Businesses That Educate Dominate

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Verbatim text

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Welcome to episode number 123, that’s 123, of the agency trailblazer podcast. This is your host, Lee. On today’s show, we will be talking with mister Mike Killen, and we are unpacking funnels. WTF are funnels. What can we do with said funnels other than pouring water into smaller containers and lots more. So sit back, relax, no funnels needed, and enjoy the show. This podcast is brought to you by the agency trailblazer community. Is agency life stressing you out? Then it is our mission to help you build an agency that you love.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
We’ve created a community which includes the agency reset roadmap that will allow you to get your agency back on the right track. We also have lots of noble straight to the point, easy to consume workshops. We have a thriving community of other agency owners. And we all wrap up every month with a mastermind call with myself and sometimes a special guest where we unpack your questions. For more details, check out agency trailblazer.com. Welcome to a conversation with your beautiful host. That’s May Lee Jackson. Thank you for saying that.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Very kind. And an equally as beautiful, handsome, debonair, stylish, funny, all around great guy. You’re too kind. You’re killing. Thank you very much, Lee.

Mike Killen:
Do you know how hard it is to not laugh at your, like, 10 second countdown, Lee? It’s just to be perfectly silent. And it’s it’s it’s just, like, grating to not laugh.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Just so you know, you totally failed. I could hear you breathing.

Mike Killen:
I could hear you.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah. Yeah. Like,

Mike Killen:
why? Gross. What was the point?

Lee Matthew Jackson:
I just you just needed to die for 10 seconds just so we could get that silence. Yeah. I’m joking with you. You were you were fine. Guys, if you don’t know who Mike Killen is,

Mike Killen:
he’s, an absolute all around legend. We’ve been

Lee Matthew Jackson:
friends for literally ages, and and I all around legend. We’ve been friends for literally ages, and and I can prove that because we did episode 32 together. Yeah. Back when this podcast was called the WP Innovator podcast. All those years, I can just see long time listeners looking glazy eyed off into the distance as they remember the glory years. Yeah. What was the WP Innovator podcast? Yeah. And we had young Mike back then, unknowingly, he still has a full head of hair, talking about marketing funnels.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
And, that’s exactly what we’re gonna be talking about, but kind of in the modern day. I mean, that was, like, nearly 2 years ago now, it feels like. And we need to talk funnels now, and we wanna talk about them with regards to agency life. So you can expect during today’s episode some amazing knowledge from Mike with regards to what the heck are funnels.

Mike Killen:
Mhmm.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Just, you know, just a recap. What are they like nowadays? We’re gonna talk about, how to use funnels to your advantage as an agency owner, you know, to generate business because that’s a good thing. And, also, we’re gonna maybe unpack as well how we could resell funnels as it were to our own clients. Mhmm.

Mike Killen:
Do you

Lee Matthew Jackson:
think you’re up for it, mate?

Mike Killen:
Yeah. I mean, you’ve sort of dropped that on because I didn’t realize we were gonna be recording. So I feel no. I’m joking. Obviously, that’s that’s that’s good, man. Yeah. That’s that’s that’s good, man. I’m looking forward to

Lee Matthew Jackson:
it. And for the record, we agreed all of this just before. We definitely did. Yes. We did. Right. Well, let before we get into all, like, the the funnel y stuff, can we just have a little introduction from you? So who you are, what you’re involved in, drop some links on us for the people who have attention deficit disorder and wanna go ahead and check out some URLs, and then we’ll get cracking.

Mike Killen:
Okay. Yeah. Well, first of all, man, thank you for having me back on. I know we we spoke back in 2016, and, you know, I just wanted to say upfront what what you’ve been doing is brilliant. I think Agency Trailblazer is a a really good looking program and you’ve I know that you worked really, really hard on it. So it’s interesting to see that transition from WP Innovator and and what you’re doing with Ankle Crown to now being, you know, on the other side of it. So that that’s really cool to see.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Thanks, man. It’s as scary as heck.

Mike Killen:
Yeah. I bet. Yeah. Yeah. Tell me about well, that’s kind of like that’s kind of how similar to to my journey as well. We had a a little agency called Devon Digital Design, and I don’t even know if the the site might still be up, but I think it’s just a holding page. And in 2000 when was it? Last year, we actually sold that business onto a media company. Yeah.

Mike Killen:
And during that time, I was building websites and stuff and it was, you know, great, but using WordPress and whatever. But I really got into this concept of, like, funnels, automation funnels, email marketing, and kind of side steps building full websites and ended up building kind of little 3 page packages for customers just to try and, like, increase, like, their email subscribers or maybe drive some more traffic or drive some more sales and write a few emails for them. And that did better than my kind of entire sort of website digital marketing agency. Yeah. So I I set up sell your service as a coaching program which is basically just helps people set up and sell funnels and we kind of have a coaching program run through that. We still have an a funnel agency which, you know, builds builds automation funnels and stuff. I’m an incredibly boring party guest I think because I pretty much tell the same funnel based stuff to everyone who will listen. So, yeah.

Mike Killen:
That’s that’s kind of where we are at the moment.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Well, we need this because people know on the podcast that I’m not anti funnel. I’m just one of these people who are like, what another thing I’ve gotta learn? And I’ve been saying this for so freaking long. I think I even said it on episode 32, mate. Yeah. Yeah. I have literally been kicking the can down the road now. And I’m now a part of this roundtable with Chris Tucker, and he’s talking funnels like freaking expert. And I’m like, alright.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
This guy’s super successful, and he knows funnels, and he swears by them. What am I doing? Why am I procrastinating? And why am I setting my set foot potentially to fail? I think I and the community need to dig deep. Yeah.

