your marketing page, and then you'll have your thank you page.

We can dive into each of those pages if you like. Then you have all of your automations around it. Each point is a touch point. However, that whole structure is useless, except for... Unless you have what you were just saying, the right input. Those are the ingredients. So when we're doing any marketing, it's research, strategy, execution. But everybody's starting at execution. I'll say that again because I think in frameworks and systems, and it helps me to figure things out, research, Strategy, execution. If your funnel is not working, you've cooked one of those phases. And it's usually the research because you shipped garbage into the funnel, right? Those ingredients are your target market. Can you articulate How do they evaluate the target market better than anyone else can? How do they word their before state, their after state, their dream outcome? What have they tried before? What stage of awareness are they in? What's the conversation going on in their brain? Then you have your messaging your differentiation. If you sound like the same shit out there that they've already tried and failed with, they're not going to buy from you. If you are copying all of your competitors, congratulations, now you have to compete on price because you idiots all just commoditize yourself.

So the messaging and differentiation. How are you going to stand out from the noise? Then there's your social proof, everyone sucks at that. Then there is your authority. So typically we try to pull an authority from the company so they're not a faceless brand anymore. We have some front facing. And then the most important part, the most important part for getting qualified leads is your offer. But most people get obsessed maybe with their sales offer, but you forget. Every step in your funnel is like a little micro yes, a little micro yes. And you have to get a lead before you can get a sale. So there's two types of offers we can talk about. I've just info dumped all over you, and now you can figure out, choose your own adventure, what sounds exciting. Yeah, thanks. But there's two types of offers in there, right? And so to your point, why doesn't anyone's funnels work? Why is everyone's marketing shit? Because they don't try. And it's company's fault and it's founder's fault because, all right, as a very quick rage bait thing, I've worked with like a thousand companies. Easy. Like, hands down, coaching in my community.

Like, easy, right? And I just see that the founders who go abdicate marketing, they don't understand it. They don't make any effort to learn it. They struggle. Any that you see, I I believe, are the exception to the rule. The owners that get obsessed with the marketing and stay in the marketing and the sales and they understand it, they're very successful. So at the end of the day, it's just, does your company appreciate marketing enough? Or do they think that it's a magical cure for your shitty business?

Wow, a magical cure for your shitty business. When you say that, what comes up for you?

Trauma. It's like a counseling session for all my past clients. But what comes up is like, some people want marketing, and I've been in the agency game for 10 years, right? So if there happens to be any agency owners listening to this, this is a trauma lesson for you. So you can fast track your own learnings. But companies will come to an agency or a marketer and expect them to magically fix things. They think it's easy without building the infrastructure, the systems, the things that they need. But your marketing is just a magnifying a fine glass. That's all it is. And of course, you can do really good marketing to a shit product, and it works. There's heaps of scammy people doing that, right? You can, but there's no longevity in that. So the other thing is you have a great product, but your marketing sucks, and no one knows about it. So you can't actually help anybody. Anyway, so what comes up for me when it's like marketing can't save your shitty business, it's like, well, you need to have something worth marketing. And most people don't. It's like, that's the problem. There's nothing interesting interesting about you.

I've literally been on kick-off calls with clients and said, cool, what makes you different from your competitors? Oh, I don't know. Nothing. How the fuck do you expect me to market your business? Yeah.

Oh, wow. That's common, right?

So, yeah, end rant. Talking, stick back to you.

Next question. No, I did. It was interesting because there was something or something behind that, right? But now I get what you're saying there. And then you also said something very interesting. So So the businesses that you've seen now, is this specifically online businesses, or are these traditional businesses, where you said, When I see the founder more engaged in more marketing in the sales, the business is way more successful than when the ones when they're just trying to hand it off to other people.

Yes. So I've worked in everything, brick and mortar, online, whatever, right? And obviously, that's a very broad stroke thing because a A billion people can point out successful businesses where the founder isn't engaged. And so I'm only talking from the data set I have, which is probably predominantly like on online businesses. But why is that helpful? Because the founder is The founder should be obsessed with the market. That's it. Like, hands down, should be obsessed with helping people and serving people. And those ideas and that information should trickle into the marketing. So like, I'm working with a, I don't know what they're doing, 50 million finance company, right? And the founder wasn't involved in marketing, not when we were working with them. But it was a Marketing Manager who just blatantly didn't really know what they were doing. And I see that time and time again. Or with smaller companies where someone will be like, I've been burnt by five agencies. At some point, my friend, you need to learn about marketing and not get bullshitted. There's no excuse to not understand marketing. Go to YouTube. Like, I'm sorry. You need to learn it because it's like the lifeblood of your whole business.

