SPI 708: Do You Know What’s Happening?

SPI 708: Do You Know What’s Happening?

Announcer: You're listening to the Smart Passive Income Podcast, a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network, a show that's all about working hard now, so you can sit back and reap the benefits later. And now your host. He's gone live over 1,000 times and he still gets nervous, but he keeps going anyway. Pat Flynn.

Pat Flynn: So I play a pretty unique position in the world of SPI, right? For a while, I was CEO and now Matt is CEO and I'm sort of a creative director, if you will. And we have a marketing team now. However, I kind of float over there every once in a while. And I needed a creative way for us to approach marketing and I wanted to present you with a question that I asked myself and that we're asking each other on the team now that really helps guide our marketing and, you know, marketing is, there's many levels to marketing, right?

Everything from what is that you're selling, how are you selling it, everything from email to webinars to search engine optimization to price, I mean there's a whole plethora of things that, you know, you need to figure out and focus on and experiment with, right, you're not going to nail it the first time, so don't be scared if you've never tried any of that stuff and I'm just blurting all this out to you.

But I want to make it simple. I love making things simple and this is what I do here. And the simple question I want you to ask yourself, especially if you already have stuff up and running, especially if you have products or at least are growing an email list. Here's the question. This is what's guiding a lot of my thoughts with marketing right now and just kind of positioning, how do we make this simple?

Here it is. Do you know what's happening? That's it. That's the question. Do you know what's happening? And I'm not afraid to say this, for years, the answer was... Not exactly. We knew we were making sales. We knew that we had an email list that was growing, but exactly what was happening in between growing our email list and whether or not a person came in through our email list or found us through SEO and became a customer if they stayed a customer for how long, it was kind of a shot in the dark. And A, hopefully it shows you, you don't have to know everything in order to grow a business. But to optimize the business, I want you to ask yourself, do you know what's happening? And this relates to any one part of your business, your part or the whole of your business.

If you're running an event, right, when I ran Card Party, I wanted to make sure that when people purchase their ticket, do we know if they know exactly what they need to know? Do they have the directions to the convention area? Do they know what time the thing's open, right? One of the best ways to know what's happening is to have either yourself or somebody on your team, or better yet, a person that you know that you can talk to that is not one of those prior to things, yourself or your team member, go through the process for you, whatever the process is, signing up for your event, signing up for your email list, purchasing something.

Being a subscriber, being a listener, you can get real time information and understanding of what's happening by simply just asking another person. Too often, we have way too many pieces in place to know exactly what's happening. But if you want to get better at it, if you want to optimize, if you want to make more sales, if you have, want to have, want to have more conversions, just try to figure out, like obsess over that question.

Do you know what's happening? Do you know what's happening? So more tangibly in our business at SPI, one thing that we've been working hard on is understanding when we have a sale come in, do we know where it's coming from? Can we decipher whether that person is coming from a webinar that we just held, a nurture sequence, or a sales pitch sequence that we have in our email list, or elsewhere?

And we've been working really hard to try to figure all that out. And we are now able to get maybe 90 95% of just pinpoint accuracy as far as where a person is coming from. But often times some people slip through and what do we do? We try to answer that question. Do we know what's happening? If we don't, we ask.

Hey! Where did you hear about this, All Access Pass? How did you, like, we can't track to see how you got in here. How did you get in here? Sometimes it's as simple as somebody saying, Oh, well, my friend's in it, and they told me about it, and they told me to go here and get it. Oh, okay. So that's why we didn't have any data beforehand.

And that also tells us, oh, people inside of All Access Pass are talking about All Access Pass with their friends, or with their family, or referring it to their audience themselves. Which is amazing. Do you know what's happening? If your email list is growing at one rate, Do you know what's happening?

Where are people landing on your website? What is happening when they land on that page with an opt in form? Are they just breezing over that opt in form? Are they hesitant to fill that in? Why? Figure out the answer to that question. Do you know what's happening? And I promise you, you're going to be able to start to see actual progress and growth.

And another way to think about this is if you don't know what's happening, are you ready for the next thing? Oftentimes we are presented with another tool, another course, another solution to something that may not even be relevant to the things we should be trying to figure out. The cool thing about conversion specifically.