Mike Killen:
I think it now to kind of preface a lot of this, that’s not entirely your fault. Funnels have done people who build funnels and funnel builders and and, you know, funnel software have done a really good job with rebranding what essentially a website is. I was on the ClickFunnels podcast a little while ago. And if you go to my episode, it says, Mike Killen says websites are dead. And that’s a massive misquote because I never ever ever said that. In fact, my point was that a funnel, automation funnel, marketing funnel, sales funnel, whatever you wanna call it, is essentially just a website that’s used properly. That’s really all it comes down to. It’s just making sure that all of the different kind of results and metrics that you wanna get from your website such as more traffic, maybe you want to grow an email list, maybe you want to generate more sales, you know, either for yourself or for your own customers.

Mike Killen:
A funnel is basically a way of thinking about how to design a website. Like when content first design kind of came out, again, it’s really just rebranding what a website is and what it should be. So it’s not entirely your fault to kind of think, is this another marketing thing that I need to understand? Because a lot of it is all is all things that you most people are probably already doing. It’s just a way about thinking about that process, you know.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
So it’s more of understanding so it’s more understanding the workflow. It’s a visualization process versus it actually being some software and a thing you actually have to do. I mean, like, bots, I I guess we could say that is totally separate. People are going on about bots. It’s driving me crazy. Yeah. And I’m, again, rebelling against that because I’m an old man. Yeah.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
But with funnels, I’ve probably already been doing it, but I’ve not been Yes. Strategically doing it, and that’s the difference. And, therefore, that’s why you were totally misquoted.

Mike Killen:
Yeah. Yeah. And it’s interesting because the thing about bots as well, I think, is another great example of like, our industry is renowned for shiny object syndrome. Oh, yeah. And part of the problem with that is that people will jump on the next big thing to kind of explode whatever result it is that you want and things like bots. Everyone’s like, oh, bots will completely revolutionize the way that you generate sales and leads and stuff through your website. And it’s a bit like that’s not entirely true because if you’re not already committing to one strategy or another, it doesn’t matter any new little feature or hack or strategy or whatever that you put on top of it. Unless you’re getting some of the core components right, you can actually miss out a lot of that stuff.

Mike Killen:
And software is another big one like funnel software. Obviously, we have stuff pitched to us all the time and and the reality is we still build out these funnels like you say this process in front of our customers using their website and for ourselves, you know, that doesn’t have to use all of the new shiny toys that are put in front of you. A lot of this stuff you can still do with a very basic WordPress website, you know.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
So no need to go and purchase ClickFunnels and all their claims of web you know, websites are dead and replace your website entirely with ClickFunnels is a whole load of tash.

Mike Killen:
Yeah. Well, the the irony is, like, all of their internal sites are all built on WordPress. Like

Lee Matthew Jackson:
See, I’d know I’d noticed that. I’ve I’ve been told a few times now, and I’ve seen people’s control. But I was like, what?

Mike Killen:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, all of their internal stuff. And, like, I can’t talk because we have a piece of funnel software, you know, so I know kind of the angle they’re trying to take. Yeah. But the reality is that committing to still a WordPress website or whatever, you know, CMS or whatever is they use and repeatedly sticking to the same principles that are basically so out there in the world and this is for if we are a, you know, a freelancer or an agency or whatever we are. There’s a bunch of people out there who don’t know that we exist and we want to basically turn them into like a a happy profitable repeat customer.

Mike Killen:
That’s kind of the goal. A funnel is a way of breaking down each stage of that buyer’s journey. And it just so happens that websites are really really good

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Mhmm.

Mike Killen:
At doing 3 or 4 stages of that journey. They’re really good at certain stages of those journey. And, yeah, you can get some pieces of software that make it a lot faster to do that. I would argue that some of them overcomplicate it. Yeah. But if you look at the guys who have been doing this a long time, you know, you you mentioned Chris

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Oh, Chris. Okay. Yeah.

Mike Killen:
Or, your inner circle, the guys like Jeff Bullis. Those guys started with real, real basic blogs. I mean, really basic blogs. And they still essentially did the same thing. You know, they attracted people who were searching for a solution. They said, hey, join our newsletter. Sign up for this free download or whatever it might be. And then using email, they try and push them through to the rest of, rest of the journey and just try and help them more.

Mike Killen:
That’s what a funnel does. And there’s no need to overcomplicate it by, like you say, rushing out and spending money on expensive software.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
So no need no need for expensive software. The way to start your funnel is a piece of paper and a pen.

Mike Killen:
Basically, yeah. I mean, ours is ours is it’s complicated as, you know, using a whiteboard and some post it notes. I mean, we do use, like, a couple of, like, funnel mapping flowchart things. Sure. But to but to be honest, after we’ve built 5 or 6 of them, we pretty much just use the same ones over and over again for each customer. Like that journey of and I think most most of your guys listening to this will will know what those journeys look like. It’s, you know, a squeeze page and then a thank you page and then a delivery page or a sales page and then a checkout page and then an upsell page and a confirmation page. Yeah.

Mike Killen:
But but the reality is there’s only about 5 or 6 funnel journeys or processes that you can kind of use. And 99 times out of a 100, your website will be able to do almost everything there, you know?

