30:4 The anatomy of a funnel - Matt Davies
30:4 The anatomy of a funnel - Matt Davies

30:4 The anatomy of a funnel

Funnels are so often abused, yet if done right, they can help us to develop lasting business relationships. In this episode Matt deep dives into the anatomy of a funnel and what the essential ingredients are.

Lee Matthew Jackson
Lee Matthew Jackson

Funnels are so often abused, yet if done right, they can help us to develop lasting business relationships. In this episode Matt deep dives into the anatomy of a funnel and what the essential ingredients are. I have so often shared my own frustration with funnels that go in for the sell and can feel manipulative. (Check out one of my recent rants on YouTube). Based on this, I give Matt a hard time asking him to help me understand how funnels can be of benefit, and how they can help both the prospect and our own business.

Matt Davies - Funnel Packs

Guest

Matt Davies

Funnel Packs

Boy does Matt deliver! He show’s how I’ve been building relational funnels for years. He unpacks how to lead with value before even asking for their email address and he then unpacks the relevant journeys you can take prospects on. This is a value lead approach that allows you to educate, nurture and ultimately sell a service that will be of benefit to them.

Funnel Packs

Check out Funnel Packs here.

Connect with Matt:

Website – click here
Twitter – click here
Instagram – click here

Transcript

Lee Matthew Jackson: Welcome to the Agency Trailblazer Peodcast. This is Lee and today on the show we have a very nice chap called Matt Davis. How are you sir?

Matt Davies: Hey buddy, I’m doing really well thank you man. How are you?

Lee Matthew Jackson: I’m all right. I’m liking the smile in your voice. They tell you when you are on a sales call to smile and I heard your smile there.

Matt Davies: Well it’s cause you were singing to me for the last 20 minutes whilst we were setting up.

Lee Matthew Jackson: That’s true, it is true. Folks now and again the universe conspires to kind of partner you with just some really awesome people. I think there’s a small group of like-minded individuals that you will meet, which will have a really good impact on your life and Matt is definitely one of those. We message each other every day. We have a lovely bromance going on. We like to moan together, we like to laugh together, all through Facebook messenger and I really appreciate this guy incredibly. He’s given me a lot of advice. So I would like to start this podcast by gushing and saying, I really, really appreciate your friendship buddy.

Matt Davies: Thank you mate. You can’t really have blushing over a podcast can you?

Lee Matthew Jackson: I was kinda hoping you’d cry though. Like you know that really bad crying, like ugly cry. Yeah. Perfect.

Matt Davies: Nice. I appreciate that you put some ugly crying in there.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Folks, if you don’t know who Matt is, he is from funnel packs. You can find out more information on funnelpacks.co because com wasn’t available and we will make sure that we put links into the show notes of course with affiliates in there as well so you can check all of that out. This is not an advertorial today. I want to talk with Matt all about the anatomy or the ingredients of a funnel. I also want to have a moan about funnels because I’ve got a lot of preconceived ideas and things that really irritate me and I want to vent them all at Matt. Then Matt is gonna calm me down, taught me off the edge and make me fall in love with funnels by the end of the show. Are you ready for this Matt?

Matt Davies: Yeah, let’s go.

Lee Matthew Jackson: That was pretty deep. Well before we do all that, let’s do the old time machine thing. Folks, if you didn’t know Matt has been on the show before and you can go back and listen to his podcast. I think it was just before funnel packs was launching, wasn’t it? And you were talking all about what you were doing.

Matt Davies: Yeah it was in the first week. I think we spoke on the Friday just before we launched.

Lee Matthew Jackson: There you go. So if you wanna go back in time, folks jump into that time machine and you can find out Matt’s journey on how he got into web development, launched, his agency grew that, and then how funnel packs itself was birthed. Now Matt, shall we get into the techie stuff?

Matt Davies: Yeah, let’s do it. Let’s get into all the tech stuff.

Lee Matthew Jackson: So we’ve done the time machine as well. So I feel like we’ve covered all bases. I want to ask you a very simple question. I’ve asked this a lot and I get many, many different answers. So I would love to know what Matt Davis thinks a funnel is?

Matt Davies: It’s a plastic device you use in your kitchen to take water.

Lee Matthew Jackson: I knew it.

Matt Davies: No that’s just me being a smart ass. So a funnel in a very basic form is a way of building trust step-by-step and building a relationship with your visitor. This is something that we used to do in person many, many years ago before the internet we’d have, you know, it takes the sort of seven steps to build trust with someone you know, then, then someone who comes to your business, whether they come to you face to face, whether they comes to you online they don’t yet know, like, and trust you. That’s what we’re trying to do when we have our funnel. So it’s simply a step by step system of building trust and just taking the most engaged users onto the next step. As we don’t want to waste time on people that don’t care about our business or don’t respect our processes.

Lee Matthew Jackson: So basically in short, you’re saying a funnel is that process of building trust and a funnel is not necessarily internet only. This could be something that you’re going to an exhibition, you meet somebody at that exhibition and then you build a relationship with that person and essentially take them through that journey. It could be through emails, through telephone calls, until you eventually get a sale. That is in essence a funnel just as much as an email automation sequence maybe.

Matt Davies: Yeah, 100%. I mean you can take the in person aspect as well. The reason why a lot of us like the internet side of things is because we can use automation and obviously that means we need less hands and less people available because we have the automation to help us out.

