Helping Founders Scale Profitably
An Astonishment: Telemetry In Media Buying (Preface)
To whom it may concern,
To have you buy media in an attempt to make whatever you are profitable, whether
buying for yourself, a client, or as an engineering-designer who is to build product.
Problems in media buying can root themselves in an inability to keep enterprise perimeter (the
barrier between the enterprise and consumer eyeballs). Keeping this perimeter to limit telemetry
while one is buying, or while one is initiating campaigns, can make campaigns profitable long
enough to find valuable intersection between two publicly-traded companies.
Contrasted to a funnel with telemetry is one of an artist: artists go to lengths to use consumer
products that could leak data into the consumer markets, requiring creativity to keep enterprise
perimeter within their content itself through new ways to express old ideas, making mirror-reversibility
with whatever is on hand. The production company that then houses this outfit is responsible for
enforcing perimeter to make profit at scale.
As a buyer, and by controlling telemetry, and by using a method that enforces mirror-reversibility
at electronic level, you can update creative less frequently than you may believe you need to
update it, make use of long attribution windows, buy with certainty for long periods of
time, and keep campaigns profitable.
Telemetry is what makes the advertising platforms and their underlying auctions function.
Perhaps you have somehow noticed Meta’s use of data to update its auctions to better serve its
advertisers–updating in real-time your interests, preferences, etc…Other tools and platforms do
this too: perhaps you are using a consumer-focused CRM to house data that is incidentally
selling data to a databroker, and either Google or Meta or one of the other "in-betweens" is picking
that data for auction in real time...and you realize your machine isn’t profitable...or you feel like you are screeching along,
barely profitable–"slugging about a leaky bucket"–unmanaged telemetry somewhere in the funnel.
Buying traffic from which you are telecasting doesn’t give yourself much chance to make
campaigns profitable on acquisition in any timeframe, and if unkept, one ends up running on a
“treadmill”.
Google, Meta, LinkedIn, and Apple are businesses, of course, optimizing for their bottom
line; and if one ships conversion data immediately (without much delay) back to the auction from
where the traffic was bought, that auction could update its pricing as a result…against one.
Somewhere you definitely don’t want to be–competing with auction houses and buying against
yourself.
At core, these platforms don’t use your funnel data to compete with you directly; but
think about all of those who work at these platforms, and all of their vendors, and all of those vendors'
suppliers. How smart and amazing are those people?…Surely, you wouldn't want to hand over keys
to a profitable campaign so easily and unnecessarily if you can delay doing that by any meaningful
amount.
Perhaps accidentally, you share conversion data with these platforms; and without any planning,
compromise your campaign; your sudden "sharp-angle" ad with no competitors ends up "facing
public’s dulling edge", muddying your analytics. Your window to capture profit shrinks and
evaporates. Creatives to be constantly updated to get...increasingly more “edgy” and even
borderline taboo to compensate for lack of enterprise perimeter. Late campaign ads push limits,
but you ask,
“how else could it be that some ads can run for years and others can run for only a
few days!?”
As clearly seen in the music industry, artists manage with perhaps a new Rolls Royce, Ferrari,
Bugatti, a lick, a new instrument, a new way to play the instrument, a new technology that
allows for resolution not seen before in their content. The speed at which artists create and
publish is importantly managed if mostly consumer products are used in production (perhaps
Apple products are used in data storage, or non-secure internet connections used for
collaboration), telecasting to consumers as one is going along. So “it’s the fastest who gets paid”, and the
reward and half-life on a reward’s window is short.
If you visit Switzerland, where some artists like to write and record, you may notice there exist studios
that limit telemetry; keeping competing artist teams from prepping to close the “window” on its
studio work as that ships: Using consumerly-available software and to keep perimeter intact,
engineers in these studios seek disjunct somewhere: in Switzerland, with its unique data privacy
laws, work is prone to less telemetry; and since the payoff for a "single" could be in the
hundreds-of-millions of dollars, so much do artists do in these studios to keep the window of
profitability open for as long as they can.
Solutions can be disjunction from the dollar itself–where one could suspect where
cryptocurrencies originated: someone or something, instead of enforcing perimeter through
enterprise-grade tooling, perhaps found it necessary to disjunct from accounting systems by
dealing in dollar proxies defined by their community, denominating in proxy’s new system.
These folk are not the first to attempt to make “on-the-fly” perimeters. In sales, managers use
point systems to motivate salespeople and disjunct from the dollar. The whole credit system is
effectively disjuncting for enterprise in perimeter. However, we don’t necessarily need the latest or
greatest dollar proxy system to get a return on buying if we just use the products we ought to
use for how they were intended.
Effects in marketing without use of proper tools are gruesome: with consumer webpage builders
instead of keeping a natural perimeter with tools like Salesforce, one needs to broach topics that
push the limits of the platforms themselves to get resonance. Similar to a dirt-biker jumping off a
high ramp to get views; the jump needs to get higher and higher for an audience to notice and
continue to notice. It gets dangerous; and as you can imagine, writing a profitable advert is
somewhat similar to what one in the music and dirtbiking world is doing…and to avoid
competing along these dangerous axes, a strategy is needed to enforce enterprise perimeter
wherever one goes.
With a longer attribution window than a competitor, you can steer and make better decisions
relative to that competitor. Imagine you are able to buy with a longer than one-hundred-eighty day attribution
window and your competitor is only able to buy with one of thirty days. You could attribute your
sales to events that happened further in the past; and use that as insight for steering.
“But, to
increase the attribution window length for analytics in auction is typical for buying platforms to
not allow easily!” you say...
I know…I know…
And…as great as technology is, it will never replace the need for humans; so much needed is to
combine the technology with the aim to bring on, and help, and provide to as many humans as
possible. This includes your salespeople, your employees, prospects, your customers, etc.
What’s nice about software and using public funds to make business is that we have tools
already in place to keep us out of the “kerfuffles” with the artists–tools that enforce perimeters
and limit telemetry if we just pick them up and use them for as they are intended, and keep in lane
that works…to scale media buying for the highest of stakes…using tools and methods in a
specific way to get efficiency. That’s it. We are not inventing any new technology...We are
not…inventors…We are not doing anything all that groundbreaking. We are simply using the
platforms for how they are intended, and profiting from that.
Assuming you have basic coding knowledge and are comfortable writing basic functions,
perhaps you have a business, or perhaps sold a business already for fifty-million United States
Dollars, and you want your next to be for at least three-hundred-million United States Dollars. In
order, you hope your campaign goes as far and as long as it can; and for that, we need an
enterprise perimeter and strategy for keeping that perimeter in place.
If art has as many degrees of symmetry in as many dimensions as possible, that property
creates resolution, and that's what we value.
“Levels” by the late Avicii contains mirror-reversibility–if you play the song backwards, you may notice its coherence. Try it out one
day and see for yourself. In media buying, we can attempt something similar: we introduce as many
degrees of symmetry as possible to get the best feedback, which helps us steer the campaign
and remain profitable. However, instead of producing content like “Levels”, we can just display
what we have and let the platforms do “magic mirror-reversibility” behind the scenes by
positioning our message in a special, “magical way” at distribution.