Lee Matthew Jackson:
I think as well they they and I don’t know who they are because we always use that phrase, don’t we? No one’s already

Mike Killen:
The Illuminati, aren’t they? The Illuminati. Yeah. Yeah.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
You you see people explaining funnels, and then what they talk about is kind of like automation funnel mapping, where if somebody gets to a certain point and then does this, you then send them off down some other funnel and all sorts of other stuff. I’m assuming that, like, you can’t just do that with an automatic sorry. You can’t do that automatically within WordPress. You probably are gonna need to use something like Confusionsoft or some other Mhmm. Third party tool.

Mike Killen:
Yeah. So okay. So that’s a really good point. And we had this conversation with one of our customers recently. They really they saw some of the automation that we do, and and we have some really big customers that have a lot of very complex automation. For most of our stuff, we typically use ActiveCampaign. We have used pretty much every automation and CRM software out there. They all pretty much do the same thing.

Mike Killen:
Yep. And what was interesting is that automation processes and software can only automate what you’re already doing. And this is something that I think a lot of people neglect. If you, as an agency, repeatedly fail to email your customers and just follow-up with them, you know, say, hey. How you doing? Checking in with how their website is. Checking in with how their current projects are. Maybe trying to book a a a meeting or a Skype call or go to coffee with them. If you’re not already doing that, buying automation software won’t make that happen automatically.

Mike Killen:
There’s a a kind of a phrase that we we use at our offices that any kind of process or automation tool will only accelerate what you’re already getting. So, yes, if you wanna start doing some very clever automation pieces, you you need to invest in some auto responder software. Some of it’s like $9 a month, you know, it’s pretty affordable. But unless you know how you’re gonna do that or what you’re gonna use it for, then all you’re gonna be doing is paying a subscription service for something that’s you’re not really utilizing. So make sure that before you do buy any of that stuff, you’re already aware that, yeah, do you know what? Once a week, I wanna email these particular customers or once a week, I wanna follow-up with this particular proposal. Because otherwise, it’s it’s just gonna add to all of that kind of bloat and, you know, expenses that we have running through our bank accounts. You know?

Lee Matthew Jackson:
I just did a a podcast actually on costs, and one of the things we did last year was saved around £4,000 in 1 year just on all of these extra services that we had. We thought we needed to purchase. It was absolutely insane. You you’re giving really, really good advice here. Yes. You don’t need to have all of this automation, especially if you’re not doing that kind of that groundwork. I think that’s kind of highlights a problem that many of us agency owners actually struggle with. It’s that, the process of connecting with our clients regularly

Mike Killen:
and

Lee Matthew Jackson:
also with people on our list. And I’m very guilty of

Mike Killen:
Yeah.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Doing the work Yeah. But not actually then working on, regular contact and keeping in touch with people. Therefore, if I’m gonna then invest in all of this extra automation, I’m more keeping in touch with people. Therefore, if I’m gonna then invest in all of this extra automation, I’m automating something that well, I’m automating these little extra pieces, but I’m not actually putting in the the work to support it. So it’s kinda pointless. It’s that shiny object, isn’t it? Oh, I I need this to accelerate growth, but I’m not actually doing anything to facilitate growth. So what’s the point in also having the tool alongside it?

Mike Killen:
Complete like, this is this is the biggest fundamental problem that I think a lot of agencies have. And we did this on one of our coaching calls recently is we were talking about, oh, you know, I wish I had more leads and I wish I had more traffic. And we went through like a troubleshooting process and it turns out that a lot of the guys on the call weren’t even sending the proposals that their customers were asking for. So I was like, well, even if I do send you more leads and customers and traffic, you’re not even doing anything with the ones you’ve got now. So adding automation would only accelerate what you’re already getting. So this it’s it’s a really important, you know, understanding that you have to have that if you’re gonna buy automation software, yeah, it’s super useful. It makes my life so much easier, but that’s because I was doing the stuff manually. And then I moved over to the automation process rather than going, I’m gonna spend $70 a month on, you know, this piece of automation software.

Mike Killen:
And it turns out, actually, I’ve then got to learn how to use it. It doesn’t really do anything. I’ve I’ve bought into their claims and stuff about how it will make my life infinitely better. And, really, I wasn’t using anything like this in the first place, so I can probably get away with it.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
You know? I hear you. Yeah, mate. This is absolutely true. I feel very guilty because I’m one of those people who’s I haven’t put in the wiki. I certainly put I do do the proposals. When I get a lead, I do send the proposals out, you know, within the 24 hours or the 48 hours that I’ve promised. You know? So I’m very big on the proposal side, but I’m not being very good on that kind of looking after the existing clients and sending regular contact, and it’s certainly something that for 2018 we’ve pegged. Now if you’re listening and you do struggle with sending out proposals, etcetera, then I just recommend that a lot of times, a lot of us agencies are trying to do too much in the proposal.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Really, what we wanna do is instigate a conversation, the way there’s gonna be some sort of paid discovery process. So really, sending out proposals should be something along the lines of, hopefully, a copy and paste with a reverse brief of what you’ve understood the requirements are so far. Mhmm. So we understand your requirements are so far. Our process is this. It’s gonna cost you so much to, you know, investigate with you as a paper discovery process. The end result will be some sort of document, which you, you know, we can then deliver if you would like beyond it or you can take away, you know, or whatever. So it’s just adding that value.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
I know it wasn’t a very grace graceful description, but really, you shouldn’t be going and spending, you know, hours and hours and hours of time trying to come up with this full proposal and understand everything the client wants for free. And then give them that, and then never hear from them again because that really stops agencies, I feel, sending out any proposals in the future because they just get sick of it. They get sick of the radio silence they receive as a result of these proposals they’re sending out, and they make too much work for themselves. So we’ve got our proposal sending process right down to quite literally a template that we use, a reverse brief. And if we’ve got enough information to do some sort of finger in the air, and we already understand what the budget of the client already is as well so that we can kind of align that against the budget we’ve been told is available, we can also set their expectations to say, look, we really feel that you’re only gonna get so much for that budget. So, you know and again, that helps set the expectation, so that they’re more likely to invest in that discovery process. So it’s a little bit off topic, but if you are receiving leads and you’re not getting around to sending proposals, you are leaving money on the table, and you’re probably overcomplicating that process. So, surest thought I would throw that in there as a whole bonus.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Because we’re in the Nice one. Yeah. Nice one. Alright. So we’re we’re an agency. We have our agency websites. Cobbler’s, kids scenario now. None of us get time really to invest in our own websites, do we? And if I look at my own website, I am so frustrated in the fact that I know if a design agency comes along to anglecrown.com, they don’t necessarily know where to go and how to get some information from me with regards to, hey, here are my designs.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
How much is it gonna cost me to make a WordPress theme? So we’ve actually been wireframing our new version. Hopefully, that’ll be uploaded in the next, like, I don’t know, 10 years when we finally get around to doing it. As an agency, I wanna I wanna kinda tackle funnels in 2 different ways. First of all, I wanna I wanna tackle funnels as an agency. What can I be doing as an agency? So that’s a design agency that builds websites and maybe does branding. So what can I do with regards to my existing crappy site that’s just got a nice about page as the homepage and a contact page? What could we be doing as agencies to utilize the funnel concept?

