How To Squeeze Extra Profits From Your Merchant Services Without Extra Effort

David Serwitz (00:00):
And we do have customers that say that they’re like, Oh my God, I was with my last processor for 15 years. I would have made 50 grand if I, if I had been with you guys the whole time. So that’s absolutely true. And you know, people do ask us, well how can you do this? And we say, look, it’s very simple.

Announcer (00:16):
Welcome to the digital marketing secrets show with Carlos A Vazquez where we share actionable strategies and tactics to grow businesses no matter what industry you’re in. Now your host Carlos A Vazquez.

Carlos Vazquez (00:31):
Hey, what’s going on? It’s Carlos Vazquez,

Carlos Vazquez (00:33):
Your host D M secrets. And today I have a very special guest. His name is David Serwitz, the CEO of Commission Buddies. And I’ll tell you right now, Commission Buddies is, is one of those, you’ve probably heard the story of market disruptors and I don’t want to spoil you just yet, but I’ll tell you right now, Commission Buddies in my opinion, is a merchant disrupter, especially when it comes to merchant services. And David, thanks for coming on board man.

David Serwitz (01:05):
Awesome. Carlos, thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Carlos Vazquez (01:08):
Thanks man. So I was very excited cause I was, I had one of your, one of your, your teammates approach me because I was on the Infusionsoft certified partner directory and Commission Buddies just came out of nowhere. Like I’ve never even, I’ve never heard of it. I’ve never actually like been exposed to it. And when I started doing the research I was actually shocked that this was actually available for us. Just business owners. It doesn’t matter what size you are. Can you tell me a little bit more about Commission Buddies and what you do and how you got started in this whole thing.

David Serwitz (01:43):
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So, you know, Commission Buddies is really simple. Essentially what we do is we say, “Hey look, we are going to make our customers a 50% partner in their own merchant services account”. So what we mean by that is whatever money we actually make on their account, we actually are going to pay them 50% of whatever we make every month on a check or direct deposit right back to them. So we’re doing things, you know, differently. And that’s of course, without increasing any rates or fees, we simply match what they have and then pay them. You know, half of what we make, we got into this and we are the only ones doing this. We got into this because, you know, I myself, my first business, which I still run is a 43 location, a tutoring company called grade potential tutoring and a, here in California, we have our headquarters with about 50 employees, our headquarters here.

David Serwitz (02:37):
And basically, you know, I got to the point where I was paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in merchant services fee each year and it just felt like too much to me. So I decided I was going to vertically integrate and start my own processing company, only to sell it to myself. And after doing that you know, we had some friends that are business owners that know me and trust me and said, Hey Dave, you set us up as well. So I said, sure. And then pretty soon friends of friends were calling and it kinda got us excited that maybe we had a second brand here. So we said, Hey, we’re going to do this, but we’re going to do it really, really differently. And I’m, you know, I’m sure we’ll get into that more. But that’s kind of how we got going and, and how we work.

Carlos Vazquez (03:15):
Wow. Okay. So then you were already running your own business, your tutoring business, and then you decided, wait, wait, I’m paying too much in fees. I’m going to start a whole little, whole little process internally so I can save on the fees. I mean, how did that actual process start?

David Serwitz (03:31):
Sure, sure. So, you know, I’m not sure what size it makes sense, but know, because it costs us, I mean, probably close to a million bucks a year, you know, to accept credit cards. I just said, Hey, look, this is such a large expense for us that I am going to, you know, vertically integrate and literally, as opposed to buying it from somebody else, I’m going to wholesale it to myself at no Mark up essentially. Right? I mean, that was the impetus for getting going. And yeah, I mean that’s, that’s basically what we did. Once I got some friends going and friends of friends and we decided we were going to do this as truly a second brand, you know, we did say, “Hey, look, there are thousands of merchant services providers is the truth. Right? So if we’re going to do this, we want to do it differently”.

David Serwitz (04:18):
And my mentor in this industry, he said to me, “you know, David, 75% of the haggling or 80% of the negotiations in merchant services are overpriced, right?” So I said, “okay, how could we take that out? I said, look, what we’re gonna do is we’re not going to do any price negotiation at all. We’re just going to take your current deal site unseen, whatever you negotiated last time. We’re just going to accept it and then we’re going to immediately make you a 50% partner in your own account. So whatever you negotiated last time, we’re giving you the same rates and fees and whatever money we make, we give you half”. And that allows us to skip over, you know, 80% of the negotiation because you know, price is not part of the negotiation does, does that kind of make sense what I’m saying or how that works?

Carlos Vazquez (04:59):
Yeah. Okay. So I got it. So like for example, most of most of the people I work with, they’re usually using something like Stripe, right? Stripe. They have like an interest, not an interest, but I have like a transaction fee of 2.9% of the transaction with an additional 50 cents or 30 cents. Okay. I think I confuse it with like maybe eBay or something. Okay. So they charge you a flat rate per cents and then they do 2.9% so yep. You can actually grab that. The same, not the commission, but the actual transaction fee. And of the 2.9% let’s just say 3% so of those 4% you will, you can actually give back 1.5% to the customer. Is that

David Serwitz (05:44):
Okay? So I wish we could give back half of the retail, you know, price, that would be amazing. But in credit card processing, there is wholesale costs that go to all the banks that facilitate things behind the scenes. So if they’re Stripe or PayPal or whatever, that’s super easy for us to master pricing cause it’s published online. If they’re with another third party, they just send us their bill and whatever they’re being charged, we match. Okay. But there is something called an interchange in, in the industry and that is the wholesale price. And there’s hundreds and hundreds of different levels of interchange all the way from like 2/10 of a % all the way up to over 3%. So we do pay our customers half back after whatever the you halfback, after our cost of goods sold. Right? So let’s say that it’s 3% and let’s say that on that transaction, you know, the interchange was 2% that means we’re making one and we’d be giving them back half. So let’s just say half of that, half a percent. That’s just a simple example, but it can vary greatly.

Carlos Vazquez (06:46):
Gotcha. So, so there’s still, I mean, there’s still a cost because the service does require some level of costs and then whatever the, I guess that that commission is what you’ll be able to split up with the customer or with whoever partners with who are we uses you as a merchant service. Okay. Gotcha. Okay. So, so it’s either don’t get money back or get some money back. You choose. So at the end of the day, you either,

David Serwitz (07:14):
I mean, we’re usually met with kind of like three stages of, of people that we work with. The verses, they kind of don’t believe it. They’re like, I don’t get it this way. Why isn’t everybody doing this? You know, why isn’t everybody doing this? Right. And I don’t know if I believe this and blah, blah, blah, blah. But since we’re 100% referral based, you know, they’ve usually been referred by a trusted friend that’s already a customer. And so they give us a shot, right? Once they’re up and running, they’re like, this is awesome. I’m getting a commission check in the mail every month. I’m not doing anything different. There was no increase in costs or fees. The only difference is now I’m getting a check every month and they say they love it. And then the third step is they’re like, I don’t, why wouldn’t everybody do this?

David Serwitz (07:51):
Like everybody should do this. And we say, get out there and tell your friends. Because that’s, that’s how we operate. You know, we’re 100% referral based. We do pay half the money, we make, you know, right to the business owner themselves. And then we pay out another 25% of what the business owner makes to the person who introduced them. And we have what we call our referral network, which we can talk a little bit more about later. But people always start off in disbelief. They give us a crack because their friend recommended us. They’re up and running it and loving it and then they’re going, man, why isn’t everybody doing this?

