The Game with Alex Hormozi - Testimonials, Lead Generation, and More… (with Emmanuel Abolo) Pt. 2 - Sept. '21 | Ep 448

Episode Date: October 15, 2022

(Disclaimer: This interview was recorded over Zoom. We apologize in advance for the quality of the audio.)Today, join Alex (@AlexHormozi) as he guests on Emmanuel Abolo’s YouTube to talk about what would Alex do if he were given a 2nd chance in his entrepreneurial journey, asking for referrals and testimonials, and the six different channels used in lead generation. This is part 2 of the interview.Welcome to The Game w/Alex Hormozi, hosted by entrepreneur, founder, investor, author, public speaker, and content creator Alex Hormozi. On this podcast you’ll hear how to get more customers, make more profit per customer, how to keep them longer, and the many failures and lessons Alex has learned on his path from $100M to $1B in net worth.Check out the episode on Emmanuel Abolo’s YouTube Channel! Timestamps:(0:43) - Selling offers: Include bonuses, upsells, downsells, avoid hesitation.(3:24) - Approaching past self: Utilize knowledge and experience effectively.(6:46) - Handling client requests for testimonials or references with new offers.(9:18) - Positioning agency for high-paying clients: Emphasize value, expertise.(11:21) - Elaborating on 6 lead generation channels; thoughts on organic markets.(16:12) - Future plans: Books on Lead Generation, Money Models, and beyond.Follow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition

What's going on, guys? This is the second half, a very good podcast that I had with Emmanuel Abolo. And he asked me a really good question, which is if I went back in time and I had all the resources I had today, what would I tell myself then to fast track my success? And I think it was an interesting answer that a lot of people got good stuff out of. We transitioned to talking about reviews and testimonials and how to stack those to get more people to want to buy your stuff. And then finally, how to leverage those things into getting tons and tons of leads for your business, especially if you are starting out. And so if you're in any of those positions, I hope you enjoy. Welcome to the game where we talk about how to get more customers, how to make more per customer, and how to keep them longer, and the many failures and lessons we have learned along the way.

I hope you enjoy and subscribe. So, I mean, when it comes to selling this offer, right, you are putting out this offer. And, you know, usually when we say we're on sales calls, we basically have one to five since we just want to double around three to five since we want to stay on this call. How then do you include all this? Do you just wait for them to get to the point of your objection and then you just, if they say, I can't do this. Then you tell them, yeah,

I have this COVID. So is that how you, you know, think around to the company? If you're in a one-on-one selling situation, you want to include those bonuses because you want to over-deliver. So if I didn't promise you something,

and then when you buy it, you get more than I promised you, you're happy. That's the point. We want happy customers. If when we get on the sales call, they say, you know,

I got to think about it, then we would ask the simplest question in all of sales, which is what's your main concern? What are you afraid of having happened? If this went poorly, what would that look like? And what they'll do is they'll tell you what their fears are. And then it's up to us to say, totally understand.

Every customer I have is the exact same fears. And here's how we make sure that's not going to happen. Fair enough. And then we go for the sale, right? And if they say no, it's like, what else is your main concern? What else are you concerned about? Right? And then they'll tell you something else.

And you're like, totally understand. So what we did to make sure you do that, a little quick anecdote about how we made it. And that's how you won't have to shrug with that issue. Fair enough. And we just keep going back over and over and over again about how we've saw, the problem and then we present the offer again. Yeah. And when you were traveling to dreams at the start of your journey,

you were helping them get more customers. But you're also working on their offers. And how did you call their offers? Yeah, on the offers. So for them, I already knew what the offer was. So I already had the best converting offer and I already had all the bonuses made. So I white labeled all the bonuses that I had spent all my time providing. So you're like, how am I going to do all this work?

I'm like, I already got to the work for you. I made the grocery list. I made the free preparation instruction. I made it the E-Out. I made the liquor fingers lunches, the delectable dinners, the, the banging breakfast, the shake guide. I made all of those things. And I made them for four different weight classes.

So they had 40 different deliverables that they could just slap their logo on. And then I made, I showed the video on how to slap your logo on this thing so that they could make it easier for them. Right? I provided all that stuff. And then I spent my own money. I worked the leads myself. I sold them myself.