Lee Matthew Jackson: That makes perfect sense. I was thinking the other day, the breakdown of a funnel is very similar, I guess to what I’m doing on my CRM system. So I’ll have an initial lead that might come in and then I will then take them into needs analysis. I’ll then take them onto the proposal stage. From that proposal, we’ll then be doing our negotiation, etc but I guess the problem throughout that is I’ve not really lead with any particular value. That has been a kind of a sales process where there has been, they’ve shared with me that they have an interest in doing something and then I kind of have to try and take them through that long and laborious process. That proposal process can take days and it can be weeks of telephone conversations, etc and through the, I also have to kind of prove myself as it were or build up that trust, so it always feels like you’re on a back foot. How different, I guess would be generating those leads through a funnel pack style of marketing funnel.

Matt Davies: Just to cover what you said. If you’re talking about people who’ve come to you for a proposal, they’ve obviously either heard enough about you from someone else or they’ve been through your website, looked at your articles on your website, and they’ve actually built some level of trust up already. You don’t normally have someone who come to your website and just pick the phone up and ring. You’re not an emergency locksmith, so you’re not someone who, I mean this is the kind of in the nicest respect.

Lee Matthew Jackson: But we do mate. So yesterday, another agency did that. So Angled Crown does really well for white label WordPress. So we get people all the time from agencies. We had this yesterday and I sent them the standard email reply as well saying, Hey, it was great to chat to you. Yes, we provide all of those services. This is how we provide those services and this is the rates that you might expect for these sorts of projects that you mentioned, yada, yada, yada. So now I kind of have to nurture that person. They literally picked up the phone after five minutes of looking at our website, having us appear on the first page of Google. That’s happened to us a lot. So that is literally our process.

Matt Davies: Wow. Okay. So I imagine for most people listening then it will be slightly different. I know from 13 years of running an agency, yes, you’ve got people who ring, who forgot the phone I’m normally before the thoughts even formed in their heads. So you kind of get some 20 or 30 minute ramble of them trying to work out exactly what they wanted to ask you whilst you’re actually sitting there wasting your time. But if you have someone ringing you up, that’s great, but having something set up so that they can go through this before they call, you would make sense. So from a funnel packs perspective, or from just a basic funnel as to what we’re talking about, what you want to do is you want to have a compelling offer that exists. So a compelling offer, they exist to something like a lead magnet, a quick start guide free videos. It needs to be around the problem that your prospect has and that’s really important. We’re not just making a lead magnet or an ebook for no reason. We need to think about what problem or what’s the biggest problem that our particular prospect is suffering from. Then we need to position our guide or videos to actually help them to solve that problem. The point is that we were leading with value like we’ve talked about and we’re going to be doing that throughout the process. So we have our compelling offer and then we’re going to position us on a landing page and all of us know what a landing page is. Anyone that doesn’t it’s a more simplistic pages. So normally a one page design, you don’t tend to have a multi page landing page where you can do, it’s a simple page that essentially positions you and it explains the problem. It helps people to understand they in the right place to get some help. They’re going to see the the compelling offer that you’re making and you’re going to share things like social proof and a bit more information just to sort of flesh out the flesh out the page. If the person is interested, if you’ve managed to hit there sort of interested part of their brain and they’re going to click them. They’d love a click on a button that would probably pop up. Or if you’ve got a form on a page, you’re ready. They’ll put their name and email address in. That will take them through to the thank you page and this is normally where you just sort of repeat what they’re going to get. This is also a great position for you to add more information on because someone who comes through to your landing page is hyper engaged of your business right at this point because they’re like, yes, I’m going to get some information to help me. So if you’ve got blog posts, if you’ve got case studies, if you’ve got more testimonials that are exactly similar to the type of offer you’re making. So let’s say we’re talking about SEO. If you’ve got some SEO blog posts or some SEO case studies, put those on your thank you page. If you like doing video to camera, make the video. Make your thank you page about a video saying, Hey, thank you so much. You know you’re starting to build trust because the person’s seeing your face rather than just seeing some words. After this, obviously there’ll be a welcome email sent out, which will have a link to your lead magnet, quick start guide, free videos, et cetera. Then you want to send a series of nurture emails and the whole point with your initial compelling offer, which is like I said, there’s an ebook or videos and the emails you’re sending out is we’re delivering value through expertise. So we’re trying to help someone by giving them some quick wins that they can take action off. At the very end we’re going to have a call to action or a sales email where we’re going to start to position our offer and begin the sales conversation. So in a nutshell, that’s kind of a more simple funnel on how you put things together.

Lee Matthew Jackson: That is very helpful. So what I’m thinking here is I’m thinking here at the point of I might have a social ad where I’m targeting a very specific type of person. So let’s think of the events industry in Event Engine we’re in the events industry, we’re looking for conference organisers. So we might be looking for marketing people who organise conferences. It’s easy for us to do that say in LinkedIn for example. We know a whole load of problems that they have. So we could create some really valuable content for that. So it could be how to use social media to sell more tickets at your event. That would be very compelling I guess would be an example of a compelling offer to them and they might then download that ebook or that PDF or whatever it is I’m offering them the seven steps to getting more people registering for your event. Would that be a good compelling offer for that type of market?

Matt Davies: Yes. One thing I would say to you as well is it’s always good idea to have a kind of an interim flow between your lets say you’re doing a Facebook advert or a Google ad. If you send them directly to your landing page. If this is someone who doesn’t yet know, like, or trust you, it’s much harder to get them to give away their personal details, which would be the name and email address. So my preferred tactic would be to send someone to a blog article that I’ve written. It talks about their particular issue that they’re experiencing. Then to offer a content upgrade and by content upgrade, what we mean is if you like the information here, here’s the way you can do it faster or here’s how you can actually end your business. Here’s a quick start guide, here’s a step by step tutorial, that kind of thing. So we send them through from the blog posts to our landing page and obviously we can also use Facebook’s pixel to re target everyone who’s been to the blog posts. Then we can position the advert directly to the landing page in Facebook as well.