Like in the book,
“Principles” by Ray Dalio; Ray has implemented mirror-reversibility in its
structure: the book is called “Principles”; in any order, those principles are useful. That itself is a
dimension of reversibility. When the book sells, Ray could monitor lines that have to do with a book
supply chain with more granularity than others who are selling a book. One could imagine that
this gathers insights better than others, useful in a hedge fund business–unlocking a property
that Ray and only Ray can use productively.
If we use a format that makes our message mirror-reversible at the layer below the text, on the
website level, all we really need to do is show up with any message, and that message will
present better than others simply because it is there, and we are there with it.
Previously, none have focused on helping customers run mirror-reversible, telemetry-free advert
using enterprise perimeter tooling, but I have helped customers create mirror-reversibility in their
content using scaffold. It seems like you may really now need a solution for another dimension
of symmetry. Perhaps to run a fund business alongside a software business, similar to what Ray
has done and is doing? Or perhaps to make even more profit out of what you already have in
your current business? Hmmm? Perhaps to capture an extraordinarily-large amount
of…profit?...or perhaps capture a downright offensive…amount of…profit? Hmmm? Would you
like to make profits that may be considered a tad…offensive?...Perhaps…offend someone with
your profits?...Perhaps attempt to make your campaign’s profit…offend?...Or better
yet…astonish?
Okay, good. You are in the right place.
Furthermore, this for some companies that may drift to implement solutions that don’t always
keep the perfect enterprise perimeter and seek to somehow boost profitability by “sealing it up”
.
For example, Broadridge (NYSE: BR) could perhaps massively improve its profitability by
adding a noiseless terminal to their funnel. This seal could increase profitability anywhere along
the Microsoft interface (anything that Microsoft touches) within their business, which in a public
company like NYSE:BR, could be of value.
I have been buying media in highly-competitive markets for the last thirteen years and have
made funnels that went on to the public markets. Before I got into the digital realm, I played AAA
hockey in Canada, then went on to study Engineering Physics at Queen’s University in Canada;
and in the second summer break, represented Canada with my team in the CDIO Engineering Design
Competition in Denmark.
During my third-year summer, I opted for an energy-company internship I had already secured,
but before it started, I sold home maintenance services door-to-door and delayed the internship.
Using just a pen and paper, a G-Shock watch, and a polo shirt, I was able to learn direct sales.
In my final year, I spent time developing an active noise-cancelling algorithm to be used in air
ducts.
While studying, I made door-to-door auto detailing business and tutored math to St. Andrew’s
College students online. When I graduated, I raised money to build out my tutoring business,
aimed at helping independent schools, however, after marketing and selling to a school in
Toronto, I learned that what I built as my product actually was for good architecture in
direct-response paid media, specially, the media architecture in the fintech world of all places:
After working with the school, I linked with an alumnus from Queen’s, Derek Szeto, who just
raised for his startup, Wirkn, and who sold his first company, RedFlagDeals to Yellow Pages
Group. ALDO execs from Montreal hired Derek as interim CEO and to build out their new
company. I helped Derek with scripting in exchange for advice on fundraising and intros, and
while cold-calling in malls, enterprise opportunities and deals with Oxford Properties (a
Canadian property management firm) and alike came about for his venture.
As I was doing this, an intro was made to a startup company, AdvisorStream, now a Broadridge
(NYSE:BR) company. I designed their funnel by hand, deployed it, and launched it to traffic to
determine entry point. I found that channel was LinkedIn Ads, and ten years later, Broadridge is
still using the AdvisorStream entry point to market its services.
The calibration was done in a way that illuminated the channel, and specifically, audience
criteria to be most profitable for the AdvisorStream offer in a matter of a few days. Compared to
a few years or few months for other offers, AdvisorStream went on to buy on their best platform for
years, and later on, they were acquired; and the acquiring company (NYSE:BR) is still using that
entry point at the interface between itself and Microsoft (LinkedIn)–using AdvisorStream as the
initial offer for the Broadridge suite on LinkedIn.
I learned only recently that ten years after I initialized the campaign with my calibration
mechanism, that I simultaneously found the highest-yielding channel for AdvisorStream and the
highest-yielding digital channel for Broadridge, a publicly-traded company and leader in fintech
marketing solutions. In other words, the channel itself, or the occupation of the interface
between Microsoft and Broadridge (two publicly-traded companies) is and was AdvisorStream,
and that was determined using a specific media calibration method, and noticeable in only a few
days. The AdvisorStream team was even surprised that it worked so well and that NYSE:BR
was still running the channel ten years after it was initialized.
The calibration method is something that I will make available to you today.
This calibration method was used, too, in my own consulting offer: my math tutoring initiative morphed
into helping clients become extremely profitable by working with thousands of clients from
around the world to help them find resonance at the messaging level by editing their technical
papers to be used in their communications. As I was scaling up, I started looking into investing. I
attended dinners with hedge fund folks; but instead of investing into their fund, I ended up
managing earnings using insights gleaned from my funnel’s own data–essentially investing into
the tools used to keep profitable at the time those tools were needed.
I saw how public companies and markets sort of worked, and was able to see the line between
public and private information, and noticed that by using this calibration method, one is
effectively able to take a company “quasi-public” by building up cash to invest it into the public
market to support the underlying profitability of one’s cash-flowing activity. Coincidentally,
exactly what a public company CEO seems to be doing. Collaborating on ideas with a hedge
fund in New York City/Miami, and by investing on my own, I saw how my data fared against
teams of analysts and networks of hedge fund managers from top global schools. Using data
from a funnel made with this calibration process, the method I am making available to you today,
I had a vantage point that was outside the view of the public markets and some of its best, silent
analysts.
There were times in my media buying where I passed the buying to others and saw some of the
limitations. For example, early on, I used landing page builders like Unbounce and
ClickFunnels–softwares used in the consumer internet marketing space. I found that if the traffic
pushed to the landing page was more profitable than the builder’s, then the funnel would “break”
(one must be bound by the landing page’s profitability?). With Webflow (another landing page
software), I found that it required “gymnastics” to get an edge at the media buying level and to
hold perimeter for any length of time.
These are just a few examples. My point is that if one uses some of these great tools too early
during a calibration, one could thwart oneself down the road, artificially constraining one’s
campaign, or never get to the intersection between the two major public companies
quickly—which is what an acquirer and public market will demand, and what we ought to tempt.
I found that one is somehow bound by the tools they use and if one is using a tool, one’s
campaign is bound by the profitability of that company’s tool; and so I figured that using as few
tools as possible is in good sense, and making use of public tools may be good too...for calibration—similar to an appreciation for an analog compass over a battery-powered one
while planning against disaster.
That’s not to say that these “out-of-the-box” tools have no use or that they are not good, but we
are aiming for a precise intersection and calibration at a specific point in time, and to make use
of a good calibration mechanism, we want to limit as many variables as possible.
