Working Smarter with Automation Tools that Nurture and Convert Your Clients with Teddy Garcia

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Welcome to another exciting episode of Marketing Speak, I’m your host Stephan Spencer, and today we have Teddy Garcia as our guest, and Teddy is a guru at business automation, at Information Marketing, creating the systems and structures and processes and all the back-end that makes marketing information work. It’s really exciting to have you on the call today Teddy.

Thanks, Stephan. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Let me just give our listeners a little bit of a background on you before we start riffing about business automation and sales funnels and information marketing. So you’ve been in the online world for decades. You built your first e-commerce website in 1997. You started the infomarketingsystem.com business that you are running today in 2008. Your client list reads like a who’s who of top internet marketers and thought leaders like Jay Abraham, Glazer Kennedy, Robert Allen, Sally Hogshead, Rich Schefren– this is an impressive list and I’m not even going through all of it. You’ve executed some really big launches and campaigns for some of these folks. You’ve really built quite an intricate set of marketing processes and sales processes, it’s pretty amazing and you have a sales conversion system called Sales Vortex which we’ll talk about, and you’re all about creating scale and automation so, I think I hopefully did you justice there with that little bio intro so yeah, let’s maybe start with a bit more about your story. How did you get from the early days of the web to where you’re at now?

Yeah, you know, I was lucky when I was a little kid really, my dad was into computers really early, he worked at a local university so I had access to computers as a kid and you know, back then we didn’t have Xbox, right? So if I wanted to play a video game I actually had to type in the code from a magazine and debug it and get it to work in order to play a two-minute game.

Yep. I did that too, yep.

Yeah, so that’s kind of where it all started. And then, when I was in my early 20’s, I had always been into bikes as a kid, I ended up buying my hometown bike shop when I was still in college, and it was in that business really where I kind of wanted, I saw the internet coming and I was on AOL prodigy and that stuff early on, and I just saw the opportunity to sell bike parts online. In fact, the bike shop actually did two things- during the summer, we sold bikes. This was up in Connecticut so in the winter we actually fixed kerosene heaters as revenue during the winter, and so really the first e-commerce site was a site where people could buy wicks for their kerosene heaters. It was all built-in Javascript with custom programming so people could look up the right wick for their heater and buy it, and literally I set it up and within a week I started getting orders from Minnesota and California, and I was like holy crap! This is like – so, that’s when I realized that the internet was really kind of going to be the next big thing and I had pretty much fulfilled my dream of owning a bike shop, and you know it was a limited amount of money and a limited amount of scalability and I was there all the time.

Wait, wait, hold on a second. You bought an existing business at what age?

23.

23, well that’s impressive. A lot of people are just going through college, partying, and here you are- you’re acquiring businesses. That’s pretty cool.

I actually started it in college. I’d been a bike mechanic for- I started working at bike shops when I was like 15. I’d been a bike mechanic and learned that business then. And, so when I went to college I made these business cards that were like a 3×5, a business card with a big slit in the middle, and I’d just walk around to the bikes on the bike racks and slip them on the handlebars,

Cool.

And offer to fix their bikes. Primarily for beer money, but you know, that kind of grew to a legitimate business at a certain point, and I called my first boss at my hometown shop and was like, “Hey, look, I need to use you to get some wholesale accounts as a reference.” He was like, “Hey, why don’t you come to talk to me? I’m ready to sell the store.” Alright, perfect. So that’s kind of how it worked out. Ironically, I’d written a business plan in high school to buy his business, so I literally executed that plan almost four years later almost word for word. When I wrote it, I had almost no intention of actually buying his store.

Wow, what a great story. Cool. Nowadays you are building not really websites as much as whole back-ends for folks’ online businesses so they can fulfill a promise on teaching people some concept or helping people through a transformation in their business or in their lives. Walk us through what is a typical engagement or implementation.

Our primary focus is helping people with a strategy on their marketing.

Well, let me just back up a little bit. Basically what happened was, once I started the internet business after the bike shop, we were primarily focused on small and medium-sized local businesses- pizza places, restaurants, whatever. We did a lot of website development for those clients. They didn’t really understand marketing and it was hard to get them to shift their mindset to a direct response marketing mindset, branding mindset, and you know, they didn’t really have a lot of money that they could dump into their website and stuff like that so, at one point I was running an online shopping mall, which still exists call PointShop.com, and me and the owner were doing all of the work ourselves in that business, and I just realized that there had to be a better way to do this. That’s kind of when I met Rich Schefren, I saw his YOU map when he released the Internet Business Manifesto, and I was like, holy crap that’s me, and so I built a relationship with Rich and kind of bought all of his programs, went to all of his events, and eventually I started working for him that was really where I got the behind the scenes of a seven-figure online marketing business and how it worked and all of the automation that was in place. I was already using InfusionSoft in my own business but hadn’t really seen what it was fully capable of, and so it was through that job with Rich that I really learned the ins and outs of the information marketing space.