Carlos Vazquez (08:23):
Right. I mean that’s, that’s how I felt when, when, when I learned about it, I was like, I, I, I, I’ll admit I had some level of skepticism because I’m like, it sounds really too good to be true. It’s like, how, how are you able to give me back some type of money from it? I’ve never got money ever from my credit card transactions. It’s kind of like getting like an affiliate commission with, from yourself almost. It’s like a new little stream of income that I was never expecting since I’ve started my business in 2003 and now you’re telling me there’s years of money I’ve been giving away. Now there’s an opportunity that I can get some of that back. It’s,

David Serwitz (09:02):
And we do have customers that say that they’re like, Oh my God, I was with my last processor for 15 years. Like I would’ve made 50 grand if I, if I had been with you guys the whole time. So that’s absolutely true. And, you know, people do ask us, well how can you do this? And we say, look, it’s very simple. You know, traditionally there are sales agents for merchant processing that are out beating the streets and cold calling or whatever. And if they signed somebody up, typically their company that they work for gets half of the earnings and that salesperson gets the other half the earnings. That’s the typical way. Okay. We just say, look, we’re 100% referral based, so we’re going to let you be your own sales agent. Like, since we don’t have to hire sales agents, right, we are going to pay you the commission.

David Serwitz (09:45):
That typically would go to the sales agents since we don’t have to have them. Right? So that was our whole that’s, that’s the way that we can do it. And a lot of people say to us, you know, why don’t other people do this, right? Why can’t people do this? And the answer is yes, it’s much, much, much more difficult to Hey customers, back half of what we’re making then is just to give them a discount, right? So most of our competitors, if they’re trying to earn your business, they’re like, Oh, we’ll discount you. Let me do a rate review, let me look at your, you know, whatever you’re paying and we’ll save you 200 bucks a month, et cetera. Right. That’s much easier. It’s much more difficult to pay thousands of people every month. But the reason we’re able to do it is I already had the backbone and infrastructure created for my tutoring company.

David Serwitz (10:30):
So for my tutoring company, we already built our own backend CRM custom built. Now you said you’re an Infusionsoft certified partner. We actually used to use Infusionsoft at my tutoring company until we outgrew it and we actually built our own custom built CRM for our own backend. Right. And for our tutors, we literally calculate and pay thousands of people every month. And so we already had this system in place that we were able to like copy and paste and move it over to Commission Buddies. So it is much more difficult, but we already kind of had the system built, if that makes sense.

Carlos Vazquez (11:02):
Got it. Yeah. You already did the hard work for yourself, so that way you were able to replicate it for basically your customers. So that’s the story. Usually the story that I’ve learned a lot about about how these businesses started out, they, they, they applied the figured out they have a problem and they figured out how to solve it. And then when they realized that they were the only ones that provided the solution, then they started offering it to other people. And then that’s how other businesses, they basically grew there themselves.

David Serwitz (11:30):
Absolutely, really, I mean, I see, you know, I mean I’m certainly not in the kind of business consulting or industry, but what I personally see a lot of times is there’s two types of businesses that going get going. The first is a technician that then organizes the other technicians, right? There are plumber, they start getting successful, they hire other plumbers, right? You know, there are tutor, they start getting successful, they start hiring other tutors, right? So the other side of it, which, which I am is, is this is the recipient, the customer. Right. You know, I needed a tutor through my frustrations in having the process be difficult. I ended up starting a tutoring company to solve my own problem of. Right. That was the same thing with Commissioned Buddies. I was a large customer of merchant services. I was frustrated by the whole process. So I solved by own problem and now I’m trying to solve other people’s problems. I mean, that’s my take on it.

Carlos Vazquez (12:22):
Gotcha. All right, so then how do you, so how does, does someone have to be in business for long to be able to use Commission Buddies for their service?

David Serwitz (12:31):
They certainly don’t have to be in business for long. I mean, there are certain levels of processing that make it probably more worth it to them. You know, the average customer that we have, we pay him about two grand a year. Okay. Now the average customer we have, we pay him about two grand a year. With that being said, I mean, we have customers that we pay over 10,000 a year. Our largest customer, we pay over $30,000 a year. Okay. So that’s $30,000 of profit. You know, one of the things I always explain to these people too is this is not revenue. This is profit, right? There is no cost associated with this. This is straight bottom line profit. And so, you know, if a company says, Oh, I have a 10% profit margin, I’m like, look, us paying you $30,000 of profit is the same as a $300,000 a year increase in sales, right? You know what I’m saying? So I’m always [inaudible]

Carlos Vazquez (13:20):
The costs.

David Serwitz (13:21):
Make sure people understand this is bottom line profit, not just increase in revenue, right? But you know, if somebody is only doing a few hundred dollars a month in credit card transactions, I mean, the reality is we’re not going to pay them enough to make it worth even, you know, them, you know, exploring us. But with that, we do have some, once you’re a customer with us, then you can start making referrals into what we call our referral network. Okay. And we have earn a lot more by, by referring us. Since again, we’re a hundred percent referral based. We have a lot of very small customers that signed up with us and even if they’re only making $20 a month, they signed up with us because they were super, super excited to refer their sister who’s a dentist and their friend who owns a restaurant, et cetera. Right? Or maybe they’re in a business networking group and they want to share what we’re doing with their business networking group, et cetera. So we do have a lot of really small customers that it may not make sense just for their own account, but they’re excited to be part of our referral network.

Carlos Vazquez (14:25):
Well, I mean, I dunno, I, I, I, I liked the idea had I known that when I was starting out, I mean there was never, maybe there could have been an opportunity for this possible solution, but if I was starting out and I knew that I can just generate, maybe it was a few pennies, I don’t care if it was even a little bit and I grew, eventually it’s going to just continue pay me. It’s, it’s almost like, it’s like an almost like an interest bearing account almost. Like it’s just going to keep building and building. All I had to do is keep selling and using this service. And then I will eventually get to the point where something will move the needle. Plus I can refer people. So if I knew that I can just start and, and I, I’m not going to pay nearly as much as someone else would that has a higher volume than me. Plus I have the ability to grow. I still don’t see why I would not want to move forward with that. Right.

David Serwitz (15:19):
Oh, 100% agreed. I mean, I have to be careful, you know, we were talking to one prospect once and I said, Hey, it’s like free money. And I really offended them because they said, well, my dad told me there’s no such thing as free lunch instead of dah, dah, dah. And like I was kind of on my heels and apologizing and I didn’t mean to offend them and dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. And so I’ve learned, I gotta be careful how I communicate, but you know, without being crass, the reality is it’s true because everything is identical. Everything’s the same. There’s no changes in any way in which our customers operate. They just get a check every month. Right. So, so I don’t want to, you know, I, I’ve learned to not be like, Hey, it’s free money. Cause maybe there’s a negative connotation with that, but as you’re saying, the reality is it really, it, you’re just getting money. Again, I hate to say for nothing getting money for nothing, but, but it’s true. You know what I mean? Everything’s the same. You just get half the money that’s made on your account every month, whether it’s a little bit or a lot. It’s certainly more than zero.

Carlos Vazquez (16:18):
Right. I mean, in other words, maybe it’s not free money, but there’s no extra effort to generate that revenue because you’re just doing business as usual and you continue selling your product, you continue selling your service and at the end of the day, by working with this, this, this merchant with Commission Buddies, you’re able to just get an extra, you wouldn’t even, an extra check that you were not even expecting. And yeah, just go ahead.