And in saying that, though, I do believe marketing and sales is one machine. So I'm not sure if you have an opinion, what's more important, marketing or sales? Obviously, everyone has different opinions.

It's interesting. If you want to go down that road, we can go down that road because you're talking to a sales guy, right? My whole business, everything has always been about sales. So at the core, I would say this, at the deep, deep core, sales trumps marketing because I'll tell you why I say that, because it's hard and I wouldn't suggest it, but sales can do marketing over the phone. Marketing can do sales over the phone, right? So Now, if we're talking about low ticket or high ticket, right? We're talking about $200, $500, even $1,000 offers marketing all day long. You actually don't even need a salesperson. I wouldn't even go near a salesperson for that. Figure out the marketing, you can scale faster. When we start getting the mid to the high tickets 5, 10, 15, 20. I still believe it deserves a phone call, and it needs a phone call, and that deserves a salesperson. But here's the thing. If marketing does their job properly, sales is easy. If sales is doing marketing over the phone, marketing didn't do their job. If marketing is having a hard time and can't figure it out, product development, offer development, advertising, whatever it might be, didn't do their job.

It's all part of a system, I believe. And I think that's where it gets very... In an agency, when you're working with other people's businesses like I do, that's where I think we talked about before this, where the fight starts happening, the marketing against sales, sales says the leads are crap, marketing saying the salespeople are crap. And it just is counterproductive of what's actually happening and what's needed for success. So for me, I think it's unique in the situation to answer that question. But at the end of the day, gun to my head, sales can Trump marketing on the phone.

Yeah, you can get your team lined up for cold calling or whatever, right? You can get it going. And it depends on offer price, offer price, industry, market, mass market versus wealthy people, et cetera. But yeah, I don't know if I have an answer, except for you should just think of it as one system.

And I agree.

Which we agree on. Yeah.

It was so Let's talk about that because I think it's really important. We both can see that, but how many business owners, how many business have you walked in? How many funnels have you walked in where that's just not the case? Why do you think that is?

Because it's a good question, because you have to diagnose the problem before you start prescribing things. So when I do go into companies and it's like, Cool, the sales director or whoever, what are the feedback loops you have set up and established with the sales team? Nothing. Okay, what data are we collecting from sales? Are we meeting with sales monthly? Like the sales manager and the top reps, are we meeting with them monthly, etc. No. And it's usually because of a past half-arsed, failed attempt to do some working together as a team. So usually when I work with sales teams, rarely, but it's nice when I do, you get sales people who are really gung-ho, bought in, forthcoming with information, and they know how to give the information to you, right? But that's not always, and that's okay. They're not marketers, they're salespeople, and we just need them to close deals. And so the marketer has to think, Well, why should I talk to the sales team? Okay, my job is to get good data to make good decisions. There's quantitative data that tells me the what, but then I need qualitative data to tell me the why and make good hypotheses to test out different things.

One of the best inputs you can get is happening in the sales process because that's when the person is the freshest from the marketing. So people might have onboarding survey set up and NPS, and that's awesome, but it's all downstream once you've brainwashed them in a good way.

Well, yeah, once you've got it, let's use indoctrinated them, but yes.

Yes, let's use indoctrinated them, not brainwashed. The sales process, what we do is we'll just get the call transcripts. We'll usually analyze close calls, calls that didn't close that should have, and the bad fit. We'll have a mixture of those. Then through our bot, sometimes I'm finding things like That probably the sales manager should. Like, your team is presenting price too early. They hadn't actually made the sale. They're presenting price way too early, and that's why you lost that deal. It's not marketing's fault. To put this into something actionable, what do you need to do? Number one is have marketing and sales agree on lead scoring. What makes a qualified lead? Because you've got to have something that's black and white and it's objective. Then we understand from the sales team, Cool, what does make a qualified lead? They'll give us the the 3-7 qualifiers, and if we can, we'll reverse engineer those into questions. So we're screening people and the closer, because that's really who's on the call, pending your size of your sales team, you've got to respect their time. So we need to make sure they're only talking to people most likely to close.