And then I taught them how to fulfill those customers in person. And I did that for almost two years. They do it one time And they're like, ah, why am I not a guru? Well, you have to be really good. I think that's probably the reason why the niche thing is really important. Really niche into an avatar that you can really,

like you have basically everything laid out for it. I can just program play. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. So basically, when you come surprising, okay, I think I've asked you this already. Yeah, when you said at the beginning of your journey, you were basically viewed out of scarcity, as you're building your business

out of scarcity because you wanted to make money. Now, if you had to go back in time because quite a number of people here and probably adapt to Portugal where they need to make money. And now you are basically giving it all away. Would you still be putting it all away if you went back in time

with your mindset, when you're in terms of building your business and starting house more? How would you approach? It's a great question. I think that I would more quickly pivot to where I'm at now and probably instead of taking so long to do it. But I mean, I would still satisfy my immediate needs. You know what I mean? Like if I, if I need to go make money,

I would go make sure that I was that I was making money, but I might do it differently. And so that's one of the difficulties is that like I have context and skills now that I didn't have when I started. So if I were to start over again, I would probably be able to do things that I didn't know how to do when I started. So I would see opportunities in a very different way. I would know how to build the business so much faster than I did that. And so, I mean, if you're operating out of scarcity, I completely understand. I tend to just lean towards stop trying to be cute and stop trying to be fancy and just find an avatar that you like and do everything you can to solve their problem.

Everyone just gets so obsessed with their revenue metrics and the other thing that they forget about the customer. So like, just go crazy on the customer. And if you can do that, you'll make the money. And then the longer you give before you ask, the more money you'll make. And I'll tell you a big wealth secret. if you give enough, you don't ever have to ask. People will just come to you and they'll give to you without you ever asking. This is better than to jump, job, job, job, right.

I mean, Gary V he talks about it too. So it's not just me. He talks about it as he's mentioned this. So it's not, it's not saying anything different than him. But if you just give more. And so the real real is if you can satisfy your immediate needs, right? You can satisfy your immediate needs for food and shelter. If you can take a longer term perspective,

you will win much better, much faster because goodwill multiplies faster than revenue. And so you want to hold back that ask as long as you can be possible. And if you do hold it back as long as you can't be possible, you'll be surprised that you will monetize without even needing to try. This is just my firsthand experience with this. And you might be like, Alex, sure you can say that now because you've X, Y, and Z. And sure, right. I can't have a long-term perspective because I don't need any of that stuff.

But I'm telling you, it is a better business strategy. Like it is. And that's why you look at the biggest companies in the world that give, they give so much value for free. And they find otherwise to monetize it. Right? Like Gmail. It's free. Like how crazy is that? It's free. They made Gmail for free. Google, we could use it for free. We get to use YouTube for free. It's nuts. Right? And they find other ways to monetize it. So that's kind of the idea here. And a lot of times when people are starting out, they're afraid of giving their secret sauce away. And the answer is you should always just give away as much as she merely can. And I know that I'm giving away the quote, write amount when I'm

afraid of how much value of it. Like, if you're not afraid of how much you're giving away, it's not a bit. Yeah. Like, you should have anxiety about it. Yeah. Awesome. Someone is asking, and I think I'll just tie this to the, you know, the passive likelihood of achievement. She said, how do you handle clients on course asking for testimonial or references for a new offer? And, you know, basically, I think that's basically trying to communicate to them that the likelihood of which is not high, but this time is a new offer. So how do you do you frame me start? How do you frame this business?

Well, you run a beta group. I mean, this one's, I mean, that's the, like, if you've never done it before, then don't promise something. Go take 20 people and say, I'll do it for free as long as you give me a testimonial. And you give me fair feedback so I can help you throughout this process. I mean, I spent two years going from gym to gym for no money. So, like, I'm like, I lived with this. People do it for a month.

I did it for two years. You know, I'm just, I'm just putting perspective on this. It's like the wider the base of the pyramid, which is the foundation that you decide to lay in terms of the depth of your skill, the taller the peak is. For fear of sounding trite, there's no, there's no shortcut. Like the height of your pyramid will be determined by your skill set, the depth of your skill, the depth of your roots that you've planned in. And the depth comes from repetition. It comes from volume. It comes from skill. It comes from time. It's time under the bar. A lot of people just aren't willing to do that. And that's why most people won't achieve a level of success they do that.

they want it so bad they're not willing to wait but the only way to get it is to wait long enough that it becomes inevitable yeah I mean sometimes it's too hard

to wait as sometimes because I mean you really have to cover the views and all it's just because of comparison though it's not actually hard to wait

you know my my dad said this to me and I think there's some wisdom in it he said you know what no matter how much money you make he said chicken tastes like chicken and rice tastes like rice. Nothing changes. It's just, it's just people feel like they're falling behind from some dude on Instagram is probably why, right? Like in my stuff, some people compare to their numbers to my numbers. And like, how many years have you

been in business right now? My current advice, three years. Three years, right. So for context, my third year in business, I think I made $50,000. My fourth year in business, I made $50,000. Right? And so, like, people see what we're doing. now and they're like, oh my God, I've spent almost a decade. And like, we're now just receiving some level of notoriety. And candidly, the other part of it is that we made our money doing the thing rather than teaching how to do the thing. And I think that's lost in a lot of people.

