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A
Hey everybody.
B
Welcome to another episode of the Business Lunch podcast with your hosts, me, Roland Frazier and Ryan Deiss. Ryan, how are you doing today?
A
Should we warn everybody that we're both brain dead because it's freaking May. May, summer.
B
This has been quite the day. So this is the behind the scenes. You're paddling a million miles an hour underwater while you're trying to float, you know, effortlessly on the top.
A
But yeah, man, my God, nobody warns you that like when you get kids and stuff like that, that May is just bonkers. Cause it's already crazy enough like there's graduations and, you know, all this other stuff and finalizing like a billion different banquets that you have to go through. And it's. And if you're in business, everybody else is trying to like wrap crap up because they want to like, do stuff over the summer. So I truly do feel like I've decided that May is like December without the presents.
B
Hmm, Nice. I like it.
A
So it's just like all the busyness, all the craziness, all the hecticness, but no presence. So. Yeah, anyway, so if you're listening to this, we're definitely gonna talk about some awesome stuff. I don't know what it is yet, but it's gonna be freaking fantastic. Just know we're a little bit stupid.
B
I do know because we did it yesterday. We did, we did a meeting with one of our Roundtable members. And Roundtable is our highest thing that we do. It's basically how we work towards having a longer term partnership with people and kind of test driving what a partnership like that might look like. And so quarterly, it's a one year thing and quarterly we do these meetings and we did one yesterday with one of our clients and I thought there were a lot of really good takeaways. We had other things that we talked about talking about, but. But I mentioned to Ryan as we were getting ready to go on today, I thought there was some really good stuff in there, particularly about where to focus and mistakes that we have made in the past and that we see people making in where they're spending money for media, what kind of offers they're making, what does the customer journey look like, what does the funnel look like that really applies to anything. So I'd love to chat a little bit about that. Ryan. And I know that's more the marketing things that you do, but. But also kind of how, how sales related to that. The application of the sales team was in, you know, perhaps the wrong place in that deal that we were Talking about. So I think maybe just starting out and saying. So if, if we're looking at something like if we were doing a consultation with you guys, whoever's listening, if we, you know, if you were part of Roundtable, we would start out with kind of simple things like, you know, when's the last time you raised your prices? And you know, what do you think about doing stuff like that? Because those are quick wins. But as we kind of dig down a little bit deeper into what's going on and you know, where can we really add continuing value? We start to look at what are you actually trying to accomplish on the end and what's the beginning that hopefully will lead people there. And, and I thought that maybe chatting a little bit about that would be helpful because I think that probably a lot of people who are listening or watching are making the mistake that we saw that was being made with our client and that, you know, we made. We learned this almost everything because we're kind of thick headed sometimes by doing things wrong and then figuring out that we were doing them wrong.
A
So I think that'd be a great place to start. Yeah, yeah. You want me to set the, kind of, give some context, set the stage for what would have been going on. Yeah, yeah. So for this particular client, and this is the case with a lot of, with a lot of businesses, they're focused on lead generation. They're focused on, you know, initial client acquisition and lead generation in particular. Like how do we get people on the list that we can eventually sell to. This person has a little bit longer sales cycle. They're not an E commerce company where, you know, somebody clicks, they go to a website, they buy today. So the idea is to generate a lead, that lead can then be nurtured so that lead can be turned into, you know, in this case, they're basically recruiting for a professional services type type type solution. Obviously don't want to reveal the client and their, and their specific business model, what their goal was. And this is the goal of a lot of business owners that I've seen and it's what I used to teach, so I'm sympathetic towards it. It's what we used to do, which is their goal was to completely self liquidate their lead acquisition cost within the first 24 to 48 hours of that lead coming in. And so what I mean by self liquidate when, when somebody becomes a lead and that can mean different things to different businesses, but for them it's you know, it's name, it's email address, its phone Number it's permission to follow up. It's some basic information about, about the individual. When that person becomes a lead, there's a cost associated with, with making that happen. They had to pay for advertising to make that happen. Now obviously in an ideal world that you would generate a rapid ROI on that lead. So you're basically able to generate leads for free.
