Transcript

Alrighty guys, welcome to today's presentation. My name is Nick Cosmin. I'm the founder of sales process IO. And in this presentation, we're going to be covering how to start and grow a multimillion dollar SAS or service business from scratch. Get it profitable and add a few million dollars to your net worth in 12 months or less. Okay. So what we're going to be covering today in this presentation is the the process of how to take an idea, how to take your idea, develop your customers, call it through process called customer development. Come up with your solution, validate your solution, collect your case studies. Then turn it into a, an actual business where you're building a marketing process. You're building a sales process. You're validating the key metrics, making sure that the unit case works and then you're scaling from there. And we're going to get into some of the mechanics, some of the sales mechanics, the marketing mechanics, the outbound prospect and mechanics.

So there's a lot that we're going to be covering, but before we get started, I'm going to show you, I'm going to give you a quick introduction to sales process IO and the case studies obviously. And if you are, are you familiar with sales process on own, then you can jump to the actual content part of this presentation. But if you're new to sales process, I know I'm going to walk through some of our case studies. Now we have over 500 technology companies, like I said, SAS and software and service based businesses. So I'm gonna walk through a few of them. Let's start with FinTech. We have quite a few niches. So the first niche is the FinTech niche. And these are some of our clients. This is copilot adviser. We took them from zero to a million dollars in 11 months and they are doing extremely well.

They're selling to financial advisors, they're doing a marketing technology play for financial advisors. They're growing very, very quickly. When we started engaging with them, they're actually billing something completely different. And we went through the customer development process and we changed the offer. We changed the product and they validate it manually. They validated the, the offer manually. And then they turned it into a software as a service product. And then they scaled up to a million dollars really quickly. This is AdvisorStream. They went from zero to a million in 12 months. So SIM they were, we didn't go through the customer development process with them. They had a little bit of customer development to go but they had a really solid product. When I started working with them, we built out the funnel. We built out the sales team. We built out all the marketing, the ads, and we proved up the unit case and they're doing extremely well.

They're now past 3 million annual recurring revenue. And they're our content marketing solution for financial advisors based here in Toronto. This is plans. Well, they are a, this is Eric from plans. Well, they are a great company. Eric has a super, super sharp guy. They started working with us. They could, they had Facebook ads running, but they couldn't get their funnel going and they couldn't generate appointments. So we helped them with that. We help them tune the economics. And after working with us, they raised $7 million to expand their sales team and they are robo advisor solution. And they're also selling their technology to large banks. This is Ben from Sourcewater source is a great case. Study. Ben is an absolute stud of an entrepreneur. I really like this guy. He worked super, super hard. He's super, super sharp. And his solution is taking the water disposal data from oil Wells and organizing it.

And then he's selling it to traders in the oil and gas industry traders and other businesses who need that data. And they need to predict the price of oil. So when when we started working with Ben, he didn't have his marketing process down. He had a really good product. He spent a lot of time doing customer development, but he didn't have his marketing process down. We helped him build out a funnel. We helped them build out a sales script and here's some testimonials from Ben. He said he closed 300 grand in the last three weeks. Okay. So this is after he implemented his his sales process. And then he posted a little bit later on that he's doing 220,000 new monthly recurring revenue a month, which is, or sorry, new annual recurring revenue a month, which is pretty significant. And his Facebook funnel last time we checked in with him netted him an extra 50,000 a month.

So very, very powerful stuff. We're going to get to that Facebook stuff later on in this presentation, Ben is an absolute beast though. This is John Cassandra from jet track. He is also selling to hedge funds. He's he has a really interesting solution. He's tracking corporate jet movement, and then he's selling that information to traders and hedge funds so they can predict mergers and acquisitions. Jet track is a fantastic idea. John is an animal animal entrepreneur based out of New York. He took his business from zero to break even in five months after working with us. Here's another case study. This is insights for hedge funds. So this is a service based company. So our process does work for service-based companies. This is accounting for cryptocurrencies. This is a really cool solution. These guys are based out of Louisiana. This is a real estate enablement software.

So basically real estate investor enablement and saw a software payment solution for HubSpot's. There's lots of FinTech and insights for insurance companies. BI is a big thing right now, business insights BI for banks, okay. Out of Ohio. These guys Lex up, they actually did a pivot. After going through our customer development process, they were, they first started selling the lawyers and then they went through this development customer development process and they pivoted to an accounts receivable solution. So they found where they could provide the most value. And they pivoted to to address that market or the a accounts receivable market, another BI solution. This is software for appraisal. So real estate investors need appraisals done. And this, this solution helps them. So that's just in the FinTech niche. We have a ton of case studies. These are some of the, the more notable clients.

Now let's get into the marketing and sales tech niche. So this is our company sales process. We have a great case study. We eat our own dog food, or as someone told me once, don't say that sake drink your own champagne. But we drink our own champagne. So we have a really great case study zero to $5 million in 14 months. And this is completely bootstrapped with a few people on the team, very, very small team, very lean. And I'll show you the chart mogul account here. So we let's just show you back in April or we go look, go to February. So you can see here from scratch is a brand new offer. Okay. You learning a offer and we ramped this up to 480,000 a month. So North of $5 million a year in 14 months, and this is the, and I'm going to get into how we did this.

Obviously that's a huge claim. We're going to get into how we did this. This is the lead source against cash. So you can see here outbound prospecting. For those of you who are familiar with outbound prospecting, we started with outbound prospecting. Then we layered on Facebook advertising. Then we layered on LinkedIn advertising and then the organic stuff and referral stuff started to pick up. Okay. And then here's an example of a sales. This is the sales team diagram. You can see here that me, I started selling all by myself. Okay. It's a really interesting diagram here. I started selling all by myself, got up to about 50,000 a month. Then we layered on another sales guy. Then we later on layered on another sales guy, then another one and another, another one. I'm going to walk you through that process, but there's a really great case study.

