114. Easy 800% Revenue Boost That Entrepreneurs Overlook! HOW?!

0:00When it comes to your business, hoping for success just isn't enough. To grow and scale, you need a powerhouse sales funnel that transforms leads into loyal customers. Today's guest is an expert at this process, and she's going to guide us through the steps to take to craft a killer conversion-driven sales funnel. I'm Alex Freeman, and you're listening to The Uplit Podcast, where we uncover how great businesses are built, how they're run behind the scenes, and how you can replicate their success. Every week, we talk to a successful entrepreneur and learn their background and how they started and scaled their business.

0:30We'll also include a business section with resources, fan blitz questions directly from our YouTube community, and finish up with my three key takeaways from the episode. Today's guest, Alicia Conlon-Herd, is an expert in the post-click experience. Since starting Persuasion Experiences, she's launched more than 500 sales funnels across 120 niches and has built three marketing teams from scratch between her own business and her previous sales roles. In this episode, we're going to hear her insights into building the correct sales funnel for your business, how to generate that high quality traffic for a site, and how she's grown Persuasion Experiences from a side hustle into a seven-figure agency.

1:04Alicia, thank you so much for joining us on the show. Hey, Alex. Good to be here. So to get us started, can you give us an overview about what Persuasion Experiences is and when and why you started it? Okay. Well, I might start with the origin story because it kind of leads into what it is and why we started it. And where I started is in the fiery pits of cold calling and sales. And when I finished high school, I thought I was going to be a dentist, but I went into cold calling and I learn about this world of business, right? I come from this little tiny country town in Australia, 800 people. And pretty much all you find out is you can be a nurse or you can be a teacher.

1:44And that's the path that is laid out for you. And I'm sure that resonates for a lot of people. And so I started cold calling and I was selling electricity contracts. I never paid a bill in my life. And I was really good at it. And I was like, wow, what is this business thing? So instead of becoming a dentist, I went and did a Bachelor of Business in Event Management and Marketing, which was somewhat useless because it taught me zero about anything digital marketing. and luckily I worked in an agency full-time while doing uni and then I ended up in this agency in Australia called King Kong. I was one of the first employees.

2:19They're a huge agency now and I built out their sales funnel and CRO team, so conversion rate optimization team from scratch. And what happened was after several years of being there, by the time I was done, I had launched over 400 funnels and landing pages and offers. Everything from Brazilian butt lift doctors, porn addiction counselors, quit smoking hypnotists, heaps of weird stuff to normal stuff like billion dollar home builders and plumbers and everything in between. So after that, I went and worked in a company called Founder, built their team, launched seven and eight figure course funnels.

2:53But at the same time as doing this, my partner and I started something called Operation Freedom. And Operation Freedom was, how do we get out of this? I never thought I would run my own business but I became financially literate and started investing. And I realized to become financially freed, which was my goal now, this North Star metric, I would have to. So, we started the side hustle. Eventually, it overtook our main income. And then we just stopped making excuses. We shook hands over breakfast one day and we were like, F it, let's go and start something. So, that's the quick origin story.

3:29And then I can get into persuasion experience, but that's the origin story. I'm very curious about your clients because I think one of the things that's interesting, my understanding, you only take on two new clients a month. So talk to me about how you judge whether or not a client's going to be a good fit for you. Okay. And we've also gone through a journey of figuring out our market selection. And I know a lot of people are maybe just a couple of steps behind me and I don't want to understate how important it is to figure out that market selection. And it took us a while. So there's a few things that we did to figure it out.

4:01One was, do I enjoy working with them and can I get them results? Because I still work with our clients and I want that to be a factor. I want to enjoy my life because that is my work and my business. Then there is, is there a total addressable market big enough to find them? And then it is, do they have a pain that they actually understand and they're looking to solve the pain? So oftentimes I'll coach people and they're like, I've got this great idea. It's like about social corporate responsibility. I want to launch it in Dubai. And this is a real example. And she's talking about it. And I'm like, girl, this sounds awesome.