SOC 2 compliance and regulations coincidentally help enforce enterprise perimeter; perhaps so that profit
and capital can be used efficiently in whatever region the regulations apply. I found that if one
focuses on hyper-profitability using few tools, one somehow leads the regulators and is
compliant without really knowing how that is so. Perhaps due to overlapping
compliance dependencies: if tools that enforce compliance are used to remain profitable, then
by coincidence or maybe even, extension, if profitable, then the funnel using those tools is also
maintaining compliance (as far as data-routing is concerned). So we lean on the profitable use
of functions of the “known-to-be-compliant”.
Over the years, I even tried updating the funnel and media buying entirely by doing
open-channel marketing exclusively using platforms like Instagram and YouTube. Prior to this, I
was invited onto podcasts and even once was sought by CNBC as an expert for buying traffic
on Meta. Here, in open channels, I found that one either needs to do "gymnastics" or "backflips
and gymnastics" at the media-buying level or copy level to get any type of return. Then, once
one gets the return, one needs to defend it publicly, since how one made the return is
completely public. I found that to create perimeters "on the fly" amidst the noise of voluntary or
involuntary public content marketing, a strategy is needed—what will be available to you...A
strategy to enforce enterprise perimeter wherever one goes.
Specifically, this is for engineering-designers who are building products or funnels that have to
do with media buying; and if you may not think your product has to do with media buying, then
perhaps consider your product’s function without good information transfer.
It’s especially for someone if their entirety depends on media arbitrage–where one is buying
media cheaper than others, capturing benefit from only that. It may be your second business, or
you may already have an exit “under your belt”, and you are aiming for an exit of
three-hundred-million United States Dollars or more.
You wish to incorporate principle into product design to "keep your backend", and to keep your
campaigns profitable as they scale. We are asserting that you have raised money and you can
access capital if need be. We are not buying consumer-to-consumer (the artist method); we are
buying business-to-business or business-to-consumer. You are buying in highly competitive, or
highly-regulated environments and are somewhat an arbitrageur.
Furthermore, for insurance companies and their actuaries: these apparati can be used as
noiseless antennas to sense risk and evaluate acquisition targets. Most of this is somewhat
obvious, but there is non-obvious content included here that was only discovered through
testing.
This may be something for regulators too—some of these tactics can be used to catch
non-profitable folks. So whether one is scanning for fraud and evil, or trying to make profits, one
gets used to the point.
Combine these mechanics with your own technology and offer. For example, AdvisorStream
already had a content marketing filter that they had somehow discovered before I got involved.
The content filter was one of the finest quality, being from Toronto (at arm's length from Wall
Street and interoperable with UK lexicon): AdvisorStream added Reuters and other licensed
content providers to advisor email communications to increase production for an advisor. This
was something I didn’t help them discover; I helped them get the solution into the market and
position it to be highly profitable using a one-of-one marketing channel as seen to be valuable
by NYSE: BR.
You can use the principles and process included here and apply them right away. Unique is that it’s not
common for something to have scope of both highly competitive media buying tactics and
underlying technology used in those tactics. If you are an engineer, I envy you for not
needing to develop this scope on your own. One person should be going through this to ensure
continuity of process.
Process In General
1) We create a sensitive feedback apparatus that also scales globally: A noiseless terminal.
2) We quickly and without telecasting information out to the networks, find the intersecting
platform entry point in an enterprise perimeter.
3) We continue to buy on the intersection and use other channels to help along your main
channel.
I am excited to make this available to you. Please submit your email to view.
1. Noiseless Terminal Setup
We are using a Salesforce/Heroku container as the hosting platform for landing pages. Unlike Google, where Google’s business model is sharing data and capturing value on that data through search, Salesforce would be stretching themselves far to broker data, since their entire value proposition is securely storing data in a CRM.
I noticed when I was using Slack, a Salesforce product for the first time; everything kept neatly profitable and quiet, almost magically. It was a “pay-a-fee, get-the-service” type of setup, where the data didn’t seem harvested and sold at auction immediately. Compared to using clunky builders, where actions lag, and libraries follow along that telecast data, we use a clean setup with few libraries.
A Key Idea: Landing pages on Salesforce. Google has landing pages. Meta in a sense has landing page builders through the React language. These platforms do more than strictly sales, particularly marketing. Unique here is drawing the barrier between sales and marketing at the interface between a marketing platform and a sales platform: if we can buy ads on the platform, we consider it a marketing platform. If we can’t buy ads on the platform, then it’s considered a sales platform. Can we buy ads on our landing page? No? So that means our landing page is a sales platform and Salesforce is fitting.
We build a custom page by hand in only HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and a PHP tag, then deploy through Heroku, which is a subsidiary of Salesforce. Use a Git repo as you go along. We use a template for spacing and responsiveness, and strip out anything fancy (JavaScript libraries) so the page is pretty much bare. You could build from scratch, but designers spend time getting spacing responsive, so it’s nice to use that spacing, and you can find these templates at places like ThemeForest. Use the designer’s nomenclature to make the page. You can customize the spacing further yourself inline with CSS.
The opt-in page is just a page that captures an email address and name. It promises something like a resource, or guide, or template, or something of substance that only one in your market would want. For example, “A List of Top Ten ___ For {industry}.”, “Case Study: How ___ Achieved {Result} in {Timeframe}”.
You want the “hook” to be a “no-brainer” for your audience. Every word matters in the headline, and you get resonance by being extremely specific to a location. Control it with as much as you can conjure. You are testing the headline by updating it quickly, forming a learning curve in your Git repository. If you just push directly to Heroku, you keep that learning curve in the Heroku repo by pushing straight to production.
Compared to using a landing-page-builder, where the edit is stored somewhere you might not control, your edit is on your local machine and in your Heroku container. This is important because if someone or something can see the edits of the headline in time, theoretically, that can “funnel hack” or at least scope required to run a similar campaign that could shorten the length of the campaign profitability. Furthermore, the commits that update text just read “added”.
If you have a headline that works, and no one but you and Heroku (Salesforce) know what works in time, then you are “in the money”. You don’t want a team monitoring the headlines and change of copy, since those changes could get into a consumer pool through telemetry, which updates the content that your prospects see, priming your angle, which dulls it, and causes noise. By pushing into production with a noiseless terminal and watching for feedback, you can test headlines quickly and quietly.
Niching Down By Using Region
In most cases, you can find resonance by just niching down to a specific region. For example, if you are looking to help advisors generate leads in Texas, then you would bound the targeting and messaging to one location, perhaps by using something like: “Texas? Find a financial advisor in {timeframe}.”
Auditing Case Studies
To determine the initial region, audit the case studies of your best customers or your first customer. Typically, your case study customer’s results contain all the required information for the marketing. For example, if the case study customer is in “xyz place” in the United States, then that’s what you title the case study headline: “How a {xyz place} {type} Company Achieved {metric change} in {timeframe}.”