And again, it's a super lean very profitable and just a, a one hell of a case study. Then let's get into some more marketing and sales tech. This is Alex Becker from market hero. Alex is an absolute animal of an entrepreneur. You can see here, he likes his Lamborghini's and he likes his Ferrari's. He actually puts them in his office, his little garage office. He's the founder of market hero. And they're moving really quick. He's at a million dollars a month and he's based out of Dallas, Texas. This is another cool case study. This guy, Rafi he's from Israel. He is doing a design, an AI design, a tool for marketers, a really interesting solution. These guys are doing marketing automation, live chat chat is big right now. Okay. Marketing automation for Pardot and Marketo users notice that people can take the solutions like marketing automation and email automation, and then apply it to different niches.

And we were able to see all these, all these applications. Then we have Alexis skill building. These guys are based out of Missouri. These guys are moving real, real quick. We have marketing automation for digital marketing agencies. That's the niche that they chose, right? Zero to 60,045 days. After working with us, they're based out of Turkey. This is a great case study, press advantage. Now, Jeremy is a fantastic customer. I love this guy. He works so hard. He's super diligent. He has five kids. He lives on a farm and he created this business called press advantage. And he lives in Las Vegas, Nevada. And within three months we built, we helped him build this funnel on this webinar. Within three months, he did $400,000, but he did the $400,000 with one live webinar. So we went out to an affiliate someone in his market and he said, Hey, I'm going to do a presentation to to your audience.

And I'm, we're going to split the commission. Jeremy did 400,000 annual recurring revenue from that one webinar. And he's moving really, really quickly. And Jeremy is just a fantastic case study, super diligent. I absolutely love this guy. Then we have review wave. These guys went from 95,000 monthly recurring revenue to 200,000 monthly recurring revenue. And they are moving really quickly. The review automation space is pretty hot. The market is pretty big for this type of solution. Then we have truly, these guys are based out of San Francisco air all from truly, he's a great, a great entrepreneur. He is doing he's selling sales, operations enablement. Okay. And he took his business from 2 million to 3 million, just in eight months while working with us, we dialed in his sales sales scripting. We dialed in some of his marketing, his outbound prospecting efforts, and he's moving really, really quickly.

We have sales sales enablement for retailers, hatch Hatcher, five. These guys doubled in nine months, digital marketing for auto dealerships. Here's some more auto dealerships. These guys are based in this is Omer he's based in Toronto, really early, really bright team. They just raised a little bit of money and he wrote us a note and he's doing it extremely well. This is Patrick from lead engine probe. This is another great case. I'll get into some more of these. Now keep in mind guys. I'm going to go. I mean, I'm going to be going through some case studies here. So if if you want to skip to the next part of the presentation, that's totally fine, but I'm going to just keep hammering through these case studies, just to show you the, the, the range of businesses that we're helping lead engine pro he is lead generation outbound prospecting as a service.

Patrick is one hell of an entrepreneur, really smart guy. And he's moving really quick, zero to 1,000,004 months. Okay. Crazy. And he gave us some testimonials. These testimonials will be available on the website, seamless AI. You might've heard of them. They're making a lot of noise in the contacts, the data sales data 480,000 to 2 million in eight months after working with us. So seamless is a great case. Study. These guys brand re a window. He wrote me a note. He said, he's growing at a hundred percent month over month growth. I'm not sure how long he sustained that. But when he wrote us that note, that's what he was claiming. Then we have marketing automation for coaches and influencers. We have digital marketing for Montessori schools and private schools. This is a really cool Joan elf he's based in Toronto. Jonah is absolutely killing it with a solution humbly doing extremely well.

Then we have chatbot agencies, this guy, Clint, you just got married. He's doing really well. This chat bot agency these guys are doing a marketing enablement, a lot of sales enablement, marketing enablement. This guy's doing DJs to CRM for DJs. And he was really early bootstrapped just him and another developer. So just one, one, a CEO, one developer, 6,000 and 10,000 monthly recurring revenue in one month. Now they're over 200,000 and Michael he's going on vacations. And you know, he's, he's just a, he's an awesome guy, not company have. These guys are based out of India. They're growing really, really quickly. This is a CRM play at the bottom end of the market. So the cheap, cheap CRM, okay. They're attacking that market CRM for martial arts schools. There's a lot of sales and marketing technology. And these guys are based in England.

So we have companies from all over the world using our stuff. Now let's get into the HR. Now HR is a really, really hot place to play right now. We have a lot of HR companies who are just killing it right now, ramp up. Okay. These guys are based in Denver, Colorado, absolutely, really, really smart team. They execute extremely well, super smart team. They're doing, they're doing great things. They're helping folks recruit valued is another great company. These Sabrina from value.co is out of San Francisco. She is one of the smartest people I've ever met. And she went through our customer development process. She was, she started with a engagement employee engagement solution. But then after going through the customer development process, she realized that a more urgent and more painful problem was around the recruitment. So she pivoted to solve that problem, whipped up a mock up really, really quickly whipped up the product really, really quickly.

She has very talented engineers on the team, and then they just started selling like crazy. And within a few weeks, they're bringing on paying customers like for a thousand bucks a month just without even the, the, the, just the MVP. So the customer development process is really, really powerful. If, you know, if you know what you're doing and you go through our stuff this is code for cash recruitment. They're helping firms recruit engineers. Here's another thing. Another company Atlas one, they're helping recruit engineers and, and other types of employees for C startups. Osmo is doing an HR play. They're doing, and they're selling into the enterprise are based in San Francisco. I think they have Iowa. I think they have a couple locations, but last time I spoke to them, they were in San Francisco.

These guys are in VC, they're doing employee screening automation. We have marketplaces for we have job marketplaces, like work in, and some of these, some of these other ones, that's a really interesting solution. We have recruiter enablement software, there's tons of those. And then we have like wellness programs and philanthropy programs that are, that are selling into the enterprise, into the HR department. So really interesting case stays in the HR. Then we have healthcare. Let me just bang through some of these healthcare case studies, patient communication, CRM for pharmacies, diagnostic solutions that help minimize miss misdiagnosed diagnoses or however you want to say it. We have a mobile doctor, SAS and marketplace, and these guys are helping doctors become more mobile. This is a healthcare, sorry, CRM for dentists. This is sales enablement for healthcare companies.