4:34Do they know that this is a problem that they have? And she's like, no, it's really hard to educate them. I was like, I personally would not go after that market because that's hard. I don't want it to be that hard. You can always come back to that market, but I'm optimizing for freedom. That is not going to give me freedom. And then there's a couple of others, but then the other one is, do they have the money and the propensity to pay. And so for us, when we were working out our clients, well, do the economics stack up to what we're doing? And that's a big reason why we moved out of e-commerce because there's not much margin.

5:07They can be doing 200, 500K a month, but that's not profit. That's revenue. And often there's not a lot of room for mistakes. E-commerce can often be quite first order thinking and what we're building. And this is why it works great for lead generation businesses because we're building infrastructure, right? We're building infrastructure that you can scale with. So talk to me about that process of building that infrastructure with a client. Like when you take on a new client, what are kind of those early steps that you take to either improve or build out their sales funnel? Yeah. So there's four phases that we take a client through.

5:39The first stage is the research phase. So this is where we're competitor hacking all of their competitors. We're seeing what we can swipe and deploy. We're seeing what noise we need to stand out from, that's important. Then the most important thing we're doing is figuring out who their target market is. Most people have never figured this out or they say, you know, women over 35 or businesses in Ohio, but that's not a person, that's descriptors. So we're in this research because it's the most important part, right? We are doing surveys to their existing customers to find out their language. Why did they buy and how can we put that into the marketing?

6:17We're doing third-party research on Amazon Books, reading the reviews on books. We're going to Trustpilot reviews. We're going to YouTube comments. We're going to Reddit forums, understanding the target market. And I know for a lot of people, the research part is unsexy, right? Because it takes time, but it's the only way to make money because marketing is inputs, outputs, and outcomes. So, at the research phase, it goes research, strategy, execution. If the research is cooked, that's like an Aussie thing for the F word. If you cook your research or you don't do it, you're putting garbage in, right?

6:52You're putting garbage into the start of your system and garbage in, garbage out. So, research is the number one thing that we do. Then we do the strategy, which is mapping out their funnel map. Okay, what is the lead to sales time? What are the different touch points someone's going to have? When it comes to a funnel, a funnel's not optional. It's just a funnel is just like every single touch point that somebody has with your business. And this is a big misconception people have. They think it's optional to make a funnel, but every business already has a funnel and each of these touch points are potential revenue leaks.

7:23And so what we see is the power when we start to plug these up and fix them, that makes a big outcome. The biggest thing we do though in this strategy phase, based on that research, is to create offers for our clients. Offers. So how are we going to persuade and motivate all of that attention, all of that traffic to take action? And then we execute. Then we do the copy and the design and the build and CRM stuff. And then we launch and then we keep running better ads. We keep optimizing the ads and we keep running CRO conversion rate optimization on their funnel. And that in a nutshell is our product offer, like our service offering.

7:55Listeners, we'll be back with this conversation with Alicia after we head you over into our business section. Do you want to grow your e-commerce side hustle big enough to quit your job? Then you're going to need to get the marketing, the buying, the promotions, the website, and so much more just right. On the e-commerce master plan podcast, you can learn how to do that from both real life e-commerce entrepreneurs and podcast host Chloe Thomas, who has 20 years of e-commerce experience and has written multiple bestsellers on the topic. Go on, start listening to the e-commerce master plan podcast today.

8:26Real quick, I wanted to take a moment and thank our loyal listener, Manavish. They recently reviewed our show and said, can't thank these podcasts enough for teaching me about analysis paralysis and making me actually take an action. Taking that first step towards starting your business is monumental, and we're honored to have been part of it. Return listeners, if you could take a moment to give us a share and a review, it helps us to reach more people who want to start and grow a successful business. We appreciate all of you. Let's get back to the show. So I guess one of the questions that this brings up for me is because if someone were to go out there and just like Google a sales funnel, like there are, you know, the more or less same phases of the sales funnel process and all of those things.