We've got to respect their time. That's one of the biggest effectiveness and efficiency hacks, right? And then once you've established that, they take the calls, you analyze the calls. Ideally, they're putting feedback into the CRM And then that feedback loop just keeps making the calls better and better. And so for us, even the other day, we're managing this huge funnel, and we had this one ad takeoff, and the marketing metrics were awesome. Cpl is awesome. So cost per lead. Booked call rate was awesome, but they weren't closing. Our show up rate dropped. And it was like, okay, if we were a normal marketer and only caring about that, we'd be like, too bad. The metrics are great. Good luck with that. But our job is to deliver business. Business results, not marketing, ticking, boxing. So we had to look and it was like, Oh, shit. This one particular ad is causing the no shows. Turn that thing off. I don't care about the top of funnel metrics. It's not working in the system. So, yeah, that's why all of those touch points are so important to be analyzing and making good decisions.

I think I've talked to a lot of marketers. I'm going to just tell you this. I've worked with hundreds of different companies, and I just wish, I just wish all the marketers had the same mindset that you have because that's how you actually win this game. To tell you, I have a client, one of my clients right now Their mindset is lowest, cheapest CPO. And then saying, why is the salespeople not closing? And that's when we're talking about the shit in, shit out. Well, when you're They're trying to optimize for the lowest cost per lead on the front-end. It just destroys everything that comes after that.

I said something on a piece of content once, and it was like, I don't know, something like CPL doesn't affect the PnL. Stop optimizing for CPL. And this guy lost his shit in the comments. You're an idiot. You obviously don't understand business. What are you talking about? And I was like, okay, no, you're That's right. Cpl can affect it. If you only track cost per lead, it'll affect it negatively because that's fucking stupid. You need to be looking at all of the other metrics and your North Star is cost to acquire a customer. That's it. That's what's going to drive the business. Or your CPA, right? Yes, exactly. I have clients that come to us and their agency or their team are running lead form ads on Facebook. And they're wondering why nothing closes and nothing shows up. Lead form ads on Facebook?

Yes.

And that can for things like, I don't know, roofing and stuff, right? Quick, commoditise, get me going. But not high-ticket coaching and stuff.

No.

And then that client, we made this system. Their lead to sales time, because that's another metric that you need to track, collapsed from 30 days to two days. I shoot you not. It's a case study on my website. All because we just did it properly and a bit more of the marketing up front or the sales up front. And so, yeah, I don't know, you got me all worked up and traumatized. Well, no, I love it.

Let's keep going. So let me ask you this, what type of funnels are you seeing convert lately? You got the book funnel, you got your VSL, you got your webinar, you got your three-day event, The list goes on and on. I got your quiz funnel, application funnel, I got your two-step, just as you know, opt in, have the setter's call, and then just qualify right away. Have you seen any specific funnel working now in today's environment that's working higher than others?

The funnel needs to match the business constraints and the business's strengths. I'll ask, How good is your sales team? What are they closing at? Blah, blah, blah. The marketing has to support the business. So that's where I always start. But typically with the clients that I work with, we are doing a book a call funnel. We're just finding people that are in market ready to go, and then we're going to scale that as much as we can. Then it's about, Cool, how do we diversify that and how do we scale it more? Then that diversification might come from a quiz funnel or a lead magnet funnel or a webinar funnel. Why? Because that's just finding people a little bit earlier in their buyer's journey and warming them up beforehand. Or and We're diversifying that winning funnel and opening it up to more niches and more audiences. You can scale in those two different ways.

When you say a Book a call funnel, what are the steps when you say that? Is it a book a call funnel?

Typically, It's add to landing page, application, so those qualifying questions, calendar page, success page.

No VSL in there. No long form video to...

You could have a VSL on I would, and we do, like some of ours we do, but when don't we? People think VSLs are easy, and that means a video sales letter, right? Actually, once you have a video sales letter up and running, now it's just like you have to look at the hook the hold rate, you have to have had already shot a bunch of different hooks. You can stuff it up because the person presenting is shit, not charismatic, or is just jarring to the audience. Now there's more things to take in, right? There's character, costume, setting, all of these things. So yes, and it doesn't have to be over complicated.