This is a management platform for life science companies, eye tracking. These guys are doing an awesome job. They are pairing up with they have this eye tracking software and they put this hardware onto wheelchairs for disabled children, and they're able to the child, the child is able to move around and and, and, and function using the, the eyes. Then we have lead generation for doctors. We have reconciled automation for pharmacies. I put this one in here. This is a case that this is emergency response. This is an interesting solution. Another niche solution, emergency response software. We have digital marketing for dentists. We have clinical trial testing platforms. We have rehab facility management. I know this rehab market is real hot right now as well. Then let's get into online programs now online programs that e-learning is a very hot space right now.

Anyone is doing online programs e-learning they are in the market is growing by like 50% a year. It's insane. Online education is, is, is growing like crazy right now, obviously sales process IO. We are in the e-learning and marketing and sales training for companies growth companies and technology companies and engineers. Okay. So I already showed you that case study. We have a coaching agency based here in Toronto called prosper. We have McAfee Institute. Now, Josh McAfee is an awesome entrepreneur. He is selling e-learning programs to law enforcement officers, and he is doing extremely well. We have Paul Xavier. Who's doing e-learning for film creators. So teaching them how to market and teaching them how to sell. These are fulfilling creators. He's Paul is an absolute beast of an entrepreneur he's North of $4 million. He's absolutely killing it. Now, you might've heard of this guy, this guy's name is Ty Lopez.

He's doing online training programs for beginner entrepreneurs based out of California. You've met you. Might've seen his whole fleet of exotic cars and it's huge mansions and all that stuff. That stuff really does work for that lower end of the market. So he's teaching these beginner entrepreneurs, folks that didn't have a a traditional education he's helping them, you know, build some skills, especially around like the marketing and the marketing skills. And, and there's some other, some other mechanisms that Tai uses, but he's doing extremely well. And we started working with Tai in 2017 software for homeschoolers and online training. I threw this one in here because this is in the online training niche as well. So online training is one hell of an industry to be in that we have real estate. For those of you who are in the real estate market, real estate is heating up too.

So we have a marketplace for off market real estate. We have goal tracking software for real estate agents and real estate firms is SISU. This company out of Utah is doing extremely well. Zack is one hell of an, a marketer. Then we have enablement software. So like booking software for real estate agents. This is a roofing company solution. I put this in the real estate cause it is like homes, right? This is a roofing they're selling to roofing companies, helping them enable sales and marketing and shorten their sales cycle. We already put, we already threw this one in software for appraisals. Juggler is selling marketing solutions to real estate agents. They're doing really well. They're based in Australia. And these guys are this is Swift agent. They are an agent specific, not necessarily a real estate agent, but they're an agent specific CRM.

Now let's get into the big boys and girls in the enterprise data world, or the big, large large accounts. So these guys, enterprise and data, these guys can Bula they're based in the Czech Republic. They are moving really quick. They're selling a really complex solution for really high ticket price into the enterprise. And they're doing extremely well. This is Fox pass. This is Aaron from Fox pass. He's a Y Combinator alumni. And he doubled in the last year after working with us, these guys are based in San Francisco, California. This is an organized, this is a AI for they're targeting the HR industry right now. They have a really interesting solution in Japan. Now they moved over to California and they are targeting the U S market with their AI. Chanksy was a very, very bright entrepreneur, very, very skilled team in the, in the AI niche.

This is a VA flow. Okay? So they went from zero to 400,000 annual recurring revenue in four months. Mannix wrote me a little note and testimonial, and he is doing extremely well. This is inspection automation software. We have ride sharing a ride sharing algorithm. These guys are based in Waterloo. This is prem very, very sharp guy. He's doing the algorithm, that's underneath ride sharing app. So it tracks it, he sells this to folks who want to build ride sharing apps. And it's a very, very hard problem to solve. Prem is the guy to solve it. And he's doing a great job. We have more physical products like air circulation and close spaces. We have QA automation. These guys are based out of India, K 99 tests. This isn't it really interesting solution gun threat alert software. So essentially this software monitors the feeds of a security cameras.

And then when there's a shape of a gun, it automatically alerts authorities. So the response time is really low, and this is in Chicago, Illinois, because there's a lot of gun crime in Chicago. So that makes a, that makes sense. Business insights. As a service, we have a lot of consultants and business insights, business insight folks, and they are doing extremely well. Or when they learn sales and marketing, if they're, if you're a consultant, you learn sales and marketing, Holy moly, your business will grow like crazy. Then we have development and design shops. Okay. There's a lot of development and design and marketing agencies. Okay. So I already touched on this case study, this is Patrick Spielman from lead engine pro, doing extremely well. These guys are doing outbound prospecting as a service combo Panda. This is Harry. He's doing extremely well. Then we have outbound prospecting, Tracy, okay.

At a Dallas, Texas outbound prospect needs a service got up to like 25,000 a month doing extremely well. We have Zulu five. This is digital marketing insights. They're really smart digital marketing firm. And they are, they built a product to to, to, to to stack on top of their services. We have SEO services, development agencies, development agencies, development agencies, development agencies lead gen agencies. The development agencies do really well because they're, they're very good at selling high ticket products, but they don't necessarily have the marketing and the sales skills down and they don't have those systems down. So when a development agency solves that they find their niche, they solve the marketing, they solve the sales process. They can move real real quickly. Okay. So then this is a digital marketing agency specializing in fitness. Let's get into eCommerce and retail real quick.

So this is chatter research. They're growing like crazy. They're based here in Toronto, Canada. They have an interesting solution that allows retailers to get, to get customer feedback on the way out of the door with these little like kiosk things. Very interesting solution fulfill out of San Francisco, fulfill IO. These guys are doing fulfillment automation software. These guys are doing AI. These guys are based in the Netherlands. This is similar.ai. They're using AI to predict what products are gonna sell. And then they put the products on the front page of the website to increase the conversion rates. This is seller locker, really interesting solution, a million dollars in three in three months. Okay. They're selling a really difficult problem in the Amazon seller space and they're doing one hell of a job at it. This is client book retail. These guys are killing it.

They're, they're selling to high end jewelry stores. They're selling to high end fashion brands. And they're doing clientelling enablement, which it's a D it's basically sales enablement, but in this world, they call it clientelling. And Brandon is doing extremely well. He's based out in Utah. We have Amazon seller enablement, business insights for e-commerce. I think I showed you this case study. And then we have home services. This, this person is selling into home services the home service world field service enablement. So a really interesting solution there. I just threw this in there with the retail. And then of course we have the venture capital firms and we have the private equity shops. And these guys will, they have a portfolio of company companies, and they will engage us to help them and and, and work with their portfolio companies.