At a certain point, he wanted me to move to Florida, I couldn’t move because I have my son here, and he was like you know, “I kind of want somebody local in the office, but you know, I’m happy to refer you to other people that you can help out. And that’s how I started working with Jay, and then everything just kind of snowballed from there. So, I’ve had a really kind of unique opportunity to really see behind the scenes of a lot of different information marketing models from some of the top people in the industry, learn how they are doing automation, help them improve their different processes, and funnels, and systems, and really get a good sense of how this space works and how you can really automate it. And so, that was pretty much the journey, so now our primary focus is really on helping people with a strategy on their marketing.

It originally started with the Sales Vortex, I now call it the FREEDOM Formula actually, I’m working on a new book called The FREEDOM Formula, and FREEDOM is basically an acronym for the seven stages that every business really needs to have in place, and what are all of the systems and processes and communications that need to happen around those. The F in freedom stands for where do you find your ideal customers, and how do you get them to your website. The R is what are you using to get them to register, and give up their email address. The E is how do you engage them in conversation and build trust so that they will buy something from you. The second E is how do you encourage them to buy something. And then, once they do buy something, the D is how do you deliver an amazing experience. And then, the O is once they have bought and have had a great experience, how do you offer them more. The M is how do you maintain them for life. So in each of those areas, we make sure that there are campaigns and sequences, and that everything is flowing together properly to move people through each of those stages effectively and in an automated fashion. We help them map out that strategy and then we do all of the implementations around it as well, setting up Infusion or Ontraport or Active Campaign. We are a kind of platform-independent, 80% of our customers are probably on Infusion but it can work with any system. We build out the websites, we build out the webinars, we build out the membership sites, so all of the technical headaches that most people struggle with, we kind of take over for them.

Very cool. So for those listeners who aren’t familiar with InfusionSoft, this is a CRM, it’s a campaign manager, it’s a backend delivery system, it provides e-commerce capabilities. What am I missing here? It basically does everything.

I mean, it’s really a $300 per month full-time employee that does all of the marketing legwork that you would normally have to do yourself is the way that I really like to think. So it does all your billing, it does all of your marketing communication, it does all of your follow-ups, tracks all of your sales, allows you to collect money- so I mean, it’s a pretty powerful system. The problem is, is that it’s not the easiest system to use. And it’s not the easiest system to really understand how to leverage everything that it does. And that’s true for a lot of the CRMs, so that is where we come in and really help people to understand that strategy of what are the campaigns that you need to have in place, what do they look like, how are you tagging things in the system so you can track what is working and what’s not, how do you integrate it with other systems such as the website, or you know, maybe it’s like a task management system, or support desk, etc. So we do a lot of custom integration work as well.

Right, right. InfusionSoft is this whole backend system, and it’s got this nickname out there in the marketplace- Confusionsoft, because it is so complicated and not terribly intuitive. I personally use InfusionSoft in my business. I looked at Ontraport which used to be called Office Autopilot, I didn’t really look too much at Active Campaign. The idea here is that if you are just working off of a very small point solution to handle let’s say, your shopping cart, 1 Shopping Cart is a solution for that, it’s missing the one aspect of broad integration with trigger email system, with setting up, as you said, tagging, and follow up sequences and so forth. Kind of walk us through what a campaign is like, versus a sequence, and why a business needs something like this in place.

Sure, you know, the reason why you need it in place is there is no real practical way that you could possibly effectively continue to follow up with all of your different prospects and customers and know where each one is in their buying process and be sending them the right emails at the right time. It just becomes too much to manage without a system like this. InfusionSoft helps you really automate that, so any email that you would usually send to a client or a prospect, even something as simple as just scheduling a call to talk to somebody, you can really automate that entire process. So, for instance, let’s take a typical funnel for a service-based business. So, it might be that they come to your website for more information or they might be requesting a quote, or maybe they download your eBook on 7 Things You Need to Know Before Hiring a Plumber, let’s say, so as soon as they download that report, you want to put them into a sequence that is first of all going to get them to read that report, so you may have a series of emails, you know- Hey, thanks for downloading our report, here’s a link to it. The second email might be a day or two later- Hey, did you see on page 12 where I talked about how to know if you’re getting screwed by your contractor type of thing, or whatever, but you are pulling them back to what they originally requested to make sure they consume it, and you know, the third, fourth and fifth emails might be about your story and some testimonials, and then, you know, asking them to schedule an appointment with you.