So it's interesting because you just said something very interesting. So try to... What I've heard is in marketing, not only are we trying to be creative and trying to get the attention of the right buyer, we're also trying to eliminate any barriers, factors, anything that we need to that may stop or prevent them from moving forward. So a book call funnel for you It's as simple as an ad that goes to an application. That application has a couple of questions in there, and then automatically they can book a call with a closer. Is there a setter involved or is it straight clogging closer's calendar up with unquiet? No unqualified leads at that point.

No unqualified leads. But why? Because we've done our ingredients. We understand the market. We're calling them out at the ad level. It's the right dog whistle language, the right bait to bring them in. The point of the landing page, it's a digital appointment setter. It will literally say, This is for you if, this is not for you if. Go away, shoot, shoot. We don't want bad people to book. Then in that application process, remember, we already spoke to the sales team. Dude, what's the three five things you need? Then at the start, depending on the company, we might autodisqualify people and then send them somewhere else if we know for sure this person cannot be sold to. Otherwise, we keep it open and then we just add disqualification at a later date. So, yeah, no, their job, my job is that they only talk to qualified leads. And ideally, what's happening is the landing page is converting at, let's say, 7 to 15 % or more. Broad range, My goal is not the highest conversions on the page, right? It's to weed out the wrong clicks that came at the ad level. That's it. To weed out the wrong clicks.

So that means 7 to 15 % is how many people are completing the application, the form. Then on the booking page, the calendar page, I want 70 to 90 % of people booking. They should just all book. Why wouldn't they? There's no reason.

I'm with you. After they've applied the application, why would they not continue in Okay, sounds good.

Exactly. Yeah. And so some people are like 30, 40 %. Bayard. That's Bayard. And then that's the booking. And then there's the show up rate.

And that's just what show it. Yeah, I was going to say, how are we increasing show rate up rates? Because like I said, I've been running sales teams seven years now. And I can tell you above the board over the last year and a bit across all sales teams I speak to, the show rate is going down. It's not what it was. It's not like it was in 2018 and '17, when it was like an 80 % show rate.

What are you seeing now?

Oh, the industry average right now is 50.

Yeah, that's what I'm seeing. And it's annoying as shit because it used to be 70, 80 %. And so it depends on your market, of course, classic market, I answer it. It depends because it depends whether you're doing mass market or business people, like wealthy or whatever.

So if we're doing mass markets, 50 %. If you're doing a little bit more niche, if you're a little bit more sophisticated buyer. So a little bit of people above what I call the waterline, more B2B, then we're seeing that being more like 70, 80s because they respect their time and they wouldn't-Exactly.

And they use the calendar religiously and that thing, right? So, yeah, I'm seeing similar trends. What are some quick fixes for show up rate? Really, you have to diagnose why somebody isn't showing up. So it's either the wrong person booked and they should never have booked. That's a different. This is the thing. You always have to diagnose the correct problem, right? So the wrong person booked, the right person booked but forgot about it, so you didn't do enough in the persuasion prior to the call. Or the other one is the right person booked. I got a whole playbook, so I don't forget this shit. The right person booked, but then they got over it. They fizzled out. And that just means that the offer wasn't tantalizing. There was no what's in it for me. It died off, right?

The speed to lead, too, though. I mean, speed to lead is everything, right? If we rely on... I'm just trying. I'm interesting because if we rely on traditionally book call funnels, which I haven't seen performing at the levels they used to, just generally across the board, and we know speed to lead is everything. Well, the whole day, the whole days of, Hey, someone books, and then 24 hours later, they show up and you can just flap your guns for 45 minutes and make $10,000. They're there, obviously. My teams are doing it. But the heyday that call is over, and I was wondering why you think that is.

The heyday of being able to sell. I guess the market has shifted and people have gone on more of these calls now, right? You used to be able to hide the sales process, so it was like, You controlled it, but now everyone knows. And the other thing is, I don't know if Andromeda is still doing it, but there was Andromeda being the algorithm on Facebook ads. What was happening there, and it probably is still happening, you would book a call and then Facebook would flood that person's algorithm with 10 competitors. That's a new as well. We never used to have to compete with that. All of a sudden it's like... Because what you want to do in the marketing is you want to control the frame. You need to be the prize. What I think is starting to maybe shift is people, there's more options, there's more people starting businesses. Yeah, that might be it. And even in one of these funnels that I'm working on, because data is everything, right? And these, to your point before, do you need a set up? It depends. But they have a set up team. And we found the data that they had a 50 % show up rate on average with no confirmation on the set up.

