Kim Walsh Phillips
Kim Walsh Phillips is an award-winning speaker, author, podcaster and CEO of Elite Digital Group, a direct-response social media agency. Her best selling book No B.S. Guide to Direct Response Social Media Marketing: The Ultimate No Holds Barred Guide to Producing Measurable, Monetizable Results with Social Media Marketing, co-authored with Dan Kennedy.
So, this contact form came into my office and at first I thought: Is this a scam? Like, is the next email I’m going to get asking me to wire thousands of dollars to a Nigerian prince? I was pretty sure that’s the path it was going down.
But I researched the company and it ended up being Etisalat, which is number 312 on the global GDP. They had sent a contact us form to request for me to go and speak to them and do consulting work for their corporate
staff at their company in Dubai.
Now to be frank, the thing that I was most excited about with this request should have been the company. It probably should have been their incredible wealth and reach and power, but this is what I was most excited about:
Recognize this commercial for Emirates? Well, Jennifer Aniston had given me the desire, the hunger to go on a plane, one that would be so enjoyable that I’d want to never get off, right?
As a traveler I thought: This has got to be something to experience. She’s on this commercial, right? She’s showering on the plane. That still was not something I ever could get into, but it seemed like an incredible experience. I thought: I could actually fly on Emirates Air, like have a reason to do this.
So, I was excited.
And so we did go. I got to go to Dubai. The day before I accepted the contract, I named my husband the chief financial officer so he would have to come with me.
It was an incredible experience. We got to go to the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, and have a meal at Atmosphere Tasting Menu. It was one of the most incredible dining experiences of my life, and it was so good that I didn’t do the conversion on how much it cost us at the end to US dollars because I didn’t want to know.
Then it was on the plane ride home that I started to cry. Here we were in this incredible—business class—on this incredible flight in complete and utter luxury and it was completely different than what my life was like just a few years before that. This never would have been possible before.
We were broke. Ten years of running my business and the only way that I made things work was to overdraw my bank account. Time after time, payroll would be made by going into the negative. And I would wake up every night for ten years at three o’clock in the morning just to see what checks had bounced and what my overdraft would be and who I was going to have to apologize to and what client I could go ask to pay early and what deal I could take to make it work.
My business was like a house of cards. And it wasn’t until I finally had to change. You see, for a very long time, I was a hamster on a wheel. I worked all of the time and yet I was completely broke. And I’ve got to tell you, there are a lot more fun ways to be completely broke than working all of the time.
I would go to networking events. I would answer RFPs. I would do what I saw all the other successful agencies doing and I thought that’s what I was supposed to do. But I would need to get business, I would have to fill it in and I would take jobs that wouldn’t pay us and this would happen over and over again until something big in my life happened:
This is my daughter, Bella. And when Bella was born she was colicky. If any of you non-parents want to know what that means, it means she cried all of the time. But I finally figured out that if I swaddled Bella, meaning I put her in a blanket wrapped up, and I put her in the pack and play and I shoved it against the refrigerator, it would vibrate a little bit and it would get her to sleep.
So she’s sleeping and I go around and start doing, you know, adulting. I’m cleaning things up. I’m going through our mail and I got a letter from my bank. It’s hand-addressed to me and I think my bank manager is sending me congratulations for the new baby. You probably can guess where this story was going.
That’s not what he had to say, he was telling me that the bank had been sold and they weren’t going to cover my overdraft anymore, that the next time I presented a negative check, my account would be shut down.
So here I am, faced against one of the darkest moments of my life, just after having one of the best moments, but it was forcing me to do something different. I don’t know about you, but I think sometimes that worst, darkest moment that’s forcing us to take a different path is a good thing because if we weren’t forced, we wouldn’t do it.
Even though I’d been tortured for ten years, I probably would have kept going with what I had been doing just because nothing was forcing me to change.
And so I had to do something different because I couldn’t go out and hustle, I couldn’t go to that networking event, I had my daughter to take care of. I couldn’t write that check that was going to overdraw my account because my bank wouldn’t let me do that anymore. I had to find another way.