And so, that email would lead them to another form where they can ideally pick a time on your calendar and schedule an appointment, and once they submit that form, now there is another sequence that takes place that would stop the first sequence that they are no longer getting the emails inviting them to the appointment because they already scheduled that. Now, the second email is reminding them of the appointment that they scheduled to make sure they show up. And then once you have that call, depending on the outcome of that call, you can update the system with the outcome- if they were interested, if they aren’t interested, if they aren’t ready, and you can have a series of emails go out based on that. So, if they were interested, it might send out a series of emails that sends out the proposal, sends out the contract, the agreement, and continues to follow up until they actually execute the contract. Or, if they aren’t interested, maybe it moves them more into a nurture campaign where it continues to provide value and keep them top of mind, keeps you top of mind, provide valuable tips and insight to keep helping them, but you know, continuing to still make offers to work with you, etc. So that would be a basic example of a typical service-based business funnel, for instance.

Great, so basically this is like a decision tree, where you have to figure out the logic of moving someone from maybe they have never heard of you before, they saw you on a Facebook ad, they click on whatever it is that your offer is, some sort of free magnet, free checklist worksheet, eBook or whatever, and then you nurture them through and guide them through the whole sales funnel all the way to the end and then you are assigning tags to these prospects as they are traversing through this funnel, as they, for example, sign up for a webinar and don’t show, so they get a tag for registering but they get a different tag for being a no show and then whole other sequences to get fired in InfusionSoft because they didn’t show up for that webinar.

And so many businesses are doing this stupid approach of let’s just send out a monthly newsletter and keep them live because we heard this thing about the 90-day contact frequency and we need to at least reach out and touch them a minimum of every 90 days. And now we’ve nailed it, we have a monthly newsletter and that’s every 30 days. It’s just a brain dead approach to online marketing that might have worked a decade ago, but it doesn’t work now. What do you tell people who are doing that monthly newsletter approach about that they are doing wrong and where they should be going instead?

CRMs are listening systems. They listen and watch for a contact to take certain behaviors.

Well, you know, there is definitely some value to doing a monthly newsletter, but that’s more at the end of the sequence than at the nurture and maintenance part of the relationship, right? So, once somebody has expressed some interest, they have kind of raised their hand and said look, I have this problem and I need someone to help me, and whether that is you or not is going to be determined by how effectively you are following up with them. So that’s where really having these sequences in place. And the best way to understand it is, InfusionSoft is, and well all of the CRMs for the most part, they’re listening systems, right? So they are listening, and watching for a contact to take certain behaviors, whether it’s fill out a form or purchasing something, or clicking on a link indicating that they are interested in something, and so the system can listen for those behaviors, and when one of those behaviors happens, it can automatically do a series of things. It can send out an email, it can notify you of an email- hey this person raised their hand, it can create a task for somebody to do something.

So there are lots of different things that the system can do in response to those actions. And I think the key thing for people to understand, or the key thing that I see people do wrong most of the time is they might build out a sequence, but they build it out in a linear fashion with the expectation that the person is going to do everything that they want them to do. And the real power of automation is the sequence that catches them when they don’t do what you want them to do and puts them back on track. So, like we’ve mentioned, you know, if they schedule a call but they don’t show up, you want to have a series dealing with the fact they didn’t do what they were supposed to do-how do I get them back on track, how do I get them to reschedule a call, I sent them a proposal but they haven’t signed it, how do I get them to re-engage and sign the proposal, so it’s really picking up all the pieces where people drop off in the process opposed to assuming they are going to go straight through and do everything that you want. So, part of it is working backward- what are the things that I want them to do and what are the things that I want them to buy, etc., and what information do they need to make that decision, and then kind of work backward from there to build out your campaigns.

So, it’s essentially trigger-based emails versus the one size fits all email blast of let’s say, a monthly newsletter, which may be appropriate later on if it’s a lead that kind of went stale and you’re just putting them on a drip campaign every six weeks or three weeks or whatever, they get an email from you. But the trigger-based emails, that’s where the magic happens because you are basically escorting them through your funnel, holding their hand through the process and then if they get lost, you bring them back.

Well, and even with the monthly newsletter, let’s say you’re just doing the monthly newsletter, but in that newsletter you talk about let’s say three different services that you offer. If you click on one of the links to one of those services, then you know that they are interested, by clicking that link you could start them into a separate sequence that is very specific to that service and start sending them emails just about that service. It’s about really segmenting people and delivering to them exactly what it is that they are showing interest in that’s very relevant and timely to the process.

It’s about segmenting people and delivering to them exactly what it is that they are showing interest in, that’s very relevant and timely to the process.

Absolutely. Let’s say that you get somebody to show up for a webinar, and on that webinar they sign up for whatever you’re selling- whether it’s a home study course, let’s say it’s a live event, a three-day seminar. They sign up for the webinar, boom, but you’re not done yet because they might not show up for the live event. They may get kind of side tacked or whatever. How do you keep them engaged and on the path from that day you sign them up from the webinar to three months later them the live event happens.

