The secret to using disruptive marketing to stand out and sell no brainer scalable services

Step 1 – Mental Prep

I’ve already written a few points on this on my “How I booked 1,000+ pre-sold sales calls using ONLY cold email” – Go give it a read and come back.

Step 2 – Is What You’re Selling Worth Anyone’s Time

If you’re not beating leads off with a stick to grasp for breathing room over your insane product offering. You don’t have a no brainer product yet.

Design one then get to sharing your value with the world. Don’t waste your time trying to paint jelly gold and then act all upset that marketing is ‘hard’ or ‘expensive’.

I’ve brought a house on the back of those guys crying. Makes my life easier.

Why you ask?

Anyone can set up a Facebook ad or send a cold email. The marketing. In fact, I don’t even want to use that word ‘marketing’ its become so over saturated of a word that its core purpose has been lost.

A successful Facebook campaign or cold email blast is not hinged upon a few nifty lead sourcing words or a knowing which box to check on set up. I can link to dozens of ‘industry leading gurus’ deliberately over complicating marketing practices to better justify ‘expertise’ and their absurd prices to teach such methods.

A fool and his money. You know the saying.

Look. I can set up a Facebook campaign with NO interests selected, Gender, Country AND NO objective selected and STILL earn a decent ROI.

How?

Because my product/service’s most influential competitive advantage will speak for itself within the ad Image/Video and Facebook will do the rest.

The moment you begin to shift your energy to your own products core ‘wow factor’ the faster and better off you will be. If you want to be the best and earn my kinda numbers. You need to start owning or associating with products that require NO sales to sell.

I’m probably losing you here so here’s a few examples that are not ‘Design a alternative fuel source’ or ‘own a SAAS company’. Read these and tell me if they fit the bill:

“The cheapest Handwritten personalised letters in North America, at just $0.27 cents each. End to end tracking and seamless integration into current popular funnels and CRM’s.”

“We build and manage and optimise your Businesses Google profile and guarantee a top 3 position in highest reviews in your services area – FOR FREE – No contracts”

“We guarantee 99.99% of all your emails will land in the Primary Tab or we don’t get paid. Performance backed retainer and only bill on a confirmed sale via our work.”

Starting to see the difference between the above and the usual: “we manage your Facebook ads for free, just pay for ad spend…” LOL All of the above examples can just as easily be a ‘Blue Monkey Digital Marketing Agency’ esk service, but it will just fall on deaf ears my friend.

Oh and by the way, the 3 examples above are real messages used in my actual companies.

I lead with the negative externalities first and for most as research has proven fear and loss convert upwards of 70% more effectively.

https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/kahneman/files/anomalies_dk_jlk_rht_1991.pdf

You need to invest your time to design or source your own no brainer offerings and you’ll find marketing to be the easiest thing in the world. I’m not saying you need to invent something. You could just find the industry leading solution and work to sell that. Legally.

See a new way companies can claim $xxxx per employee – for free? Brilliant, use it.

Discovered a method a company is using to source cheaper energy in a world of growing costs? – Great, share it with others.

Identified a severe bottleneck in an industry that is so common its seen as ‘the norm’ and you have a process to resolve it? – You’re walking on sunshine my friend.

I’m a marketing kinda guy – yet the above examples (which are real btw) have not once touched on some marketing lingo or notion of ‘pay to play’. Some Ad > LP > Webinar, copy and paste trash you’re all so fixed on. This clear understanding of what you ACTUALLY do as ‘paid problem solver’ that uses marketing systems to fulfil. Is the biggest light bulb moment you can ever have to make generational wealth my friend.

Step 3 – Get Your Supplies

We’re sending letters via the post. Guess what. You’re going need stamps and paper. Pretty simple. Nip over to amazon and get a few things:

Envelopes

DON’T GET BUSINESS LOOKING ONES – The whole idea is to stand out. Get envelopes that you would most likely associate with birthday or wedding invitations.

Stamps

Post office / Amazon again. No point getting first class. But again, very important rule. You need to stand out and not look like a business. No buying of pre-paid stamps or barcode esk looking things. It needs to be a physical, lick the back and stick on type stamp.

Paper

Don’t cheap out. Don’t get bible-thin paper lol. But don’t break the bank either. Just get something that ‘feels’ like it wasn’t pulled right out of a school printer.

Inserts

Post-it notes, stappled extras, paperclips, folded 1 sided messages, small trinket, etc. These add immense levels of human investment into this message. This always pays dividends.

Pens

Black ball point. Black and red felt. All you need. Ball point for the bulk of the writing inside if you so choose to handwrite *recommended* and the felt for a quick *private* written on the envelope / underlining a CTA on the main message inside.