Is that when you understand what happens, you then understand what to do about it, how to change it, how to optimize it. What I love about conversions as well is specifically there's a lot of easy math involved, right? You have a number of people coming to your website, let's say like a hundred of them. 10% of those people end up on a sales page.

So 10 people. 10% of those people end up purchasing. So one person. So now we know for every 100 people in general, one person will convert. Well, there are several ways to literally double the amount of money that's coming in. Let's now have 200 people. Not just 100 people, but 200 people are now on the website.

Okay, let's focus on search engine optimization, getting more referrals, getting our name out there, building relationships, getting to be a guest on another person's podcast. Everything else remains the same. You will double your money because you have twice the amount of people now coming to your website.

Now there's of course a lot of other factors involved. How much do they know about you before coming to the website is a person who's recommending you saying something good about you or not. Maybe you're getting a lot of traffic for something that's not so great. So, you know, not all traffic's created equal.

So we'll get that out of the way, but just now you have twice as many people coming to your website, if everything else remained the same, you've doubled your income. Now let's say you only have still a hundred people coming to your website. Well, instead of 10 people converting, you're gonna need 20 people to double the amount of money.

So 10 people, originally, were actually subscribing and signing up. Well, okay, let's focus on why they subscribed or why the 90% of the people didn't subscribe. Well, I didn't know what I was subscribing for or the language was weird. I didn't understand what this was about exactly. I, I'm afraid to put my email in when I know, I don't know exactly what I'm getting.

Ooh. Okay, again, we went to the person or people to discover what the problem was so we can figure out the answer to that question, do you know what's happening, right? This isn't just a specifically data specific thing, although that's where it is. The focus and on SPI side of things right now is with data, but it's, it's very much a contextual story based user story based analysis as well.

So a hundred people come in, 20 people are subscribing to the email list. Okay, cool. And guess what? You've doubled your income. Or, let's say a hundred people come in, ten people still subscribe to your email newsletter, everything else is the same except, for every ten people who visit your sales page, not one person is converting, two people are.

Awesome. You've just doubled your income from what originally happened. And when you go into those specific conversion points, conversion to email, conversion to sales page, conversion to anything. You can now start to understand how you can figure out the answer to those questions. Do you know what's happening?

Do you know what's happening to get to a conversion? Do you know why people aren't converting? Figure it out. Obsess over what the answer is to that question. Do you know what's happening? It's so curious to me that when I speak to a number of my students and I say, Okay, do you know what's happening here?

They're just like, Oh, I'm not sure. Well, figure it out! Find out the answer. Obsess over it. Why wouldn't you want to? Now, I know the answer to that a lot of times is sometimes we don't want to know the answer. We don't want to know that our stuff is terrible or failing or not converting like it should because we've already spent so much time and effort into it.

Well, that's exactly why. We need to obsess over it. This is the follow through in the golf swing, right? If you were to swing a golf club and you stop the golf club at the point of impact, you'd think that the results would be the same, right? Does it even matter that you follow through or not if you've already struck in the ball?

A thousand percent it does. On paper, it doesn't really, but it absolutely does. Trust me, I've taken lessons, I have played golf, and when you focus on the follow through, it helps ensure that everything else in front of the follow through, or that had just happened, is actually properly set up as well. It's also great practice to, guess what, not just get to the point of sale, but figure things out, right?

To follow through. The fortune is in the followup. So figure it out, answer that question. Do you know what's happening? Do you know what's happening? Dare you to ask a team member of yours that. I dare you to ask yourself that. Do you know what's happening? And if you don't, great, now you have a place to start.

Thank you for listening in, I appreciate you, and make sure you don't miss out on the next episode coming your way. We got a great one, great story, especially if you're an agency or you are a creator who might be thinking about scaling into an agency model and you're worried about who's going what that might do to your revenue or even your own work.

It's gonna be a great one. Thank you so much. Take care. Team Flynn for the win.

Thank you so much for listening to the Smart Passive Income podcast at SmartPassiveIncome.com. I'm your host, Pat Flynn. Sound editing by Duncan Brown. Our senior producer is David Grabowski, and our executive producer is Matt Gartland. The Smart Passive Income Podcast is a production of SPI Media, and a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network. Catch you next week!