Articles

5 minutes... That is how long I spend working on a podcast or blog after the recording and writing is done. 
Everything else is 100% systematized. 

I don't touch my email marketing software.
I don't touch my website.
All I do is create the content, and the rest just happens.

The month was March of 2018.
I had just laid off 6 people from Lead Cookie.
Lead Cookie had racked up $22,000 of credit card debt.
And for the next two months, I wasn't going to be getting paid.

I picked up a copy of the book called The One Thing by Gary Keller. 
And the opening line changed me.

"If you chase two rabbits, you will not catch either one." - Russian Proverb

There is a habit that my team has done on a weekly basis for over three years now.   

We did this even before Lead Cookie existed when it was just myself and my ops director.

This habit has been a complete game changer for our business.

It's called Workshop.

Failure. It fucking sucks. 

In November, I started up a business in stealth mode that would eventually become Content Allies. I signed a few early customers in stealth mode, and then publicly launched the company at the start of January.

The problem I was aiming to solve was one I experienced myself.

At Lead Cookie and Content Allies, we have a team of over 20 virtual assistants who work with us. They are literally the backbone of our company and run a majority of the actions that our company takes on a daily basis.

And as of today, we have a 95%+ success rate when hiring new virtual assistants, and an extremely minimal turnover rate. Only two team members have left us since starting, and both were because they received offers that were at triple the pay rate we offered them.

2083 email signups.
That is how many people have opted in for my Lead Cookie lead magnets in the past 18 months. 
That is 100% organic without any advertising spend at all.

28.32% of revenue. 
That is how much of our overall revenue has come from Content Marketing at Lead Cookie. 

Whenever I started Lead Cookie, I had a mentor ask me some questions. 

But to be honest, I didn't really think through them well at the time. This is what lead me to leaving open a fatal flaw in my business model which I wrote about last week. 

And so as I start up a new venture, I returned to the big question that my mentor asked me at the time. I have shared the question in more detail, and even walked you through my own processing of that question with Content Allies.

Earlier this week, I announced that I am launching a new business.

To many people this came as a shock when I told them. They said "If things are going so well with Lead Cookie, why would you divert your attention to launch something new?"

And the truth is, things are going well with Lead Cookie. In 18 months, we have grown from Zero to $60k in MRR. 

Yes. You read that headline right. 
I am launching a new business. 

Content Allies - Virtual Assistants for Content Marketers

After 18 months of building a productized Linkedin Lead Generation service up to ~$60k in MRR, I've decided that it's time to start a second business.

2 hours... That is roughly how long it used to take me every time I closed a new customer. 
Today it takes 5 minutes...

That is because I have automated our entire closing process and customer onboarding process. 

In this article, I am going to walk you through the closing automation I set up and provide you with a model of what you could do for your own company. 

As you start to improve your sales and marketing game, you will find yourself having a lot more conversations with potential prospects.

And with those conversations, you will repeat yourself often.

That is why it is essential to create a bank of sales scripts that you can use and customize over and over again.

In this article, I am going to share the standard sales scripts that I use and teach you a few tricks on how to use them effectively.

One of the biggest mistakes you can make in sales has nothing to do with losing the deal...

In fact, you won't even see the problem until you start to work with the customer. It is only then that things get bad...

The mistake is misaligned expectations.

It starts in the sales process, and it affects everything after.

One single sentence has the power to double your close rate... 

"We like people who make decisions quickly, that is why we will offer X discount if you commit and pay your setup fee by Y {{time frame}}."

When I learned this simple little sales tactic, it massively changed the results I got from my sales at Lead Cookie. 

375 sales calls
154 closed deals

Those are my numbers over the past 16 months with Lead Cookie. 

At 30 minutes a piece, that is 187.5 hours on Sales calls or 7 days and 19 hours of total sales call time...

Over the course of that time, I have built and refined a sales call framework that I use over, and over, and over again.

At the time of publishing this post, we have run over 150 Linkedin outreach campaigns at Lead Cookie.

These campaigns have been for all different types of businesses and value propositions.

Through these campaigns, we have come across 7 core frameworks that we use over and over again to generate results for our clients.

In this article, I am going to share each of these frameworks in more detail and give examples of each.

If there is one mistake I see people make in their positioning over and over again, it is a failure to understand their buyer’s awareness.

A great niche and value proposition is your foundation.
But even if you have that, you will fail if you do not understand the concept of buyer awareness.

My goal in this post is to explain to you what buyer awareness is, why it is so important to your marketing, and how to use it as a guiding light for all of your marketing efforts.