Yeah, that’s an awesome example. That’s actually funny, there is a lot of talk in the marketplace about capturing leads and getting them to buy something and all that stuff, and there hasn’t been a whole lot of discussion about what happens when somebody buys, but the reality is that, and as everybody knows, the real money is in getting your customers to buy more from you and buy more often, and keep them for life, opposed to constantly trying to capture new clients. You need to do both, but the best way to grow your business is to focus on the people who have bought something from you. Most people aren’t talking about that, and most people don’t really have systems in place for that. We actually did an event a couple of weeks ago, called the automation super summit, where I interviewed 20 of the top people in the business and automation marketplace and that is all we talked about- how do we focus on what happens after the sale, how do we focus on maximizing lifetime value, and how we build businesses that are scalable and can run without us.

But, for something like that live event for instance, once they register for that live event, you might have a sequence in place that is now trying to make them an offer to attend a special VIP lunch, you might make them an offer to bring a friend at a discounted rate, you might have a couple of additional offers that tie into that once they have indicated that they are coming, so how can you get more money from them and increase the value of their experience. Then, leading up to the event, you might issue a survey for what things they are interested in learning about so you can tailor the event to what the audience is looking for. The week before the event, you could send them an email or create a task for someone to call them and make sure that they are showing up so you’ve got a final headcount of how many chairs you need in the room. Then, a couple of days before the event- “Hey, I’m so excited you’re coming”, actually probably about a month before the event you would have sent them all the details about the hotel, how to fly in, and directions, all that kind of stuff. And if you’re doing a live event and you’re on the hook for a certain amount of rooms, you might send a separate email making sure they booked the hotel through your group code so you get credit for it. And then, like I said, maybe right before the event- “Hey, I can’t wait to see you. Here’s the agenda for tomorrow. Maybe it’s sending them a personalized text message or voice call greeting them and telling them when registration is etc.

That’s all the stuff you could do previous to the event, and then post-event you would do the same kind of things, you would do some emails around “Hey, thanks for attending the event. We hope you had a great time. Here are any resources we might have mentioned during the event that we said we would send you”. You could have that, you could do another survey or feedback on the event, what they thought about it. You could give them a limited amount of time to sign up for next year’s event if they didn’t sign up while they were there. Additional follow up around the post-event, tell your friends, things like that. You can see that is typically stuff that you would either not do at all, or would do manually and on the fly, whereas you can really leverage automation and think all of that through ahead of time and just have it all cued up so that anytime somebody registers for the event, all of that stuff is happening, you know you are getting the right notifications, you know they are getting them at the right time, you know they are going to have a positive experience because of it.

Yeah, what a difference, right? It could mean doubling your revenue from running a live event just simply doing that systematized follow up, and one thing that I think a lot of people neglect is every customer touchpoint, or client touchpoint, is an upsell opportunity as well. If you were on a thank you page after having downloaded some free lead magnet or you’ve placed an order to attend a live event, a thank you page isn’t just a place to say thank you and go check your email for your receipt or for your free download or whatever, it is an opportunity to upsell. Much better than inside of a PDF that they’re consuming, if they ever consume it, or in a crowded email inbox. What are some of the most creative uses of thank you pages that you’ve seen or that you’ve implemented?

There’s definitely a lot of different things that you can do on thank-you pages. You know, a big part of that conversation right now is around retargeting to make sure that you have retargeting pixels on those pages that you can identify and retarget them through other offers, through Facebook or Google, things like that. You can definitely have a one time upsell offer that offers them something else in relation to what they just bought because they are emotionally engaged to pull out their credit card and trust you to make a purchase, so that’s usually the best time to offer them something else. And ideally, it’s something that helps them implement something that they just bought, especially if they just bought an information course. A lot of people don’t want to go through an actual information course where they won’t take action on what is taught in it, so if you can give them a done free system, or done with you, but some way to help them implement that quicker, faster, easier, that’s always a good offer.

The other thing that is always a good offer is some sort of membership in continuity- so maybe it’s a monthly membership club, where they get really strong content, Q&A calls, and things like that. That’s a great way to build leverage in your business because now you have this monthly recurring revenue coming in every month like clockwork and it just continues to grow over time as more people buy the initial offers so you can, that’s definitely something that everyone should have in their business is some sort of continuity program. You know, maybe you only have one product or service to offer so on the thank you page you could offer an affiliate offer for something else related or similar to what this person may be interested in so that way you don’t have to create anything else but you can still earn additional revenue from that customer. There’s a lot of different things that you can really do.