B
And so in other words, so that you, you're not investing in media and going negative for a period of time while you're waiting for that lead to actually buy. This is the goal is our leads are for free. And that's slo right. Self liquidating offers.
A
Self liquidating offers. Yep.
B
All the rage.
A
It's yep. Whether you know, supplement offers or tripwires, all the stuff that we would talk about kind of what was the core of really funnel architecture when people would think about the marketing funnel, it was how do we get a lead in and then how do we ROI that lead as quickly as possible so that the lead is effectively free? And on the surface and on paper this sounds like a really good idea. And it can be like there, there are times when it, when it can work. But what we found is that there is a cost associated with extracting immediate value from that lead. And there's a couple of ways that this cost, you know, is associated. One of the, one of the first things that can happen is what we found is that when a lead comes in, if you immediately try to sell them something right then and there, which that's exactly what this client was trying to do. So they're trying to recruit and to get people into their program. And when they get somebody in, one of their clients is worth anywhere between 40,000 and over a hundred thousand dollars a year to them. So just for context, that's a lot. Now what they're trying to do is how do we get people in and how do we basically sell them like a book and some other stuff so that we can immediately self liquidate this lead. Well, the problem what we found is when you do sell somebody a low ticket, a low dollar type thing, what you're basically giving them the opportunity to do is to scratch that itch, to attempt to solve that problem on their own. And when you do that, you're actually making them less likely to buy your most expensive thing. So in seeking to basically pull more of that future forward, to get more of the money earlier, and not a lot of it, mind you, just enough to quote unquote, offset the lead cost, you're actually lowering the chance that some of these people are going to buy. And we've experienced this like we would have really good quality leads come through. We had a service that we were trying to sell them, but before we offered them the service, we'd say, oh, let's sell them a course to see if they could do it themselves, you know, and then we could say, oh, you got the course. Now buy this like service where we'll do it for you. And it sounds like a good idea. We're going to offset some of the acquisition costs. We'll make some money off of that. What we found though is our, some of our best leads who bought that course when we'd fall and be like, hey, you want some help doing this? They're like, no, no, no, I'm going to try to do it myself first because I've already made this investment and
B
that's the, and I think it, it actually does a disservice that you don't think about, which is that they had pressure enough to seek the solution and you've given them this escape route to not actually have to do it and be able to put it off. Because instead of like an assisted thing where you would actually have to go and start the work of doing whatever it is you're going to do, you've given them this magic pass to put it off. And so they're not getting the true pressure relief they want. Whatever caused them to do this is still going to be there because 90% plus of people that acquire a DIY solution don't ever even open it. But it makes you feel good that you took that step. It takes that pressure off, even though it's still going to continue to simmer. So you're really allowing them or enabling them to not get the result that they want by doing that. Right.
A
That's.
B
That to me is something that I think is important for people to realize. It's like, it's not even, it's not bad to say, let me do the high end help you thing first because most people need that more than they need another information.