All in all you’re spending like $50 bucks max. for your first wave of letters.

Step 4 – Writing

We’re long past communication via grunts and chest slaps. We now use scribbles on paper to convey our emotional instability. Calling out you Twitter addicts!

Begin to plan the words to be written in the precise order that gets the action you want. Here’s a few tips on doing just that.

Define your mailer’s objective:

• An email reply – via a written email address
• A URL follow – via a written URL
• A URL follow – via a QR code
• A phone call – via a written phone #

Now, ask yourself.

Does the lead have at this moment, enough motivation to act on your desired output?

Email you, call that number, take out their phone and scan that QR code?

If not, you need to go back to step 2. Seriously.

Here’s an example of a very strong letter I’ve sent that gets upwards of 80%-90% engagement.

Take a breath.

It seriously is that easy.

No need for over complicated scripts and systems. Just contact guys that have yet to discover a no brainer ‘thing’ and go above and beyond telling them about it.

How many do you think that received this letter went and did it themselves out of some superficial greed?

10?… 50?…

Not a single one…

I filled my schedule and took a fat fee for each lead I ran through the system.

If you need help working on your own ‘no brainer’ offer – try booking a call with me, I take a few each day with you guys.

Step 5 – Organisation

Pipelines and Kanbans. AKA CRM’s and trusty old Excel. Failure to organise is a failure in whole. This is going be a ball achingly long journey and you aint no rain man. You’re going need to efficiently organise your leads, contact points, who’s engaged with this, that and what is even happening a week from now.

Use these tools like your life depends on it. Frankly, some of you need money so bad in this guru / make money space it might very well be!

Just listen to papa J, you won’t need a course mate.

Whatever you decide to use, I’ll break down the basics that apply to all.

Set up your pipeline with simple yet accurate headers.

Lead pool | Vetted | Ready For Outreach | Contacted | Call Booked | Pitched / Proposal Sent | Verbal Sale | Closed Sale | Follow-Up

This is as complicated as 99% of you will ever need to pull in fat numbers. It should quickly end up looking like a right-hand triangle as the most busy column will be ‘Lead Pool’ as they slowly begin to move right.

Using Google Sheets with a few integrations we’ll get to lower down, you’ll see why the chart is designed as above. As leads progress, or outside systems update. We can trigger events like, ‘update the tracking link’ or ‘update QR code # scans’. Its going get wild!

This will be open 24/7 on your other monitor, kept religiously up to date in real time and shared to all third party VA’s that are working on their assigned header. AKA, guys working on sourcing leads to put into the ‘Lead Pool’. Guys working on researching unique/specific things about each lead in the ‘Vetted’ header, and so on. I need you to think that, if you were to walk away or hand your CRM to someone. They’ll automatically be able to see all lead notes, how many calls are coming in, where your bottlenecks are, how much money is currently sitting at each stage, etc.

Bonus Tip

Have an idea of progression chance (%) from left to right. E.g. What’s the % that a lead inside ‘Contacted’ will progress to ‘Call Booked’. Let’s say 20% for this example. Knowing this, from a 30k view, we can begin to see how much $ value is in our pipeline at any one time. If our product offering is a fixed price.

Ready For Outreach | 100% chance to advance | Contacted | 50% chance to advance |

With a bit of math, we could see from the above rules that, as on this moment, with 200 leads inside the pipeline, we have a pipeline worth $xxxx. Major alpha play here.

Bonus Tip #2

Just as when we set up an idea of estimated % of progression, we can do the opposite. What is the % chance a lead will degrade/fall back into previous stages. In sales we call this ‘Rot’. Using certain CRM systems, we can easily set this up. Using only google sheets, it will require a few nifty cell formulars to move leads left and right.

Data accuracy is money. That’s all we do here.

Step 6 – Testing

Remember that part about putting those words in the correct order to get the action you want? Yeah you aint going know that order on your first attempt.

This is where you’re going to design a simple, yet effective testing road map within your market to help you save some money, and hopefully make more of it too.

We’re going use some basic formulas to determine the amount of tests we need to run and the number of people we need run said tests too, to figure out an accurate perspective on what a piece of direct response marketing will return if we use that at scale.

Basically envelope A vs envelope B

Or

Short Copy vs Long Copy

You get it. It’s just I’m going to apply actual math that has been undisputed for decades.

Formulas we’re going to use:

Margin of Error and Sample Size.

Variables we’re going to test:

A White Envelope vs Purple Envelope

Short copy vs Long Copy

Funnel 1 (VSL to Schedule) vs Funnel 2 (Direct to Schedule)

6 objects to test – whilst we need 3 of them at once to run.