Lee Matthew Jackson: All right, so let’s go back. This is really helpful, so right now then what I’ve done in this hypothetical universe now is I’ve created a blog post which talks about how we use social media to sell more tickets for our event because event organiser wants to increase footfall. That’s what they’re interested in. That’s one of the metrics that they’re focused on, so I might do that blog post and it’s a good informational blog post and through that for free without giving me anything, no personal information other than obviously I’ve got the social media retargeting, they have got some value from me and they’ve built up that trust, which means I can then position at the end of that article an extra offer as it were which is still free, which is there’s no risk to them other than providing an email address of which they can also unsubscribe Prompt saying, and if you want to here is the one on let’s say the six month social media plan, guaranteed two sounds cheesy to guarantee to get more ticket sales at your event. They’re like, Oh, I’ll give you my email address for that PDF. So then they’ll give me that and then they’ll get the PDF and that’s at that point that I might trigger that nurture. So tell us a bit more about those nurture emails. Are they emails talking about the content they’ve downloaded or are they further value?

Matt Davies: Sure. You can take that in both directions. I mean, now what we try and do, I mean specifically in Funnel packs, what we will do is we will base our nurture emails on elements that the a, the lead is just read in the lead magnet. So on day one they’re receiving their lead magnet. Day two, three, four, five and six will be an email you know, we normally have about five points and our lead magnets, just to keep them sort of fairly succinct, but also to have some good meat in them. So we will write a typically an email that relates to something we’ve talked about or it might be a twist on something we talked about. It may be a for example, a tip on doing something quicker. So just thinking back to one of the most recent ones and we had a reviews funnel pack recently and we recommended that people always say thank you to to those who leave reviews on that, that to you and me, that might seem quite basic to say thank you, but a lot of people don’t realise that actually, you know, you can go and reply to review and say thank you so much and it shows that you’re an active business owner and you tend to care about what people think when you’re replying, not just to the positive reviews but also to negative reviews. It’s important to remember that we do want negative reviews because no one trusts something that’s only got five stars forever. That’s a really, really strange out of out kind of sync thing because we know that people are all different and some people are going to have a less good experience than someone else.

Lee Matthew Jackson: So I didn’t even know that by the way.

Matt Davies: Well there you go. I mean, put it this way, if you go into Amazon or other e-commerce systems are available, but if you go into any eCommerce platform, Amazon’s typically good for this. Go and look at products that only have five star, one star reviews, those ones a suspicious, the reviews to care about and to pay most attention to if people leave a two, three and a four because those are the ones who’ve considered that this isn’t awful. A lot of people leave one star reviews. Um, sometimes it’s unwarranted, like, Oh, the packaging was damaged and you know, fair enough. But that’s probably the delivery driver’s fault rather than Amazon’s fault or the product owner’s fault and all the FiveStars, it’s very easy for people to buy reviews these days. So the two, three, and four people don’t buy two threes and fours. It’s not their not for some reason the systems are smart enough to do that. So paying attention to two threes and fours that he tells you a lot. Just to circle back. So I have so finished a point, with regards to reviews funnel pack, we talked about saying thank you, but we also talked about doing it, in a kind of a unique way. So we recommended to use Bonjoro which you may have seen before. It’s a little video app where you can use your mobile phone or cell phone can record a 32 second video and you can send that to someone directly. And so what we were saying is if you link up your review systems to Bon Juro, then you can actually send a personalised review, a personalised video to every single person that leaves your review and it goes that extra mile of for just just saying thank you. So you or someone in your team is helping to build even more trust and even more sort of value with people because again, you’re showing that you care.

Lee Matthew Jackson: That’s really good. I kind of went down the Amazon rabbit hole just to back you up here. So I’m looking at fast action weed killer. We bought this a few months ago cause we have a weed problem. We’re looking at 4.3 out of five, which didn’t put me off. There are a very different range, the 69% of five star reviews at 13% of four stars, you know, which are reasoned. The three stars are pretty reasoned. Then, you know, and they’re all reasoned feedback on this particular fast action. We’d kill a very good, it’s pumping, go ready. I highly recommend it. Five litres. But then if I look at the one star reviews, a lot of them are things like glysophite is probably cost agentic to humans and I would avoid this product. It’s like conspiracy theory. So, so yeah and I, I’ve totally lost track now because the minute he told me that, I was like, Oh yeah, you’re right. As I get so worried about what if somebody spams my reviews and it gives me a negative review, yada yada yada. But Hey, all right. So let’s just go back a little bit then I want to recap. Recapping really helps me because I’m a slow learner. What we’ve said is we want to start off with something of use. We’re going to do a soft sell in and we’re going to not soft sell, but it’s soft approach where we’re providing something of free value that somebody can read via a blog post as an example or a YouTube video. At the end of that we’re doing the upgrade offer, which in return for your email we’re saying, Hey, I’m in return for your email address we will give you this amazing pack that is going to show you how to do this quicker. So that’s your compelling author at that point, isn’t it? During that they’ve downloaded it and then we’re sending them a nurture campaign then over a period of time. That’s taking elements out of what they’ve downloaded and what they’ve learned and encouraging them perhaps to do more things, yada, yada, yada. You could also do what you were saying as well and add a bit of that personal touch and you were giving the example of the Bonjuro app for reviews, but presumably you can also do that sort of thing with this nurture. So if you find that that person has gone through your nurture campaign and as you know has actually opened and not unsubscribed and got to email five, you could also send them a Bonjuro email saying, Hey, I’ve noticed you’ve worked your way through the campaign. Would you like to jump on a phone call to see if you, you know, if you have any questions or things like that. Is that something you would recommend as well?