A
Yeah, you're selling them guilt reduction. And one of the key aspects in sales is you actually want to widen the gap, right? You, you want to expand the, the, you know, make people even more aware of the problem that they're dealing with. And, and the right way to, to solve it. Not like in a cruel, knife, twisty kind of way. Just this is what persuasion is. It's, it's. Look, this is the problem that you're facing here. And when you Sell somebody something that has the perception of being a solution, but it isn't actually the real solution. What you sold them is guilt reduction, and you've. You've actually narrowed the gap in their mind. It's. It's. My favorite example of this is the old rule with gym equipment was you wanted to make sure that the gym equipment could be folded up and slid under the bed, because if it just sat in the corner and made them feel guilty about the fact that they weren't using it, that it was going to come back. Well, if we actually care about solving this problem for our clients, like, if that's what we're doing, if that's what we're selling is a true solution on the other end, then we don't want them to buy a less expensive thing that's going to alleviate the guilt and then be able to slide it underneath the bed so they never see it again. But that's what happens all too often with these lower ticket offerings. And so one of the advice that we gave them is get all those things out of the funnel. Like, get them out of there. You'd be better off just bringing the lead in, absorbing that cost right now, and just nurturing the lead and selling the 3 to 5% who are actually ready to buy your most expensive thing now, figuring out, how do we get those people to raise their hand and say, I'm ready to buy now. And for everybody else, leave them the hell alone. Don't let them scratch that itch. Allow that itch over time to get even more itchier. And then the job of marketing is to continue to identify those 3 to 5% who are ready to buy now, have them raise their hand, and then move them through the process. Don't let them scratch the itch for an inexpensive amount.
B
Yeah. So the. The other challenges is I think that people will think, well, but aren't I supposed to create awareness and nurture? And then once I've established, you know, faith, or once I've had a free line where I give this thing to them that's a value and they feel, you know, reciprocity and. And things like that, does that. Does this, in your opinion, obviate that? Does it, like, does it take that out, or do you try to give them the solution that you would like them to have that, you know, will help them the most, and then for those that aren't ready for that, move them into that? So it's kind of reversing the order that most people teach.
A
Yeah, that's exactly It, I mean, and so what I would encourage people to do and what we told this client to do is effectively to flip the funnel so to make it to where, when, when a, when you have a lead who comes in. Your job right then and there when that lead comes in is to find out are they ready now? And this can be done by the way with a simply somebody. Let's say you're giving away a lead magnet. Because I'm still okay with free stuff, like give away free stuff. Because free stuff doesn't make somebody think, well, I invested a lot in this, I should at least try that first. So if you give somebody a free ebook or a free tool or something like that, that's, that's still fine, that's how we get the lead. But once you have the lead now what you want to do is you want to ask them, hey, you download this thing, you requested this thing. That's probably because what you really want is this big result. That's kind of what we do as a company. If you want our help doing that, sign up here, fill out this form, book this meeting, apply for this thing, click this button, Give some of these people who say that they want the thing now the opportunity to raise their hand again. About 3 to 5% of the people are going well probably about 10 to 20% of the people, 10 to 15% will identify in 3 to 5% of the total. So call it 30 ish. 20 to 30% of that will wind up actually becoming a client. Now those are the people, those now people, those are the ones who will help to self liquidate your lead cost. But for everybody else to your going back to your question, yeah, we want to nurture them, but we want to nurture them by again continuing to give them free content. Because the, but the goal of the free content should again be to stretch the gap, not to narrow the gap. We don't want to give content that's going to make people think, oh this is great, I now have it all figured out. So we want to give content that might completely address one small sliver of an issue they have. But it should point out, okay, we talked about this and this is going to be great. But if you want the solution to the big thing, we should talk. And so you're just looking to re engage them even though they're already on your list with the same basic mechanism that got them on the list in the first place. So we're just going to repeat that activity. And that's the job of marketing. And every Time they do that, we're going to get and ask them that same question. Are you ready? Now, whatever mechanism we use the first time, it may make sense at a certain point in time to offer certain low dollar, lower ticket kind of things to generate some revenue and to activate. We do that at the scalable company. Tomorrow as we're filming this, I'm going to be doing a workshop that cost a hundred dollars. But that workshop is on a very specific thing. Nobody who invests in that workshop and shows up for that is going to decide that, oh, I've now got every single thing I need to scale my business and achieve my ideal exit. Completely solve for little things, but don't give them the perception that they can solve for the big thing.
B
The other thing that I heard you mention that I think, I think what I heard was something I hadn't really thought about is that would you say that you said keep giving them free content. So after you offer the larger thing that you ideally would like for them to get and you find they're not ready for that yet, don't downsell to something less than that or, and instead keep giving free content because if they make an investment by making a purchase for money, then they feel like they need to ROI that investment first and that creates delay or note for that.