(We need an envelope + insert + funnel, simple)

Quick math gives us 20 possible combinations. In other words, we need to run 20 tests. Yeah, I don’t think so. That’s going add up big time in Dollar Bills so I’m going to add a little commentary from an experienced Direct Response Marketers perspective.

We’re going to add more weight to specific tests. Meaning. I’m going to say the value of knowing which envelope to use is more important than short vs long copy. Simply because if the user doesn’t open the envelope, the rest doesn’t matter. Agree? With that, the total number of tests isn’t 20. It’s more like 3.

(I just saved you a few hundred bucks mate – If that’s isn’t worth buying my book I don’t know what is lol)

Now its only 3 tests. We now need to figure out how many leads we need to use to determine which set of variables is going to be the best to choose and run to our whole market henceforth.

Let’s add a few more sample data sets to make this easier.

SaaS companies that just finished their first funding round and beginning development. We’ve pulled together 1,000 of them and put them into our Google Sheet under ‘Lead Pool’.

We’ve written up our short vs long copy. Have both our white and purple envelopes sitting here. Both of our funnels ready too.

Test 1 – Which Envelope gets more opens.

Test 2 – Which version of copy gets more engagement.

Test 3 – Which funnel results in more sales calls that close.

To keep this simple, we’ll run test 1 with short copy and funnel 1 and test 2 with funnel 2. A little tip to help you decide what other variables to use when you test BEFORE you actually have data to back your decision. Go with your gut. Keep it simple. I tend to prefer the fastest route to money.

Now back to the tests. we’ll use the Margin of Error and Confidence level – This will tell us how many leads we need for each test, with the above numbers.

Margin of error Calculator – https://www.calculator.net/sample-size-calculator.htm

Confidence Level – 95%

Sample Size – 100

Population Proportion – 50% (They engage, or they don’t. Binary, yes or no)

Population Size – 1,000

= 9% margin of error but at a cost of sending 100 letters to 100 leads. This is where you need to apply your own level of budget to your individual preference of how important testing is to you.

Adjusting the Sample Size to 50, gives us a new margin of error at = 13.5%

An increase of 4% but at a saving of 50% in costs.

Think like this with your testing budget.

Sample Size Calculator – https://www.calculator.net/sample-size-calculator.htm

Confidence Level – 95%

Margin of Error – 13.5% (As above now you’ve worked it out)

Population Proportion – 50%

Population Size – 1,000

= 51

Meaning to accurately determine statistical significance with our white vs purple envelope. We need to send the white envelope to 51 leads, and the purple envelope to 51 leads. Totalling 102 leads used out of our pool of 1,000 leaving 898 waiting to be contacted with the superior, data backed version.

Short version of testing. Its vitally important you know how to perform accurate tests with the correct data sets… But damn ROI is way more important for a beginner here…

I recommend you lead with just a strong handwritten envelope and not rely on a specific set of words in a specific order being the ‘make or break’ of a direct mail campaign. Re-read and study step 2, you’ll thank me for that bro.

Step 7 – Tracking

Knowing where your spit covered wrapped paper has gone and whom came back as a result is the make or break of this. You may as well have sent your money in that letter if you’re not tracking who is worth your time.

I’ll show you a free way to track who engages with your physical mailer to better prepare follow-up campaigns with your limited budget – max results – little cost. I like it.

We’ll be using custom short links and a custom QR codes, that all automatically feed into our google sheet… Oh and its all free long enough to make bank with this.

You’re going to need a few things:

• A new domain used exclusively for tracking | Namecheap
• A Free Cloudflare account
• the short link tool I’ve used for years *Secret*
• A QR code generator | qrcode-Tiger.com (This was a secret but I figured I’d throw a hint at the locked alpha inside my trade secret vault)
• Google Sheets / CRM of choice.
• *Secret tool that will automatically update your google sheet / CRM when a lead scans a QR code*
• *Secret tool that will automatically create a personalised, unique landing page for each lead, the moment they scan the QR code*
• A master email inbox to receive key notifications of lead progression through your pipeline.
• A cool mp3 file to play when you get a response *not mission critical*

Buying a domain & Cloudflare

Go to namecheap.com and hunt for a short, relevant domain to your brand with the .link TLD

Put it to one side for now. Now go over to cloudflare.com and set that up. All the basics don’t need to buy anything.

Setting up your short-links ready for unique mass automation

Setting up your QR Codes

This is a major part of making your leads lives so much easier when it comes to engagement. You can try do just use shortlinks but even having to type in abc.link/119 is just too much effort for a complete stranger.

Sounds daft but we want next to no investment of action here. 100% seamless.

Phone, picture, done.