Just for whatever reason, the set up didn't connect, didn't try, or the dialer didn't put them through, and a 70% show up rate on connection. With the set up.

Yeah.

And previously, in this heyday, I would just say, fire your whole set up team. My marketing will overcome this.

Your marketing can do the setting or AI.

Yeah, or AI. Now, maybe you can do it with AI setters, but yeah, having that confirmation, and this is why it's so important to understand the principles of persuasion, that whole book, the Childini stuff, commitment and consistency.

I was going to say Robert Childini.

Yeah, you got a commitment and consistency, reciprocity. You have to just tack into that. Liking? Yeah, liking all of these things.

Yeah. It's so funny. It's funny you say that because The rules are so simple, but yet people just either miss it or they just think they can bypass those rules. I want to go back, though, because there's a lot of knowledge here, and I want to just make sure we're getting the deeper, deeper knowledge here is all these 620, I just keep bringing the number up, but of all the funnels you've seen, even of the 10 funnels you're seeing right now that are converting, is there anything that you're seeing that makes the difference between the winning funnel, the one that's just crushing, versus the ones that were like, they're still like that little, and you know what I mean by that nuance. It just hasn't cracked the code yet. It's working. You're doing maybe a million a year off of it, but it just hasn't gotten to that point where you can get to escape velocity and just start scaling.

I have a boring answer. It's all of the basics. Message market fit, underserved niche, shit hot offer that no one's ever launched, understanding your market, have all of those ingredients I mentioned, being different, having Having that authority, having the best proof, etc. But we're moving out of the attention economy into the trust economy. Maybe Gary Vee has spoken about this or something, and I've stolen it. But it used to be a number It's a numbers game. It could just be a numbers game. Get the most attention and everything will trickle down and you'll make seven, eight figures, whatever, easier. But now people are so skeptical. I was looking this up the other day for a piece of content, and it was something like, I'm going to butcher it, no one fact-check But let's just say there's at least 100 million scams every year across the world. It's something like that. It's like people are getting scammed. Like even I notice in my emails now, like the fishing emails, it's escalating and it's getting more sophisticated and it's getting more news coverage. So you always have to remember that your marketing exists in context, right? To society and whatever.

So, yeah, I think that that's a big thing as well is like what's working, all of those things But not just relying on ads. Ads are fast, but content lasts and building that sphere of influence and all of those touch points outside of that funnel because people are going to go and look you up, look at your YouTube, look at your Look at what reviews, look at what people on Reddit are saying about you because they don't trust anybody. Everybody's been sold to on the Internet now for 10 plus years.

How can you? So let's talk about that because you're right on the sense we are living in trust is more important ever now. Way more important. It's crazy because there's even people getting caught on like, fake reviews and fake testimonials and all this stuff. And then I think some of these people you might have mentioned, not mention their names, but even some of these people that we know that do very, very well, three, four million dollar a month, not doing the fulfillment. It's going to come around at some point, right? At least I hope. I think that we're getting to that point in the marketplace where people like, it's Trust and do what you're going to say you do. And this is the greatest thing. I tell my salespeople this. Salespeople have become so horrible and so just not good at what they do. The art of sale is gone. And I tell my guys, you don't have to be great to be good anymore. You just have to be good and you can be great. And it's the same thing I feel in fulfillment, and it's the same thing in marketing. And the market, I think, is getting tired of it.

And that's why there's this idea of trust. But how does someone who's starting out, who doesn't have the big audience, they don't have the big influence, they don't have the big powerhouse funnel experts like you behind them, how can they build the trust in the marketplace so that when they are running as simple as a book to call form, it actually means something. People actually show up and they're actually ready to have the authority to be able to close them on the trust.

And even when I first started, I didn't have this stuff. The stuff that I have now, I didn't have. And so for us as a company, we made case studies on North Star metric. They are the greatest asset for leverage you can build. So we just went gung ho on that. And then as another rule of thumb, if you have less proof and you're a smaller brand, your offer and your guarantee, assuming your market is cool with those things, needs to be stronger. That's all it is. And then you can map like any big business, their shift from when they start on a really strong offer, their brand and marketplace, they understand it. And then they have more competitors come in, and then they end up coming to me because they eat shit, because they stopped doing direct response and brand response. So don't only rely on that. But if you don't have proof and you don't have what you need, I mean, the simple answer is go get it. But how do you start? It's like, how do you start? I'll talk from an agency marketer, freelancer point of view. You might just have to be a bit cheaper.