Matt Davies: Absolutely. Well, I always recommend having a call to action email at the end or you can have a sales email if you want to position a productised service as well.

Lee Matthew Jackson: So this works for both. This could be, Hey, do you want to work with me? I can build your website. Or Hey, do you want to buy my digital product? Which is awesome. Or do you want to buy my widget?

Matt Davies: Absolutely. I mean it does work both ways. I mean we, we use the call to action emails in funnel packs literally to just position a 15 minute call and it’s not a 50 minute sales call. It’s just, Hey, do you want to chat about what you’ve learned? So we’re asking them if they want to talk about things, if they have any questions about what they’ve learned so far. The idea is that they get someone in on a phone call, you can have a conversation and you can get a feel for where they are and you can start positioning that sales conversation. So it’s a nice soft approach there. Now you could twist that and take that into a, into a harder approach and go look, we’ve got a product here and this would work for product or service. So let’s say you were doing speed optimization. If that was your thing at the end of that sequence, you could easily position a productized speed optimization service. If you charged let’s say $249 for speeding up a website, you can push them on towards a sales page and you could have your sales sequence and further email sequences afterwards and that’s very, very easy. And if someone doesn’t buy from your sales sequence, it’s easy cause to go back to a call to action sequence where you’re trying to get a call again. So it’s not like you’re going with one or the other. You can actually use both in a sequence as well.

Lee Matthew Jackson: That is really helpful. So I’ve made them an offer, they’re not necessarily interested in, but I could at that point put them in another, not funnel, but kind of loop them around and nurture them again to try and get that call. But nurture them with some of the emails and then try and get that call because for some people it would be the call that would help convert.

Matt Davies: Yeah, exactly. I mean as we know, everyone is different and everyone buys in a different way. But if we provide immense value from the start, then some people are gonna be ready straight away. Some need to have a telephone call. But it’s normally that seven points of contact or seven touch points to actually build trust. So we should have got most of those along the way through a good funnel.

Lee Matthew Jackson: So what we’ve worked out here is essentially the anatomy of a basic funnel and also understanding how those little extra trees happen when we see these pictures of these really complicated funnels. If someone doesn’t respond to this, then we can send them on this little loop and then maybe look them back up here and over there, etc. So that all makes sense. I can visualise that I’m a very visual person, so that’s helpful. So we’re saying that our core ingredients here is obviously value is education and that compelling offer and where we’re trying to give as much of that as we can so that we can build up that trust. Now then, based on kind of leading with education, recognising that it’s going to take several touch points and leading with all of that value. This kind of brings me to one of my key frustrations and I kind of share this in the latest Frank Friday video, I think it was from last week or the week before, and I have a moan about funnels and I am obviously brutally aware that you obviously are a funnel expert and you have funnel packs. So I am not slagging off funnels per say. What has been frustrating me excruciatingly is the sorts of funnels where I will be pummelled on Facebook and on LinkedIn by these videos of people who will tell me that I can work two hours a week and run an agency and be a multimillionaire and all of that sort of stuff. So there’s tonnes and tonnes of people I’ve never heard of or it might be some software that’s going to completely change my life. I might just out of curiosity, go and click on it and then wish I hadn’t because I then get a landing page that is a mile long full of stuff. No actual value, just this is going to change your life. Here’s a picture of someone telling me it changed their life, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah and they may offer me something for free. It might be some little download or something, which again is usually crappy. At the very end of that, what they’re trying to test sell me is some sort of software or some sort of package that I can get now in three minutes. If I don’t buy in three minutes, I lose the opportunity forever to buy something that’s actually worth 700 pounds. But they’re going to give me it for $49. Perhaps it’s a pack of images and something and I’m like, yeah, that’s useful for my business in $49. Well, I’ll go for that. But then what happens is once I put in my details, I get taken to this other page. And then there’s this person on a flippin two or three minute video saying, Hey, it’s really exciting, all this false empathy and like, Hey, I’m really super excited to be on the journey with you and that you want to invest in your business and to invest in your business. You should be doing this. Then they’re trying to upsell me like a 200 or 300 or $400 mastermind or membership or top-up and they then have two buttons at the bottom and like one’s yes I’m in I want to transform my life and then the other button is tiny. It’s like, no, I don’t care about generating revenue for my business, blah, blah, you know, like really negative messages. Then I’m getting really mad at this point. I’m like, I just want the $49 download and you’re really irritating me now. So I’m like, skip, skip, skip, or trying to skip and then they give me three other videos until eventually they give me my $49 package, or I give in. But I’ve also done the flip side and I’ve said, okay, I’ll do the upgrade because you’ve kind of convinced me against my better judgement. Then I spend that $300 on top and low and behold there’s another offer and I’m not even lying. I’ve experienced this a lot of times, and that for me does not build trust. That for me is frustrating for the end user. That for me has been my experience of funnels and it’s actually taken me a long time to actually come around to the idea of funnels and using them for my business and meeting someone like you who can actually say, Hey, you’re going about this all wrong.