I had to find a way to grow my business, to get new clients, that wasn’t going to cost me money, put me deeper in debt and was going to allow me to get more qualified clients who would pay us what we were actually worth.
And then finally things took off. Finally I found a way to have clients come in without spending money to get them. Finally I found a way to have customers with lots of cash in hand ready to do business with us. Finally I found a way to support my business.
Some of the great clients I’ve been able to work with are:
- Mr. Dan Kennedy, GKIC
- Shaun Buck, Newsletter Pro
- Robin Robins, Technology Marketing Toolkit
- Mike Michalowicz, Profit First Professionals, incredible book if you haven’t read it before: Pro It First: How to Make Pro It Into Your Company
- Then we have Josh Turner, LinkedSelling
- Kevin O’Leary from Shark Tank
That all came about because of this ability to drive profitable marketing.
I’m also a best-selling author. Some of my books are:
- The No BS Guide to Direct Response Social Media Marketing with Dan Kennedy.
- The Ultimate Guide to Instagram for Business
- The most recent best-seller, Game Changer: How to Get 10,000 Fans in 72 Hours and Turn Them Into Your Next Cash Paying Customer
But the biggest deal is this: That we were able to generate $1.1 million last year as side income.
You know, when I first started this journey, I just needed an extra $3000/ month to cover our business expenses. Like if I just got $3000 more a month, I could pay the rent, I could pay our internet bill, I could pay the few things that were our expenses and I wouldn’t have to worry anymore. I could go after clients who could pay us what we were worth.
And that has grown over time so that we brought in $1.1 million in addition to our client revenue and I’m going to show you how you can do that too.
The thing is, for so long I was running so hard thinking I needed to find a way to run harder and faster. I needed better sneakers. I had to go longer. The thing was, I was on the wrong path. That was the problem that we had.
Sometimes you’re running so hard up this difficult path, rocky terrain, it is hard. And what you don’t see is that right next to you, there’s a smoother, easier way that you should be going on that will actually get you to your destination.
I want you to think about this: Is it time for you to choose a new path? I’m a woman of faith and I know I went through that dark time just so I would have the opportunity to be on stages like this to share this message with you right now that you are not in here by accident, you came to hear me talk today with a purpose and that was to hear this and to believe it to be true and that you were made to thrive.
No matter if anyone ever told you different: A parent, a coworker, a boss,
a friend, they were wrong. You were made to thrive. It’s not supposed to be hard. It’s not supposed to be torture. It’s not supposed to be constant sacrifice. You are meant to prosper and profit. You were made to thrive. You have value and you deserve to be paid for it.
This is from a book of wisdom that I believe in and it says:
Now to the one who works, his wages are not counted as gifts but his due. We are meant to be paid for our work.
So, you’re going to stay with me right now no matter how cheesy it might feel. I’ll say it once and then you’re going to repeat with me: If it’s not going to get me results, I am not going to do it.
Because you are meant to spend every minute of your day, every dollar out of your pocket, every ounce of your talent and energy getting a return on investment. The things that have been wasting those for you need to stop immediately. Immediately.
Well here’s what you’re going to discover today: how to eliminate marketing and advertising costs and instead get paid to get new clients.
You’re going to discover the one tool every business needs in order to have the maximum amount of ideal prospects and a super simple way to close more sales, get more repeat business and tons of referrals, and the only place where you can literally turn your marketing from an expense to a profit center.
Let me start by telling you a story. This is what dating in South Florida was like for me, this picture right here:
For a long time, this is who I would go out with. This very pretty boy who really loved himself, like a lot. We would spend the night hearing about his life and the only question he would ask me is: Why did you go out with me? Which is really more about him, right? So that was one type of guy.
The other type of guy was this one that on the first date he’s asking me: “How many kids do you want to have? Our parents should meet each other.” Like he’s ready to get married when we haven’t even gotten to know each other.
You know what though? As businesses, that’s usually who we are. We’re either making it all about us or we’re trying to get too serious way too fast, and that’s how most people screw up their marketing and filling their sales pipeline. They don’t understand that it’s like a customer courtship.