Everyone gets to $10,000 a month and immediately makes the course on how to make $10,000 a month rather than why don't you go to $100,000 a month? Why don't go do you a million a month? Why don't you just keep doing the thing that you're doing? Absolutely. I think I would just probably take this one as a last question. and someone says how, as a virtual assistance, how do you position an agency for high paying clients? So do you have any specific, unique answer to that?

Real quick, guys, if you can think about how you found this podcast, somebody probably tweeted it, told you about it, shared it on Instagram or something like that. The only way this grows is through word of mouth. And so I don't run ads. I don't do sponsorships. I don't sell anything. My only ask is that you continue to pay it forward to whoever showed you or however you found out about this podcast that you do the exact same thing. if it was a review, if it was a post, if you do that, it would mean the world to me,

and you'll throw some good karma out there for another entrepreneur. Well, I think there would be a business model question, too. So, you know, there's a number of different models you can do there. You could specialize in creating one specific type of service provider. So let's say you were like, I will train people on how to run ads. And so you say, hey, I'll give you a media buyer for, you know, $10,000 one time, it'll be fully trained. And after that, it's only, you know, 200 bucks a month or whatever, you know,

whatever the income of the VA is, right? that would be one model. You know, another model could be the same concept in terms of what you do, but you might monetize by saying, hey, you can pay me $1,000 a month, and I'll assign you a full-time rep. And you pay $200 a month to the person the whole time. And as long as they stay an employee of that company, that becomes a staffing play from a, like you become like a staffing company for payroll.

That has very, very good enterprise value, has really good stick rates, for the most part, as long as the people are good. So again, if you have a high level of skill, you can teach people the high-level skill, which means that you can sell the high-level skill on their, behalf to other people for more money. If you are not that skilled, you will not be able to teach a high level of skill and so that you won't be able to sell a high level of skill on their behalf. So it all comes still back to like, what's the value that we can provide? And the better you can

get at both acquiring the skill for yourself and teaching the skill in a replicable way, then if you do that, then you'll always be able to provide value, right? Because you're helping this person who's the VA get probably better income they would normally be able to get. You're going to help the business owner get labor for lower than they normally would be able to And there's this night's delta of room, and that's where you can extract the value that you want for yourself for connecting the two. Awesome. And just because I've heard you say this quite often, quite a while recently, about the five different channels of this generation. I'm talking about one media and media, six rather, six.

Yeah. One media and media, paid traffic, you know, outreach and, you know, refrauss. I talk about five of them being linear, one being quadratic. because someone else is asking about organic markets and how you feel about it. So I feel that maybe you would just elaborate on that. Sure. So like I mean I just said, there's a lot of ways to acquire customers, right? And each of the strategies is pros and cons. If you're at zero to a million, you just need to pick one.

You have to pick one and become a master at it. Because that's you when you're starting out. You have no leverage. Once you get higher up, you'll still probably need to learn a second one or scale that one even higher to maybe, you know, three million a year. and then at that point you'll have enough leverage from a monetary perspective that you can find someone who's good at another channel, bring them in, and then have them build out a second channel, and then find someone else who's good at it and build out another channel.

You can't try and pay someone to learn it. That's a dumb idea. Find someone who's already done it for a business that's similar to yours and then have them build out that team on that channel. So in terms of what are my feelings on organic marketing, I mean, I'm a huge fan if you're very good. Kylie Jenner, it's worked great for. Kim Kardashian's worked great for it. We honor, it's work great for it, right?

So if you have star power and you're good on camera or you look amazing or you're amazing at delivering content. And the way that you define that is if you make stuff and people share it and subscribe to your channel or follow you or download your podcast, then you're good at it. If you do it and none of that happens, then you're not that good at it. And so I think the lesson at least for the organic stuff is you can start investing in that stuff now because in time you'll get better at it and it'll be a hockey stick. for two years, three years, nothing will happen.

And then all of a sudden, you'll get good enough after you make 100 videos or 200 videos, 300 videos, you'll learn your voice, learn how to speak, you'll learn your keys, and you'll start to really develop something that becomes more interesting to an audience, right? It's okay to suck. I think everyone just doesn't give themselves for business to suck. But in terms of speed to money, paid traffic is the fastest. It also requires the most skill and requires capital. So not everyone's in that situation.