So all in all a ton of great case studies and yeah, there is a, there's just a ton of people who are getting value and the testimonies are coming in like crazy. I get one like every day from a really, really awesome company. All right. So let's get into the overview of this presentation. First off, we're going to cover the lab system or the customer development system. So this is going to take you from idea, okay. Maybe if you don't even have, you don't even have an idea. This will take you from the idea to your first paying customer is usually around 10, 20,000 a month in a very short period of time. One to three months, this is very, very important that our customers get this part right next, we're going to be talking about the accelerator system and that's going to be taking those case studies that we do, that we that we collected in the customer development phase.

We're going to be building a marketing funnel. We're going to building a sales process. We're going to be building a sales team, and we're going to be optimizing that machine. And then we get into the growth where we need to get into hiring. We need to get into paid ads and scaling paid ads. You need to get into fundraising. Okay? So this is the overview of this presentation. Now, who is this presentation for? So this presentation is for technical folks, engineers, designers, salespeople, marketers, entrepreneurs, analysts, who are aspiring to build their own technology company. And they're looking for a short path. They're looking for the shortest possible path to get there. So you could be working on a nine to five job. You could already be working on your project full time, and you maybe you've raised money, but you really want to get to traction.

You want to see growth as fast as possible. You could already be at 10,000 to 20,000 a month, and you want to get to a hundred thousand a month like ASAP. You could be at a hundred thousand a month. We have a lot of clients who are already at this stage a hundred thousand a month, and they want to get to a million a month. And that means they need advertising. They need sales teams. And they're going to need some of those processes in place to make sure that engine is efficient. This is also for young folks who want to earn a lot of money like millions. They want, they don't want to wait until they're 40 and 50 to earn their millions. They want to do it in their twenties and thirties. And so we've been able to do that. I've been able to do that.

And so folks that really want to, they might not, not necessarily have an idea yet, but they, they, they have this goal. If they want to build a great business, they want to accumulate capital in their twenties and early thirties. And so this is for you, we're really focused on the experience or the the motivated and competent entrepreneur. This is not really for beginners. Beginners can use our stuff, but we get really deep into the technology. We get really deep into the concepts. A lot of our stuff is kind of complex. So entrepreneurs with high capacity, that's, that is our our niche. Okay. So that's really who we are focusing on now, who this is not for. This is not for those beginner entrepreneurs that just want to get rich quick. This is not for you. There are like Tai Lopez. For example, if you want to, if you don't know what to do, you don't have and you're completely lost.

Then Ty Lopez is a good fit for you. He has great programs on how to make $10,000 a month doing this, this, this, this, this there's tons of things for him. So if you're looking for that type of thing, then I'll refer you over to tie a super skeptics. I don't like, you need to have an open mind. You're going through this stuff. And this is going to require you to take a look at yourself and weight in your activities and do some introspection and think, wow, like maybe I didn't do the right thing. And so that, that takes a lot of maturity to do. And that takes it's a painful conversation to have. And trust me, I've been there too. I had, I wasted a year of my life on dammit. I wasted a year doing this. And I, it turns out it was a wrong thing.

So if you're really skeptical or you are unwilling to look at things objectively, then this is probably not for you. So I'll just quick, quickly mentioned that. So let's get in to the key points of this presentation. So getting your SAS business or your service business off the ground and profitable and less than 12 months is completely doable. If you follow the right strategy. Now here's the key sales and marketing is closely tied to product design and development, more closely tied than a lot of people think, okay, this is really, really important. It's because there's an iteration loop. So you're building things and you're selling it. And you're, you're tweaking things. You're listening to the market feedback and you're tweaking, and then you're selling it again. So there's, it's very, very closely tied to product development. Sales and marketing is very closely tied to product development, to get traction.

The entrepreneur needs product development skills and sales and marketing skills. There's three, there's three pillars. They need product development skills. They need sales and they need marketing skills. So most entrepreneurs, they have either one, two, or if they have three, they're great. They don't really need us, but most entrepreneurs, they have the technical design skills or the engineering skills, but they don't have the marketing skills and they don't have the sales skills. Some salespeople don't have the customer development and engineering skills. Okay. So this result without these three skills, this results in frustration and failure. So even if you have these skills, your team needs to be competent on these marketing and sales skills. Your team needs to be competent with the engineering skills. Okay? So if you have a larger team, you need to have these, you need to have these three pillars down.

So sales process IO is the number one firm on the planet dedicated to helping technical folks develop and hone their sales and marketing skills. So I'll give you a quick background on myself. My name is Nick Cosmin. I'm the founder of sales process IO. I'm actually a very technical person. I studied engineering physics at a school called Queens university, and I did a thesis on organic photovoltaic cell. So a very technical, I was very, I was, I was into science. I was into math. I was top of my class and I was very, very technical and also accumulated a lot of debt while I was at school. And so I got a job in the summertime selling door to door for a company called Canadian property stars. So some guy came to my door and I said, wow, if this guy can do it, I can do it.

And I'm within a month, I was the top door to door sales person at this company called Canadian property stars. I was trained by a guy named Ben Stewart. He really helped me develop my sales and marketing skills, my direct sales and marketing skills. And that was a fantastic experience. I was able to pay off all my loans. There's a $50,000 loan bill. I was able to pay that off in one summer, just selling door to door did extremely well. And then from there I had some capital when I graduated, I built a business called midnight detailing, and we took this door to door detailing or sorry, this door to door sales and marketing model. And I applied it to auto detailing. So I'd go around the wealthy areas in Toronto, like Burlington, Southeast Oakville, Rosedale, forest Hill, Lawrence Park. And I would knock on doors and I would sell these these people 200 to $250 car washes or detailing with the shampooing and the wax and all that stuff.