That’s great. Let’s come back to continuity programs because that really is like mailbox money where it’s running on autopilot and giving you checks every month so how do you navigate that minefield of consumers or customers being wary of or anti rebill and various FTC guidelines, all of that sort of stuff to offer something that is high value, low return rate, and chargebacks- when people contact their credit card companies because that can really damage your reputation with your merchant account.

Be very clear and transparent with your continuity programs.

The most important thing is to be very clear and transparent about it and not try to hide it in any sort of fine print or anything like that. Make it clear that this is a recurring revenue program, possibly have them check off a box that or put in their initials where they agree to the terms of service, that’s usually enough to protect you from chargebacks where you can prove that hey, this person initialed that they were signing up for a recurring membership. The reality is that there is always going to be a certain percentage of people who are not going to pay attention to that and not realize it, so having good customer support in place, and again, this is where automation can really help out, having a process for dealing with refunds and possibly downselling them to a lower level membership that isn’t publicly offered, or giving them a couple of months credit maybe but keeping them in the program, the longer you keep them in the better off they are, and then it’s all about developing a good value program. It’s not like you set up a membership site where you add all the content once and then you don’t continue to update it or you don’t continue to provide value.

If they are paying you every month, you need to be providing additional value every month and really making it worth their experience. And a lot of it’s based on price point too, I mean there are certain membership programs that can be as low as $5 per month and there are others that go up to $15,000 or $5,000 per month, so depending on what they are paying to be in it, obviously determines the level of value that you need to deliver. But I’ve seen all sorts of different membership models- everything from print newsletters, to high-end coaching and strategy mastermind groups. There was one example that I heard of, I think it was at Traffic and Conversion, where it was a husband and wife team, the wife wrote poetry and the guy was an artist, so every week she would write a poem, he would draw a handmade picture depicting the poem, and it was a $5 per month membership. But they had like 30,000 people, at $5 per month, to get a poem and a picture once per week. So it doesn’t always have to be super complicated, and can still get to the very big numbers if you do it right.

Very cool. So what about guarantees, because if you get this right, you’re going to have a rock-solid program, if you get it wrong, you are going to get in all sorts of hot water. So what are some of the best practices for the guarantee and what is the ideal implementation of that?

The best practice is to not mess with anybody. If somebody requests their money back, just give it back to them.

Well, really the best practice is to not mess with anybody right, so if somebody requests their money back, just give it back to them. Don’t argue, don’t try to prove yourself, regardless of the situation in most cases, because the reality is they always have the ability to chargeback, usually for a 90 day period, and if they go that route not only are they going to be upset with you, your merchant account company is going to be upset with you, your rates could go up, they could tarnish you on social media and stuff like that, so it’s a lot easier to just bite the bullet and you know, if they are not happy for whatever reason just give them their money back. So basically, just an unconditional guarantee of if you’re not happy within 30 days or whatever, we’ll gladly refund your money, no questions asked. That doesn’t mean that you can’t try to save the sale in a certain way, but you know, if they are just not interested or they’re not using it or they don’t want it anymore, just honor your terms and be ethical about it. It’s when you try to really kind of nickel and dime people or take advantage of them or not honor your word that you get in trouble. But you know, most of the people in this space are very ethical.

The problem is that most people buy stuff and then they don’t use it, right. They buy a course with intentions of going through it, and then they never go through it. That’s actually another place where automation really comes in handy, where somebody’s buying a membership site, or a monthly continuity program, it’s very important that you have a sequence in place that’s checking to make sure they actually logged in. If they haven’t logged in for a certain period of time, start sending them emails or maybe trigger a phone call to them to find out why they are not logging in. Maybe they just got busy, maybe they forgot, whatever, but just have that in place. And if it’s a course that’s broken into different models, you can do the same thing, you can have automation in place that’s tracking, hey have they finished module 1 within a certain period of time.

And if they haven’t can we have a sequence in place that encourages them to go complete it. Because the reality is that if you get them through the course and they get the results that they were looking for in the first place, that’s when they are more likely to buy more, that’s when they are more likely to refer you to other people, that’s when they are more likely to give you a testimonial, and those are all the things that grow your business so it’s really, that’s where I see a big drop off. A lot of people focus on getting the lead and getting the sale, and then what happens after that is it’s like a no man’s land and people are kind of on their own and that’s why they struggle, and that’s why they don’t get any results, and that’s why sometimes information marketing gets a bad rap. It’s really because the person creating the content, or the course, didn’t set it up in a way to guarantee, or try as hard as possible to guarantee that person’s success.

Such great advice. To summarize in terms of the guarantee, it’s no questions asked, money-back guarantee for some period of time, at least 30 days, maybe 60 or 90 days, what time period do you think is best?