PHP Hanky
The page is pushed through what we call a “PHP Hanky”. This is just a single block of PHP that tells Heroku to serve the page as a PHP app. Label the opt-in page, “opt-in.html”. It’s deployed on a new server and on a totally new domain or subdomain, where it cannot be accessed through search traffic just yet.
Keeping the distribution layer mirror-reversible, it slips through filters and allows you to gather important feedback. Theoretically, it really doesn’t matter what you put on your page so long as you are using something like this to deliver the message, however, you obviously want to mind the messaging so that you can compete with those already using the “PHP Hanky”.
Deployment Tag in index.php:
include __DIR__ . '/opt-in.html';
Pushing Edits To The Opt-In Page:
git add .
git commit -m "added"
git push heroku main
Updating The Headline
As you are editing the /opt-in page and following funnel pages that route from the opt-in, you are pushing changes to text almost in real time. Imagine yourself as a streamer; except instead of using a streaming platform like Twitch, you are using your own domain and platform to stream changes to your opt-in page’s headline.
You update the headline until, when you send it in an outbound message (what we will be doing shortly), it immediately gets resonance. If the case study data contains some specific metric change in a time period, you include that change in metric in your headline and on the opt-in page. You are writing to one person. For credibility, you are using either a raw data screenshot from your case study or just the specificity of location on the /opt-in page.
Headlines That Have Gone Wrong
A headline that is the opposite of productive is something you want to avoid publishing. If your headline aims to be a beacon for conflict, it becomes a “black hole” of energy–a true hazard. Not surprisingly, these types of headlines push business in the wrong direction, and if kept unchanged, can propel the business to do harm, requiring authorities to step in. So if you are a regulator or activist, just look at headlines that staunch themselves in negative concepts to find problems or opportunity. If you are an investor, look for headlines that in their limit result in positivity.
Parameter Capture On Submit
When you send traffic to the page, you capture the parameters appended to the URL (params) on the client side in a client-local cookie. On the form or on action submission, route these params to the CRM by yanking these params down from the local cookie before the action, submit after putting the params in the local cookie on the load. Only store the params to the server when the user submits the action and alert action-takers that you are doing this on the submit. This allows you to store params for up to one-hundred-and-eighty-days and longer instead of the typical thirty or ninety days that typical auctions and “out-of-the-box” analytics solutions offer. If you can store params longer than another buyer, you can out-buy most everyone since your steering reaches further into the past for anchor.
Since we are only using the page with the campaign, there is not much organic traffic to the page, and we can track opt-ins by looking only at the UTM params in the CRM or Slack channels. For form endpoints, I use something called Formkeep: This provides a webhook to direct data to Slack and to your CRM (Close.io) through Zapier. You could use a custom form route, but Formkeep works fine. Name the params yourself (don’t use a generator). For example, you would append something like: “?utm_content=ad1&utm_source=meta”.
Routing To A Sales Page From Opt-In
The opt-in routes to a sales page. A sales page presents more information and helps frame the questionnaire (a qualification mechanism placed one step beyond the sales page) so the prospect can get through the qualification with intention. The sales page delivers the asset promised on the opt-in. It contains a video presentation (video sales letter) and a medley of case studies (if you have these). This video sales letter is a thirty-minute to one-hour to three-hour video pitching whatever you are pitching (three-hours if you are doing a lot of “heavy lifting” in that you are teaching the prospect something new).
Video Sales Letter Creation
This video sales letter is used on the page to “warm” the prospects and push prospects through the rest of the funnel. It is written first, then recorded and pasted on the website. You host the video on something like Wistia as opposed to YouTube. It could take a few weeks to write. It’s then transposed to slides. Like a salesperson who is selling around-the-clock and who doesn’t get tired, the video does a lot of work.
There is a specific structure to use with writing the sales letter to maximize its effectiveness: Something that I brought to the copywriting world (consumer direct-response techniques and long-form copywriting to be functional in the business-to-business arena).
Sending Autoresponder Emails
Once a prospect opts into the funnel, send the prospect an email using something like ActiveCampaign (an autoresponder). You route all autoresponder traffic to the /quiz page, and “pepper” leads with case studies and truncations of the sales letter throughout the week up until the two-week point or until the quiz action is completed on the /quiz page. Once prospects submit the quiz, you remove their contact from the opt-in cadence and add it to the demo-booked list within your autoresponder, only if prospects made it through to the demo-booked step (the next step in the funnel after the quiz). The emails are short and to the point: “Here is your requested asset:..”
Routing To A Quiz Page From The Sales Page
Once you send prospects through the opt-in and through to the sales page, you route them to a /quiz page where you qualify traffic further. This page serves somewhat like qualification that a salesperson would do on the phone, except instead of the salesperson qualifying manually, you are having the prospect qualify themselves using a quiz tool like Jotform to ask the questions and house the responses.
Embed the quiz directly onto the quiz page. Update the language of the quiz questions so that the prospect keeps momentum within the funnel. Save the name, email, and UTM params on the opt-in action in the temporary cookie and pass these values through to the Jotform when prospects land on the quiz page so that prospects don’t need to enter again their name and email into inputs as they go through the quiz…by pulling params down from the cookie before the quiz loads in the embed by appending the params to the URL in the iframe of the quiz on the load...Route the quiz responses to Slack in a “quiz channel” and into your CRM.
The quiz questions mirror qualification questions: “What is the current situation? What is the desired situation? What is the problem? Where did you come from? Contact information.” Immediately reach out to the prospect if they are fit by their quiz answers. In some cases, prospects may have spent ten minutes or more on the quiz answers and they are thinking about the solution when they submit their responses. Within the quiz, always ask from where the prospect came: “What content piece resonated with you the most?”, “Where did you first hear about us?”, “If someone referred you here, who was it?” You can use this information to piece together attribution patterns for later.
Routing To Calendar Page
Once you capture the quiz response, you route traffic to a calendar page where you can speak to the prospect one-on-one through call or video call. This is where you execute the sales call by running through a sales script. Update the name and email fields of the calendar page load in a similar way as you did with the questionnaire embed.
Calendar Thank-You Page
Once the appointment is booked, you route the prospect to a /thank-you page where you provide more content and more case studies to prime the prospect for the sales call. Ideally, the prospect spends at least six to seven hours interacting with content and funnel before you speak to them, and it’s sometimes useful to display the same video sales letter on the /thank-you page (the page after the calendar page) as you did on the sales page so prospects can watch it again.
Auxiliary Content
In some cases, the prospects will need to see at least three pieces of content located on the funnel in a blog index to help make a decision. The pieces of auxiliary content are just truncations of the sales letter that exist on the sales page, past the opt-in. So host three pieces of content on /{content-title} from /blog-index page on your funnel, and route these content pieces directly to the quiz page in the top right of the header menu.