David Serwitz (16:44):
100%. You know, a lot of our customers, they tell us it’s the favorite check they get every month because they didn’t have to work for it. Like, you know, they say, man, I get my check for 200 bucks from Commission Buddies and it puts a big smile on my face because I’m, you know, I’m just getting a check that didn’t have to really work for and, and it’s just kinda fun and feels good and, and you know, people seem to like it,

Carlos Vazquez (17:05):
Man. That’s, that’s actually exciting. It’s funny. That’s funny. I can’t believe that it actually exists. So commissioned buddies works with in, if you’re using infusion soft, you can actually connect with Commission Buddies. Right. I know a lot of my, a lot of my clients, they use ClickFunnels. So I know, I know you guys. So it sounds like you guys will figure out how to make that connection. That’s what it sounds like to me.

David Serwitz (17:30):
Yeah. I mean, we can work with the vast majority of online systems such as infusion soft and click funnels. We can work with the vast majority of all software. Vast majority of all point of sales for restaurant, retail, like whatever, you know, there are some that are locked down or whatever. But the vast of systems we can work with. We have many customers on infusion soft, many customers on click funnels, many customers on Ontraport, a Zoho. I’m trying to think what other

Carlos Vazquez (17:58):
Shopify,

David Serwitz (18:00):
Yup. Shopify, woo commerce. All of these systems we certainly can work with. And I mean the, there’s going to be some that we can’t, but I mean there’s thousands of systems so I can’t list them all off. But you know, usually in the first call or email or, or inquiry, you know, we find out what system they’re using and you know, we’re not going to waste anybody’s time if we can’t work with them, but you know, nine out of 10 times we’ll be able to,

Carlos Vazquez (18:23):
Man, that’s super exciting. I’m really excited to have you on board because I mean, everyone that I know, they accept credit cards and just to know that you have an opportunity as a business owner to get some, some cash back. It just sounds exciting. I mean, it’s not even like an awards program. It’s money. It’s your money. You just get her back.

David Serwitz (18:42):
Exactly. One of my friends said, David, you’ve got to pitch this. Like, Hey, you’re used to getting credit card are used to getting rewards when you spend money on a credit card. Now you’re getting rewards when you accept money on a credit card. I said, okay. Yeah, that’s true.

Carlos Vazquez (18:55):
That’s awesome, Yeah, that’s a really, that’s it. It’s like, it’s like a rewards program, but you don’t have to spend the money. You just got to receive money.

David Serwitz (19:02):
Yeah, exactly. You just get the money, then you get a little extra on top.

Carlos Vazquez (19:05):
That’s awesome. David, thank you so much man. I’m gonna so I know that there’s a landing page that, that I can send people to. It’s, it’s it’s a miamimarketer.commissionbuddies.com, I’m going to go ahead and link it to it, but for you that’s listening on to the podcast episode, you can just go straight to commissionbuddies.com. Go straight to the page and I think there’s a form right, that you can just inquire.

David Serwitz (19:27):
Yup. There’s a form they can call us, they can schedule a a call back, you know, whatever they want to do. Of course, we’re happy to accept their inquiry in any way that they’d like. And if they don’t go through your landing page, of course, you know, we’ll, we’ll, we’ll ask them, you know, how they heard of us, et cetera. Of course.

Carlos Vazquez (19:42):
Yeah. But Hey, it, by you listening to the episode, I, I’m in no way obligating you to go through me. I, I really do believe in the service. I do believe in the, in, in the fact of you getting your money back that you work for, you earned it. Why not get it, you know, a percentage. It’s better than zero. Put it that way. So,

David Serwitz (20:00):
Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, you know, the same friend that the same friend that said, Oh, I got to pitch it like, and this is a rewards company, you know, and accepting credit cards. He’s like, man, David, you know, the average business owner is, you know, slogging it out every day, try and so hard to be successful and grow their business, which I can very much relate to myself. And they’re just getting taxed, right? They’re getting scraped off the top, you know, a relatively large portion of their hard earned revenue and you’re given a piece of it back to him and you should feel good about that. And I said, Oh, thanks man. Yeah, I appreciate that. I mean, you know, the reality is you know, even though things are going well for great potential, my tutoring company and commission buddies it’s a slog every day. And I’ve never met any business owner that tells me that things are on cruise control and they’re just crushing it. And they don’t worry, you know, I’ve never heard that. Right. And, and everybody is, is, is, I don’t see struggling with a negative connotation, but it’s just a struggle, man. It ain’t easy. Right. And the fact that we get to give back and contribute and you know, bring value to them does make me feel good

Carlos Vazquez (21:14):
David, thank you so much for your time. Thank you for coming on the episode and sharing this nice little secret for the crew. Is how do people get in contact with you? How do they reach out to you if they ever have a question?

David Serwitz (21:26):
Yup. I mean they can call us easily (888) 562-6489 that’s (888) 562-6489. They certainly can go to a commissionbuddies.com and reach out in any of the ways we talked about before or through your landing page. We’re certainly excited to talk to you and if we make sense for you, wonderful. If not, you’ll get a little bit of an education and we certainly always appreciate talking to passionate business owners regardless of how it works out.

Announcer (21:53):
Thanks for listening to the digital marketing secrets show with Carlos A Vazquez. Want to join the exclusive digital marketing community? Of course, you do. Make sure to visit us at miamimarketer.com/growth for more info. See you soon.

How To Use Automated SMS Texting To Build Trust From Your List

[spreaker type=player resource=”episode_id=22246870″ width=”100%” height=”200px” theme=”light” playlist=”false” playlist-continuous=”false” autoplay=”false” live-autoplay=”false” chapters-image=”true” episode-image-position=”right” hide-logo=”false” hide-likes=”false” hide-comments=”false” hide-sharing=”false” hide-download=”true”]

 

Ryan Chapman (00:00):
And so if you do that in the first 3rd and then run that banner across the top of the rest of your slides, not the bottom, because there’ll be block by people’s heads, at the top for the rest of the sides. What happens is you may not have had everybody in the audience at the first third. You may have only had the people that really connected to you, but as you continue on,

Announcer (00:19):
Welcome to the digital marketing secrets show with Carlos A Vazquez where we share actionable strategies and tactics to grow businesses no matter what industry you’re in. Now your host Carlos A Vazquez.

Carlos Vazquez (00:35):
What’s going on everybody! My name is Carlos A Vazquez and you’re listening to DM secrets podcast. I’m your host Carlos Vazquez and I got a special guest. I’ve got the CEO, I’ll Fix Your Funnel. I’ve got Ryan and he’s based out of Tucson, Arizona. Quick little blurb on my man, Ryan. He, got his start in direct response marketing. So in other words, he knows marketing. He’s, been in the trenches writing serious copy and then he did marketing automation in 2006, 2007, he partnered up with his,with his partner and they,use his marketing automation skills to convert a $237 investment and turn it into a $1.3 million in only 12 months. So he started Fix Your Funnel, 2009. And it just, Ryan, man, I’m very excited at you’re on board and I’m grateful that you came on the show, man. Thanks for coming, man.