I want you to start thinking about the way that you drive people into your sales funnel, the way that you convert a lead into a sale is just like dating.
- We have to attract them
- We have to engage them
- Then it’s time to ask them for something
- Then you want to continue to upsell
- You want to keep them and not lose them
Think of it like a relationship. Way too many businesses stick around number one. They skip number two and they go right to number three and they never go through the rest of the relationship. That’s why there’s no profit, right?
Because your profit comes once you pull them in, you continue to keep them and grow them into a high-value raving fan.
So we’re going to go through how to do speed-dating now because we don’t want to take forever to go from prospect to marriage, right? We want to go quickly through the funnel so we’re going to do speed-dating for profit.
We’re going to go through the three-day date funnel. We’re going to take our leads from not knowing anything about us to a profitable customer in three days.
Step one is to fill your sales pipeline with a campaign that pays for itself. So here’s Dave D. Some of you may know him. He’s a sales and marketing consultant who worked for somebody else for a few years, you guys might know GKIC.
He went to work for them for a few years, and then he went back out on his own and what he found was, his list wasn’t responding to him anymore and we had to grow his list.
Now, the problem is, Dave didn’t have a big budget. He didn’t have the budget of Pepsi or American Express. He was worried about wasting money. He needed his marketing to give him a return, meaning that every dollar he put down, he needed for it to bring back at least $1.25.
What he launched was what we call a social media cash machine. It’s one that as you’re getting your leads in, it’s paying for you.
This image may be like what’s up with the golden egg. The benefit of running an actual agency is we have clients who spend a lot of money on Facebook and they test out different images to let us know what works.
This golden egg works all of the time in many different industries. Why, I don’t know and it doesn’t matter. Just the next time you’re running an ad campaign, test a golden egg. This image is right inside Facebook’s ads manager as one of the free stock photos you can use so it’s there, you can use it and it works. That’s just an inside secret.
This ad is promoting what we call a juicy carrot. Now why a juicy carrot? When it comes to filling your sales pipeline, I want you to think outside of normal marketing.
Normal marketing is: You go to an event, you meet someone and you follow up or you get a referral. That’s one-on-one. When it comes to Facebook marketing, you want to scale. You want it to grow and multiply.
Now what animal loves to multiply? Those cute little baby bunnies, so that’s why we’re doing a juicy carrot so we can attract those bunnies in, they take a bite out of it.
Now your juicy carrot should be so good that if it weren’t free, people would pay for it. But it is free, you’re just going to get their contact information.
This could be a template, a checklist, a blueprint, a video series, a webinar, an event, a coupon code, a sweepstakes. They all make great juicy carrots.
In Dave’s case, he’s promoting his free seven-figure sales presentation template as step one. Then people go to the landing page and then they go to the Thank You page of the landing page.
Now most businesses on this page would say: Thank you for downloading the free report or thanks for your information. Check your email.
If you do that, you are leaving a ton of money on the table and you’re not helping your prospect because your prospect just raised their hand and said, “I have a problem. I think you can solve it. I trust you enough to give you my contact information. Now it’s time for you to do something else for me.”
So, do something else for them! Give them an opportunity to buy something from you or immediately book a consultation because you have them on
the hook. If you sell something here, not only are you going to be able to fund your marketing, but you are getting all of their real contact information because in order to enter their credit card, they need to give you their phone number, their mailing address.
They’re going to give you their real email address because they just purchased something, so that fake email they just gave you, it’s going to now go to the real one because they’re now a customer. So you have a much more qualified lead and you can fund your marketing.
The results for Dave have been officially amazing.
- He brought in 2,200 downloads of the template
- He spent $7,000
- He brought in $9,000
- Net cost for $2,210 new leads: $0
- Profit generated: $1,764
Is that life-changing? No, but wouldn’t you like to fill your leads, bring 2,200 new people on your list, fill your sales pipeline, and make money instead of spending money?
Exactly. That’s the difference. This is the game-changer because now you’re filling your sales pipeline at a profit and as soon as you can do that, the sky is the limit. Now you don’t have a marketing budget, you have a social media cash machine.