A
Yeah, that's, I mean, so yes, if, if, if they're, if they're not ready, then if you do say, well okay, then let's go ahead and downsell you to this, you know, to this other thing. Look, there's a really good chance there. What we found is the conversion rate on that downsell is going to be incredibly low anyway because they just identified, they're not quite ready to, to fully dive into this. They're just in terms of like the nurture cycle and the life cycle, they're just not there yet. And so when you ask them to make another purchase, all you're actually doing is you're further extending the ready period. That's, you're, you're just pushing it out even further. We, you know, we have found, and this is if you're selling a more complete service or solution on the back end or at least something that is promising to, to deliver a more complete service or solution. So if what you're offering, and this is important, if what you're downselling them to is the same promised end result as the big thing that you want to deliver, that's I would say a. No, no. If you want to try to downsell them to something that is a micro solution to a micro problem. That's a slightly different scenario. I think that's, that's less risky. I still though wouldn't do it immediately when you get a brand new lead. I would let them, I would nurture them with free content and see if we can get them back, back through for probably at least the first 30 days.
B
Yeah. Okay. So the other thing that we were talking about with that client was where is the salesforce focused? And so I think we should say a couple of things. One, I believe that we have identified that very frequently, particularly for higher and purchases, simply selling online isn't enough. Simply making a presentation or a pitch without, or giving content and then saying, you know, please buy my expensive thing was something that was working in 2022, but not something that's working in 2026.
A
And so the only people I see making it work are people teaching you courses on how to make it work.
B
Yeah, yeah. With income claims, it'll probably get them in trouble.
A
Almost certainly. Yeah. No, but I mean we've tried it across boy, a dozen plus industries like how do we get people to give us 5,000, you know, plus even with payment plans and stuff like that. Certainly if you're, you know, if the service or solution that you're offering has a, you know, contract value of, you know, 20,000, 50,000, 100,000, which a lot of service contracts do, this is not going to be a somebody goes to a website, reads it or watches a video, fills out an order form type deal.
B
So, so the first thing is, is if you don't have salespeople, a sales team will ultimately be very likely to make you more money if you get it deployed in the right way. Which we can talk about a different time, but when you have the sales team being sure that they're focused on selling, the right thing is important as well. And that was something that we identified when we kind of dove into the client that we were talking with. And I think it's, it's also something that people could benefit from hearing.
A
Yeah, I mean, so for this particular client they had a sales team, but the sales team was really focused on once somebody became a client, how do they get them activated and how do they, you know, help them actually go out there and, you know, and sell the stuff. So I don't know that it was necessarily misapplied because the reason that their clients are worth as much as they are worth. And again, this person, let's say this person is in the financial services industry and so they're recruiting other financial service professionals, I think that's, we can keep it narrow to that. And so, yeah, so they've got, they've got somebody now in the business as a financial service professional. The way that they make money is if this person goes out there and does the thing. Right. And so the sales team that they had was charged with getting this, you know, their client to do the thing. And that's amazing. But there wasn't a sales team for the actual getting of the clients. And that sounds like obvious, but for this particular client, in their defense, that they had previously been able to do recruiting and things like that without needing a sales team. So they didn't need.
B
And even as a, even as the people that were helping them, we just kind of assumed that the sales team was doing that.