9:04And there's kind of the basics of a sales funnel. But then what you just described to me is so very hyper specific to the business. And so I'm just curious, like how much of what you're doing are like, these are the nuts and bolts basics of a sales funnel. And then this is how we translate those into actually what your business needs to be doing. Yes. So with a funnel, how we think about it is like a funnel for a business is in three phases. Now, of course, you're going to have other funnels like Leap Magnet funnels and other random funnels. But we think about it like this and we call it the persuasion experience.

9:39So that's why we called our company what we called our company. This is your persuasion experience as a business. And so they're in three stages. The first stage is attract, okay? And that's all of the touch points of when you get attention, when you get an ad, all the way to when you convert that into a lead, a lead ready to talk with you on the phone. And I'm talking lead gen here, not e-com. I'm talking you want leads for sales calls. So a big problem people have is they're brainwashed to believe that ads and more traffic is the thing that's going to save their business, but you can't scale traffic that doesn't convert.

10:11So in this attract phase, which is phase number one, this is where we're mapping out our lead generation system. So that's number one. Number two then is the convert phase. And the convert phase is the sales choreography to turn that lead into a buyer because these are different touch points. This is different conversation going on in the head. It's a different stage of the journey with your business. So we look at things here like what's your sales proposal? What's your script? What are the emails that go out? the pre-suede flow from the moment they book in to before they speak with you. These are all touch points we can control and optimize.

10:44That final stage, the third stage, is a stage called ascend. Ascend is, while we've got the customer, attract, we took attention and we turned it into a lead. Convert, we took a lead and we turned it into a sale. Then ascend, we are taking that asset that we've got of a customer and now how do we 2x or 3x or 10x the LTV? How do we get referrals? How do we get case studies? How do we make more money from our existing customer? That's that phase. And then we map that out for each traffic channel. So imagine that goes horizontally, vertically, then we look at every single traffic channel a client is running.

11:20And then we look at the entry points, typically convert and ascend are the same. And then those lead generation funnels will vary slightly based on the temperature of the traffic that we go after. Wow. I mean, so as I listened to that, I mean, there are just a million spots where that could go wrong. And it makes perfect sense why a company would, should, and probably must at some point, hire somebody to come in and look at their lead funnel and kind of help them answer these questions because it is so specific and so very important. But I'm curious for those that are just starting out with their business, let's stick with the lead generation example that doesn't yet have the funds to bring in a specialist to help them build out their sales funnel.

11:57Like what are the common mistakes that you're seeing people make in those early funnels for their business that they could and should avoid? So the biggest mistake in lead generation is neglecting having a lead generation offer. There's three different offers that you're making your lead generation funnel. One is what we call an authority beacon. So that's your lead magnet, but done properly. That's for colder traffic. It's how you build your list and you build pipeline. The second is your lead generation offer. So I'll talk to that in a second. And then your third one is your sales offer. That's what you present in front of somebody for them to become a customer.

12:31The thing about offers is that people forget is you need a lead before you can get a sale. And so when people are first starting out, they don't have anything exciting for someone to like warrant someone to actually want to talk to them. And I see it in cold outreach. I see it on LinkedIn. I see it in websites. When somebody looks at your marketing collateral, they're going to think, so what? Who cares? What's in it for me? Right? And so that's the same, especially for this lead gen. And so what a lot of people do with this offer, and an offer is just something that motivates and persuades someone to take action.

13:06That next micro step with you is they'll have something like get a quote, speak with us, chat to sales. And that stinks like a sales call and there's no value baked into that. Why would I spend time to talk to you? What am I going to get out of it? What's in it for me? And so the two biggest things when we're coaching, especially early on agency owners and early on businesses, is to get that lead offer down pat, to train themselves in sales, and then to start building themselves up as an authority and not be a commodity because that compounds over time. It takes time. But if you can have those down pat and then have like just one or two channels that you absolutely nail, that is how you get started with your business.

13:43Alicia, I want to ask a little bit more about AI and automation in particular, and just kind of how it best fits into the sales funnel process. Like what are the correct places to be using automation and where are some of the places that you're like, no, this probably should be a manual process. So that's the thing. AI can't replace not everything, right? Because you need human interaction at some point. But where I find automations and or AI really helpful is where you are doing something repeatably through manual labor and it can be automated. So I always think of that Tim Ferriss automate, eliminate, delegate.