Mike Killen:
Yeah. Yes. Okay. So it’s a good question and we’re we’re often asked this and I think the answer is often kind of takes people by surprise. Typically, we don’t have a great website ourselves, you know, like the cobblers children has no shoes.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
That was what I was trying to say. There you go.

Mike Killen:
Yeah. And so and we often want to try and put together some kind of portfolio. What’s interesting is that when we first started this kind of this new funnel process that we were doing at our agency, we decided we’re only gonna work with course based businesses, online course based businesses. And, of course, we didn’t have a portfolio. So what we decided to do is write up, I think, 2 or 3 really long form high quality blog posts telling our ideal perfect customer what we would do or how they can increase the number of emails on their email list and generate sales on automation. Right? So that was just that we just wrote up how we knew how to do that. And I’ll get a little bit onto actually how you can do

Lee Matthew Jackson:
that, but we wrote up

Mike Killen:
these 2 blog posts. And the first thing we did was use that as a kind of positioning tool. And what we found is in the kind of the overall funnel process of, you know, traffic to subscriber to customer to hyper profitable customer. The stage at where people are traffic, where people are kind of, you know, landing on your site as an agency because there’s still a lot of a few misnomers, you know, about businesses looking for agencies. You know, they think of term freelancer means you’ll work for free or the term agency means that you can do absolutely everything, but you might have, like, a specific skill set. So having something that educates your audience is vital, really, really, really vital. And you kinda have to get over that fear of, oh, well, if I tell them how to do it, they won’t want me. And that’s not true.

Mike Killen:
It’s kind of like saying, you know, now that all those guys were on Chef’s Table, like, you know, a lot of the chefs were on Chef’s Table, now that people have watched what they do in the restaurant, no one wants to go to their restaurant anymore. That’s obviously not true. And we have found we have like our little saying which is businesses that educate dominate. So if you want to find more work, regardless of what it is you wanna sell, you’ve gotta educate your audience at the top end. So at the right at the ignorant part of the funnel, the open top end of the funnel. And if you can produce a couple of really high quality blog posts around what it is that you do, you instantly position yourself better. And we’ve found that people don’t want a portfolio, they don’t ask for a portfolio if we can show them these these pieces of content that we’ve developed, you know.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
I love that phrase, businesses that educate dominate. I feel like that should be the podcast title.

Mike Killen:
I’m almost positive I’ve stolen that from someone though. So you might have to Google it because I’m almost positive I’ve stolen that.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
It’s okay. I I believe Steve Jobs, like, stole a few ideas. That’s that’s true. Into his biography. So I don’t think that’s libelous to say that. Exactly. Yeah. But if it is, then without prejudice, I said that just in case the lawyers are listening, which I highly doubt, Ben, anyway.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
No. That that’s that’s true. So I actually don’t have a portfolio either, and I can’t because I work with agencies. We’ve got NDAs. So it is a case of Yeah. The only way I could kind of elevate myself was to provide content. So we provide, obviously, the blog post. We’re doing the YouTube channel.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
And also we’re doing exactly this, which is educating agency owners, freelancers, etcetera, all around the world by either doing solo episodes, you know, educating from our experiences, or having people like yourself on Experts where we’re bouncing off each other, and we’re all learning together. And, and through that, we’re actually finding that we’re then gathering business. So we’ve actually won clients and suppliers

Mike Killen:
Mhmm.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Through this amazing networking tool called a podcast slash, you know, like you said, educating people. It allows us to dominate. And we are we feel like we’re dominating our niche because the people that do process to work with us already know, like, and trust us. We’ve done no groundwork. We’ve not shown them any work. They already know who I am. They’ve already consumed all of our content. Yep.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
They’ve already had the benefit of actually actioning some of the advice we’ve given, and they’ve seen results. So now they are, like, they’re not even a warm lead. They’re a baking hot, sweating, like, crazy lead. That sounds that sounds weird. That really does sound

Mike Killen:
weird, doesn’t it? Yeah. Yeah. All of

Lee Matthew Jackson:
our sweaty clients.