It’s a very different way to market your business. This is your game-changer. This is your competitive advantage. You know, one of my mentors, Dan Kennedy, always said, “The one who can spend the most wins.” This lets you spend the most because now you’re paying for your marketing with your marketing.
Step two is: You want to turn your leads into cash-paying raving fans. We bring them in with step one as something that pays us and then we need to turn them into a cash-paying fan.
So, like Mr. O’Leary says, “Show me the numbers.” We’re going to go through the numbers. Before any contracts are signed, before we bring a single client in the door, the funnel I’m about to show you has a 521% ROI. That’s pre-client contract. Okay? We’ll go through the full thing.
There are different levels of influence when it comes to doing your marketing.
Sales
The first one is: You tell someone you’re great, right? If I got up here and said: I am the best Facebook marketer in the world, which I do believe, but if I was to say that, that’s me telling you I’m great, right? That really is not believable in any way. In fact, studies have shown when we tell other people we’re great, only 14% of people believe us, so that’s not really worthwhile, which is why I don’t start my talks that way.
Referrals
Then you have the other thing, right? Someone else tells someone you’re great. I have a bunch of our clients and customers in here. If they were to come up and say: “Kim is great,” that’s a little more believable because it’s someone else saying it, but still you’re like: Is she paying them? What did she really do for them? Not much more believable.
Demonstration
Then we get into the: I demonstrate that I’m great. And this would be that if I ran a campaign before you live, that would be showing you a demonstration of me being great because you would see: She not only says she knows what she can do, she’s showing us what she can do.
Validation
But the ultimate is the final one. If you can get your customers to see that they’re great, that is the secret to your game-changer, because now it doesn’t matter about you, right? We talk a lot about the whole hero thing. They’re now the hero because they can do it so they now see not only is it possible, but you’re going to lead them on a path to allow them to do something that’s possible. That is a game-changer.
What we do in our funnel is, and my ads have probably harassed you at one time or another, we teach people how to get 10,000 fans in 72 hours and turn them into cash-paying customers.
We do that through a three-day live training. I show them step-by-step, live, how to get 10,000 Facebook fans for less than a hundred dollars, they’re about a penny a piece, and they do it with me. So, it’s a live workshop. Every day we check in with them, they come back on and they’re having success.
For some of these people who attend, this is the first time in the history of doing marketing that they did something and had an immediate ROI, like the first time. Now they’re believing in: This is possible. What Kim tells me works. I think I could do this. I’m now seeing an ROI, I want to keep going. We’re bringing this in and letting them not only see it but feel it and touch it.
Have you ever seen one of those knife demonstrations? They always get someone to touch the knife and start chopping. There’s something about doing it yourself that makes you so much more a believer than anything else you can possibly teach.
Step one was the ad. Then they go to a landing page where they opt-in. This page gets about 40% opt-in. I know its meta because I’m advertising on Facebook something about Facebook, so alter your numbers a little bit accordingly.
Then they go to the landing page where my profit center is our webinar recordings. Your thing that you sell doesn’t have to start super-complicated. We are just selling the recording of the webinar on the Thank You page, that’s my profit generator.
And then on the Thank You page for that, we give a free trial offer to our membership group of Powerful Professionals. They go from webinar opt- in to you can buy the recordings and now you can take a free trial into our membership.
This is what the funnel really looks like.
This is how this funnel works so you get all the real numbers.
Step one: 41% of people opt-in on the landing page and it costs us about
$3.37 per opt-in. This is totally cold traffic by the way. This is not affiliates, this is not our list, this is 100% cold.
12% of them take the webinar recordings and they buy them for between $7 and $17 dollars, depending on when they come in (we give them different times that they can buy it.
18% of those convert into a trial membership at $100/month. That’s how those numbers work.
Then, the way that this works is: They come on with me live three days. During that time, so 41% came in, 6% overall converted to a membership, 12-22% show up.
Our show up rate is the thing that we work on all the time. We recently instituted a text reminder, which definitely improved our show-up, it brought it way up so I highly recommend those.
2.3 % of everyone who opts in buys a $1,000 course that we have. That’s our lead generation funnel right there and that’s how those numbers play out.