In this link to the quiz from the content piece, append, “?blog-article={title of content piece}”. The link to the quiz page from the blog index would append, “?blog-article={blog-index}” to its URL. You can store these params in the local cookie and submit them in the Jotform in a similar way you did with the UTM params. There are tools like Oribi analytics (now www.fullstory.com) that do this too. I have used Oribi (when it was called Oribi) and liked it. With it, I could see how the prospect travelled through the funnel to the demo-booking event, but I didn’t have cash data along with the path which meant I couldn’t weigh the data, and since we are weighing the data with cash, we don’t need to use this tool during calibration.
Payment Processor Setup and Deposit Page
Ideally, you have hard money hit the account when you are running the advertising and campaign during calibration, so make sure you have ability to collect wires. Once you scale up, you can introduce some credit facility and gateway to increase conversion rates. You can also accept cheques. I also don’t mind wise.com either–wise.us was actually a customer at one point before they went public.
2. Finding The Entry Point
There are always new platforms that are being gobbled up by the incumbent. It’s up to you to find what platform and feature works best for your offer at the time your offer is relevant. If we use our noiseless terminal, we can successfully scan through the platforms and their features to determine what the best platform feature is at a point in time for our offer.
You run the campaigns in a “private environment”, outside the view of public search, where traffic is controlled. You don’t want the platforms determining what traffic to send to you yet, since that’s not really their job as a media auction. You want to “go to the media store and buy media, and make sure that the media bought is what they tell you it is”. The platform’s job is to glue consumers to their screens, not to give you the most profitable media buying advice. So we use the media buying platforms in a simple and specific manner:
Targeting Regions - First Local
Target only the smallest region you can to not invite competitors or attention to your test. Test where the population is only a few hundred or a few thousand, maximum. Contrary to what data scientists may tell you, you don’t actually need a massive sample size to get a signal since the apparatus used in this is so sensitive. Ideally, you only have one to ten people in your audience so you can saturate the audience with a message and can mark the tests complete, while updating the landing page and messaging “on the fly”. When you get the message right, you will know it, and you can determine that with a small budget and within only a few days.
Data handling or privacy requirements could vary across state and country lines. If you target multiple regions, you need to account for the complexities of managing multiple legal jurisdictions from the get-go, which makes the calibration instrument less sensitive. Start as local as you can. If you buy a list, or make a list, start with only the local entries in that list.
Running An Outbound Campaign Before Your Paid Campaign
Anchor any media buying in one-to-one outbound. If you ever get lost in the media buying, or something changes platform-wise, you can always refer back to the one-to-one outbound campaigning for recalibration. This is where a lot of media buyers will get confused: “What? I am supposed to buy media. Why would I run outbound?” Because media is just an extension of outbound. You will know in a matter of a few days whether or not the message is working, and testing one-to-one/directly with outbound reduces noise for little cost.
You are driving traffic to the Salesforce/Heroku page; the data isn’t telecasted and you calibrate messaging. You use something like Sendgrid with Close.io (sales enablement CRM) if you are emailing a list of prospects, and the Navigator if using LinkedIn, or both. Instead of sending many emails through Google or Microsoft, or through some other client wrapper, you send directly with Sendgrid using an isolated and dedicated IP address.
If you test with Google or Microsoft at initiation, again, those platforms could update public content in real time, which could cause dynamicity in your setup. You want to keep things relatively still - using Sendgrid for email pushing and Close.io for your inbox handling, and LinkedIn for outbound direct messages. If you are using a brand new email address, you may need to “warm it up” by sending a few emails to yourself and respond to them. However, we are not “spamming”, we are sending one to ten emails per day up to only thirty per day and looking for a fifty to eighty percent demo-booking/action-taking conversion rate from the cold message.
Routing To The Noiseless Terminal
When you are sending the outbound email or outbound LinkedIn message with Navigator, route to the noiseless terminal (Salesforce page) created in the first step of this process so you can track the resonance and adjust messaging quickly if needed. If you send the audience to a page that contains investor communications or something not what we designed as above describes, then you won’t be able to make the adjustments and get the angle required for you to scale the campaign in the next step (scale). It's not uncommon for a company to have a public page with investor updates perhaps hosted on something like Webflow or WordPress, however, if you route traffic to those “noisy” pages, you could 1) confuse investors and 2) create errors in your experiment.
Running The Campaign Yourself
It takes a few days for you to capture the data required to get resonance and you don’t run the campaign with others watching the feedback. You run it yourself since you pick up sensitive ratios only visible during initiation. If you do this properly, the return on your media when you start buying it will be astronomical since all you are doing is shovelling people into an outbound campaign that you have already validated, somewhat outside the scope of the auctions without deriving resonance at the expense of the campaign.
Don’t tell the public that you are marketing to an audience. You don’t need press; you don’t need to broadcast your specifics at this point. The less you telecast, the more likely you will be able to find the message resonance point immediately. In fact, the best campaigns I have run were run without a public presence. They ran in the “dark” or at arm's length from something that was already public. Once you have the campaign working, then you can let whoever you want know that it exists, but during this testing, your aim is to keep as many variables as you can still. Keeping this stillness could be the difference between getting the result in two days, and getting the result in years, or no result at all.
Notes On Previous Founders and Region “Ceilings”
Some founders may already have an exit “under their belt” and may already have at least five-million United States Dollars in investable assets and may want to do this. You will need to structure assets properly so that you can get past the invisible “thresholds” or "ceilings": Regions have different personal "invisible ceilings”, which may be ten-million United States Dollars or one-hundred-million United-States-Dollars (liquid) depending where you are. If you are in this camp, structure so you can run the test properly. The moment you get a positive result (resonance), the value of the business theoretically can jump quickly since you just found occupation between two publicly-traded companies.
Some ceilings may come from insurance tolerances that exist within your existing service providers: For example, a medical clinic, law firm, or accounting firm may only have two-million or five-million, or ten-million, or twenty-five million United States Dollars worth of downside insurance, and the second assets get over a certain amount in value, those service providers, believe it or not, without conscious involvement, may start working to keep you as a client and within the range of their coverage. This to manage with a new domestic or international setup or going over to London or certain places in America for certain services where the insurance caps are higher (sometimes one-hundred-million United States Dollars and more).
Selling Using A Script
On the sales call, you run through the script verbatim. Even if you know the script or know the prospect, you use the script so you can monitor feedback and make adjustments “on the fly”. You can’t scale sales without a sales script that can be given to a junior rep to execute. In general, you should do forty to fifty calls yourself to validate the script. Use Zoom or Skype to do the calls, and run the meetings in one-hour blocks. Have the script open while you are selling either on a separate monitor or on paper in front of you. Take notes directly in the Close.io CRM using the note function or using a notepad. Sell using ex-athletes and those who went to school for something. Don’t bring on folks initially who don’t have this background.
Some may say, “Don’t use a script. The script is for beginners.” Sure, fine. But keep in mind that every call is recorded and every word is recorded, and if once you are tired and “wing it”, that could cause a negative ripple effect. It’s best to just read the script and stick to it like a robot, especially when selling over the phone or with online demos. The training and management process is easy when reps are told to read the script: Training is handing the reps the script and getting them to recite it. Managing reps is just monitoring adherence to the script as reps are selling.