And then there's levels to the game. I started selling traffic maybe two years ago. Before that, we were just really high ticket funnel builds, which wasn't the best solution for our clients, which is why we do traffic now. And you know what? The first client I sold on, I think it was Google Ads, was 1,600 a month a to ID. That was the first one I ever sold.

To run Google Ads?

Yeah, to run Google Ads. Yeah, to run Google Ads. And now it's like, we can't even talk unless we're going to be doing 10 to 15,000 a month plus performance. Because I've evolved my offer over time. So it's like, that's the thing. It all comes back to the offer and the market that you serve. And how can you find a rich market with a big problem and create the best thing to help them? So if you don't have results yet, I would say start with one organic channel and you can do cold outreach and do cold outreach creatively. We did a cold email campaign just because we needed more clients, did like 70K in a week. That was back when cold email was a bit easier, about two years But we have a mate who built his whole... Because people aren't creative, right? They're lazy and boring. We have a mate who built their whole agency on pizza. And again, a couple of years ago. But he would send a pizza to, this is pre-COVID, send a pizza to whatever, because he was an IT agency. He would call them and say, hey, I'm the guy who sent you a pizza.

Can we talk about this? And reciprocity? Yes, you can. And he built a multi seven-figure agency with a $20 CPA. Yeah, exactly.

I was going to say it's funny because most people are like, send a pizza. They're trying to do the math. I'm like, you'll spend a lot more money on advertising than you will spend money on a pizza. So that's interesting. When we think about the future then and you're seeing where the market shifted and how it's shifted a little bit, where do you see the next couple, say two, three years in how we are marketing and how we're communicating and how we're using funnels?

There's going to be a big shift, obviously, with AI, and AI is getting better and better, not just from being able to replicate humans, but also in its intelligence and logic in DMs and stuff. So, yeah, I don't have an answer for you yet because it moves so quickly when I have a hypothesis and I think I should start testing something on a funnel, something new comes out. Like that's the honest truth. Shit changes so fast at the moment. And so then what I think is, okay, that's what's changing, but what never changes. Everyone's so obsessed with AI, but no one's sitting back and thinking, well, what never changes? What never changes in society? It's our little monkey brains and how we're persuaded and how we think. So it's like I just think, I should say, where I'm doubling down as a business owner who's doing seven figures and I would like to get to eight figures is storytelling and personal brand and organic.

Yeah.

Mustering those things.

I couldn't agree with you more. Being able to story selling, storytelling and story selling. I think personal brand is going to be one of the most important things you can do, especially with AI, because as great as AI is going to be, it's never going to be able to do you. I used to do a lot of motivational speak, and I remember you used to be like, Kavon, man, you remind me a lot like Tony. And I always used to say, listen, do you expect me to be a Tony? I'm going to fail you 100% of the But if you're interested, I do a pretty good cave on. The reason I'm saying that is I think AI just can't replicate. You can try, but it's not going to replicate who you are. It's not going to replicate your authenticity or your nuance, your energy, all of that. I think a personal brand is everything. Speaking of that, in marketing, someone's listening here, well, what's the difference between a personal brand and marketing?

Marketing Marketing is the function for your business. Marketing is a thing you do to get leads and make sales. I'll just say that as it's as simple as little. So for me, we'll put it in the context, for me, my marketing is I have lead magnets and I have funnels and I go on podcasts and I do these things. Yes. And I have these things. That's my marketing machine. But my personal brand is the perception that I'm... You can't control people's perceptions, but it's the perception that I'm trying to curate and the authority that I'm trying to build in the market and the relationships I'm trying to build at mass in the market. The personal brand is the most... It's pretty much the best asset I've ever built. And I'm a very little personal brand, and it's already the best asset I've ever built. And it compounds, right? So I haven't been super consistent all of the time, but that's why I jump on these podcasts. You have an engaged audience. Even my head of performance, who's awesome, he listened to me on a podcast two years ago, and he's like, I listened to you And I kept in contact with your content.