And then I'd hire detailers to come and do the job. And this business was fantastic and it was very profitable. My first like really successful business. And the only problem was it was seasonal in Canada. I don't know where you're watching this, this presentation from, but in Canada it gets cold as hell for 75% of the year. So you can only operate that business for 25% of the year. And those 20, that 25% was great, but it was very seasonal. So in the winter times, I started helping software companies with my skills. So I started building sales teams and marketing procedures for these companies and the case studies were insane. And then from there I sold midnight detailing to a company called go ranch auto. And then I really dialed in on helping these software companies SCRO. And it didn't take very long before people started asking me, Nick, what the hell are you doing?

What the hell are you doing? And the software companies wanted to learn the process. They wanted to get help doing it for themselves. And that's what spawned sales process IO. That's, that's how we got to, well, I've been doing this for a long time. We recently packaged this up into training and consulting, and then that's when we we got it. We took the business from scratch in this, in this, with this particular offer to 5 million in 14 months, we have companies from all over the world using us. A lot of guys are from Y Combinator, Techstars, 500 startups. We have people from Harvard, MIT, Stanford. Some of them are some really sharp people. Some of the biggest VC firms refer us, which was interesting, like some of these big VC firms that refer their companies to us. And of course I work with some of the best internet marketers in the world like Sam ovens, Ty Lopez, Alex Becker, Ty, and Alex are customers.

Sam is a great, a great marketer as well. I learned a lot of Facebook advertising stuff from Sam. He is a one beast at Facebook ads. So that's a quick background on me and sales process IO. So let's get in to the customer development process or the lab process. Okay. So this lab process is pretty pretty straightforward. Let me get into this year. So we're going to be zooming in a little bit, and there's a few steps and you can see here, there's three sections. So learning, building, and then measuring. And this, I took this from Eric Ries, the, he, he wrote a book called the lean startup. And a lot of these concepts come from from Steve blank and Eric C blank authored the four steps to the epiphany. And so let's get into this, the actual training here. So the first step in, in the customer development process is we need to pick a person and a promise and an outcome.

Okay. This is very, very key. You want to pick one person and one promise. That's that's what a business is. If you think about it, a business is just delivering a promise to to someone, okay? So you want to identify what the person really wants and the outcome that person desires. So people don't buy products, they buy outcomes. This is really, really important. And it's easy if you are the person, because you spend a lot of time with yourself. So if you don't understand the prospect, you're going to either, well, if you do it for yourself, you're gonna understand yourself. But if you don't, if you're building a solution for someone other than yourself, then you're going to have to be doing these discovery calls and really understanding the prospect and learning what that deep desire is, what hurdles are in front of them and what is their most urgent hurt them.

Okay. So you're going to need a, an extremely deep understanding of this person. And without being specific, it's tough to find a meaningful problem to solve. So you want to be as specific as possible. You can conduct discovery calls about during this phase, by asking the questions and having them articulate their solution. And ideally you want to pick someone with money and whom you already have access to. Okay. So here is a little diagram here. So if we want to pick, if we're coming up with an idea from scratch, we're going to be picking the person we're going to be. We want access to the person. That's a really, really important. We need access to the person. So we don't want to be selling to some, somebody on Mars, right? Even if we have the best solution, we need access to them in the beginning.

And then we're going to be defining their current state. And then we're going to be defining their desired state. And we do this through the process of discovery, calls and interviews. And then we're going to be defining all the hurdles that are going to be in that are preventing them from getting to that desired state. And then you're going to be solving for the most immediate hurdle. If you are, if a competitor's not solving that problem sufficiently, you're going to be able to want to solve that problem. And you're going to get paid the big box that like, this is when people throw credit cards at you. They're saying, Oh, how much does this cost? Can we get started? When can we get started? That's what happens when you find that that fit? Okay. So that's the customer development process. So let's go through some questions.

So how specific do you need to be? So you want to, you can go, you can be niche, you can be segments or vertical specific, or jobs, job specific, or you can layer on both, especially in the B2B. Okay? You want to be as specific as possible when you're starting, because you don't want any competition. Why does this person need to have money? So I mentioned in my last point, the person that you're selling to it needs to have money. And here's why it's not a hundred times harder to build and sell something for $10,000 than it is to build and sell something for a hundred dollars. But the economics and the business are drastically different. If you're selling something for a hundred dollars, you need volume. And people always forget about the cost to acquire a customer, because it is you're competing with everybody else on the planet for attention.

So you want to sell something you want to sell to a person with money because the economics will will work out. Should the access channel be determined should the access channel determine my niche? So, yes, this is what I was saying. If you already have access to the market, then that should really influence your decision on who you're going to help. If you don't have access to somebody, right? Like I can't access NASA, right? So I can't build rocket ships. I don't have that access, but somehow Elon Musk had access to them. All right. He had access to these people and he was able to come up with solutions. So you want to really take into account who you have access to. And then that will make, that will help you make your decision. Is the niche outcome set in stone. So no, you're constantly testing the niche and outcome.

And this is in the sales development process. You're constantly testing what the you're testing for resonance. So a lot of the times you're going to be coming up with an outcome. You're going to realize it's not the right thing, and you're going to have to redo it. And that's totally fine. That's par for the course. Why is specificity so important? So the market will respond to an ultra specific message. Okay. So if you, if, if you want to be, if you want resonance, if you want a marketing to work, you need to be really, you gotta be like a surgeon. You got to go in and be really, really specific. So higher resonance means lower cost per lead, lower cost to acquire a customer, higher close rates and higher probability of problem solution fit. So if you're really specific, you can actually build solutions that people want.

So then the next step in this customer development process is we're going to be building a mockup. Okay. And this is before you actually build the whole product. And for those of you who already have products, you can, this is a good refresher for you guys. So people are really bad at imagining outcomes. So they need a rendering or a mock up to help them visualize the outcome. Okay? So once you have that person in your, you know, who that person is, you know, what the outcome or the, the promise is now you need to communicate that to the prospect using a mockup. And this is an example, Tyler, Ryan, he is a, he is actually an engineer from NASA, the X engineer from NASA. He built this mock up. He came up with this niche. It was marketers using like click funnels. And he realized that multichannel attribution was a big problem for them.