Not

Phone, browser, look at letter, type a few letters, look back at letter, press enter, done.

See the difference?

For this, a great tool is this free QR-Code generator.

They have bulk options but its really not needed for beginners. All you need to do is literally just paste a Landing Page URL / Calendar URL into this and generate a QR Code.

Download it and insert onto one of those sticker backed printable sheets x 100 and cut up ready to be stuck to all your letters.

This is where 99% of you will just stop and go with that.

But we’re the 1%…

We want unique tracking on each leads engagement with their unique letter… Going to a personalised webpage… On mass… All automatically… For free…

I locked these steps off from the public to protect their absurd potential. If you want these locked steps to add real power to this strategy. You can buy them for $100 here. You will get an ROI with your first campaign just by adding these locked steps to the already god-tier strategy above.

Not even sorry for the blue balling. There’s a reason my employees don’t know how much their co-worker gets. There’s a reason my suppliers don’t know how much I pay my other suppliers.

You’re buying optional trade secrets to add jet fuel to an already alpha marketing strategy.

Automating your letter engagement tracking with your google Sheets

That’s all you need to launch better than probably everyone in your space.

Want more? Then keep reading bro. Plenty more where this came from!

Step 8 – Human Touch / Personalisation

I’ve said it before. If you want 80% engagements and 50% sales rates – You need to start using unique personalisation at every possible opportunity you can.

The more human you are, the more of all that good, glorious money that will spue all over you.

I’m talking their names, jobs, headaches, the number of likes they have on Facebook, the # of reviews they have on Google My Business, when they moved into that building.

Bank all that info and apply it in your copy and funnels.

I’ve written a pretty decent piece In this post about sending cold email to book calls

There are levels to this. I’ve been using a few extra strategies here to automate this from end to end.

• I’m talking personalised handwritten letters – at scale.
• Unique letter tracking
• Personalised Landing Pages / Calendar pages with the leads name, business, the works all over it.
• Updating in real time to both a Google sheet and any other CRM of choice.

Imagine not only getting a handwritten letter. But its filled with personalised, unique points just to this lead… That has a unique tracked CTA that takes them to a personalised Landing Page…

Without costing you a fortune in VA manpower or 20+ tools to do it all.

I’ll show you how to do it in less than 60 minutes in the paid guide here.

Or you can just use the free version I’ve written on this blog, bank the cash you’ll make and come back. If its still even up.

Step 9 – Funnel

The machine that’s going to do all the heavy lifting for you. How to push your leads through a digital path that leads them to the end result you want, at a probability that makes this whole thing profitable.

How you get paid and how you’re going to be able to easily track and segment your leads. It goes beyond a few boxes connected with arrows.

You don’t need to over complicate this step.

It can be as simple as taking the lead to a Calendly page. Really.

You don’t necessarily need over the top funnels.

I’ve found the more complexity in a funnel – The more disconnected the offering from the lead/market.

“Hey I’m hungry, every day, around this time” – Guy set up outside the building at 1pm selling hot dogs.

That’s the hot dog guys funnel lol

Your chosen product/service offering is all you need to do the selling. Go back to step 2 of this guide. Where is the pre-recorded webinar in that? Or the expensive website developer here?

Think of funnels as force multipliers. At a point you will need to scale and grow. A funnel will achieve this for you with an extra layer of functionality to your marketing.

Is it needed to make money? No.

Is it needed to efficiently scale? Yes.

Multi-platform retargeting via social media, email, phone and more letters. Funnels quickly organise and present this ability to those that are ready for it.

But for now, I recommend one of these two funnel designs:

Letter > Free Calendly page

Or

Letter > Unlisted Youtube Video > Calendly page.

Both free and all you need. Focus on action and not fluffy non-monetary tasks.

Step 10 – Scaling

Now you’ve gone through the steps to make 1 sale. You can now put more in, to get more out, Scaling infinitely to your budget and time resources. Now you’re going to start thinking about upsell and cross sell opportunities.

Easily set up and scaled if you’ve followed the methodology outlined so far.

Focus on finding a no brainer opportunity.

Design a monetisation system around it.

Outsource or automate fulfilment.

Figure out the exact steps and cost to generate 1 sale.

Is that profitable? Yes/No

If yes, double input.

If no, go back to finding a no brainer opportunity.

Guys. Its that simple. In the time you’ve spent reading this blog, you could have found multiple overlooked opportunities using just your phone. Written 20-30 handwritten letters. Set up your QR code farm with time left to set up a Stripe Account…

If you need a kick up the arse or accountability. Buy me a coffee and we’ll talk it out. I’ll be as real as you need to make it in this jungle. It costs $7 for like an hour with me. What are you waiting for?

Let’s get to work.