Ryan Chapman (01:30):
Oh, it’s a pleasure to be here. I’m excited to hopefully help our listeners be able to do better with their business. You know, I was raised as an entrepreneur. Were you the same way Carlos? I mean for me, my dad was a builder. He was a contractor and so, you know, he’s always self-employed for most of his life at least. And it kind of raised me and my, my brothers and sisters to be there. I’m the oldest of 13, by the way, which is kind of a weird thing. It’s not very common. And so he just, he worked us, raised us to be entrepreneurial minded. Was it that way for you or did you discover it later?

Carlos Vazquez (02:08):
Well, my dad. All right, so my dad, he was a plumbing contractor and he was always a computer geek. In fact it was because of him. I got my start playing with computers and he used my, eagerness to play video games to learn how to basically use a computer. So,My whole computer life started with a Tandy 1000 and then, so while he was doing the computers, he was running his business on the side. And that same entrepreneurial spirit, he kind of just pass it off on me because I was always trying to find ways to not work for anyone else and just trying to build something of my own. And, absolutely, man. I, definitely share that same, he literally was a contractor. So I mean, call me contractor.

Ryan Chapman (02:56):
Yeah. Well, you know, with that though it’s not like he passed on all the skills that I would need to be successful. You know, entrepreneur, in fact, he had most of his life was making millions and losing millions, and making millions and lose millions, which may be part and parcel for the residential construction industry because it was always boom or bust. But you know, it also is still in me and my brother who were partners in Fix Your Funnel. We were partners in that company we started in 2007. It’s still the nest of desire to try and learn those missing pieces. You know, how do we maintain that even cash flow? How do we create a repeatable, systematic business that could,eally pay us constantly? You know, and not be so feast or famine. And,back in 2007, the reason my brother came to me is because he knew I’d been learning direct response marketing.

Ryan Chapman (03:47):
I was doing that through Dan Kennedy. He was a mentor of mine for that and then I’ve also been introduced to Mark Animation through infusion soft. But I’ve seen some other marketing automation tools before that, but infusion soft really peaked my imagination because here was a tool that was so powerful, because it could do just about anything you could think of. That’s almost also its downside, right, for some people is that it’s too powerful. But because of that, it allowed us to take this $237- it was my brother’s not mine cause I didn’t have any money at that time. I was just coming off of a downside and trying to find enough way upside and he had the 237 he bought the materials that we needed for our very first sales event and we turned that, the training company into $1.3 million. The first year, the first 12 months.

Ryan Chapman (04:31):
Of course from there it went up to 2 and then 4 and then kind of stabled off at 4 for a while until that business died, which we had anticipated because we’re helping real estate agents who are having to close short sales. So it was, it was a business that lasted longer than we hoped or thought it would. Because, you know, you don’t want anybody to be upside down in their house. Right, but we were healing that problem for the nation. And so yeah, we were in that business and we found a real need and we used our marketing skills and our marketing automation to bring that to them. Well, out of that, you know, I started doing all of this more advanced stuff with the marketing automation tools and people started asking us and masterminds and then training groups, how are you doing that?

Ryan Chapman (05:12):
And that’s kind of where Fix Your Funnel came out of, it was our experience growing a very successful business. Mmm. Using marketing automation, using direct response marketing concepts to, you know, generate really stable community that paid us really well to help them to what they’re trying to do.

Carlos Vazquez (05:31):
So you basically, so it sounds like to me you started a company by accident because you were using the technology yourself.

Ryan Chapman (05:38):
Yes.

Carlos Vazquez (05:38):
Infusion soft, and then when you had a bunch of people asking you, “Hey, how are you? How are you doing?” Now you say, “Hey maybe, maybe we should turn this into an actual solution for people?”

Ryan Chapman (05:47):
In fact, the very first tool we developed was a OneClickUpsell. It was something we needed in our own business as we created a one click upsell solution and I almost sold it as a joke because we were making so much money in our training business.

Ryan Chapman (05:59):
It’s not like I needed the revenue. And so we would like sponsor events and put up a booth and play video games and invite other people to come over and play video games at our booth instead of trying to really sell, cause we didn’t really care if we sold. But if we did sell a few and cover it and we figured out what happened, it was fine. We weren’t really serious about it because it was just, it was something we were already doing. And so we just, you know, invited other people to participate and benefit from it. And then we got into some direct mail because we were doing direct mail in our training company, we’re sending out direct mail to as part of our sales process. And so we said, “Hey, people might be interested in that”. And they were, and then we discovered texting.

Ryan Chapman (06:36):
That was about 2010, 2011 and that was exciting for us because we knew emails had a hard time with delivery. You know, you’d send the email out, people may or may not see it depending on how good they weren’t keeping up with email. Way worse now than it was 10 years ago, 12 years ago. But you know, that was a concern for us. We knew the text was going to be seen. Smartphones in 2007 were just born and so all, you only had your bleeding edge. People that have an iPhone or then the new thing that was coming out the Android. And so, you know, it was still kind of relatively new and the number of people on the internet was way lower than it is today. Today it’s up in the, in the billions. Back then it was hundreds of millions. And so the market has grown significantly since then. And you know, texting is a big deal and you know, we just started figuring it out and that’s kind of where we evolved. We discovered that’s where we can get people the greatest gains for the least amount of effort that’s through texting. So that’s kind of been our forte at Fix Your Funnel. Even though we have a bunch of other things that we do. To kind of support that.

Carlos Vazquez (07:40):
Got it. Yeah. Cause I, I would say a lot of, that’s how I actually stumbled upon Fix Your Funnel myself. I had a client that they were a speaker and they were just a public speaker. And one of the things that they wanted to do was get opt-ins from the stage without having to go through the website. And the process of sending people to a website hoping that they land too on a landing page, submit their name and email. I mean it’s, it’s been done. It could be done,

Ryan Chapman (08:09):
It can, but it’s, it’s definitely less effective. In fact. There, there are some specific strategies, if you don’t mind, I’d love to share with you and your audience around there. Because what we saw when we first got into texting is we were facilitating this ability for people to, you know, put up a keyword and a phone number, have people texting to get something. Right? And people were coming back to say, “I only got like 30% of the audience.” And I’m like, “well, was it the right audience? I mean, were they interested in your topic?” And they’re like, “yeah, yeah! They were.” I said, “well, walk me through it step by step”. You know, 30% doesn’t sound right cause every time I’ve done it it’s been 90 95% of the audience I get. So we’re obviously doing something different cause we have the same tools, right?

Ryan Chapman (08:53):
As they walked me through it, what I discovered is they kept it to the last slide. And so, the last slide they put the keyword in the phone number. Well that’s the wrong time to do it. So I started studying people and I knew how I did it. I started looking at other people that were getting 90 120%. Because Carlos, you actually can get 120% opt-in because if there’s only a hundred people in the room, you get 120 people text in, you got 120% we’d have people sharing the keyword phone number cause they did it so effectively. And so I said “okay, let’s take that formula, Is it for people? So speakers they’re speaking in front of audiences can win, right? Well there’s two places that people speak. They speak to get leads and they speak to sell. And usually when people speak the sell, they don’t think about speaking to get leads as well.

Ryan Chapman (09:39):
They think that it’s either or. Have you ever heard that Carlos from people?

Carlos Vazquez (09:42):
Yeah, I seen that they always want to focus at the end trying to get that sale close as many people as possible. Right.