Matt Davies: Appreciate that man. I’m going to have to say that I completely agree with you. From my perspective, just to say look, the reason we would do things like that is it works. Now, it works, but it’s also a system where you’re not looking to build relationships with people. If you want to build like a really awesome try with people as customers who love what you do, you don’t go through a system where you’re like, here’s another upsell and here’s another upsale and here’s another upsell. You’re going to click this button that says that you feel like you’re an absolute idiot because you don’t want this thing and here’s another one. I mean there’s hosting companies that do this as well. I’m not gonna name them on your newer podcast, but there’s companies in America who might run with no body. Let’s just say that sometimes when you buy a domain name and it’s like, do you want to add this? Do you want to wear this? Do you wanna add this? Do you want hosting? Do you want it? I literally wanted to buy a domain name, but now I don’t mind. Don’t mind. I’m fine. That’s the problem that the reasonable or they piss of people position upstairs is because it works. You know, if you get an extra 10% for every sale that works from the bottom line for business, but what isn’t bottom line is relationships. Relationships are top line. They’re the most important thing you should have if you want to build a group of people to actually care about what you do. I am pixeled by a heck of a lot of these bad funnels. So I have a habit of clicking on bad marketing messages cause I want to see what people are doing because I kind of like to imagine what I would do differently. Just yesterday I saw a guy who was offering pricing, I think it was like a pricing calculator for freelancers. So Australian guy, a minimal likes on his Facebook page, which has existed for like two months, which immediately as like a warning flag for me. But anyway, I read through his message and I clicked on the button to go and download his pricing as pricing guide and I literally got presented with a MailChimp sign up form, so that was it. So what I would expect to see if someone cared about me and sort of building a relationship would be a landing page that repeats the offer that I’ve just read in his Facebook message that tells me why it’s going to help me, and really sort of hooks into the fact that I have a problem, which in this case, if I did have a problem, would be freelance pricing. So perhaps I’m struggling to understand how to price things. Maybe I want to know is value pricing is better, hourly pricing, whatever it might be and I want to get his calculator that’s going to help me. Honestly, a blog post would have been the perfect thing for him to send me to. If he’d written a one thousand two thousand word blog post about freelance pricing and here’s some cool ideas and strategies. Then said, Hey, look, to get started quicker, here’s a calculator that would hook people in so well because you’ve delivered value, you’ve it, you’ve shown your expertise and you’re not just giving me a crappy MailChimp form.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Or just a mile long page telling me how amazing you are and how amazing the product is that you’re about to pitch me and also how all of these random people from Fiverr have said how amazing you are in these video testimonials.

Matt Davies: You’re 100% right. These Fiverr videos, if you go onto Fiverr and just kind of recognise a few of the faces, just pay attention to a few of the faces on there. Then go through some of the funnels you see on Facebook. It’s amazing how many of these faces turn up and they’ve got their little green screen behind them and again, John Smith was awesome. He really helped my business too. Then you see them reading down to the next slide. Oh no, they’re just reading the script.

Lee Matthew Jackson: All right. So we’re talking lead with value and yes, my experience has been this. Okay. So this is a bit like therapy now mate. We’re in a pub, I’ve got a beer. I’ve not really, but it feels like we are, because this is therapeutic for me. Thinking back now, I can recognise that when I started to get into internet marketing and listening to the podcasts that I thought were gonna help me, I kind of consistently got exposed to all of these funnel messages. Social media picked up on the fact that I was interested in digital entrepreneurship. I’d always been an entrepreneur. I was doing things offline. Then I was moving into this kind of online space and learning digital marketing, etc. So suddenly all of these, quote unquote digital marketing experts appeared in my feed and were sending me down funnels and I blew a whole lot of money on all sorts of promises that was going to get me, you know, I could start my own agency or I could work two hours a week or whatever it was, you know, all of these random messages and I just got totally sucked into it. I now resent all of those people that ever did that to me and I would never ever want to have a relationship with them or work with them or align myself with them or even have them on this podcast. I know several have and then since tried to get on this podcast, and I’ve said on your bike. Now, I think what you also touched on is that relationships are key funnels. Are there yes to help us generate some initial leads. We lead with value, but the important part is to then create that relationship because one of the most common answers to what do you do when you’ve not got very many leads well you go to your existing clients. So if you’ve got relationships and you have existing clients based on those relationships, you have got a pool of people that will help you to generate further leads. If your funnel aren’t working for example, or whatever’s going on around you, if you’re just relying on automating and making people, like you said, feel crappy by these, if I press that cancel button, I’m an idiot. Then you’ve just got to hope that you can just keep reaching people by numbers and just selling them that tat that you’re trying to sell to people and more people and more people and you could kind of keep throwing in money to that machine and not that that just takes the human element and the relationship element entirely out of funnels and I hate that. What you’re talking about that bro is just gorgeous. And I wish I’d had a better understanding a few years ago funnels, cause perhaps I might have invested a little bit more. I think I’ve done some of this accidentally. The whole podcast in itself is kind of like leading with value isn’t it? I’ve been doing it for so many years, you know, and obviously off the back of that we’ve then sold tickets to the conference and we’ve got the premium membership and all that sort of stuff. They never happened purposefully. It was never my mission to do that. It just kind of naturally happened because that’s the way the community wanted things to go, which has been awesome. But yeah, perhaps I should have been a little bit kinder to funnels, right. Rather than judging them by my own negative experience of them.

Matt Davies: Possibly. But I mean, coming back to what you said about the past, I mean even I spent probably well upwards of $10,000, in the past on nonsense products. So you know, the kind of things where you know, 10, 15 years ago, looking at, you know, internet marketing and how we can make more money doing things. And I think especially your a very similar age to me, like a year older than me.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Shut up, stop telling people.

Matt Davies: Sorry, you’re like 57.

Lee Matthew Jackson: 21.