So he figured out, or he just came up with a mockup to address this problem. He made a little video and he got people signed up using the mockup. Okay. Sabrina, another example here she, she created this mock up in a fig mama and then sold it and then built it and within the span of like two weeks. Okay. So you sell the mockup to validate the that the customer has appetite for what, what, what, you're, what you're what you're trying to build. Okay. So you can use tools like Sigma. You can also sketch your mock up on a piece of paper. Okay. I've done that. You can engage a designer at this point. Okay. And then you can use clickable mockups. If you have the development skills, you can actually turn these into clickable mockups. And this is an example of a click clickable mock-up.

I built this with HTML, CSS and Ruby on rails in the matter of a couple of days. And then I just went out and tried to sell it. So if you have those development skills, you can whip up these clickable mockups really, really quickly. And they shouldn't take more than 14 days to produce. And you want to spend time really thinking about your solution. So let's talk about questions. So do you need to hire a designer? So only if you don't have the design skills in house, in some cases the founder is the engineer and the designer and the sales person. In that case, you can move really, really, really, really quickly. Okay. And you got to remember that design is not something ha is not what something looks like. It's how something works. So a good design just shows the outcome and it shows how something works.

Okay. So just really try to make the damn thing work. And you don't need to be a professional designer to get results like you to see Tyler's. This is not a professional design. He clearly used a template to to get this working. So another question, how expensive is this step? So it's pretty much the cost of like Photoshop or a fig. It's like $50 for templates. It doesn't take you a lot of money to get this to get this completed. And you don't wanna spend any more than one to $2,000 coming up with your your mock up that you're going to use to test the resonance. So how do you know what to put on the mockup? So what features you can put in the mockup, remember you care about the customer, cares about the outcome. Okay. Is the outcome they care about?

So it's usually metrics against time. Okay. If you're, if you're saying you're going to improve someone's sales efficiency, you want to show the sales efficiency of the close rate against time. If you're going to sh if you're telling someone you're going to improve their operational efficiency, you want to show a certain metric against time. That's well, that's what will help them visualize the outcome. And then that's what will get buy in. If they don't like the outcome, then don't spend the time building it. Okay. So that brings us to our next steps that you have your mockups. Now, you're going to ask yourself the question. Do you have direct sales skills? Remember you need three things. You need sales skills and marketing skills and you product development skills, or at least your team has to have those skills. So ask yourself, do you have those skills?

If not, you're gonna want to learn direct sales skills. Okay. So now we're going to reach out to the current network or do, do some cold prospecting, and we're going to ask them for a meeting using the mockup with a short video. Okay. This is really, really important. So here's an example of a little video. This is the sales tool that I built using rails. Okay. Hey, Henry. I want it to show deal. So I just sent this to a customer and I was like, Hey, Henry, do you want to do you want to take a look at this? He's like, yeah, give me a demo. Okay. And it's very easy. I, and I went out to my current network. I just shot this little video. Boom got demos, easy peasy, lemon squeezy. So if you don't have a network, you can mind using LinkedIn or Facebook, your LinkedIn or Facebook audiences by posting a short screen, share video, and then ask the folks to DMU if you're interested.

So you're going to be doing a little bit of marketing here. Okay. And this is an example of one of our clients. He did this in a group. Okay. He posted in us like SAS growth hack or something like that. He posted some content in a group and he's asking people to DM him or contact him for a demo. Okay. So you can also use outbound prospecting and spearing to get in front of decision makers. So if you don't have a network, then you're going to use outbound prospect. And this is true direct sales. And this is what we specialize in. We can turn, we can train you on how to be a direct sales boss. And so you don't really need a network. You can just go door to door and get resonance. So this only takes you one to 30 days. You should be able to get eyeballs on your mop mockup in a few days, if not, you should hypothesize a new niche and come up with a new mockup, or you might say, Hey, wow, I don't have access to these folks.

Or and, and in which case you want to switch your niche. And and the channel that you're using. Okay. And you should be able to develop meetings. It should look like this. You have a little 15 minute discovery call meetings. Okay? Hey, 15 minute meeting. Hey, 15 minute meeting. Here's what I'm working on. Hey, do you want to talk about this? Very, very simple. And then that 15 minute meeting turns into a sales call. Okay. So questions. How many messages should you send to test? You want to test 10 to 30 messages lined up three to four sales calls a week. Okay. Your warm network will bite. If they're interested, ask a warm network, not to hold back, don't get your friends to tell you that this is an awesome idea. You want the real feedback you want to say, Hey, give it to me straight.

And that's going to help you. What if you don't have a network, you can do outbound prospecting, or you can partner with someone who has a network. So you want to ask to message their network on their behalf or, okay. So you want, you want to send a message to their network, but the problem here is it catches here is you're going to have to pay them 50 to 70% or pay them like shares or what, in whatever you're doing. Okay. So they'll a lot of people with audiences will, will entertain the idea, but they're going to be one that they're going to want to be paid for this access. Okay. You can also mind and Facebook and LinkedIn, and you can be a social butterfly. And then just pitch up, just get eyeballs on you, get eyeballs on your mockup and get those get those appointments.

What is involved in the discovery process? Again? You want to keep it simple. You have to isolate the current state. You have to isolate the desired state and then the hurdles that's what is necessary for the discovery call process. Okay. So then now once you're able to get those appointments, then we're going to get conduct some discovery calls and start closing our first deals. Okay? So you want to sell the outcome and get commitments from the customer before you build anything. It's, it's important to talk pricing at this phase. Since this information will help you validate the business unit case. So the worst thing that can happen is you sell something, but you realize like two months to a year to two years later that, Oh, crap, this pricing is way too low. I can't sustain a business. So you want to get this pricing thing out of the way and, and validate pricing and are going to need sales skills for this.

And this is an example. We have the advanced sales process here. There's a whole sales process that you go through and we teach this to our founders. Okay. Here's the schematic, there's a ton of little nuances and language patterns in this sales process. Let me just zoom in a little bit. Okay. Tons of little nuances that go into the sales process, and this is once a founder learns this, then they then there'll be able to close deals. So if you're not able to get deposits, commitments, letters of intent that you're getting to sharpen those design skills or sales skills or both. So it's important to realize that your niche could be off and doing these discovery calls. It's super important if you're not getting those closes. So you want to shoot for a 10% conversion rate on this sales call. And if you don't do that, you're going to have to go back up and learn some direct sales skills, or you're going to have to go back up and tweak your, offer your message, your mockup.