A
Like we, that was people. Yeah, I'm thinking they do both. And it kind of goes to a bigger sort of macro thing. I mean so this is specific to sales to sales teams, but it applies to a lot of different, it applies to a lot of your departments where you have fundamentally different ideal clients that you're talking to. You're likely going to need a different sales team for that. And so in the case of the sales team that they had, this sales team was basically selling financial service products to end consumers. Right. To, you know, small, medium sized businesses and things like that. That's what they were good at. Well, you can't take that exact same sales team and say, well now we also want you to sell, you know, the, the program to, to bring in more people. Just asking a salesperson to sell a fundamentally different product or service line to a fundamentally different type of person and quick switch between those two. It's not going to happen. So you're going to need a. I'm going to tell you though, like, just,
B
just because I know I did. I think you did. But like we pushed back on this forever because it's like you got two things. Thing one, thing two, you talk about thing one. If you're selling thing one, you talk about thing two. If you're selling thing two, you should be able to switch calls every other call, no problem. But it just, even though to me that seems like it's something that should be easy and obvious that it should be easy. That is an incorrect assumption based on our experience.
A
Founders can do it. Founders can do it. And this is one of the reasons that a lot of business owners have such a hard time shifting from founder led sales to actual like to having an actual scalable sales team is Just that is because the founder is able to sell anything they got to anybody they talk to. They just can't.
B
Including. Including, like investing in the company?
A
Yep. That's the founder's gift. And when you're building out sales teams, and I believe it also applies to marketing teams, and you and I have talked about this before as well. But having these single threaded sales team where this sales team is gonna sell, and I believe that one sales team can sell multiple things. Like, so if you have, you know, three or four product lines, that's okay. That's okay as long as they're selling it to the same basic person with the same basic problem. It gets a little bit more consultative. So if it's okay, I'm talking, I'm always talking to the same people. But what I'm doing is I'm trying to diagnose what their specific problem is so I can slot them in the right, you know, product or service line. That's something. Now that is a harder sales task that I'm only ever selling this one thing to this one person. And that's what might separate a junior account executive from a senior. But that like, that's something that people can develop into and that you can still scale. But asking a sales rep to talk to different people with fundamentally different problems and then try to back in what the specific solution is, I'm not saying nobody can do it. I'm just saying it's going to be really difficult to do at scale. And so you're better off splitting them up. And same with marketing teams, by the way. If you've got a marketing team and that marketing team is, is used to marketing to a specific type of ideal client, a specific ICP with very specific problems, and they want to generate leads that, that are that person that have that problem. And then you say, hey, in addition to this, we also want you to market to this other person over here and they're probably going to fail. This, by the way, is why a lot of agencies, the bigger they get, the worse they get. It's not just because they add teams. It's because their knowledge of who it is that they're serving starts to get diluted. And so the really big agencies who actually do this stuff at scale, they have partners that focus on individual clients. They might only have a portfolio of, you know, two, three, four, five clients because they need to know those businesses. So I think having single threaded sales team, single threaded marketing teams, customer support, and definitely on the fulfillment side, by the way, you're probably going to want to thread that one as well. Those are going to be important. And so that's. Yeah, with this client, it's like you got salespeople. It's like, oh yeah, I'll just have some of my salespeople sell instead. No, you won't. You will not. You're almost certainly going to have to hire a totally new salesperson. It's probably going to need a different sales manager because they're managing to different metrics and the way they coach is going to be different maybe all the way up to and through. They're reporting the same chief revenue officer at some point, but those are two different groups.
B
The other thing that we talked about was budget because the nice thing about a salesperson versus say hiring a CFO is that the timing that you have, if you're like, if you don't really have it in the budget to add right now, immediately a sales team, it might not be as expensive as you think because of the structure of the compensation. So I think that would be worth chatting about for a minute as well.