Matt Davies: So yeah and I’m obviously 20 but basically if you think back to years ago you would have been sort of early, mid twenties and so the younger you are, the more you kind of think that, Oh, I’d love to just do some work and not really be at work, if that makes sense. So you kind of want that four hour workweek that is the biggest myth in the world unless, unless you’re a millionaire already and it’s obviously this, but there’s a caveat there that if you’re a billionaire, yes you can have a four hour work week but, and that’s just pressing delete and all your emails I imagine. But coming back to sort of saying that it’s very, very easy to fall into a trap of seeing something and going, yes, this is for me.The thing is they, they prey on the, the type of feeling you have. So when I was suffering from depression, I was very much, I mean lots of 2010 when I wasn’t doing so well, I sold a lot of stuff I had like. I had a lot of um, collections of valuable things. Like I used to collect football programmes as a kid, so I had loads of like prewar football programmes, which are worth two, 300 pounds each. They’re very, very valuable items for a small piece of paper and it’s like four pages. Um, but I sold a lot of things just to make sure that I could meet the sort of payments I had to make for rent and looking after things. As I wasn’t in a position where I can be working really well and, but I was still going, Oh I should get this cause maybe this will help me to sand things around. And then, you know, two, three, $400 later you’re like, Oh Hey, it’s literally stuff I know or this is nonsense. Or they’re trying to teach people something that doesn’t work and it’s so easy for people, especially if we’re not quite in the right frame of mind at a particular time or going through something to make a payment. Again, we’ve kind of been lied to and sucked into a system rather than had that relationship building and values deliver to us where we know, yes, this is great. You know, the other thing that he stops from a product owner or yeah, for business owner side of thing just stops refunds. Like if you build a relationship with people and really make sure that what you’re offering is right for them, you stop having refunds, you know, instead of having 10 or 15% refunds, like some people get into digital space, you might get 2%. Massive difference. So having, having that sort of a, that the expertise and the value and the goodness at delivers. I mean, I think from what you said about a podcast, it’s not just a landing page and things. It could be anything, but you are going out consistently delivering value to people every week. Obviously you have a Facebook group as well with how many thousand people is it now?

Lee Matthew Jackson: Nearly 3000.

Matt Davies: That’s a huge number of people in our space. So when you’ve got those 3000 people and when you’ve got the podcast that tens of thousands of people listen to. When you’ve got the website that even more people listen to and come to every day and call you up and kick your tyres. When you’ve got all of these people, they all able to see that you deliver value and then you’re doing what you didn’t think you were doing already. As you said, you’ve fallen into it.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Yeah, exactly. It is insane for all those years I’ve slagged off funnels. It’s only because I’ve been experiencing the crappy end of the funnel. That sounds wrong, but leave that in any way.

Matt Davies: I mean just on an example of that, I mean, Russell Brunson has a strategy that a lot of them are using, and you’ll notice this straight away if you hear about it or if you’re aware of it. So the really common strategy is having a very, very low low cost offer that covers your ad costs. But it is purely designed just to cover your ad costs. There’s not even a trip wire where traditionally a trip wire we’d use to bring someone in on a low cost because we know that once someone has paid us money, it’s easier to get them to pay money again. But this one’s purely like, Oh, we’re gonna give you, you know, it’s like, we’ve got a book, so you’ll have seen it with the expert secrets and whatever else he has. It’s like, just pay the shipping and whatever that shipping cost is. It’ll be like, that’s the shipping costs. But that’s also just about how much it will cost to get you as a lead into this system. Then immediately you’re going to start getting the upsells and with clicked funnels as well. I have no opinions along. I’m going to talk about on a podcast or anything like that about the software. I think it works really well for people who don’t know what they’re doing on the internet and that’s fine, but in terms of click funnels I think there’s a lot of affiliates who make more money with click funnels than the courses that they’re selling.

Lee Matthew Jackson: I’ve heard that. If you sell like a hundred accounts on like affiliate setups, like I think it’s a hundred accounts on ClickFunnels as well, you’ll get like you get so much money, it’s all something like that. It’s ridiculous. It’s actually in their interest to sell you on to a ClickFunnel system. Which then have to pay for it and then they, it might not even be good for you.

Matt Davies: They have a car system where if you refer enough people, they’ll pay your car payments.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Yeah, the car system. I knew it was money or something. Sorry, carry on mate.

Matt Davies: Well, I was going to say it’s just when you see that a lot of people use this system and it’s one company I’m naming them because they’re so popular on Facebook ads, traffic and funnels, if you’ve not seen their adverts yet, they literally target digital agencies, marketing professionals, all sorts of people.

Lee Matthew Jackson: That’s two lads in there isn’t there?

Matt Davies: Yeah, there’s just two guys.

Lee Matthew Jackson: They’ve totally tried to do me all the time.

Matt Davies: There’s two guys, they record quite cheesy videos, making sure I didn’t say anything that slanderous, cause I don’t, I don’t have a negative attitude towards them. I’m just pointing them out. But he can’t recall quite cheesy videos. They’re reasonably entertaining people, but they’re always going like, we spend $1 million on ads and as soon as someone says that to me, there’s a detector that starts with BS. This is, like boop and it’s like beeping at me. I’m like, really? You’re spending $1 million on ads? Okay. Then they’re offering a book. So the most common one, you’ll see this, they see two main offers that they’ve got. There’s a book, which when they hold it up kind of looks quite thin. So I’m a bit dubious about it being a book. It might be a pamphlet. Then the other thing is like a $49 something, I guess like a quick start guide and bits and pieces together. That’s more of an online thing, but that’s their two offers. I see those every single day, two, three, four, five times a day. I know I’m probably pixel bang and I’m going to say landing pages, but they’re consistently just throwing things. What they’ve never done that I felt them do is build a relationship. So it’s always like, here’s our advert, here’s our video. Boom here’s our landing page. There’s never like, this is us. We’re really cool. It’s like, I mean, yes, they do have a story on this, on the landing page, but it’s the same generic, you know, I wasn’t doing very well. Then I discovered this thing, now everything’s better. Now I want to teach you how to do this as well and that’s not a very interesting story.