Okay? So you want that 10%. So early adopters will place a bet on you. You need to pitch at least 20 or 30 times. It's not enough to pitch like five times. You gotta pitch at least 20 or 30 times. That's when you start going to that's. When you're going to start getting some feedback, this could take you one day to 60 days. It could take you six months, depending on who you're selling to you're selling to, into the enterprise. It could take you a little bit longer, but if you are selling it to the enterprise, make sure that that price is really, really high. Okay? And you're going to use incentive based pricing and discounts. This is all covered in the sales and marketing training. This is an example, Sabrina. She got a hundred thousand dollars, sorry, a thousand dollars a month. Okay. Just by pitching on the sales call.

And she is a developer and she's very, very, she's honed her sales skills in a matter of months, she's doing very, very well. So why is this so important to get commitments and talk pricing again, you don't want to learn in the future that the market can't bear the price to sustain a profitable business. You need to learn this information ASAP. If you need to learn it, the market is willing to pay for the solution. If not, just toss it to the bin, go to another, come up with another mockup, come up with another experiment and, and start executing. What if you're not a trained salesperson? Will this affect results? Yes. Without sales skills, the outcomes of your sales calls will obviously be worse and you could get false negatives. So an entrepreneur without sales skills, that's like very dangerous. You need to hone your sales skills to validate that what you're doing is right.

Okay. And if you don't have the sales skills, you might get a false negative, and you don't want that because you'll end up wasting your time. And you might just, you might think that it's not a thing when it really is a thing. Okay. So the next step in the lab process is once you get those sales skills down and you get those first commitments, you're going to ask yourself, can you deliver on the promise with your current resources? And if not, you're going to have to raise some capital. If you can, then we're going to create a manual process that delivers the outcome. This is before the product is even made. So a product is just a robot version of a manual process. Okay? So let's say I make a claim 20% efficiency in three months. Now I have to figure out how to do this.

So I have to map out all the jobs job, one job, two jobs, three job, four. This is from Clayton Christiansen. What job are you trying to do? I have to map out those jobs and see if I can get the result with either a prototype or a simulation. Okay. And if I can get that result with a simulation or prototype, then I can turn it into a product. And you see here, this is the leveraged version of part leverage. This is fully, this is fully leveraged. So you're mapping out all those discrete jobs. And then you're turning that into a process. And that's usually what the product is. If you think about it, that's what a product is. If you can't do these jobs manually, you can't do a simulation, then it's probably not going to work too well. Okay. So if you can't deliver the promise outcome using a manual process, then you won't be able to build a product.

This doesn't scale, and you shouldn't worry about scale at this point. Okay. You can opt to raise money if the manual process and figuring out phase requires more people and more time, okay. You can also opt to hire engineers. At this point. This process can take seven to 90 days, depending on what you're selling. If you're building a rocket ship, it could take you years. Okay? So you want to check if the simulation or manual process delivers the results twice and independent in independent environments. So this is the next box here. Can that simulation work twice in a row? And that's just basic scientific theory. You need to be able to duplicate your experiment results in order for it to be valid. Okay. So here's some examples, Tyler, Ryan, he validated his algorithm. So this this, this this tool he validated first before we turn it into product with spreadsheets.

So he just did the, the manual data crunching. And the number crunching with spreadsheets. Henry be valid is lead generation process with people first, manually. And then he did it in the Philippines and then he turned it into a SAS product. Okay. Then here's another example. We validated our closing process manually before we started building tools in house to facilitate the closing process. Another example with a simulation. So in university I was studying physics and we did we did a lab. We did a lab like course, and I was charged with building a noise canceling device and for air vents. Okay. So before I even built the device, I used a computer computer simulator to build the algorithms, you know, taking the sound waves, inverted it and phase mashed it and whatever to create noise canceling. And then I tested it.

And then from there I built the actual, so I modeled it on the computer with the simulation. And then I built the actual thing and I was able to duplicate the experiment results. Sabrina she's manually matching candidates with her, to our positions, Ben Stewart, he sealed driveways. This guy is the guy behind Canadian property stars. He built a 400 person sales team and he has this huge home services company before he, he sealed this, he had this big driveway sealing machine before he sealed driveway, or before he built the machine, he actually did everything by hand. And then he hired an engineering firm to like watch him do and go through all the jobs. And then the engineering firm turned that return. They built a product that helped them do that and increase the efficiency. Okay. So some questions. Do you need to be an engineer to deliver results with a manual process?

No, but it's good to be familiar with the engineering process or consult with an engineer. If what you're doing is really technical. Like what Ben Stewart was doing. He was a sales and marketer, a salesperson and marketer, but didn't have the engineering skills. So you hired an engineering firm to help him. Okay. There's a trick to finding a solutions. You want to find someone who already solved a problem and then copy their solution and put a twist and apply it to your your specific circumstances. Okay. So there is, there are some tricks. What if your simulation doesn't deliver the promise results? Well, this is obvious. Go back and fix your simulation. Make sure that actually getting results. How much money do you need to test your experiments? So you really don't need much to test. Okay. Especially if you're doing a simulation, you just need to simulate things only a few hundred dollars for parts.

You don't need money unless you're billing like something physical, you're building like a prototype. And this, like I said, simulations are really cheap. If you want to simulate a SAS product, you can just do mockups. It's very cheap and very easy, and you can build things very inexpensively these days. Okay. So why didn't you test outcomes at independent environments? Again, scientific experiment is not valid unless you can duplicate the results in different environments. Okay. That's just standard scientific method. All right. So now once you have the outcome and your simulations working, or your manual process is working now is time to build that minimal viable product and validate the outcomes with the leveraged version. Okay. And the leverage you can use, there's different forms of leverage. You can use technology, you can use people. Okay. Do I increase the efficiency of the, of what you're doing?

So you're going to turn your manual process or simulation into a working product. Okay. So you can engage engineers, you can raise money at this point. This can take you 14 to 90 days, depending on what you're building. In. Some cases could take years. If you're building something like really complicated, like a car or something like that. But for SAS, you can build the MVP real fast. Okay. And then you're going to validate that the MVP delivers the results in independent environment, similar to your manual process and your simulation. You're gonna validate that your actual product delivers the results and independent environments. Okay. So you're going to set, you're going to build the product. Are the results achieved with, with the same results are achieved in the simulation, if not go back and rebuild it or they do is the experiment results. Can they be duplicated if not go back and, and and and prove it out.