A
Yeah, I know for us at least, I believe in account executive there's different. A sales compensation could be not just an episode all on its own. It could be like an annual series all on its own. There's so much that goes into sales compensation. But, but I'll just broadly say we believe for the most part we pay our sales rep a base plus they're going to earn a commission. Now, there are some that have commission only and there's pros and cons to that, but let's say that you are going to pay them some base. For us, an account executive is going to earn a $5,000 base. Now, I'm not saying that's nothing, but it's not like to your point, going out there and hiring a $300,000, you know, c level type person who's also going to be earning, you know, bonuses. We're going to pay this person $5,000 and they fast, they need to ROI within, you know, 30 to 60 days or they're gone. And so if you look at the actual risk associated with, let's say this person never sells anything, it's probably going to be a 5 to $10,000 risk. That's a decent risk to take. When you figure that person could after, you know, a week or so of onboarding, depending on how, how complex your, your sales motion is and, and your talk tracks are that person could and should be increasing your sales if only because you have one more other person to do it. Not to mention the fact that they're ideally better than you are at it because they're like a sales professional and, and so they should be accretive very, very quickly. Also on the budget side, because this is one of the things that our client said, he's like, well, the problem is cash flow's tight and so I need my marketing to self liquidate, right? My marketing's got to self liquidate. It's got to generate this immediate ROI or we're not going to be able to afford to go and spend. That is not the right way to think about ad spend at scale. The way that you need to think about ad spend at scale is what percentage of your revenue are you willing to budget for advertising? And at a minimum it should be 10% on average. Companies spend 14% on average. If you're high growth, it should be 20 to 25%. Now you might be like, that's ridiculous, I can't do that. Yeah, the 20 to 25%, those are usually funded companies, but at a minimum it should be 10%. If you're saying, well I can't possibly budget 10% of my revenue towards advertising, then you don't have a marketing problem. Don't put it on marketing to self liquidate day one. Put it on finance and operations to find 10% of the budget to allocate towards this. I mean this, when we were asking this client, how much do you think you should be spending? Like, well, at a minimum, I want to start with a $10,000 a month test budget. Now this business is doing a lot more than $200,000 a month. Right? But if it were only $100,000 a month, that would be 10%. And so what we were really talking about here was less, way less. It was probably like 2 ish percent. Actually, probably even less than that. Now that I think about it, it's probably, probably less than 1%. But he was saying, oh, I can't afford it because he's thinking about $10,000 when he should be thinking about what is the percentage of my revenue that I should budget for this. And if your advertising is working, your revenue goes up, which means the percentage, even if you keep the percentage of the same, the amount of money that you can spend, but also assuming revenue is going up and you're managing it appropriately, margin should increase. So maybe you can increase that as your percentage. So all of these factor in. Think about budgeting. This is what real companies do. Don't think about self liquidating offers. And you know how do I get an immediate return on this investment? That frankly is what marketing, Internet marketing chuckleheads do. And I can say that because I am a recovering Internet marketing chucklehead.
B
I love it. Anything else you think we should leave people with?
A
I just, I just would reiterate and this is what we kept coming back to with the client. Work backwards from what you actually want. So you don't actually want a bunch of leads. And this was the point that I was making. I was like, man, how many new clients a month would be life changing? Like what is the goal? You know, you want like 20, 30? He's like, no, if I just got 10, yeah, his goal is a hundred for the year. So I was like, so if you get 10amonth, okay, let's work backwards then how many, like what, what percentage. If you have a lead and it's a qualified lead, what percentage of those turn into clients? Now let's work backwards into how many leads we need and what's the budget that we would need from an advertising and marketing perspective to do that. And if that's the case, don't create a marketing strategy where the primary goal is to self liquidate leads as though there's going to be no downside to that. Create a marketing strategy where the goal is your actual end result, which is to produce enough leads to generate the 10 clients. Like work backwards from the actual goal. Don't work backwards from a $0 net, you know, cost. Meat cost. Exactly. Cool.
B
Well, hopefully you guys found that helpful. Also. Just try to help people understand. We were talking here about a high end or a high value service that was being sold to businesses. If you are selling product to a consumer or you are selling, well, let's just say you're selling a product to a consumer. Does anything change if assuming it's still high ticket?
A
The only thing that's going to change is just the numbers. But we still want to work backwards from what, you know, what, what is that? You know, what's the, what's ultimately what do we wanted to buy like that, like that's the key. And we want to make sure.