14:19And that's how we screen everything when we do a process post-mortem every month or every quarter. And so the best way to use AI or automation is like if you keep sending out the same email again and again and you have to think about how to write it and you're kind of writing the same thing, that should be automated. But if you're having a sales call to close somebody, and I'm using extreme examples, but if you need to like use something human where a human needs to think about it and be creative, then that's often where you can't automate it. And so, especially in that sales lead process, you can kind of think of the automation and the AI as like an appointment setup or an assistant to do a lot of those menial tasks to keep you in your genius zone.

14:58And there's a lot of ways to go next level, but most people are not at that stage. Talk to me about how paid advertising factors into all of this and what advice you can offer to getting the best return on an advertising investment. So how does paid advertising fit into all of this? Well, at a very high level, if we think about a channel strategy, you want to have a diversified channel strategy. And you do not want to have an over-reliance on your paid media, on your traffic channels. Because one algorithm change and you are up shit creek basically. And I'm beating companies where that has happened.

15:33So, at a high level, if we think about how do we diversify our channel strategy, we have inbound. So, content, ads, whatever. Anyway, someone finds you. We have outbound and we have strategic partnerships. So, those are ways that we can go, okay, I know I need to have different diversified channels in here. But the way to get the most out of your paid traffic is to remember that your paid traffic, it's worthless unless it converts. So getting the click is just the first step of the job. And it's everything that happens post-click that's going to make you money. And the way that you convert that traffic is through strong funnels, through strong landing pages, and through strong offers and figuring out what's going to persuade and motivate that traffic, that person, that click to actually take the step that you want them to take.

16:17Talk to me about the Persuasion Experiences team. How big of a team are you working with now in year three of the company? Yes. So, it was our birthday in January. Happy birthday, us. Happy birthday. Congratulations. Thank you. I was definitely fishing. So, what does our team look like? One of the biggest things that we're making sure is that we don't equate team members with success. And I see a lot of agencies do this. But what a lot of agencies do is they scale and scale and scale and they start to realize that the profits, it's their take home that they were doing at 50K or 100K a month. They're actually doing less at 200, 500K because they haven't scaled properly or profitably.

16:54And they've added more and more people into this agency and it's no longer profitable. So, we know our numbers inside and out. I know exactly how much I want to take home this year. I know how to get there. And if I follow my game plan without shiny objects in Durham, I should get there. So, who's in our team? There's myself, There's my co-founder. We have four internal team members. I have an amazing EA who is a very recent hire and I wish I did it earlier. We're very bullish on our content. So, we have somebody who manages our content and then we have two internal and say they're like they can do account management, they're media buyers, they're like full stack marketers.

17:30And then we have a team of contractors and that allows us to not have overheads all of the time and our team overheads are low, and then we can pull in contractors for specific parts as we need them. So this is going to bring us to a section of our show that we call our Fan Blitz Questions. These questions come from our YouTube community. Listeners, you can head over to youtube.com slash upflip and pose questions to future podcast guests. Alicia, we get a lot of questions for you from our listeners. So we're going to run through these real quick. Some of them you sort of touched on already, but if we could get maybe a 10 second recap of what it was, let's do it.

18:05All right. Are you ready? Is it? All right. First one from FLVFLV4712. The necessary skills to opening up a media agency. The necessary skills to opening up a media agency. Being good at hiring, being good at sales, being good at client retention. That's it. You don't even have to know how to do the thing. I don't do media buying. I'm just really good at hiring. So you need to know, like any business owner, once you get into business, the skills you need to have is how to market your business and how to sell. And then in an agency, the most important thing is retaining clients. So having a great fulfillment system where your North Star metric is case studies and every single client should turn into a case study.