And then I just randomly was on your site and saw a job. Awesome. Actually, that's an important point I'll make. Your personal brand is not just good for client acquisition, it's good for talent acquisition. And back to your point, what's going to make a business stand out? Yes, the personal brand, but the best systems, the best tech, the best people, the best data. And those are the things that I'm like, as well as the personal brand on the back-end, that's what I'm really doubling down on.

So what do you think comes first, marketing or personal brand?

Well, so you can build a personal brand and use your marketing to amplify it, right? So that's what I do. So I could have done marketing on LinkedIn through my business, and it could have been persuasion I've experienced posted this. I'm like, boring. No, instead, I've attached, I've powered up my marketing with a personal brand. So we pretty much don't do anything as the business. It's all through me. And there's pros and cons to that. Obviously, if you want to exit one day, whatever, not ideal. But if I get to eight figures and someone comes and just slaps a big $50 million check on my desk because they want to buy my business, it's a good problem to have. I'm not trying to solve the problems right now. I'm trying to make an impact and hit my mission. I like that.

Yeah. I can tell you're passionate about the funnels, and I can tell that you authentically want to help the right people. So saying that, who Who is your right audience? If someone's listening and they're like, I want to work with you, who do they got to be?

Yeah, I have two ways that we help people. The first is in my community where we have a lower ticket and you can get access to... No secrets. All my systems, I'm in there doing landing page reviews on Loom. Come and jump in there if you want to learn how to master this. As you said, I'm very passionate about this and helping people. Come in there. And then we have a coaching program as well. That's more if you are doing, I would say, six It's figures a month, you're doing high ticket lead gen, and you don't want to hire an agency, but you want somebody to roast your stuff and help you come up with new ad ideas and come on the weekly calls. For the agency, this is not even a story we have time for, but I scaled us. I went to three pods. I had the sales team and I freaking hated it. And so now it's like, no, we're a boutique agency. It's just what I want to work on. What excites me because we run our own offers. And to pull me away from that is like, well, you have to have something cool to work on.

We can make money together. Do you know what I mean? But that's levels to the game. I'm blessed that I'm there at that.

Yeah, absolutely. That's called leverage. I understand that from the sales perspective as well. As you said, a lot of people think they're going to come to you Because you're trying to save them and you know that you're not there to save anybody. You're there to amplify them. If they're not in the right position, they don't have the right offer, they don't have the right message, they don't have the right fulfillment, they don't even know who they're speaking to, there's nothing you do to save those people.

Yeah, that's been a big lesson learned this year. You can't help everyone. And as an agency, you're hitching your business to other businesses. You have to be really careful who you hitch a ride with because some of them are going down and you don't want to be dragged down with them.

It's hard. I mean, as an agency owner, we've hitched many times, even though we were like, don't do it again. You do it again, right? Because you just you try to be optimistic, but you got to stick to your gut. You got to stick to your rules. So our new rules are very, very simple, right? Is not number one, in order to be effective, we got to be selective. Number two, we are not in the business of helping losers become winners. We are in the business of helping winners win more. So if there are eight, we take in the nines and tens. If not, I leave it up to Tony.

I like that. I might steal it. Not in the business of helping losers become winners. I wish we had this podcast about six months ago, and you could have said-We're in the business of helping winners win more. That's what we did. Yeah, I love it. Yeah, that's really cool. Thanks for sharing.

Well, thanks so much for being here. Where can people find you, though, on your website or your personal brand so they can come and get you?

Yeah, so my name's Alicia Conlin-Head. Check the show notes for that spelling. Thanks, parents. And the best way is to jump on YouTube. Again, it's all for free. If you want to hear me rant about Funnelz more, go and check it out. How to fix your show up rates, how to fix qualified leads, everything. Or if you want to come and join me in my community, that's It's called The Obsessed on School.

One last question. If you lost everything today and you had to start over on a blank piece of paper, what's the first thing you'd do?

Tap into my network. I still get that. I don't lose my network in this situation.

You've lost your network.

Then I would just find an underserved niche who has money, and I would cold call them. I would just build something new. There we go. That's all I would do. Cold email, cold DM, send them a pizza, and then get a few clients on, build a new offer, hire people to run the offer. That's it. Choose a good market that has money and get them on calls. Sales, as you said, sales trumps all.

It's all the same process.

Yeah.

Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being on the show. Love to have you back sometime soon. Have a great, great rest of your evening.

Thank you.