Mike Killen:
Yeah. Super sweaty. And that’s that’s the type of client, you know, that’s the ideal client. And but in in a weird respect, you are right. And I still I think a lot of agency owners feel that they can’t compete with some of the bigger guys or they can’t compete in their marketplace for whatever reason. And that’s because they think, oh, you know, businesses sort of they don’t really want me. The fastest way to get a customer to really desperately want to work with you is to educate them. I don’t know if it’s like this magic switch we have in our brains that whoever seems to kind of help us with educational content, we elevate them in our own mind and we think, oh, man.

Mike Killen:
This person really knows what they’re talking about. And it’s a remarkably simple way to, like, really position yourself well in a niche as well. You know, if you if you really wanna go after a particular category or a particular niche, creating content is the fastest way to do that. And that’s kind of, you know, this open traffic part, you know, if you wanna start driving more traffic or if you wanna start showing people what it is that you can do, write free content about it. Yeah.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
For people who can’t visualize kind of the online version of this, if you just think of a meeting and you’re in some sort of initial sales meeting, I’ve got a good record in the businesses that I’ve been involved with over the years to being a very good closer. But that’s not because I’m one of these sleazy salesman who’s like, right? If you, if you don’t buy today, then you’re gonna miss out on your 20 percent discount and all that rubbish that we get whenever we go and buy a car. But what I would always make sure I do is that I spent the entire meeting asking questions and getting from them all the questions and the problems they have, and giving them all of the answers, and making them feel super safe in my knowledge, asking them to get the IT guy in if they want to, just to get that kind of feeling of, is this guy, you know, pulling the wool over my eyes and just pretending he knows his onions? You know? And then we’d get the IT guy in, and, and he’d chat with me, and we’d all have that conversation. He’d be impressed because he’d know I understood what his concerns were or her concerns were, and so on and so forth. And by the end of your hour to 2 hour meeting, you’ve just spent the whole time answering all of their questions, no holds barred, being super educational. And by the end of it, they feel so freaking safe. They know you know what you’re talking about, and they want to work with you more than anyone else. Because if anyone just stood up and talked about themselves for an hour, they’re at the bottom of the list.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Whereas Lee Jackson and his business are at the top of the list because he was lovely. He answered all our questions, and we feel really safe with him. So I just wanna kinda back that up in a physical environment. It’s exactly the same process.

Mike Killen:
Yeah. And, you know, this kind of leads us onto the next stage. Some some of you guys might have heard about, like, a lead magnet or an opt in or, what they call it, sometimes we call it ethical bribe. This is kind of that second stage. A lot of the time when we do consulting with our with our customers and we we, you know, talk them through, we do a very similar process. We just ask a ton of questions to them. They feel really enlightened. And the easiest way for me to begin to cement in in their mind that I’m the guy that they should be working with is we’ll give them another free piece of content in exchange for an email address.

Mike Killen:
Now if we’re doing that online, we’ve all seen those opt in forms, you know, OptinMonster is what we use, Sumo, all of the autoresponder programs have like an embed form, gravity forms. There’s tons of ways of doing it. But by offering that free piece of content to them, say, hey, if you’re really thinking or struggling with, I don’t know, search engine optimization or landing page conversions or generating more sales, then you should download our checklist ebook guide whatever it is. In the exact same way that we’ve we’ve recently got a puppy for example and it was genius what she did. She took us through this class and got us to do loads of exercises and then she said, oh, here you go. You can take this, little workbook and gave us something physical to us and it was all branded really, really well done. She said, if you give me your email address, I’ll send you a PDF version as well. I was like, oh, this is brilliant.

Mike Killen:
So, it signed up straight away and now she has a method to get in contact with us, you know, check-in with us and stuff like that. And that’s exactly what we wanna do on our website. And that’s where we start this lead generation process of of building up an email list and slowly slowly talking to more and more people. You know?

Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s exactly what my hypnotist did.

Mike Killen:
I I

Lee Matthew Jackson:
got a free session. I then also got a, like, an m p 3 download that I could access, which would allow me to use that audio to get to sleep with. And that was all free. And Uh-huh. I didn’t have to go any further with her services. But instead, I I spent a whole ton of money. And, as a result, you know, I used the MP 3 for a few nights. I was, like, wow, this is the best sleep I’ve ever had.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
I need to go see this lady. And, you know, then I paid for I think I had 6 sessions, and I was the most chilled person I’d ever been for years. And I just reminded myself, I think I need to go ahead and do that again.

Mike Killen:
Yeah. Yeah. But this this kind of that process, again, it’s the problem is when something gets popular, it becomes sort of watered down. And you go to a lot of websites now. It’s like, join our newsletter. And for a lot of agencies, I will they’ll say, hey, join our newsletter. And I’ll sign up and I’ll use this little special email address just to check what happens. And I hardly ever get newsletter copies from them.

Mike Killen:
Okay. So, right. So so I’m signing up. I clearly am interested into hearing what it is that you’ve got to say maybe because you’ve helped me, maybe because you’ve educated me. And yet, I very seldom actually receive any content from those guys. Even if it’s just a written text, kind of like a a Facebook post to that email address saying, hey, Mike, you know, have you thought about this? Rather than just trying to sell something, the thing I absolutely loathe when people have newsletters is they’ll send me updates like, oh, Christmas is around the corner. Have you thought about that? I’m like, come on, man. I know Christmas is around the corner.

Mike Killen:
I’ve signed up. I’m clearly interested. You know, show me something that note that shows, you know, what you’re talking about or that

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Can I say guilty as charged again?