Yeah, I think by default you get 90 days to issue a chargeback, so I mean. Now again, if you have a stated guarantee policy that says hey, you have 30 days, then if a chargeback was ever issued, you could clearly state that they had a 30-day guarantee, they are claiming a refund 90 days later, they didn’t take advantage. That gives you more grounds to fight the chargeback if you want to.

The best strategy for avoiding these chargeback situations and people asking for their money back on your guarantee is to simply walk people through the process of using your system, your tool, getting ready for the live event, making sure that they get their hotel and their airfare and everything, and maybe upgrade to VIP and all that stuff, to maybe walk them through the whole process of utilizing the thing that they just paid for. And that’s where that no man’s land typically occurs and I see it all the time myself too.

The worst thing you can do is just send them a receipt and never mention anything else about it again. And a lot of people just do that.

What are some best practices that you’ve seen or that you’ve utilized with your clients around creating urgency and scarcity because people just tend to keep going with the same inertia and getting them to get off their butt and take a transformative action is oftentimes very hard so using urgency and scarcity to motivate people really works. What are the best practices around utilizing urgency and scarcity?

Conversion rates in this market are typically 2-10%.

A couple of things. Basically, whenever you present an offer, maybe it was through a webinar, at a live event, whatever it is, there is always going to be a certain, a majority of people who don’t buy. The reality is that conversion rates in this market are typically 2-10%. There’s 80-90% of people who saw the offer that didn’t buy it. There is definitely ways that you can pick up some extra sales through that process. A lot of times a sequence, if I attended a webinar and saw the offer but didn’t buy for instance, then there might be a sequence of emails. The first email might be testimonials from people who have gone through the program to lend some social proof and credibility that hey, this program works. There might be additional bonuses that you add specifically for the people who didn’t buy. You might break it into multiple payment plans to make it more affordable. And then again, having a limited time window where they have to make a decision. That’s usually two or three emails, you know, hey you’ve got 24 hours left, 48 hours left, this ends today, that kind of thing.

And the reality is, and Jeff Walker has proved this with all of his product launch formula stuff is that there’s like this huge, it looks like a Golden Gate Bridge kind of thing right, so there is a huge spike the day the offer is initially made, then it kind of dips down and slows down, and then that last day when it’s available again you’ll see a surge of sales if that urgency and scarcity is in place. So that’s pretty important. And other thing too is if you say you’re going to close this deal on X date, then you legitimately want to close that deal on that date. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t offer another deal at a later date that is a little bit different package, right. So maybe it’s a higher-end package that is the original core plus now some coaching element to it or something like that. So you are still honoring the initial thing of this course is closed, but if you buy this coaching package, now you can get the course as a bonus sort of thing. There are ways to keep it reopened and reusing it.

Right. And there are also folks who will reopen a closed program, maybe two months later you have to get on a waiting list and then they notify you if and when it does open up again. So, you know, it still creates that scarcity and urgency but you give people the opportunity to opt-in later on. Maybe they missed the first X number of live webinars or live trainings or whatever, and midway through you give them the opportunity to join in full.

This is one of the things we talked about at the Super Summit actually, I brought up this issue with a couple of different people that I was talking to. If you think about it, oftentimes what we do in the information marketing direct response base around these launches and stuff like that where the thing is closed for a certain period of time and you simply can’t buy it until it reopens, it’s just ridiculous. It’s like Apple introducing the iPhone and saying you can only buy it for a week and then you are not going to be able to buy it again for the next six months. It just doesn’t happen in the real world.

It’s so arbitrary.

Special offers can build urgency and scarcity to enhance what you offer.

Right. There needs to be a way that you can create that urgency and scarcity, and like I said, that could be that they only get these certain bonuses at this time period or things like that, but you want to have an ability for people to buy that product, ideally anytime, but yeah, there are certain special offers and certain things that you can build urgency and scarcity around that enhance that offer or add different components to it that aren’t normally available, or the price is lower, or whatever. But to completely close it for a period of time, to me, doesn’t make sense. Although obviously, lots of people in this space do it.

Right. Bonuses are a great incentive for folks. Would it be for a bonus that is for the first X number of people, or is it more of a time-based bonus- you have to make the purchase today or by the end of this webinar? What is your experience works out the best?

Usually, you start with a, well the way I see it done most often is you start with a large list of bonuses and then you gradually start taking them away. Maybe the people who registered for the early bird get a special price or special bonuses, and people who are on the webinar, if they buy within 24 hours of the webinar they get a certain bonus package. Then, for the people who don’t buy, people respond when you start taking stuff away from them. Even if it’s stuff they didn’t even know they wanted. Having a large list of bonuses to start with that you can gradually start taking pieces away from as time goes on is a great way to do that.

You can use this methodology and system for selling little things like $9 eBooks, you could use it to sell a $25,000 mastermind, or perhaps even a hundred and whatever thousand-dollar private coaching. What would be an example of the highest-end package that you’ve seen, like maybe a super expense mastermind or something like that?