Ryan Chapman (09:48):
And what we discovered, and we did this by actually working with some of the salespeople that worked for infusion soft at one point, is that if they captured leads early on in the, in a presentation, their confidence in selling went up through the roof because there wasn’t so much at stake. Like when you’re selling from the stage, you know, man I gotta I gotta nail this close cause if I don’t nail this close, I’m out the fence over. It’s done. But if you capture leads on the front side and then sell, your confidence goes up because you’re not, you don’t have that desperation though. That tends to follow people when they have to sell because you know, I already captured the leads.

Ryan Chapman (10:24):
So worst case scenario, even if I bomb on this close, I’ll follow up and I’ll close them. But if when you have that in the back of your mind, you actually close way better and they saw their close rates actually go up as the capture leads on the front side. So here’s the formula that you want to use. In the first 3rd of your presentation, because we all know it takes a little time to gain rapport with the room. You’ve got to establish that connection and kind of get them on the same page or same flow line with you. Well, as soon as you do that, and preferably in the first 3rd, you want to interrupt and give them a reason to text in. So the offer creation is the critical part here. The timing is important, but the offers gotta be compelling.

Ryan Chapman (11:05):
If you’ve got a terrible offer, it doesn’t matter what we do in terms of mechanics, it’s not gonna flow. But if you have a great offer, then what you want to do is you want to tell them, put the keyword in the phone number up on the slide, a dedicated slide with the details about what they’re going to get out of the offer. Say, okay, “Hey, you know, let me read some report”. That’s a real common one, right? “I Got this report that tells you the 10 things you’ve got to know in order to be successful or whatever”. So we’re going to say, “I want to give you this report and I wanted to do it before we get too far in because I want to make sure that you get it and so I want you to text this keyword to this phone number and when you do, here’s what’s going to happen”.

Ryan Chapman (11:39):
Now this is the important part is cause you’ve got to walk them through what’s going to happen. “I’m Going to ask you for your name, your email, and then I’m going to send that report to your email inbox. Okay? So please be sure to go through each step when you do what you’re going to get in this report”. And then you sell them on why they want the report. So some people don’t do this, they put it at the very end say, “Oh by the way, if you want this report to text here”. What we discovered, and I did this by actually sitting in as many presentations as I could where we had a text opt-in, is I wasn’t looking at the stage, I was looking at the audience as I looked at the audience. I took a timer and I timed how long does it take for people to actually recognize they’re being called to action process, the call to action and then start doing it and then finishing.

Ryan Chapman (12:22):
And what I discovered is for the ladies in the room, many of the ladies, if they’re paying attention, they’re taking notes, they’re taking notes on paper and the phone is not in their lap. It’s not in a pocket cause frequently they won’t have pockets. It’s in the purse. Right. And so for the sake of the ladies, we have to give 10 minutes cause that’s how long I figured out it actually takes. So if you are in a great presentation, what happens is they’re taking notes and now you stop the presentation to do the call to action sort of, we’re not really stopping it, You’ll find out this is the most important thing. This is the reason that you’re there, is to capture leads and then the sell. And so what happens is they’re taking notes and then they realize, “Oh okay I’m out.

Ryan Chapman (13:01):
I’m actually having to do something” So they’ll finish the notes, they’ll put the notes down, then they look and they try and understand what is it that you’re asking them to do. And we may think no instantly they get no, they take time to process cause they went into passive learning mode and to active engagement mode. And that’s a transition psychologically. So it takes them a little time to register what’s going on once they understand, because you take the time to explain what’s going to happen, what they need to do and how they do it. You’ll close on saying, so again, just text in this keyword, this word for this number, you’ll get that. What’s going to happen is they’re going to pull up their phone now for the ladies, they got to dig through the purse and they got to dig through the purse and then they get to get through the notifications.

Ryan Chapman (13:42):
That’s true for men and women. They gotta all get through the notifications and hopefully they don’t get too distracted in the process. Then they get their texting app open, they start typing in the keyword and the phone number. Now what was happening for the people that were only getting 30% is they were moving on from that slide too quickly and it’s okay to move on from that slide, but what you’re going to do is you’re going to move a banner to the top of all other slides for the rest of the presentation that has text, then the word, to, and then the phone number. They’ll remember the call to action because you’ve gone through and you’ve had a slide dedicated to it. You’ve explained it, but with that across the top of the rest of the screen now as you continue on to the presentation, they can still catch up, text in the keyword and the phone number and then get back to taking their notes.

Ryan Chapman (14:26):
And as I timed this out, the average was 10 minutes for the ladies, it was about five minutes for the men because they too had the transition from note taking or passive listening to active engagement and then pulling up their phone, getting past notifications, and then doing that. And so if you do that in the first third and then run that banner across the top of the rest of the slides, not the bottom, because there’ll be block by people’s heads at the top for the rest of the slides. What happens is you may not have had everybody in the audience at the first 3rd, you may have only had the people that really connected to you, but as you continue on, you’ll start pulling in more people and then they’re thinking about, “well, do I really want that?” and then you get them to the flip and go, “Oh yeah, I actually do.”

Ryan Chapman (15:05):
And because the instructions are across the top, they’re able to do it at any time after that. And so what you’ll see is an actual, you’ll see a big bump of people at the beginning of your presentation that will text in and then you’ll see a long tail. And those are two different types of people. So not only is it great because you’ll get close to 100% of the room if you’ve engaged with the right audience. But also you’re going to learn about the types of people. The people that take fast action at the front are your hyper responders. They’re good for a different reason than the long tail people. Long tail people just are more thoughtful and they take a little more time to make a decision and that tells you more about them than it does anything. And so not only do you capture the leads, but you start learning more about these prospects. I mean some people don’t pay any attention to that and it’s like group them all together and go for it. And that’s fine, you can do that. But if you do pay attention to these two groups, which you can based on the time at which the tags were applied based on when they texted in, then that tells you something. If you want to get a little deeper, you can actually start treating those groups a little bit differently, which is kind of exciting for the advanced person.

Carlos Vazquez (16:10):
That is exciting. And then not, I’m just thinking about my behavior as far as like me going to conferences there, there have been times where you see, an awesome slide from the presenter where the slide is like some data, some reports, some checklists or some lists of some listicle or whatever. And then they’ll put like their call to action, the text, they take a picture and sometimes they’ll post it on social media. They’ll post it in their groups. And now that’s how you get, I guess that’s what you’re talking about. Get that over a hundred percent opt in rate because you created a comp, a compelling piece of content that is worth sharing. You leverage social media and because you made it easy for people to opt in because you put the banner right at the top, you’re now, you just increase your chances of getting even more opt ins. I love that, that, that I actually have a, a talk coming up, in a few weeks, I’m going to be speaking at the WordPress WordCamp. I’m going to, definitely, I’m going to try it. I’m going to apply it and they’re done. I’m one of those guys, I put it towards the end. “Hey, If you guys want to…” You know, I always, I always feel like…

Ryan Chapman (17:16):
See, and here’s the thing, Carlos is sometimes people can go, well, you know, there can be psychological reasons why they want to put it to the end, but here’s the truth of the matter. Whatever you’re doing, there’s a purpose for it, right? And the purpose for you being on the stage is to connect with your audience and the best way for you to connect with audiences. Not for an hour, but for a lifetime. And the only way you can do that is if you have some method of communicating with them going forward. When people send someone to a website that’s a totally passive activity and people go, I guess I’ll do that. They’ll remember the website or whatever. The problem is It takes as much energy for some of the texts to you as it does for them to go to a website psychologically.