B
Let's say that you're selling water filtration systems. That's a, you know, five, $7,000 thing. How does this apply to that?
A
So with, with a lot of these, when you're selling physical products, the whole lead concept gets thrown out the window because very often you're just. Nobody's going to want to opt in for a special report about Waterfield. I know people will say to do it but again, we tried it across a lot of different industries. It usually doesn't work. And it's the same kind of thing. If you put a lead capture form in front of the thing that somebody actually wants, you're gonna get a lead, congratulations, but you're gonna lose like the number of people who are gonna see your final offer by putting that gate in front of it is gonna go down. So let's work backwards from what we actually want.
B
So just sell the water thing right,
A
Right off the bat, go, go and go and create content out there that's ungated, that gets as many people to the place where you want them to be who have the knowledge and information that they need to buy. But just know when you put barriers inside the purchase process for the goal, not necessarily of nurturing, not for the goal of moving people through the different levels of awareness. So going from unaware to problem aware to solution aware to product aware, like when you're doing it just for the purpose of being able to say, ooh, I now have a lead or ooh, I was able to self liquidate my advertising costs. There are second order consequences of that, but that usually have significant downsides. So just start from what you want, work backwards from what needs to be true to get that. And don't worry about self liquidating along the way, or don't worry about the number of leads that you have or anything like that. Just focus on how do we get the right person in front of our message. If you work backwards from that, then you're going to be right more times than you're wrong. If you make the goal $0 leads or $0 traffic or any of these other things, you're going to optimize for that and you're going to, you know, win the battle, lose the war.
B
I like it. Well, if you guys found this helpful, please let us know. If you found it very helpful and you can think of somebody that might benefit from it, please share it and we look forward to hopefully seeing you
A
next time on Business Lunch.
Release Date: May 21, 2026
Hosts: Roland Frasier & Ryan Deiss
This episode centers on a transformative approach to marketing and sales success: “working backwards” from your ultimate business objective, rather than optimizing for superficial early-stage metrics like self-liquidating lead generation. Using recent experiences with a high-end client, Roland and Ryan discuss why trying to recoup ad spend too quickly can actually diminish long-term results—especially in businesses with higher-ticket sales cycles—and how smarter budget allocation, offer architecture, and sales team deployment can drive growth. Their candid reflections, specific tactical advice, and relatable stories offer fresh frameworks for entrepreneurs seeking sustainable scale.
Timestamps: 03:30–11:23
Timestamps: 11:23–14:10
Timestamps: 14:10–16:17
Timestamps: 16:17–23:34
Timestamps: 23:34–27:58
Timestamps: 27:58–32:00
Don’t optimize for leads or $0 net marketing costs; instead, work backwards from your real business objective (i.e., number of new clients).
Focus only on the metrics and milestones required to achieve that goal. Don’t design your strategy around vanity/meantime metrics.
This logic equally applies in high ticket B2C—get rid of unnecessary lead forms and “gates” if your primary goal is direct product sales.
On the dangers of self-liquidation:
“What we found though is our, some of our best leads who bought that course when we'd follow up and be like, ‘hey, you want some help doing this?’ They're like, ‘no, no, no, I'm going to try to do it myself first because I've already made this investment.’” — Ryan (07:01)
On nurturing leads appropriately:
“You want to nurture them by again continuing to give them free content. But the goal… should again be to stretch the gap, not to narrow the gap.” — Ryan (13:04)
On focus in sales & marketing teams:
“Having single threaded sales team, single threaded marketing teams, customer support, and definitely on the fulfillment side, by the way, you're probably going to want to thread that one as well.” — Ryan (22:43)
A punchy self-critique:
“That frankly is what marketing, Internet marketing chuckleheads do. And I can say that because I am a recovering Internet marketing chucklehead.” — Ryan (27:48)
This summary preserves the original conversational tone and relatable storytelling style of Roland and Ryan, while organizing their key wisdom and quotes by topic for actionable reference.