Mike Killen:
I’ve written

Lee Matthew Jackson:
that email before.

Mike Killen:
But we all do it, and it’s because we struggle with content. And, really, it’s the exact same process. And that this is this is why this process is laid out in this way because a lot of people instantly go to the newsletter bit as in an agency will go, hey, let’s set up a newsletter. Or if we’re working with a lot of customers and and a lot of our customers do this, they’ll say, oh, we wanna have a newsletter opt in. I’m like, awesome. What are you gonna send them every single day? They’re like, oh, I hadn’t really thought about that. I was like, well, let’s not worry about that just yet then. Let’s make sure that you’re getting content out every single week.

Mike Killen:
Let’s do that first and then send that same content to people after they sign up to your newsletter. And how about we increase the number of people who sign up to your newsletter by offering them something in exchange. And it could be as simple as an ebook, a checklist, a guide, you know, there’s we haven’t got time unfortunately on this call to go through that entire process. But the lead magnet is essentially what that piece of content is called. And you can repurpose and recycle previous blog content, you know, that you’ve you’ve used. It doesn’t have to be a, oh, we, you know, so and so’s, you know, have had a kid or got a puppy now, you know, it’s like that’s not interesting.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
I feel like at this point as well, guys, I should just mention, go to sell your service dotco.uk because Mike really does know his onions. And he’s got a whole load of information on his website and courses that you can go ahead and buy. Mike is being a very, what’s the word, and courses that you can go ahead and buy. Mike is being very, what’s the word, humble and not mentioning any of this, but I have spent money with Mike before and not regretted it. And, this is not The purpose of the podcast is not really to sell at anyone, but just know that there is a ton of this. So for the sort of deep dive into funnels using email marketing with your customers, etcetera, then you really need to go ahead and check out, Mike’s content. In fact, I I seem to remember I bought years ago, you’d done kind of a how to sell email marketing to your customers or something. Was was that something you did? It feels like a few years ago.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. A really small investment, and that was really well, it was a very high value to to us, at the time when we consumed that content. So, again, sell your service.co.uk because, obviously, like Mike said, we can’t actually do the full deep dive and tell you exactly what to do.

Mike Killen:
Yeah. And this is, like so go to my site actually for two reasons. First of all, because, obviously, there’s incredible killer amazing well written content with no typos whatsoever. Right? But on the other side, I will if you’re if you kind of rise above that level and think about, okay. Well, I’m gonna opt in here. Because I build funnels every single day, the entire site is this overall funnel and it’ll show you the process that you can go through. It’ll take you to a thank you page and then a delivery page and you’ll get an email. So it can actually you can use that as a kind of a blueprint to understand, alright.

Mike Killen:
Well, how does this entire process work? And everything I have on that entire site is just WordPress. We have page builder of Beaver Builder.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Beaver Builder. Yeah. Karen.

Mike Killen:
Yeah. Exactly. Right? We exactly. We have our own, little funnel plugin that kind of works with Beaver Builder. Sorry.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
I was gonna ask you about it anyway, mate. So No.

Mike Killen:
It’s yeah. It’s it’s it’s not it’s all I’m trying to say is it’s not there’s nothing on there that no one couldn’t do with a standard WordPress install, and a and a nice theme and a nice theme and just writing a bit of content, you know.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
So remember, folks, that’s sell your service dotco.uk. Because this actually now feels like we’ve gone into kind of those, you know, the, the QVC.

Mike Killen:
Yeah. That’s the dream.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
About the dreams is all your funnels on QVC. And and my

Mike Killen:
Hey. That’s not the funnel. I have no idea what it is, but that might be very convincing. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. I’ll wear an ill fitting boot. Boot, a really bad tie.

Mike Killen:
Awesome. Mushrooms.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s so good. I’ll be I’ll be cameraman. Now I’ve got I’ve got well, we’ve got 2 last questions. I wanna learn about your product right at the very end, and I believe you’re gonna give us a special code as well. That sounds cool. But I’ve got one more question that is blowing, on my mind. Now Yep. I understand you what you’ve said is funnels is a concept.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
It’s not necessarily a piece of software that you have to go and invest a a load of stuff in. Most of us have websites, which means potentially we have lots of broken funnels out there. Yep. So Yeah. At what point should we, as agency owners, for our customers, at what point in the build process, the design process, should we be talking about funnels? And are there any kind of leading questions that we should be asking to start to unpack what the client’s requirements are?

Mike Killen:
Yeah. See that okay. So, this is a really good question because the first rule of selling funnels is not talking about funnels. The reason why is because, one, if you don’t know what they fully are, and that’s fine, like, you know, we’re not we can’t know everything, then your customers are really gonna struggle. Selling a funnel to a customer is, you know, it’s there’s too too big a bridge to gap. So instead, what we like to do is we absolutely ask those leading questions. And you can ask them at the consultation stage or the discovery stage or the deep dive stage or during the project or you can ask this to your current customers. And it’s 3 super, super simple questions.

Mike Killen:
It’s first of all, how much traffic are you getting at the moment? Secondly, how many leads are you getting at the moment? And thirdly, how many sales are you getting at the moment? It’s just understanding those numbers that they have. And they’ll typically say to you, oh, okay. Well, we have, you know, 10 sales a week and we typically have, you know, like a100 or a 1000 or 10000 email addresses and we get maybe 2,000 or 3000 visitors a month or whatever it is. And as soon as you can understand those metrics and those numbers and the physical things they’ve got, 1, that instantly positions you as someone way above the standard agency designer or developer. All of a sudden you’re asking about real important numbers. And then you can ask this kind of question that caps it all off. If we could increase any one of those numbers, what would that do to your business? And what that does is that shifts the focus away from I want to just design you a nice website or I want to just build you a fast loading website. 2, I wanna increase something within your business.