So if you're looking for the cheapest fastest, then you're pretty much left with three channels. right, which is going to be your owned media, which is all the contacts you already have in your cell phone, your followers on Instagram, your friends on Facebook, all those people have given you permission to access them. So that's the fastest and cheapest and probably highest likely to success for most people who are starting out. You probably have between all those, at least 2,000 people who, between all those sources I just said, that doesn't even include a customer list, just that. So there's 2,000 people we can reach out to. If you reach out to 100 people a day, it would take you 20 days just to get through the list once. So you could have multiple runs at that

list and you'd probably have enough cash flow and experience to then go to either cold outbound because you'd learn enough from the warm to extrapolate it to cold, which would be a second way, which is fast in terms of like you can you can make some money and it costs you very little because it's just your time. But scaling it requires people. So you have two people doing that, five people doing that, 20 people doing outbound on your behalf. The next way is affiliates. And that's probably like if I had to start over tomorrow and I had to make a ton of money, it would be how do I find partners that already have my client base that I can tap into and create some sort of value proposition to them to make it a win.

And so my last two companies were off that strategy. You know what I mean? So my supplement company is based on affiliate network. It's not it's not any direct response. So how do I feel about organic? If you're good at it, it's worth it. It takes time. And if you need to feed yourself today, I would do that so that eventually you'll get the dividends.

But I would still like your money is going to be like, make sure you don't get obsessed with that. I would say take the two hours a week, do the two or three videos or podcast or whatever it is that you want to do, and then the remainder of your week is focused on making money. Awesome. Ask about Facebook groups. Facebook groups are fine.

It's a version of owned or earned media. Yeah, awesome. And your book, the next book coming out is $600 million dollar in the generation? Or which of them exactly? Yeah, I think it'll be lead generation. I think lead generation will be number two. And then the third one would be money models,

which is kind of the, originally it was called monetization structures, but I have a feeling that doesn't as sexy as money models. So I'll call it money models. But it's basically all the different ways that you can structure offers to monetize off promotions. And so there's 19 different offer structures that I have in the book. It's one of the ones I'm actually the most afraid of publishing. It was the first book I wrote because I think it's like the stuff that I geek out the most about, but I'm not sure if it's going to be too dense. So I might have to figure out how to make it

really readable for people because it's offer combinations, how to sell continuity, downsells, I was like all the different kind of like metrics and things like that that you need to look at, but I'm not sure if it's going to be too boring. So I'm trying to make it really interesting. All right. Yeah. You basically have about six more. So you say,

is it nine in total? I think I have 10 in total. I know the first six. And I'm sure that once I write the six, I'll probably have three or four more that I'll come out of it. But it'll be, so we have offers first. We'll have lead generation second.

I think money models will be third. Sales will be fourth. sales teams will be fifth. Increasing lifetime gross profit per customer will be six. I'll probably come up with a sexier name for that, but that's what it is, is making more per customer. And then I'll probably end up making some sort of one around money, just money in general, money, beliefs, wealth, stuff. I'll probably make something around buying and selling businesses. And so I'll let it evolve over time. But the first six are pretty clearly defined. I already have those wire framed out. And the first, the next two books are already pretty much written. I just have to go back

over them and re-edit them and try and simplify them and make them easier to read and put more pictures in and all that stuff. So I would just like to know, you know, what's next for you? Maybe the next, you know, after you're done with all these, you know, books and then what's next? Well, that'll probably take me a few years. So, I mean, acquisition.com and the courses and books that are going to come out for free from there, that's kind of just a passion work. I'll probably continue to do that as I acquire more skills and as beliefs change. I'll probably also update some of them and re-release a few of them if they change substantially or my views develop on them. But the phase that I'm answering is I'm trying to just deploy capital into small businesses.

So, you know, three, five, 10, $20 million businesses and, you know, invest in them and the entrepreneurs and then also, you know, use the resources that I have, the connections that I have. And then, you know, whatever strategic insights I can provide to help them grow. So that's pretty much what I think. my foreseeable future is going to be is that. And then I'll probably layer in a strong element of philanthropy beyond the obvious of just giving away everything for free for everyone who's not accompanied. So that's just kind of, so that's where it's at.

And I think that, you know, Layla and I have the goal of giving away more than as being the couple that gave the most. And so that's, that's, you know, I don't know if we'll ever achieve that, but that is the goal we have because at the end of the day, like there's one thing to hold it all and then donate a bigger number because I think we'll be better at allocating capital than maybe a charity would be. But, you know, in some ways, it's like, what's the point of accumulating it all than dying and giving it away?

It's like I'd almost rather, I'd rather give less in an absolute amount and then enjoy the benefit. But then I think is that me being selfish? So I go through all of these different versions of the same thing. I'm like, well, does it matter from being selfish because it won't matter anyways? So, anyway, that's where I head off into. Awesome. Thanks so much. Thank you.