Lee Matthew Jackson: No. In fact i’ve just gone and checked and it is a mile long page that I described. With get me my free copy and in brackets just pay small shipping and handling fee. By the way, I’ve totally fallen into the Russell Brunson thing. I’ve got all of his books, but I did that a couple of years ago. I’ve got this little it’s like a special offer. I think I ended up, I was going to get one book and I ended up with like a box of books in the end and paid way more than just shipping. I was suckered into that one. You know what, I’ve read the first two pages. I just didn’t understand any of it

Matt Davies: With respect for you to Russell Brunson, his books aren’t that bad. What a lot of people don’t tend to like, and I think I’ve seen this online discussed is some of the bro culture that their business has. I think certainly I’ve seen, women saying that they found out uncomfortable. The type of culture that they come across with and I can certainly understand as, as society has changed over the last few decades and we’ve obviously all changed how we’re trying to be as human beings. Well, most of us have and certainly some of the things that people used to say and do 10 15, 20 years ago, realistically are unacceptable now. You know, and that’s absolutely fine. It’s how it should be. And so there’s certain homes there, but the actual content of those books is not bad at all. I mean, I’ve read expert secrets from cover to cover. I quite enjoyed it. I personally, I wouldn’t go with the big long story line webinar type system that he uses because that’s not who I am as a person. But I understand it and I know it works. When delivered well, you won’t sound like a robot reading a script will actually sound like someone who is a human being. You’re trying to build a relationship with people. So it does kind of work. But I mean, if you want to read a book about scaling a business, Mike Killens from single to scale is a brilliant book. And I highly recommend it is. So there we go. Probably get commission for that.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Yeah, I’m sure you will. Well I said brilliant book as well. So can we share the commission?

Matt Davies: Oh absolutely. Yeah, we can go splits. You can take 60%

Lee Matthew Jackson: Oh, nice one. I suppose it’s my podcast I’ve got, I’ve got an early copy of that book. It’s awesome. It’s amazing. Yeah. I love Mike. Got a bit of a man crush on Mike.

Matt Davies: He would have been a little bit upset with your funnels video as well, isn’t it?

Lee Matthew Jackson: That you both put nice comments. Well, all I was saying was, I was just, and I have it around with you just today now, but I was just, the thing that has always upset me about online marketing is that kind of, I’m just a number, you’re basically pitching me to sell something and you also want more of my money by up selling me stuff. Unfortunately therefore funnels in their own right have have gotten a bad name because of that practise. So the whole point of that Frank Friday was actually, I think there are good guys out there and that includes people like Mike Killen and Matt Davies and the other people out there. But you know, I want people to remember that there are humans involved and I want to encourage this sort of conversation because funnels are helpful for all businesses. We all are building funnels like you said by accident, you know, I built a funnel by accident through agency, trailblazer, etc. So we should go into this strategically and doing things on purpose. But it’s what we do with it and how we’re doing it. So A, are we treating people as humans? B, are we leading with value? C, are we looking to build up these relationships? And I think it’s such an important conversation that we need to have because I am definitely second tired and sound like I’m not even 40 and I’m already a grumpy old man here. Now I am sick and tired of people being treat like numbers and that rinse and repeat of let’s just sell, sell, sell at these people. Not necessarily with their best interests at heart.

Matt Davies: No that’s right. They do treat us as like cattle herding along and you know, if one of them leaves it doesn’t matter because we might pick up some more cattle along the way cause you’re going to keep throwing money into the money machine. If we’re using a certain type of system, then our ad costs are technique, you’re going to be free. So it’s all about the upsell anyway. I think there’s nothing wrong with an upsell in the right eye condition. So the way I love enough is particularly, I mean I used to do a lot of work will be eCommerce businesses and so one of the problems that an eCommerce business has, and I know we’re going to slightly of course, but it’s still, this is still technically a fault, but one of the problems that are typically eCommerce business has is that they might spend a lot of money bringing a customer on board. But is that the most difficult thing is getting that far customer is what the first time to buy again. So I was setting up like systemized strategies to help someone to sell again, for example, after someone makes a first purchase, if it’s a product that could easily be gifted, make sure you have an email sequence set up so within a couple of days. You offer them another one at a discounted price so they can give to someone in their family or friend, like really simple.

Lee Matthew Jackson: So like half price book offer as an example.

Matt Davies: Well yeah, exactly. Really really simple like come and get a second one of these and give it to a friend right now. And obviously, you know, yes, the eCommerce store and it makes it a bit less, but the person’s made a second purchase and we’re getting them into that ecosystem of making another me or making another purchase. So let’s call it a kind of buy another one as in like yet again another copy and you’ve got other systems where if it’s something that people need to buy regularly, you have a proper funnel or email sequence. Whole email systems are still funnels, but you have a proper email sequence set up, which is bringing someone back to the website to buy another copy. It’s basic things that an eCommerce store owners typically don’t have in place. When I worked with a lot of Magento and woocommerce store owners, that’s what I did for a long time and it was mayhem. I’ll say. I do believe that the entire eCommerce and email marketing industry, there’s a huge opportunity for someone to exploit. So someone listening to this, if you want to exploit it, I literally wrote a business plan last year on nest. It would get you six figures in a few months. It’s a really, really simple system to use. But here’s one for you right now. If anyone wants to go and do this, find an eCommerce website, sign up for their newsletter and look and see if you get a welcome email. If you don’t get a welcome email, now you’ve got an opportunity for a sales conversation because they’re not really respecting to people and delivering value and building a relationship with people who are signing up. That’s a really easy in for you to go and make some money though.