Your office will turn into “The Wolf of Wall Street” (you don’t want this) if you hire even one person without a university/college degree or friend. So keep an eye for this. Don’t hire a “Johnny Drama-type” to do sales, even though it may seem like a good idea, and because the system is so predictable. Just give your “Johnny Drama team guy” money if he asks and don’t talk about work–just lift weights with him and talk sport. You want the sales positions to be coveted so reps stick around, and hiring friends or “Johnny” will make doing that difficult.
Running Analysis and Updating The Script
You have a few things going for you at this point: you have a silent terminal with baked-in mirror-reversibility that allows you to pick up patterns. You also have a silent initial campaign if you keep the page from getting exposed to the public while testing with outbound. This means that the feedback data is actually close to prime data (truth/raw profitable data). You use the data to steer the message and the price of the offer to find the resonance point by tweaking one variable at a time while “moving” with outbound advances.
If you don’t have a silent terminal, you can’t steer the message or the price of the offer to find the most profitable state with any certainty. When you do the analysis, you look for the most cash and the fastest cash: Because the calibration instrument is so sensitive, you can interpret short-term cash movements as predictions for long-term movements–one of the benefits to having a sensitive cash antenna in the “dark”. When you are selling, you are updating the script as you go along, and you may update the VSL (video sales letter) as you go along too if that’s needed as determined by the rate at which leads submit questionnaire responses.
Using Chartmogul For Analysis
Run the campaign analysis while working inside the enterprise perimeter using something like a Chartmogul to aggregate the payment and campaign data. Chartmogul has an enterprise perimeter and it allows you to tie in financial data to it and tag revenue over time without getting into the expense column. Chartmogul integrates with payment gateways like Paypal and Stripe, and allows for a manual upload with a spreadsheet for handling wires.
You have created this isolated “bucket” that separates the marketing arm from the major platforms. You separated the banking from the advertising platforms using something like ChartMogul, and you found a unique message that leads to cash right away by steering messaging using ChartMogul as your compass–you found a pulse by spinning messaging around in a small and isolated environment using a container that can scale if you need it to as quickly as you need it to, while not doing much telemetry.
Validating Channel
Run the outbound campaign with email and then introduce LinkedIn outbound automation and some retargeting media buying. I’ve seen positive results from buying on LinkedIn and have experienced success with it almost always when outbound email was used prior. When you have a message that works in the outbound realm without telemetry, you can spin through audiences on any platform with a few dollars using identical-to-outbound-message ads and actually validate the best audience and feature for your offer.
Using Automation On LinkedIn
Use a tool to automate the prospecting on LinkedIn from your profile. This tool sends the first message, waits for the response or connect, then sends another message, routing to the funnel. Then on reply, routes folks to the calendar. Don’t route this traffic directly to the /quiz when you are doing this type of prospecting because it’s strange for someone to get an outbound message and then to be routed to a quiz. If you qualify within the LinkedIn chat, then send them directly to the /calendar page.
Meta vs. LinkedIn
I believe that Meta is as the inverse to LinkedIn messaging: In your Meta retargeting ads, you are “barking” at the audience and somewhat shaming them for being on Meta. You meet the audience where they are–if prospects are looking at open-channel communications, a shameful activity as far as an enterprise perimeter is concerned, then we match that in the messaging we collide with them.
To illustrate this point: On LinkedIn your advert reads, “Get the 10 Steps To ____ to Do ___ In {Industry}”. This routes to the opt-in page that provides that resource in email and on the sales page. In outbound, your message reads something similar. However, while retargeting on Meta, Google, or anything open-channel, your message could read literally anything and it will still work if used in combination with the direct outbound anchor we have already set.
Creating Retargeting Pools
Mind the retargeting pools on the consumer ad platforms: You upload a list of leads, a list of quizzes, a list of demos-booked, and a list of customers to the platform to target. When you market to the lists, you subtract the pools in the “next steps” of the funnel: For example, if you have a list of leads, you subtract pools of quizzes, demos-booked, and customers from your leads pool. If you have a list of quizzes, you subtract pools of demos-booked, and customers, etc…
Running Advertising Creative
If the funnel is working at the outbound level, you are simply running the headline at the advertising level that worked in outbound and “picking up” people as you would “pick them up” in an outbound environment, just with retargeting ads. Use the exact messaging you use at the outbound level at the retargeting ad level and within the retargeting campaign. There is no creativity required. Again, so long as you are using this setup and running coherent outbound direct campaigns, the advertising that follows the campaigns around can read anything, so don’t get hung up on making the “perfect ad.”
Solving For Golden Ratio
Meta helps you find the root ratio specific to a message and campaign, which is useful later on as you scale when buying on platforms other than Meta. You can use Slack events as an indicator and viewport during the early moments of the campaign to solve for this ratio. You will notice that some leads will be marked utm_source=”outbound” or utm_source=”meta”, but some leads will be marked with no UTM parameters for whatever reason. If we run only Meta retargeting alongside outbound traffic, then we know with high certainty that the untracked leads are from the retargeting campaign.
The Golden Ratio
Comparing “tracked” to “untracked” hints at the leakage ratio or the “gravity value” in the campaign. Without a noiseless setup, this ratio would be very expensive to see. With this ratio, you know precisely what the “slippage” is in general if you use Slack as the viewport. If the “gravity” of your funnel is high, then there will be few leads unmarked. If the “gravity” is low, then there will be many leads unmarked. This “gravity” value is used to approximate consumer attention as a function of direct inputs and is used to steer at scale. It’s the measure of how focused the prospect is when they encounter your message when they take action.
When you are scaling to ten-thousand United States Dollars per day or one-hundred-thousand United States Dollars per day, on any platform, even without Meta, you will have not much idea what is tracked and untracked, but you do know this “golden ratio” or “gravity” specific to your messaging and perimeter if you use this setup and watch for this ratio during initiation. With this, you can ramp up any cold campaigns while keeping retargeting spending controlled on any consumer platform without worrying too much as you spend. The age-old problem: “We know 50% of the marketing is wasted, but we don’t know which 50%” is sort of contained by understanding this ratio: You would know with certainty that the % untracked is the result of the tracked and only of the tracked, so it doesn’t matter if later on you can only see 50% tracked because you know the relationship between tracked and untracked–something that is underneath all media platforms. This approximates the amount of space the campaign has to scale. The Chartmogul viewport allows you to solve directions and messages at a granular level, and this Slack viewport allows you to solve for scaling room. This ratio is only visible within a few moments during the campaign and there is certainty in its value only if this type of setup is used and only if this type of procedure is used.
3. Scaling
Most of the scaling is simply “not touching things” and “not doing things”. You would be surprised how tempted you are to change, “fiddle with”, “involve”, etc… when a campaign is working. Perhaps you wish to offboard the media buying to someone who can keep an “eye on things”. You can, but the key is getting that offboard to “not touch anything” and not “blow out” the campaigns or involve complexity where it doesn’t need to be had.