Ryan Chapman (17:59):
But one gets you to a visitor and maybe that you know you can advance that counter on the bottom of your website. The other one gives you a phone number. Okay. Phone number and context. Okay. Cause the keyword always carries with it. Context and context is really important cause it knows what kind of conversations should we be carrying on. And the reason a conversation is important is because all sales happen in conversation. Going back to the context and the phone number with the phone number, I can do texting, I can do calling and I can do Facebook remarketing. See a cell phone number will match it nearly 80, 90% versus an email address is like 40% match. So if you’re going just for email addresses, you’re, you’re gonna miss out on most of your remarketing opportunities on Facebook. There’s a strategy called the speaker tsunami.

Ryan Chapman (18:49):
And what it is, is you get up there, you give this presentation, you ask for people to do the call to action, and then you have your marketing automation, add the person to a custom audience on Facebook. This can happen within minutes of them texting him. By the time they leave your presentation, you’ll be in their Facebook feed, you’ll be in their Instagram feed. So instead of you just being present in their life for that moment that you’re on the stage, you get to be present in their life, ongoing and tr until you’re done spending money to be in front of them. But that’s how you create a tsunami of influence instead of just a little wave that goes down and it’s done. And you’re from Miami, so you know all about waves, right? The way it comes up, and then it stops and it’s done, right?

Ryan Chapman (19:31):
Right. But with the tsunami, it carries in and it goes and has a huge impact on all of the land in front of it and as a speaker, you can have that kind of influence when you carry your presentation beyond the moment of the presentation and all the way forward, and that’s why if you get this call to action done right and you put it in the right place, the first third people are like, “well, I don’t want to break up my flow”. Guess what? Your reason for being there is to capture the lead. It’s not for your flow. You can recover your flow easy. It’s not a big deal. I’ve had some people be really concerned about that, but once they understand, they actually apply the strategy, they realize it didn’t disrupt my presentation at all since they put it in the first third. I was able to establish enough rapport that I could make the ask and then get the rest of the people as I went through the rest of the final two thirds of the presentation. And so yeah, if you do this, I guarantee you’re going to see great results if you have the right audience match, right? That’s all hinges on that,

Carlos Vazquez (20:28):
Right.Right. And it has to be relevant to the, to the people that you’re speaking to.

Ryan Chapman (20:31):
Yeah, your offer…

Carlos Vazquez (20:32):
And I’ve also, I’ve also noticed that when you alleviate the, the need to take notes, people pay attention, pay more attention. So if you’re giving the opportunity to, let’s say, grab those notes real quick, even take a picture and get it right, then there they’ll stay engaged with your presentation because they’re no longer trying to listen and write down and acknowledge.

Ryan Chapman (20:55):
On that note, I have one of our users that he would do it as a strategy. He would just really cram the first couple of minutes with just a ton of great information and to get the people frantically trying to keep up with them and they say, “Hey look, I see a lot of you guys frantically trying to keep up with me. Here’s what I’m going to do. If you’ll text slides to this number. I’m going to just send you my, all of my slides so you don’t have to worry about keeping notes. Just write down the things that are your action items, those impressions that you get as I’m going through the presentation, because you’re going to get all of the slides with all this great information sent right into your email inbox, so don’t worry about that anymore. Just think about action items that you want to take based on what we’re going to talk about today.”

Ryan Chapman (21:37):
“So go ahead and text SLIDE to this number. I’m going to ask for your name and your email so I can get that into your email inbox and just don’t worry anymore about keeping detailed notes because I’m gonna give all of that to prompt your mind when you look at them later”.

Carlos Vazquez (21:49):
That is brilliant.

Ryan Chapman (21:50):
As a Brit, it’s a brilliant strategy. Really. If you don’t, if you’re like, “man, I don’t know what the offer, I’ve got really great content, but I don’t have this great report”. Rush them on the beginning, yeah. Not too fast where they’re like, “who is this ridiculous character?” Rush them enough, where they’re trying to keep up, you know, you might hit heavy at the beginning just to bring him in. Then I say, Hey look, I see a lot of you guys stressed about notes. Even if they’re not, you say it, don’t worry about it. I’m going to send you the slides. All you gotta do is just text SLIDE then number.

Carlos Vazquez (22:19):
Gotcha. No, that’s amazing.

Ryan Chapman (22:21):
Now, Carlos, one of the things though that we’ll often have you tell me if you’ve ever run into this, is that sometimes the, the people that are putting on the event say, “Hey, no lead capture from the stage”.

Ryan Chapman (22:33):
Have you ever run into that?

Carlos Vazquez (22:33):
I haven’t. I haven’t dealt, I haven’t dealt with that at all. I have dealt with the no pitches from the stage. That’s what I have dealt with in the past, but not the lead captures

Ryan Chapman (22:44):
What you’ll find out is that usually they’re hesitation if you run into this, so and this is for the audience, just in case they ever run into this. The bigger concern is they’re afraid that you’re really trying to sell from the stage so you’re not going to deliver value because you’re trying to do this lead caption thing. So what you’ll do is you can do that. You can tell them, “Hey look, all I’m doing is giving them the copy of the slides” and if they object to that, you’ve got to have a plan B, plan B as well. There’s this resource that, you know, the best way to deliver it is just to give it to them that way. It shows them how to do the thing I’m talking about. So it’s just to enhance value of the presentation. I’m not really trying to sell them or anything, so you don’t worry about that.

Ryan Chapman (23:24):
It just, this is the easiest mechanism to deliver this resource that they need to actually use. What you wanted me to talk to them about. That’s a good plan B to have ready in the wings if they say no to the slides. So, well actually I’ve got two things I’ve tried to deliver to them, the slides and then this, this resource. And that will help you to overcome. If you ever do run into that situation where they’re like, “Hey, we don’t want you doing lead capturing from the stage”. “This Isn’t really a lead capture. I’m just delivering the support and resource for them to be able to implement what I’m talking about, which is going to give them a better experience. So they want to come back to this event next year”.

Carlos Vazquez (23:56):
Right.

Ryan Chapman (23:57):
That’s fine. Right? And that way you can deal, this has usually happens with larger events where, you know, they’re concerned about people taking their audience or something silly like that. Right?

Ryan Chapman (24:08):
Audiences don’t belong to me.

Carlos Vazquez (24:10):
Right. If you’re not properly trained or if you haven’t had enough experience and trying to sell from the stage or generate leads, it’s going to show in it. It might just turn off the crowd and they may not want to come to another future events. So I can understand if you’re working with people that haven’t had that experience. But yeah, the method that you have is definitely, I mean that’s just the way it’s supposed to be. I mean that’s what you learn in direct response marketing and the way things are, it’s all about giving value first and if you position things in a way where you’re giving value, it’s not that rough of a transition to ask for any type of call to action. So,

Ryan Chapman (24:44):
If you don’t mind. Yeah. Some people miss the point though. They think that, the capture of the leads is the point, but the reason that we do the text message lead capture is to open the door for texting it is not the point in and of itself. Yeah. We do want to get a high percentage when it get a high number. You know, those are things that we may have as a short term goal, but it is not the purpose. And a lot of people miss out on this, and I see this all the time. Speakers will go, they’ll generate all these leads and then they’ll just email them. It’s like, wait a second guys, we missed out on the big opportunity, which was to communicate with them via text message where we know they’re actually going to see it.