Lee Matthew Jackson: I am so glad that there is a welcome email when people buy a ticket for Agency Transformation Live, else I wouldn’t be respecting them very well.

Matt Davies: It’s important. I mean if someone’s trusted you enough to come and sign up, especially because like you’ve gotta remember now a lot of eCommerce websites, they are using plugins and extensions that will pop up a new site of sign up at the very start when you entered the site and there’ll be like put your email address in and get 10% off our sunglasses or whatever it is they sell and you go and do that and you’ll get like a three line email. It’s a voucher but you’ve got nothing from them that actually makes you feel like you’ve, you’ve dealt with a human being. It literally feels like the robot dispenser was throwing you a coupon and you may or may not be able to use this coupon on the website. If it said ‘Hey, this is Lee and the risks. Thank you so much for signing up at a sunglasses shop. Here’s your coupon down below. And here’s also a funny picture of us wearing loads, loads of sunglasses’. So you actually share your personality. If you want to share your humour and fun. And it probably takes you two seconds to write an email like that and to take a picture, but it literally can go out to any, you know, anyone who signs off. And that way you’ve delivered a bit of value delivered, some kind of like some fun and you can even follow up with even a sequence of like what shape head have you got? I know that’s a weird one, but obviously that makes a massive difference with your sunglasses. I mean, I’ve, I’ve got a giant football for head at the moment, so whatever sunglasses shapes the suits, that is perfectly fine.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Brilliant. Oh shout out to Richard Bland. He bought a ticket ages ago for the 2019’s Agency Transformation Live and then pointed out that there wasn’t a welcome email.

Matt Davies: Oh nice.

Lee Matthew Jackson: So yeah, so I then did it, so thanks Richard. I couldn’t wokr out how to do it in WooCommerce so I ended up buying a plugin to do it and now since I’ve realised you can just use like something like Zapier and then just trigger a mini sequence and say MailChimp or whatever email provider you’re using which is what we’re doing for 2020’s agencytransformation.live. If you want to meet Matt, he’s coming as well and meet some amazing speakers. That just seemed like a really good opportunity to advertise that.

Matt Davies: It’s good. I mean both Mel and I are coming next year and we’re both highly looking forward to it. We were sad we missed out this year and after all the amazing feedback we got from people is that while this is a no brainer, so as soon as you open up tickets, we were straight in on that and I’m delighted to be part of it. Just what you said though about e-commerce as well. Any emails that go out from your platform and sequences, try and get them to your email provider because your email system and using MailerLite or ConvertKit or active campaign or whatever it is that’s going to have a better system than your website. The other thing to bear in mind is a lot of people these days who host on systems like Cloudways where you might be on the, like a VPs, one of the kind of companies like a Vulture etc. If you’re, when you’re on those systems, you don’t have transactional email sent out via PHP mail, which kind of the default for WordPress, you need to set up a transactional email service. But if you do that and then you send out any kind of marketing communication you need to be very carefully your transnational email service allows marketing communications. Otherwise you’re kind of breaching the agreement you have with them.

Lee Matthew Jackson: I didn’t even know that actually.

Matt Davies: That is worth bearing in mind. See there’s Cartflows for example, they’ve released their abandoned cart plugin, which looks really cool, it does have a link out with Zappier if you use a web option, which can be a bit complicated for people if they’ve not used Zapier before. But just on that note, James Rose has got a Zapier mastery course, which I’d highly recommend. He’s just actually launched that properly as in, we’ve got the email out and access last night. So I’m highly recommend having a look at that. But anyway, if you do it for just WordPress, if you’re one of the people who’s got transnational email set up with someone like Send Grid or whoever it might be and they don’t allow marketing emails and abandoned cart email is a marketing email and so you can fall foul of the agreement you’ve got there and obviously you don’t want to do that because you can get your account terminated. Simple things to bear in mind.

Lee Matthew Jackson: So as always, Matt is leading with value and dropping value bombs throughout. We have come to the end of our time. I’m afraid though for this particular show and I would love to encourage you folks to go and check out more about Matt and Mel and what they have been up to with marketing funnels. So obviously check out their original podcast episode where you can get a little bit of background about Matt, grow to know I can trust him he’s a legend but also go and check out their website funnelpacks.co or if you click the link in the show notes and if you were to buy anything a little thank you comes to the Agency Trailblazer Podcast. So consider clicking that if you are going to go ahead and invest in any of the funnels and the sequences that are in there. I have purchased and although I have not actually implemented any yet because you know life, sorry, I will and I’ll let you know how it goes one day. I’m sorry man.

Matt Davies: That’s okay mate.

Lee Matthew Jackson: So with all that said, Matt, thank you so much for being on the show. You are a legend and have a wonderful day.

Matt Davies: Thank you. It’s been an absolute pleasure to talk to you again. Like you said, we talk every day. You make my day brighter, so thank you very much for being who you are and thank you for having me on. It’s an absolute pleasure.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Love you.

Matt Davies: Love you too.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Yes, he said it back. All right. Take care. Be good, bye.

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PodcastSeason 30

Lee Matthew Jackson

Content creator, speaker & event organiser. #MyLifesAMusical #EventProfs