Mike Killen:
Now, if you were to take the traffic for example, if you said, okay, well, if we doubled your traffic from 2,000 visitors a month to 4,000 visitors a month, what would that what would the knock on effect be to the number of leads that you generate and the number of sales you make? Or you could start at the other end and say, okay, if we were to double the number of sales you generate, what would that do to your business? And that would obviously increase their profits, increase their revenue. They’d be very, very happy. A funnel, if when it’s done kinda correctly, can do any one of those things. You can have a very simple sales funnel. You can have a very simple and you can get into this. Like, my advice would be to, sell it first and then kind of shoot me an email or comment on this podcast about, like, Mike, I’ve sold one. I don’t know what to do next. I’ll I’ll help you out from there.

Mike Killen:
Yeah. By looking at those numbers and those results, you steer away from having to explain what a funnel is. You you steer away from having to talk about the tools or the automation because everyone and their dog has got opinion on whether they should use Mailchimp or Infusionsoft or SharpSpring or ActiveCampaign or whatever. And you’re gonna steer away from that. And instead, you’re gonna talk about some real numbers that they can use within their business that’s gonna help, you know, improve their lives, improve their revenue. So, that’s kinda how we begin to position funnels to customers. And even as a funnel agency, it’s very rare that we’ll use that term because really what I wanna talk about is how much money can I generate for them, how much traffic can I generate for them, and, you know, how much clutter in their email list?

Lee Matthew Jackson:
So good. Thanks for that.

Mike Killen:
That is genuine. Useful? Because I because that’s just how it works.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Send podcast to rev.com for transcription. Because that was kill that was killer from kiln. That was cheesetastic. Thank you very much.

Mike Killen:
Well yeah. No. That’s good. I’m I’m gonna record the killer from kiln. That’s gonna

Lee Matthew Jackson:
be nice. Yeah. Well, you’re you’re gonna need to kind of I’ve given you the beginnings. You can you can work on it, involve that, and come up with something. Kill it with Killin’ All. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Mike Killen:
Well, that was gonna be the name of one of our books, but Killin’ Killin’ It. I was worried that people would see it as like Killin’ IT. I was like, I don’t Yeah.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Sounds a bit printer up. Boring, doesn’t it?

Mike Killen:
So it’s a whole thing.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Reminds me of former life. Yeah. Right. Now then, we’re gonna shift gears a little bit because, yes, we can do pretty much everything you’ve described with with WordPress and tools like Beaver Builder and all sorts of different plugins, etcetera. But you did mention Beaver Builder, and we have a huge percentage of Beaver Builder fans and listeners out there in podcast land. I am one of the biggest raving fans that I know personally. We use it as part of our workflow within the business. Now, 90% of all the WordPress websites that we deliver include some sort of usage with Beaver Builder.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Absolutely phenomenal tool, ridiculously powerful. And I realized very early on that I didn’t no longer needed my leads Leadpages account or anything like that because I had Viva Builder. Yes. Now I understand you have developed Yeah. A fantastically exciting new application that helps people design and build funnels with Viva Builder. So instead of me murdering what it does, which I have actually purchased and we’ve installed and we’re getting our heads around, can you just let people know what it is and and how they can go and check it out and any offers you may have on it?

Mike Killen:
Yeah, man. So, you know, I I hate Do we pitching on these things, but the the truth is Yeah. We it’s called Beaver Funnels. Right? So first of all, our American partners, they were like, how are we gonna tell Mike that that’s, you know, Beaver is and I’m like, do you know what? There’s a big community called Beaver Builder out there. Just trust me. It’ll it’ll work with them. And we released a course on how to build marketing funnels with with Beaver Builder because I was sick and tired of using either, you know, Leadpages or Unbounce or OptimizePress or ClickFunnels or any of the other software because I was like, but I build the best looking pages using Beaver Builder. So why can’t I build the rest of my funnel using that? Why can’t I use that as the page builder? Why should just the automation software tell me what page builder I should use and yet my website looks way better? Everything from the mobile responsiveness and all this kind of stuff.

Mike Killen:
And I showed this to my developer and he was like, oh, you know, we could automate this. We could turn this into a plugin if you wanted. I was like, okay. We’ll we’ll see what happens. And 24 hours later, he came out with like a working prototype. And very basically what it does is we have 5 pre built types of funnel in there such as like a squeeze funnel to increase the number of email addresses you can capture, a sales funnel, which basically has a sales page and then checkout page with an order bump and an upsell page or one click upsell page, which we’re hoping to release this month. So there’s 5 different types of funnels there that, you know, you can build. But what we also started doing is making sure that when you are using Beaver Funnels, the content is the biggest problem I think a lot of agencies have.

Mike Killen:
So we built this content engine into the into the software which means that you answer a load of questions, sometimes it’s like 70 something questions. It’s quite a lot and we’re working on that. But you answer those questions and it will populate all of the content across your entire funnel. So it’ll do your sales page, your thank you page, checkout page, upsell page, delivery page, all that kind of stuff. And what it does is it basically builds it in a beaver builder template so that you can go in and edit that page using any of the templates that you want or the design changes and things that you wanna do. But it still allows you to do everything that you wanna do, building an entire marketing funnel or multiple unlimited marketing funnels inside your same WordPress install using Beaver Builder as the page builder. And yet there’s things like funnel management, which allows you to see all the different pages and things like this. And, you know, really I use I wanted to use it because I was feeling incredibly lazy.