Ryan Chapman (25:26):
It’s not going to be filtered where they can actually engage. It said so, “Sales happen in conversation”. That’s where we see higher value sales should happen in conversation, right? If somebody just wants to order our book, all right, go order the book, you go to the website, but the higher ticket services or products that we may offer frequently required conversation. So that’s where we want to focus is, okay, yes, we generated the lead. Now to what point to what end? And often that’s gonna involve driving them to either some additional content that sells them on a bigger purchase or engaging them in a conversation that leads to a sales decision or a buying decision for the prospect. So keep that in the focus. That’s just something I’ve seen a lot of people do is they go out, they generate all these leads and then they just fall flat with them.

Ryan Chapman (26:15):
Have a purpose beyond generating the lead. Know what you’re going to be selling. What is the ultimate point for being on that stage and speakers that figured that out really mature into a very good business that can last for decades because they have a whole business model that they’re following, not just a collecting of leads and then trying to eat email, you know, broadcast them until they buy. We want to actual flow that involves conversation. Conversations are usually worthy of higher ticket items and that will be good for us as a speaker that’s trying to sell or get leads from the stage.

Carlos Vazquez (26:49):
Gotcha. So then so Fix Your Funnel bridges that gap between the automation instructions and that a texting platform, right?

Ryan Chapman (26:56):
Yes, exactly. So it does, it has all that texting side and then communicates directly with the CRM and the marketing automation to be able to trigger it to send out the email, add them to a campaign, which may include asking them questions via text message. So we’ll let the marketing automation engine handle all of that stuff. And the fix your funnel is the live interaction and the automated interaction that we want to have to facilitate. All that. So once you create this keyword phone number situation. Yup. You probably don’t have to do it again. You know what I mean? You just go start giving presentations. Then have that machine connected by someone like you, you know, hooked up so that it’s going to deliver your message at the right time. Start a conversation at the right time, invite them to buy at the right time using these different mediums that we now available. Email and text.

Carlos Vazquez (27:48):
Got it. Got it. So then you, so in Fix Your Funnel, I was checking out several features of theirs, so one of them definitely you see, is the opt in via text and then that information gets sent over to infusion soft. So that way Infusion soft could manage the CRM to contact management aspect of everything. What other, what other uses that you find speakers using with Fix Your Funnel?

Ryan Chapman (28:12):
So they’ll use the outbound messages that are sent by the automation. So you’ll create a campaign, send a text out. We send principally two types of text messages. One is a content. So we’ll have a link to a video that we might have that give some more content and then ask for a buy. And then there’s the conversation starter question. So we’ll send out a text after we send out that content saying, yeah, I noticed you know, I sent you a video about X, Y, and Z. What was your biggest takeaway from that? Something like that. That’s fine. All we’re looking to do is start a conversation because conversations can lead to sales, you know, because the, it’s all going to be in the context of the topic of whatever that speaker is about. And hopefully there’s, you know, a backend sale that’s, that’s part of this, this business. And we’re going to be, you know, diagnosing a person, seeing it. “Okay, So what’s your situation?” “What are you trying to accomplish?” “Oh, actually this would be perfect for you”. And then we prescribe, diagnose and prescribe through the texting and then, you know, potentially pushing it to a phone call. So that’s another part.

Carlos Vazquez (29:12):
So the person gets to a stage into the sales process. Can someone manually take over after that?

Ryan Chapman (29:18):
Oh yeah. That’s the whole point. So the automation is all designed to set up the live texting that will go on through Fix Your Funnel. So we capture the lead. In fact, the formula for that lead capture part that’s really important is we ask for the name, we ask for the email, and then we ask an open ended question. So yeah. What was the biggest highlight for you out of today’s presentation? What was your big action item? What was the takeaway that you’re going to be implementing? Something like that to create engagement. Now we either as the solo preneur or with our team can respond to those messages after our presentation and start engaging with prospects and leading that to a sales conversation. So that’s really big. That’s what fix your funnel facilitates. We have the the iPhone app and Android app that allow you to do that right on your phone while you’re out and about, or you can jump on your computer and do it there.

Ryan Chapman (30:10):
You can also, you can call from that same number that you text from. So maybe we text back and forth with the prospect a couple of times and then we say, “you know what, this might be faster if we jumped on a call do you have time for a call right now?” And then boom, we click the button, we’ve called them straight in there. We’re not in the type in numbers or anything like this. We’re just column. And then we have that phone conversation right there and all that then can get recorded into our Infusion Soft or CRM so that we have that record long term too. So next time we come back to communicate with them, we have a whole context of their automated the campaign messages that we send out and the light messages we had so that we know, “Oh, okay, this is where I am with this person”.

Ryan Chapman (30:47):
Just like you would with, you know, your normal cell phone. But now you’ve got all the business logic and strength behind it.

Carlos Vazquez (30:54):
Right. And so someone else can actually take over, if in case you’re gone, they could see that history and it’s not that awkward introduction…

Ryan Chapman (31:02):
What you’re talking about, yeah. That kind of stuff. Yeah. So you could text them and then you can say, Hey Ryan, why don’t you go ahead and take over this conversation and I could take over and it’s seamless for the contact on the other side. Did you start interacting with your, your persona, your business?

Carlos Vazquez (31:19):
That’s awesome. I always tell people marketing automation is not supposed to replace that human element. It’s supposed to facilitate. Yes, exactly. It’s supposed to short list who you should prioritize. It is the best way I can put it. Yeah. Based off of certain behaviors and certain triggers, we’ll let you know how serious or how, how not serious someone is when it comes to making a decision.

Carlos Vazquez (31:43):
And that’s what I feel these marketing automation tools are supposed to do.

Ryan Chapman (31:48):
Yeah. One of the things that they all say that goes right in, in line with what you’re saying there is that, but what we’re trying to do is mitigate, mitigate the impact of human nature. Well, we enhance our humanity. So human nature is to forget about stuff. Right. “Okay. I got all these business cards from that conference or whatever. I’m going to follow up with these”, and then they go into the journey. Nothing happens, right? Because that’s human nature where like, Oh, I’ll get to that later or something else comes up that seems more urgent, important and so the important but not urgent things get put to the side and as a result of business struggles and we’re in famine mode and then we hustle and then we feast and then it goes back to famine , it’s this feast and famine.

Ryan Chapman (32:32):
If you’ve ever experienced that in your business, that’s a signal of human nature because human nature is cyclical. Know we see those cycles over the place and so if you’re seeing feast or famine that what that means is you haven’t mitigated the impact of human nature on your business and that’s what marketing automation should do. But if you don’t allow that to enhance humanity, then you don’t get the uplift of marketing automation. You just get a bunch of ticked off people because they’re having to deal with bots and stuff. You know what? What you want is to be able to enhance your ability to focus. On the moment with the prospect. And that’s really the thing that texting is great about is because it’s not this time enveloped communication. So if I do a phone call or like this podcast, what we’re doing, we both have to be here and president at this moment in order for this communication to occur.

Ryan Chapman (33:18):
But if we’re texting, I can text you and it can be a couple of minutes before you get to it. And so it gives us flexibility of communication, but still the instantaneousness of it. And so what that does, that allows us to be able to communicate with multiple people, but be in the moment with each of them. And so we can let the marketing automation do the remembering of, “Hey, I need to send out that message to the person who texted in at my presentation and ask them that question”. And then all we have to do is when we get that push notification saying, Hey, you got a new message from so-and-so, let’s go look at that and see the context and respond. So we’re always in the moment. Instead of worrying about the past or the future, we’ll let the marketing automation handle that, which again, mitigates the impact of human nature allowing us to enhance our humanity of connection with another individual, which is what we’re built for.