For example, some may be tempted to “clone” a landing page or part of the funnel to vertically integrate functions into some other part of the stack. For example, I’ve seen customers attempt to integrate HubSpot landing pages into the direct-response funnel and consolidate funnel parts right away or before finishing calibration.
“HubSpot has opt-ins and landing pages; surely we can just use those, right?” Wrong for calibration. HubSpot is made for hosting inbound content and driving opt-ins and sales purely using an inbound marketing approach. There is nothing wrong with using Hubspot, but use it for how it’s intended. In my opinion–and I may actually be on my own here–but I believe that running content and organizing it the way Hubspot does is mostly for decoration during calibration.
HubSpot actually does what our container we made does in that it tracks UTM params, it assigns source data to deals, opportunities, and leads, and it allows for easy segmentation and remarketing. However, when using it, profit is no longer made at the campaign level since the enterprise perimeter is violated due to combining all the moving parts in a platform that scales by using an affiliate program, and we want to scale with affiliates, so why would be pass that over to HubSpot so willy-nilly?
With HubSpot, the profit is made at the treasury-movement level or banking level, somewhat perpendicular to whatever is going on in the HubSpot ecosystem. By using HubSpot data and the banking perimeter, one can move around treasury and still somehow get to profit…but you need treasury in the first place for it to work. That’s what we are doing here–building up the treasury with our Salesforce solution before involving Hubspot.
By the time you use HubSpot or need or want it, you may have your treasure chest full of capital, and you can swish around and grapple with HubSpot all you want until you are acquired. Using HubSpot may actually be the action that gets you acquired, so use it when you absolutely need to and no sooner.
On the other hand, if you choose to scale up the Salesforce perimeter to its limits, you “print cash” and you start running into issues like capital management and insurance tolerances. So the question really is: how much HubSpot do you want? Do you want lots? Okay, great, find the edge using this mechanism and “tidy everything up” in HubSpot and “call it a day” and go on vacation, and sell your company.
Do you want controlled cash and cash flow? Okay…run the Salesforce perimeter until you fill up your tanks. Could you staple on a Salesforce perimeter to a HubSpot and cause lift? Absolutely you can. Could you pedal off gas by using more Hubspot and cause stagnation or pause? Sure you can. For this purpose, we are going to focus on the Salesforce perimeter and not touch it to cause lift.
There are a few rules to scaling the campaign and putting pedal down until Hubspot comes into the conversation.
Don’t Change The Message Or The Tooling While Scaling
As you are buying more media and scaling, and as you are bringing in more sales reps (we will get to this shortly), you still use the message that worked in the small audience using the interface that worked for that small audience. Why? Because there is value to keeping a consistent message and the route of traffic.
For example, you might start by saying “Hello prospect, are you in Houston? Take the quiz here!” You run the ads in Houston and they work. Then you run the retargeting ads to those who engaged with the Houston ad. Makes sense, right? Right. Nothing out of the ordinary there. But then, as you expand to other regions, let’s say Nashville, you keep the Houston messaging…Why? Because the messaging is proven and everything down-funnel, including the product features, depends on that front-end messaging.
So even if you scale the ads worldwide, you still lead with the “Houston” ad. This is counterintuitive since you are letting the viewer do a bit of the work: “Wait, this is for Houston only; why am I seeing it?” says the viewer. Most media buyers will advocate for “personalization at scale”: “Oh! We need to personalize the message at scale!”; but uniqueness comes from the “absurdity” of the ad and the ad’s momentum and direction. With this rigidity, the meme becomes “alive”, and it starts to take on “a life of its own”, and somehow the viewer gets the message and the campaign remains one-of-one and profitable. Personalization at scale is really just mirror-reversibility, meaning the ad plays backwards and forwards coherently, and we have already tucked that property quietly into this design with our Heroku container contraption using the “PHP Hanky” at an electromagnetic level.
All you need to do is just hold on to the reins and scale the thing up, and not introduce other messaging or other technology. We are using Salesforce that scales as far as you would ever need something to scale. Personalization at scale is already baked into the source code if you use the Heroku perimeter with the PHP language. If anyone questions your campaign, you question their sanity: “Excuse me, are you questioning Salesforce? The very backbone of enterprise in general as the name suggests?”
Keeping Public Content To A Minimum
Podcasts
Don’t go on podcasts. Don’t do content. Hosts may reach out and invite you on shows to share your story. Do not go and/or entertain them. You are not a content creator or entertainer. You are a media buyer. If you need public channel content, you hire the best fashion models or actors to stand there and say nothing or say what needs to be said. If you get on podcasts and do public content, you interfere with the profitability of the initial campaigns, the outbound, and the advertising.
Another reason you don’t want to do much public content is because platforms like Google and other index platforms sometimes sort and serve by relevance and not necessarily location. Someone viewing your content could be a great fit for what you have, but you haven’t yet saturated your current regions with purposeful campaigns, so Google ends up pulling you thin, even though it looks like it’s giving you free customers: the free reach comes at the expense of profitability on the backend by forfeiting focus on a region. For example, you may not have the accounting infrastructure set up to sell aggressively into another country at the point in time Google demands you to through its recommendation, causing drag.
I once had a client who's teammate started doing well with the campaign and went on YouTube to do shows. What happened then was that media buying became a lot more difficult to contain and measure. Furthermore, by going on podcasts or shows, you may be endorsing a message that is not as clear as your paid traffic message–if there is something in the podcast that counters the paid traffic message, that could create more work for the prospect during research and more work for you to account for the change in the funnel.
Reddit, X, and Google
In some cases, there will be chatter on Reddit about your offer. In some cases, there may be chatter from your employees or contractors on these platforms. The only time I got feedback from Reddit was when I was recruiting more salespeople and marketing in consumer channels to hire those salespeople. Salespeople or candidates, as they are going through the application process, as you might imagine, may share their thoughts on Reddit. Don’t comment on Reddit or engage with consumers on that platform unless you are buying media on that platform. Make sure there is a way for customers to get feedback to and from you without talking to these other channels.
Furthermore, recall Reddit is an explicit content platform. Any customer influenced by Reddit may not be a customer for you. X can be used as a “telephone line” used to sell your solution, however, it’s not recommended to focus on X or pay much attention to either for the same reason as Reddit, unless you are buying on X.
Google is a consumer platform and is helpful for folks looking at consumer solutions; however, you don’t want to be optimizing for Google directly or pay much attention to it since, as mentioned, it can spread you thin by getting you in front of customers not in your direct target region at the point you want those customers. You can play nice with Google, by writing your content using a “triplet resonance pattern” in the writing–something Google and everyone else enjoys, and something we won’t get into here, but you don’t need to worry much about “ranking on Google” to get a high return on your buying.