Mike Killen:
I was sick and tired of cloning my sites using, Duplicator or WP Engine or something like that. So it now allows us to kind of build everything inside the one WordPress site. And, yeah, if people wanna go and check it out, it’s it’s beaverfiles.co. We have got a a little promotion for anyone listening on this. It’s we can give you a 10% discount on any one of the packages, any any license at all. And I think the code is 10%, so spelled out as 1zeropercent in all caps and just add that in at the checkout bin. Yeah. We’ll we’ll give you a discount on a on a year’s license.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
What I really liked about it, mate, was those questions. I mean, 70 odd questions are a little bit overwhelming, but I did like the fact that it gives you all these questions. It really just helps you to start to really think through what should be on a page. Because a lot of the time when we’re actually designing a page, we’ve got absolutely no freaking idea. You know what the purpose of it is. I know I want them to land on it, and I want their email address. And I know I’ve got some, like, problems that I wanna hone down in on, but I don’t I don’t know where to go from there. And you do ask all of these questions, and then you very cleverly insert them.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
So I was I was really impressed. So we’ve not we’ve not actually tested it, I think, in a real live environment. We’ve just been playing with it for now just to get used to it. Because I think initially when you have a look, it’s a little bit like, well, what what’s this then? I’m not a 100% sure how this works. But once you kind of kind of deep dive and have a play around, I was I was impressed. And I’m really excited to see where you’re gonna go in the future because, like you said, Beaver Builder is freaking amazing. The best pages, the best sites I see are with Beaver Builder. Sorry, Elementor, guys.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
We love that as well. Elementor is amazing. Don’t get me wrong. But you know, I’ve used Beaver Builder now pretty much since it came out, and, I am, you know, I’m a loyal fan. Uh-huh. So, yeah, I wanna be able to do all of this inside of Beaver Builder. So we’re using this for agency trailblazer. We wanna obviously try and grow that community.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
So I’m gonna get to test this now for the next year and and see, you know, whether we can just bring everything in house into the one website rather than all these third party tools because we wanna try and get those SaaS Yep. Products down. We’re trying to get down to the absolute bare minimum essentials Uh-huh. So that we’re increasing our profitability Yeah. As a business and actually having to work a little bit less.

Mike Killen:
Yeah. Absolutely. And that that’s all we wanted to do is because when you build funnels for customers and you have to use other people’s software, that’s unscalable. By definition, it’s unscalable. They charge per funnel or they charge per account. And I was like, I don’t do that already so why should someone else force me to do it? So that’s why we have, like, unlimited funnels on any website and I think the pro version allows you to have unlimited websites as well like a license management thing. Because I was like, why should I have to pay another $297 a month just to have the customer? Because that’s already over $3 a year just to have the customer, like, set up. So I I wanted to massively cut back on that, you know, hugely.

Mike Killen:
And like I said, it’s it was really a scratching our own itch kind of thing. And, yeah, it’s in its early stages with there’s a lot of things that we still wanna change and edit and stuff. But, we’ve got some really cool stuff coming out. So, yeah. Beaverfunnels.co

Lee Matthew Jackson:
and if you want to learn more about funnels or growing your lists or any other cool sort of stuff then you do need to check out sell your service.co.uk. You’ve also got a facebook group mate. What’s the, how do we find that?

Mike Killen:
Yeah that’s just the sell your service private mastermind. I I think if you Google it, it’s yeah. Just Google sell your service

Lee Matthew Jackson:
or beaverfunnels.co. That is where it is all out. And also guys, young Mike has a fantastic Facebook group. That’s a private mastermind. We’re gonna put a link in the show notes for you. I’m in there. You go live in there sometime sharing some amazing advice which is brilliant all for free which is phenomenal. And don’t forget there is also sell your service.co.uk if you wanna do a deep dive.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
There are some courses in there and some ebooks etcetera to get your knowledge funneled. No. I couldn’t make that work. But who cares? Because I’m now 55 and I’m a dad so I’m allowed to make really crappy dad jokes. It’s the law. Law.

Mike Killen:
Definitely. No. No. Yes. Absolutely. That’s written into our law.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
I I I I do.

Mike Killen:
Start doing that.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Well thank you so much. You’re a legend.

Mike Killen:
No. Thank you very much for having me on. I really appreciate, coming on board. Cheers, mate. Good to talk to you again, Lee.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
And that’s a wrap. This has certainly been a massive eye opener for me. Just the very fact that funnels is just simply another word for something that a lot of us have already been doing for a very long time. Now if you are a funnel expert, I’m definitely interested in connecting with you. We really wanna deep dive into this, get more understanding of how to effectively take people down those relevant paths. So if everything we’ve talked about today has been just like all hat to you, you already know it, that’s great. I wanna talk to you. Get in touch.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Angledcrown.com/contact. Let’s have a conversation and see how we can collaborate on some content all around funnels. Don’t forget. We have the free Facebook group over on wpinnovator.comforward/group. There are over 1,500 designers, web designers, WordPress enthusiasts, agency owners, and all around awesome people who like to share GIFs in there, so it’s a great place to be. And if you’re not a member of the Agency Trailblazer community, that is the paid community that includes a monthly mastermind with yours truly and lots of premium content, then that will be going live on 16th April. So the doors are reopening and staying opening opening? Staying open for good. You will be able to get on the list if you wanna be notified of when the doors are open over on agency trailblazer.com.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Have a wonderful, awesome, and spiffing day.