18:45So you'll retain them. They'll refer you more work and that case study becomes an asset for leverage. This one from low BVLL8969. What made you take the leap into marketing? So I probably touched on that because I was going to be a dentist because I thought like healthcare, duh, let's do that. And then I did the cold calling and I was like, wow, business. What is business? Then I did a degree. I took up every single opportunity that my uni had because I found my degree somewhat lackluster. So I kind of thought opportunities were the only way. And what I was really drawn to about marketing, I think was the psychology behind it and understanding people and then the economics where you could see results straight away.

19:26And that's definitely what's kept me in it. Morris4324 wants to know, how do you actually help the client get sales? So good question, because that's the thing with a lot of agencies is they'll give you leads maybe, or maybe sometimes it's just clicks and impressions and then go, cool, good luck with that. We got you leads. Our job here is done. But what we're doing is we're tracking all the way through to revenue. So that means that instead of optimizing for leads, we're actually optimizing all of our campaigns for buyers. On top of that, I review all of our clients' sales processes and give optimization tips.

19:59Some of them require a bit more coaching than others. And we also have a sales sprint program. So we have a lot of programs and as being part of our clients, people get access to all of our paid courses as part of being an agency client. Misha Bilichak wants to know about your pricing model. How does it work? Is it based on number of leads, subscription, success rate, et cetera? Great question. And the agency, There's a lot of different ways to do agency pricing. So one thing is if anyone's doing hourly, stop that right now. Do not do hourly. You want to be doing based on the value of the work you provide and the outcome that you provide.

20:33So the way that we do it is there's a project fee. Then there's three different projects, which just based on the size of the problem, they're just different levels of a full system. And that can range from 5K up to about 30K. And then there's the management afterwards. So we have a flat fee for management up to a certain amount of ad spend being 20K, at which point it then moves to a percentage of ad spend because there's a lot more work involved on the account then. Paulius Bagdanovicius6433 is asking about the differences in a sales funnel between leads for something that is on the high end of cost versus the low end of items or services.

21:11Yes, great question. that's a different decision time often, but it also depends on the sophistication of the market and how much education they need. And then also this depends on the education they need and then depends on the stage of the buyer's journey. So where are you finding the person and where are you bringing them into your funnel? So a funnel for a funny dog toy is going to be very short. It's pretty much just like click here, buy. But a funnel for a$30 ,000 business coach is going to require more touch points. And if we think about what is a funnel, your job is just to map out what those touch points are, what are the false beliefs, what are the objections, and what are the different proof points you need to inject in there to nurture somebody from where they are now to becoming the lead and becoming the sale.

21:57Bono Percussion is asking, how are you utilizing AI in the lead gen sales funnel process? Lots. Before I tell you, YouTube person, I'm going to say this one disclaimer, and that is AI will not save your business, okay? AI is a rocket fuel. AI is not a life raft. And so how we think about marketing and the business is in our PX equation, psychology, so understanding your market plus economics, knowing your numbers times technology. AI is technology. It's an accelerator and 1 ,000 times zero is still zero. So I know it's not popular because AI is a very sexy topic, but you need to have your foundations down first.

22:37then you can accelerate with AI. We're using it everywhere to accelerate our processes and we want to keep a very lean team. So we use AI in our copywriting. We've trained up chat GPT4 to talk like the Wolf of Wall Street, Jordan Belford, and it's very funny. And we work with that bot. We use AI in our cold outreach process to do personalized videos in our cold email. We use AI in our fulfillment. Yeah, we're using it everywhere, but we didn't inject it until we knew that it was going to accelerate something, not cause more of a headache. Last one of our fan blitz questions here from The Rowell.

23:13What are your best networking tips? So this can depend whether you're an introvert or an extrovert. And so this is not relatable to a lot of people, but I'm 98 % extroverted. So my tip is go to parties and networking and have fun, but that's not for everybody. What I've found really helpful, and this also helps for my friends who are a bit more introverted is to reach out to people for coffee catch-ups, right? So maybe you're on LinkedIn, maybe you're on Instagram, and just reach out and try and have three of those a week. And that will compound over time. If you happen to be at a networking event and you really struggle to make a conversation, just keep asking the person questions.