These are some fun facts about this…
We’re number obsessed and we look at everything and one of the things we found was webinar recordings were really vital to making this profitable.
Those that buy the recordings are so much more likely to buy the course and become a client, which may be counterintuitive, but I’m going to show you that too.
Our best clients last year came through this funnel. I’m going to show you that. This is not just information marketing, this is client generation. We made
$40,000 just on that $7 recording.
2% of the people who attended but didn’t buy the recordings bought the program, but 11% who attended and bought the recordings bought the program and 4.75% who never attended live but bought the recordings bought the program. Buying the recordings became super, super important.
Here are the numbers: From July 1st to January 31st, we brought in 36,000 leads, 949 new members. Our cost per lead was $3.37 and our lifetime value so far for each one of those leads is $17.80.
In about six months we brought in $652,000 in revenue before the contracts are signed. Before we started doing the work, 521% ROI.
These are just a few of the clients that came in through our 10,000 Fans campaign. If you’re thinking, “We can’t do that,” yes you can because now when someone gets on a prospect call with you, they are incredibly qualified because they see you as the guru, they know what you do works, and they’ve committed time to learning how you operate.
These are the most compliant, easy to work with, profitable clients we can bring on because they all came in through a funnel that makes us money and gets us compliance from seeing us as the guru.
The Parent Company, they do a baby pillow that’s a breathable pillow for infants. Florida Professional Driving School, they have millions of people who buy a course every year because in Florida you have to take a course online before you can get your driver’s license, they sell those. Life Credit, it’s a multi-billion dollar insurance company. Flooring Success Systems, multi- million dollar flooring agency. 5PALMS is the only outpatient rehab center in
multi-counties in Florida. All of these clients came to us. I did not know them. They just came through this funnel.
They bought the course, went through the 10,000 Fans and then became a very high-level client. This is the revenue generated so far from those clients.
Obviously, it keeps going, it doesn’t stop there so that it continues to mean profit and before we start working with them we’ve already profited from the account though, which is amazing.
Some Funnel Secrets…
You want to deliver a quick win. This is really the secret to the three-day date funnel. It can’t be theoretical. You can’t be telling them about how things can work, you have to get them to see it does.
That’s the big thing, it needs to provide a very quick win. You want to prove that it works and show them that they can do it. This is really important. This is the big difference. Now, some of you might think: Yeah, but I’m the guru, why would I show them how they can do it? You’re just doing the first step, or just one piece. You’re not showing them all of it. You’re doing this one piece prior to getting them in as a customer.
Then the live classes are huge because I can engage in question and answer with people. I can celebrate their wins because on Day 2 they’re all jumping on there and saying how many fans they got and they’re super excited and that makes a big difference.
But it could be a hindrance too because most people don’t want to get on live. I actually do it four days a week every single week, but weeks like this where I’m talking to you and I can’t do it, we use Evergreen, so there’s other ways to do it too, but I do get on live whenever we’re not traveling and I can.
Email and follow up promotions account for another 1.8% of all those that come into the funnel to convert to profit. Following up is really important. Too many businesses when they get the lead in, that’s it. No, you want to continually follow up to turn them into a customer and a client.
Testimonials are super important. We have them in along every step of the way. Every time we get a testimonial now, it goes into our Dropbox so we can pull from them all the time, update them, and I share those testimonials every single day when I’m teaching.
In review, it doesn’t take money to make money. There is no better time to be marketing on Facebook and you can get paid to generate clients.
This is the deal: Most people don’t operate in a way that demands ROI from every minute of their day, but you know different now. You were made to thrive, so ensure that every second of your day and every dollar you spend gives you an ROI.
- The No BS Guide to Direct Response Social Media Marketing by Kim Walsh-Phillips & Dan Kennedy
- The Ultimate Guide to Instagram for Business by Kim Walsh-Phillips
- Game Changer: How to Get 10,000 Fans in 72 Hours and Turn Them Into Your Next Cash Paying Customer by Kim Walsh-Phillips
- First: How to Make Pro it Into Your Company by Mike Michalowicz
- www.tc10kfans.com