Carlos Vazquez (34:07):
Right. Man, it’s amazing that you put it that way because automation doesn’t sound as as poetic when you try to explain it. Just try and try to explain to people they don’t really understand automation. It’s, always like an uphill battle, but at the end of the day, it’s all about just trying to connect humans.

Ryan Chapman (34:24):
Yeah. It’s removing all the busy work that we don’t want to do and avoid doing. Letting a machine handle that stuff. And let us just worry about connecting with humans because if, if in your business, you could take all the busy work that occupies your time and pass it off to a machine and just focus on being present with other humans in conversation, well that’s where sales happen. And so we could diagnose and prescribe and collect money. It just focused on that. Letting automation handle all the consistency, so go give your presentation, speak to your audience of 200 capture those 200 leads and then let automation work with them based on their behavior. The set up conversations for you just to respond to, I mean our ideal person that adopts our full philosophy where they end up is that they go and give presentations, they post out their keyword and phone number on social media, on blog posts and other content marketing that they do, Facebook ads, what have you, and then they just engage in conversations with people.

Ryan Chapman (35:27):
They listened to their problems, listen to their dreams, and then they prescribed ways to fulfill those using their business services and that’s where they focus on. They’re having conversations, put out some content, invite people to the call to action, the text-in, to start the journey and then let the machine set up conversations for him. That’s kind of beautiful if you think about it.

Carlos Vazquez (35:50):
Right. Absolutely.

Ryan Chapman (35:50):
That’s the dream in some ways is to connect with people and know that you’re going to be paid because you’re just diagnosing, prescribing. I mean, it’s essentially what a doctor does. They’ve set up their whole environment so people show up to their door, money in hand, Sharon’s card in hand, whatever it is, and they just have to sit there, listen, look, diagnose, prescribed, person walks out of the door, they get paid. That’s essentially how we can set up any business when we understand what it is that we’re doing and who we’re doing it for and let marketing automation experts like you set up that infrastructure that allows them just to focus on connecting with people.

Carlos Vazquez (36:27):
Well, okay man. Well, speaking of connecting man, how can people connect with you and cause I know you have a podcast. I checked out your podcast and just these small little moments of knowledge bombs you shared. I can only imagine what your podcast is all about, man.

Ryan Chapman (36:47):
Which we try, we try, you know, because here, let me. I’ll get a little personal here in terms of what drives me to want to share with other people is if you back, I know my success story started in 2006, 2007, but before that it wasn’t so sweet. I, distinctly recall in 2005 laying in my bed looking up at the ceiling. It’s 3:00 AM I have five little children and my wife and I am scraping. I’m really scraping. I’m doing all I can, but we’re just kind of scraping by and I’m looking up at the ceiling. I’m thinking, “what am I doing? I don’t have any business doing this. I’ve got kids and a wife that are, you know, relying on me”. Well, I got to figure out what I’m doing, you know? And that kind of started a journey that eventually led to me finding a mentor that taught me direct response marketing, introduced me to marketing automation.

Ryan Chapman (37:43):
And then, you know, my education and an application of that education had led to that success that looked like it was overnight. But that was really started back in that 2005 or 3:00 AM cold sweat coming down the forehead. You guys know it, everybody that’s entrepreneurs felt that at some point. Hopefully not too recently. And I understand we only get one life and we don’t know how many days we have on this planet. We don’t know when we die but we have to work just part of it. So why not make the work the very best it can be? Make it the most profitable for you and the people that you serve, the most enjoyable, where you really in your sweet spot. And so that’s why I share the stuff I do is to try and help people because somebody was kind enough to me, give me that and I want to give it, you know, I want to pay it forward.

Ryan Chapman (38:28):
So that’s why this book, is most recent book, I’ve written a few books. This is the messaging connection. This is more about the topic we’ve been talking about today. I’d love to give people a free digital and audio copy of it and they can get it by texting the word, LEARN to (949) 835-5300 and maybe you can put that in the notes or those that would like to, I know this is at the end, but this is a different situation. This is a podcast. You guys can rewind it. It’s not like a live thing. So that’s why I’m okay doing it at the very end. But yeah, the text, the word LEARN to (949) 835-5300. And if you’re on audio or on the video, you can just rewind it. Listen to that as many times as you want to capture it. It’s unlike radio, which was one shot, you know.

Ryan Chapman (39:12):
But if they do that, what will happen is, again, I’ll ask them for their name, ask them for their email and I’ll give them a link to a page that has an audio. If you liked my voice, you’ll get to hear it. If you didn’t like, you have to bear with it. And then a PDF version of the book. Of course you can go buy the book on Amazon, but if you just want to listen to it and, and look at some of the graphs and diagrams that I have in there, that’s what the PDF is for. I’d love to give that to anybody that would need that help of getting better at messaging and texting. It’s such a right field right now. There’s so many opportunities in that, when people understand and use the right approach,

Carlos Vazquez (39:50):
Right? I think it’s all coming down full circle. It’s, back then it was all about automation, automation, just scale as much as possible. But now automation has gone to the point where people have burned it. So people are craving that human connection again.

Ryan Chapman (40:06):
They do. And so if you can, if you can use automation, right? Again, like I’ve been in this industry for 12 years, not just observing it, but using it to create successful businesses. And my whole philosophy is, is evolved into this point where let’s let it do the busy work where it doesn’t really matter. We just, we have to ask for name, we have to ask for email. That’s gotta be done. Let the automation do that, but stop there. See, funnel like the Facebook bots and all that has become really popular and so people are just, they’re automating the heck out of conversation. I’ve got one, I’ve been running an ongoing seven month experiment on where I ask a question periodically, I’d never get a response because they only have a bot connected to this Facebook messenger. And so then I periodically, I’ll get a Facebook automated message that they’ve sent out as a broadcast or something, but never responds to my live question.

Ryan Chapman (40:57):
And this is exactly the problem because people don’t understand where automation should be because they don’t have an expert like you. They don’t put it in the right place to try and put it everywhere and we put it everywhere. Just irks everybody. Nobody liked telephone trees, you know what I mean? Press one for this. Okay, now press seven for this. Now 99 for… Nobody loved that. So why do we think that we want to do that again with a different medium? We don’t, right. Use automation, the bare minimum necessary to do the busy work and to allow the human nature to be mitigated and then enhance the humanity. If you do that, you’ll win every time. It doesn’t matter what medium texting,

Ryan Chapman (41:34):
Facebook messaging, email, whatever. You just got to think about that philosophy that you have and I have if you get that right. Oh then it’s a beautiful thing. Right? Well and it’s effective.

Carlos Vazquez (41:47):
Yeah, man. I agree man. Well Ryan, thank you so much for your time. I’ll make sure to post the phone number and the keyword on the podcast and the, in the show notes. That way we canspread as much of the love to anyone that’s listening to this one episode right now because, this is one of the deepest episodes I think I’ve ever had. So I really thank you.

New Speaker (42:10):
Pleasure, my pleasure…

New Speaker (42:10):
You got it man. Well. Thanks for your time, my brother.

Ryan Chapman (42:16):
My pleasure.

Announcer (42:17):
Thanks for listening to the digital marketing secrets show with Carlos A Vazquez. Want to join the exclusive digital marketing community? Of course, you do. Make sure to visit us @miamimarketer.com/growth for more info. See you soon!