Yeah, there definitely is a hundred thousand dollar masterminds and stuff like that being sold. Joe Polish’s 25K group is a great example, it’s a $25,000 per year, there is no payment plan, it’s 25 grand upfront, and if you can’t afford that, you don’t deserve to be in the group basically. But the reality is, most of those, you don’t ask for a $25,000 sale, you do it through an application process, you make them fill out a survey, like they are qualifying themselves to be in that group and applying to join. Mindvalley does this with Awesomeness Fest, which is their twice per year event, both personal growth, and epic parties, it’s an awesome event by the way, but yeah, you have to apply, you have to be a certain type of people, and they only take 400 people to each event, but they get 3,000 applications. It is higher ticket stuff, usually, there is an application process and talking to an actual live person to finish closing the sale, it can be an automated process but usually, it’s a live person, you want to talk to somebody if you’re spending that kind of money, you know. You want to know that there are real people behind this. That’s usually the best strategy.

Right, so you have this intermediary step where you get somebody on a strategy call or a triage call because selling a high ticket item that is more than a couple thousand dollars is just really hard if you are trying to do it purely online, you need that human interaction.

Yeah, and I do that in my own business. In order for somebody to become a client with us, they first need to talk to me, and in order to talk to me, it’s $500. We’ll spend an hour doing a strategy where I will mindmap everything, they take a survey before they talk to me so I gather all of their vital information, what systems they’re using, how big their list is, what their products are, all that kind of stuff so we don’t have to waste time on the call doing that. But then during that call, I’ll build them a map of here’s where you are, here’s where you are trying to get to, here are the different things that you need to put in place that you don’t have, and then if they decide to work with us, that $500 gets applied to whatever they do with us. If they don’t, they still got some valuable information and strategy and recording and the mindmap and all that kind of stuff for their $500. But what I found when I wasn’t charging for it was a) people weren’t as ready to buy after the call, they would just take the free advice and not do anything with it, which was a waste of my time and really a waste of their time. So by adding that piece in place where they have to actually pay to talk to me made a huge difference. It’s much easier to convert somebody to our higher-end offerings or services once they have already dished out $500 to make that investment.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, and so it’s like a higher equivalent ticket to the tripwire where you just train people to spend money with you by buying a book or some physical thing or digital download that is low price, $7, $15, whatever, and then they are much more amenable to spending quite a bit more money with you after they have made that initial hurdle of trusting you enough to give you their credit card. It’s a consulting equivalent. Yep, I totally get that. And with my consulting clients, I make them jump through hurdles too in order to become a client. It’s not easy for somebody to work with me because I only have enough slots in my dance card to take on a very small number of elite clients so again, it just goes right back to that urgency and scarcity.

And I just want to point out for the audience, the reality is we’re not making you jump through hurdles just for the sake of making you jump through hurdles, the reality is that if you are not willing to jump through those hurdles, then you are not going to be a good client in the long run and you are not going to do what we tell you to do, so it’s a way to weed out the people that we can really have the most success with. I’m only interested in working with people that I can help have success, people who aren’t willing to take action or take the steps involved to even have that initial conversation are the people who are less likely to implement what you tell them to do afterward. It’s a matter of finding the best clients that we can help the best.

Yep, for sure. I did have one question that I wanted to loop back to the automation discussion around webinars and follow up sequences and that sort of stuff, and then we’re going to have to close out this awesome podcast, thank you for joining us, but I want to get back to the concept of using a tool specifically for webinars such as GoToWebinar, and how do you integrate something like that with InfusionSoft, because they don’t always, these tools they talk very well with each other, and let’s say that you have a list of attendees who actually showed up inside of GoToWebinar, but InfusionSoft doesn’t have that list, so is there manual labor involved in making these systems?

It’s not manual, but it does require a third-party tool. There are two tools that people are specifically using, well there are three tools actually, so if you are specifically using InfusionSoft you can use a tool called PlusThis, which is basically a bunch of little add-on functionality that you can use within InfusionSoft, and one of the tools that they have in there is the ability, so when somebody fills out an InfusionSoft web form, it automatically registers them to the webinar, and then when the webinar ends, it queries GoToWebinar and pulls back the people who attended or didn’t attend and applies tags to them so you can trigger whatever follow up sequences. You can do it with PlusThis, you can also do it with Fuzed App. Fused App works with InfusionSoft, Ontraport, and Active Campaign to do that same thing, also has other integrations. You can also do it with Zapier, although the PlusThis and Fuzed App are a little more robust than Zapier, but you can do it with Zapier as well. Zapier is a great tool that you can connect lots of different systems together. When somebody buys something in InfusionSoft, maybe it creates a task in Basecamp, or Asana, or Trello or whatever project management systems you’re using, and you can use Zapier to kind of bridge those tools together and things like that.