Scaling With A Targeted Affiliate Team
You simply scale the campaign by onboarding a batch of prospectors to drive traffic to your funnel in a measurable and controllable way. You assign an affiliate ID to each of these reps, and you and your salesperson/salespeople take calls using the script you validated. All your prospectors are doing is going out to the networks in regions you define for them and sending people to the funnel you created using a unique link to your funnel that you made for for them. An affiliate can make up to ten-thousand United States Dollars per month by simply driving traffic to your funnel this way. You pay this affiliate a commission and just keep them accountable to doing daily inputs. If you make it really easy for them to make sales by just sending traffic using their link to your funnel, they will enjoy working for you.
Assigning Attribution To Affiliates
Since the affiliate ID is separate from the UTM params, this ID won’t get updated unless another affiliate knocks on the door of the prospect and that knock causes the prospect to take action (“last-touch”). You put the affiliates in a Slack community and have them compete with each other for status and bonuses.
If you don’t use this funnel design, some affiliates may say they work for the company or that they are a “Vice President”—perhaps they saw "The Wolf of Wall Street" too many times and think that saying that is a good idea. If you use the funnel we designed here, you can define the affiliate role to literally be only sending traffic to a single funnel endpoint you created. The affiliates don’t need to do much talking at all and don’t need to be a “Vice President” to make sales, and even prefer not to say anything more than they need to. The funnel does the work, and the affiliate just picks up the commission by implying, “I am an affiliate. Here is the funnel: {funnel}?ID={affiliateID}”.
You Can Only Scale Affiliates If You Have A Mirror-Reversible Funnel
Scaling affiliates is an incredible feeling. People show up and work for you for “free”, and bring you customers for “free”; however, this will only work if you follow the steps prior and you have a stellar funnel already complete with a video sales letter or sales letter crafted in a noiseless environment using enterprise-grade tooling. If you use such an affiliate strategy without maintaining the enterprise perimeter with something like the Salesforce container, you could end up in trouble. Trouble is what it looks like: you don’t keep an enterprise perimeter and find yourself in hot water since you can’t interpret funnel data for profitable use in the public markets (drive attention in the reverse direction for profit--what we can do if we keep enterprise perimeters). Instead, you need to exercise the funnel data insights in the niche alternative markets/crypto markets to keep profitable, which counters the public markets by undermining them–something you should seek to avoid while using public-market tooling.
Hiring A Remote Sales Force
Once you start generating leads and pipeline predictably, you bring on a sales force to manage more accounts and close more volume. If your funnel is made properly, and you started the campaign properly from start to finish, then you will likely be able to hire anyone you want for salespeople and those people will be successful. The affiliates will want to work as salespeople, and getting them to prospect first as an affiliate or partly as an affiliate, and to drive revenue is a good screen for the salesperson role: if the candidate cannot drive revenue or ship content and drive appointments, those candidates likely won’t be too eager to follow-up and close deals on behalf of the company. Once the rep has proven they can “play ball” and drive revenue, assign the salesperson a spot on the calendar and have them execute the script as they go along while you control the retargeting spends.
Caution: If you use this strategy, you will grow the business extremely quickly, so you need to make sure you have the right people and support in place from an accounting perspective and banking perspective. This isn’t just how to “scale your business” for scale’s sake, it’s how to scale profitably.
Using A.I. In Buying
The value of the platform’s functionality is in its ability to remember data and use it. You can create a memory on the buying platform and use of that memory will give you lift in your campaign: As your retargeting pools grow, you just spend more with “reach-heavy” campaigns (ratcheting up the retargeting frequency to its maximum to follow around the outbound campaign).
You don’t go to the platforms and ask them to “find people similar”. Even if that does work temporarily, you are risking a headache down the road because “similar” is an effect of the movement of the campaign and “similar based on some limited interpretation” is not reliable. Keep the platforms buying in “crystal-clear” pools by defining the pools manually by uploading your lists continually, and don’t give platforms much leeway for determining what “similar” means. Spend more on cold outbound and retargeting with identical-to-outbound ads using your golden ratio found in step two.
If platforms can maintain attention and serve ads where they tell us they are serving them, then these platforms are doing something really incredible and they deserve the advertising dollars. At the retargeting level, ideally, you can spend a few pennies, and get your message in front of someone who is already qualified, and who has already engaged somewhat with your brand through direct effort.
Reporting
Not only do we report what happened, we report our targets to Google Sheets and we use telemetry, if it were to ever accidentally exist inside Google Sheets, to our advantage–like a magic genie. All you are doing is reporting daily spend data, reach data, click data, opt-ins, questionnaires/quizzes from Slack, closed accounts, cash on the day, and revenue on the day. If you include the projection targets, you can see how far off you are from them and adjust actions accordingly.
You are inputting this data manually in the spreadsheet, not by using automation. Arcane, yes, but important. You go to the outbound CRM and search the number of cold emails sent, you look in the LinkedIn automation tool and look for a number of touchpoints and accepted requests. You go to the networks and look at the spend-per-day and clicks of that spend. You count the leads created and questionnaires that came in from the website.
You count the amount of follow-ups done by you or the sales team in the CRM with the smart views in your CRM. You glance at the email reply rate and click rate from the autoresponders and put those into a spreadsheet manually, then manually update the Speadsheet and ChartMogul when customers sign up. Go into the CRM and determine from where the customers came, what UTM params exist, if multiple sources exist, then determine what the path was according to the timing data, and update the source accordingly.
We are collecting real data in our campaign so we can scale profitably. You don’t want to just report on “closed”; you want to report on “closed” and “cash-collected” for your game-time steering.
Hire In-House Accounting Functionality
Bring the accounting functionality in-house as soon as you can so that when you are scaling, everything keeps relatively smooth. The first hire will likely be an administrator whose main job is working accounts receivable. Paying someone thirty to fifty United States Dollars per hour to do this is justified. The administrative function will also be in charge of tracking commissions and paying out commissions to the sales team and affiliate team, as well as general bill payments and bookkeeping with respect to the funnel. This role works in the CRM and maintains a spreadsheet.
If you use this system, you will be able to scale a campaign profitably.
Next Steps
Where some clients sometimes need help in this process is in the sales letter creation phase: matching the technology to the market in a symmetric way to get resonance at the product level. For example, AdvisorStream first went out to market with a “compliant content” angle. They bought premium licences and ported the licenced content to email newsletters (a great idea). However, what they didn’t see right away was that the content license that created the infinite value for the product to work was Reuters–Reuters has a unique property of a “golden share” governance mechanism that keeps the content independent, something that investors appreciate (investors don’t want bias communications when speaking about investing their money or building trust). I positioned for AdvisorStream their messaging and design of their features to emphasize the value creation too with their funnel creation.
If you need help executing this process of publishing your mechanism through a noiseless funnel while tuning the messaging of your technology so that it resonates, then reach out to inquire about working together.
Regards,
Nick Kozmin
CNBC Reference:
Salesprocess.io Press (Guest Expert): CNBC Article: "Despite Facebook’s struggles, one important contingent remains loyal" May 8 2019, 10:53 AM EDT