Yeah, Zapier has so many of these connector widgets, it’s mindblowing. In summary basically, what we are saying is that you need to have the knowledge of the marketplace of third-party tools that are add ons to InfusionSoft or Active Campaign or Ontraport or whatever CRM system backend that you’re using. That’s part of the value of working with an expert such as yourself, Teddy, is that you have all that expertise, you have all that knowledge, and you’ve test driven all these third party tools because otherwise there are going to be these gaps where you don’t know how to connect X to Y and there happens to be a third-party tool, but you wouldn’t know it until you talk to an expert such as yourself.

Yeah, I think the biggest mistake that most people make in this space, at least around the technology standpoint, is they’ll go to one of the job sites like ODesk or Elance or whatever and just hire a website designer or developer who doesn’t really understand direct response marketing at its core. So they will build something that is functional but isn’t built around getting conversions or generating leads, they don’t really understand the methodology they just understand code. It’s a whole different mindset to understand what makes people opt-in, what makes people buy and how these systems all work, versus just the technical ability to just write some PHP code or set up a WordPress theme and stuff like that. They are two different animals. So you really want to work with someone who has both, ideally someone who has the marketing expertise but also has the technical ability to implement it.

Great stuff.

There are great tools like ClickFunnel now, it’s a great tool for anybody who has some graphic ability, you don’t have to know any code but you have to understand web design a little bit to manipulate it, but that’s a great tool that has really simplified the process of building sales funnels and integrating with some of the different platforms and stuff like that.

Awesome. Well, I really appreciate you joining us for this information-packed episode, this has been fantastic. How does a listener get ahold of you, what is the best way if they perhaps want to work with you or find out more?

Sure, so if they go to infomarketingsystem.com – system, no S – infomarketingsystem.com, they can go there, they can download my sales vortex book and they will get an opportunity to schedule a call with us to discuss their business. The other thing that I would recommend is, like I said, we just did that Automation Super Summit event which is 20 of the top people in this space, a lot of them are my direct competitors honestly, but I really wanted to bring together lots of different viewpoints and perspectives because we all have different experiences, we have different clients, and that whole event is focused on how to automate your marketing, how do you speak to your market, how do you build all this post follow up and customer service, all that kind of stuff.

There’s tons of great content in there, the recordings and transcripts are currently available, so if they just go to automationsupersummit.com they can find out how to get those as well, but that’s really valuable, like there is so much wisdom in those- I think there is 21 different interviews that we did-but it will give you the right mindset and really get you thinking about all the stuff that you could be doing that you probably aren’t doing. If you really want to build a business that is not only scalable, but is actually someday sellable, which is another key benefit of automation, right, if you are the one doing everything then no one is going to buy that business from you because it’s reliant on you, and people want to buy businesses at some point, at some point you are going to want to exit and move on to something else. It’s important that you build something that someone else can take over by having the right systems and processes and documentation and stuff in place, and we talked a lot about that. Automationsupersummit.com or http://infomarketingsystem.com/

Perfect, and I will also include those links in the shownotes, along with a bunch of summary notes on this podcast episode, and we’ll make a transcript of the full episode available to all you listeners as well. Thank you, Teddy, really appreciate it, and thank you listeners, and we will catch you on the next episode.

Important Links

Your Checklist of Actions to Take

Decide what you want to offer. Would your target audience like to have a free eBook, a webinar, or a live event? What would add value and capture interest?
Create a survey and send it out to your list to gauge what they are interested in.
Create a follow-up plan that keeps your clients on the hook. Create intriguing emails that introduce the offer, but also remember to include the different steps they may take.
Upload your emails to your CRM, using a tag system. Have your leads tagged for the offer, and create tags based on the potential steps that they may take.
Don’t forget to include your terms! Ensure that your refund policy is clearly stated somewhere on the purchasing page or contract.
Don’t fight a chargeback – if the customer was unhappy, let them have their refund. If anything, you can prevent negative feedback on social media.
Add bonuses. If you are running a live event, include a special VIP lunch. If it’s a webinar, include a sale for 24 hours after attending. Adding value and urgency to your offer can dramatically increase sales.
Start with a large list of bonuses and gradually take them away as time passes –this will increase urgency for your list.
Try a membership program – make sure it offers as much value to your customer as the amount that they are paying for.
Recurring membership programs cannot be fully automated if they are going to provide value.
Give clients new value each month.

About Teddy Garcia

Teddy Garcia is the founder and CEO of informarketingsystem.com, and is considered the go-to for email marketing automation.

Teddy Garcia has always been an entrepreneur, starting by buying a bike shop to taking the online marketing world by storm.