Okay. So and then you want to validate that the customer pays in full and provides a testimony. This is so, so, so, so damn important. Okay. You can't just build a product and not get paid. Okay. And then think everything is rosy. If someone's not giving you a testimonial, if a customer is not jumping up and down for what you're building, okay. If they're not just super jacked up and they're like, wow, don't sell this to my competitors. That's how, you know, you did something. Well, if the customer goes, Hey, can the guy buy this? But you can't sell it to my competitors. That's how you know, okay. So customer provides a testimonial and payment. If they don't do that, you got to go rebuild that product. And you have to go rebuild the the MVP. Okay. So you want to keep this build cycle extremely short and the feedback cycle extremely short, the feedback loop extremely tight.

Okay. So this is I've. I've went into companies before and the engineering team in startup mode. They're very like, Oh dude, we'll put this on the roadmap for next week. Oh, we're going to build this feature for next week. No, no, no, no, no. The best companies they're like, shit, we need to do it right now. Okay. Cancel your appointments. Let's build this thing right now. They do it the same day and they push code the same day. So in this very, very early stage, that that builds cycle needs to be super, super, super, super tight. Okay. Here's an example. So Henry B from copilot adviser, we validated the outcome with the manual process. Then they spent a few months building the the SAS product. And then as soon as they have the SAS product, they unlock that scale and the efficiency, and then they were able to shoot up really, really quickly.

Okay. So why do I need to validate my MVP before we start real marketing? Okay. So here's the thing. It's way easier to fix a product with only two to three customers than it is to fix the product with a hundred customers. Okay. It's way, way, way, way, way, way easier. Okay. It's like, if you're trying to solve the, you're trying to bake the perfect bread. You want to bake the perfect bread for one person before you start doing a whole dinner for the, for a thousand people. Okay. You want to, you want to make it's way as you to do that with, to figure it out with one to three customers, what features go into MVP? So only the features that allow the customer to get the outcome. Remember people don't buy products, they buy outcomes. So as long as the slow thing fricking works, it just works.

It gets the outcome. Then you're good to go. It can look like, you know throw up Brown. You can use the worst colors on the planet. Okay. And as long as it works, customers still going to be happy. Okay. And then later on, when you're selling to the mass market, stuff like that, you can tune it up with the design, but in the very beginning you, it just needs to work. How do you raise money with the thesis? So if you need to raise money for, to to build your product, then you want to show the investors signed, purchase orders or signed contract saying, if you can deliver this, we will pay you this. And if investors sees that, it's going to be very, very straightforward, and it's going to be very easy to raise money and we'll help you do that.

Okay. So then the next step, now this is the lab. This kind of concludes the lab process. We're going to get the case studies and then we're going to enter the accelerator Mo we're going to enter the accelerator process. Okay. So lab and we help customers go through this whole lab process. This is, this is really challenging. Okay. But we help customers go through this whole lab process. And then from there, we're going to enter the accelerator. Okay. This is where things start getting more fun. This is when you start your, you kind of exit at a science mode, you're still kind of in science mode, you're still kind of a scientist, but then you exit and then you start kind of building your business. Okay. So there's a few things that we need to do first order of business. And we're going to jump to the accelerator process diagram.

Okay. So first order of business, we're going to write the foundational copy and collect the case study. So you did you have the case studies from the previous step. Okay. And then we're going to be building something called the minimal viable assets. Okay. This is super, super important. We need like minimum viable product. We're going to need minimal viable assets. And these assets just need to work. They need to generate leads and opportunities. They need to close deals. Minimum viable just needs to fricking work. They don't need to be a ma. They don't want to be the most polished things in the world. They just need to work. Okay. So landing pages, sales pages, video sales letters. This is an example of a video sales letter, sales scripts, bottom of the funnel sales scripts. Those need to be on point. Here's an example of a funnel, minimal viable assets for truly one of our customers.

We actually made this funnel for them. You can see here, it's not the most fancy funnel in the world, but it does work. Okay. Here's another funnel sales process IO. We have sales pages, video sales letters. This is what got us to 5 million bucks, but minimal viable assets. It's not the most fancy page in the world, but damn does this thing work? Yes, it does. We're going to need some content examples. So we're going to need to come up with some videos. Okay. Some content, some supporting content, minimum viable assets, folks. You can't. If an engineer learns this stuff, for someone who builds the product learns how to build minimum viable assets, how's he get on camera and do this stuff. Holy crap. You guys are gonna kill it. Okay. so this is an example of a minimum viable assets in the form of a YouTube video.

Here's a minimal viable asset with a, an article. Okay. Just a really well written article. You need a couple of these to get attention and get credibility in order for you to generate appointments. And then you're going to be able to close deals. And then of course, you're going to need a sales script. You're going to need a sales script to close the deal. And if you don't, if you're unfamiliar with this, this process, then you're going to need to learn it. Okay. So that you can see it's a 20 page sales script I've been selling for a long, long time. I still use a sales script to sell a, to sell because I forget things. Okay. And I want to go through a process that I know works. Okay. So you're going to need to build those minimal viable assets. So let's ask some questions.

How long does it take you to build these minimum viable assets? So it should take you more, no more than one to two weeks to write and publish your minimum viable assets. Okay. And with us, we'll be able to get you. Some people take like six months to get these things done. To me, that's absolutely crazy. Okay. You need to be, you need to be taught by someone who knows what they're doing. Someone who has the map, you just execute and you'll be able to get these things out the door. Like if you're going to learn like Java script, or you're gonna learn like, like backend development, you wouldn't just try to go figure it out. You're probably going to learn from someone who knows what to do, right? And so this is really similar with sales and marketing. You want to learn from someone who knows what they are doing, what tools do you need to build the metaphor, minimum viable assets.

You need a quick landing builds landing page, building software, like click funnels or Insta page or HubSpot. Okay. You need keynote or Google calendar and you need a calendar software, or sorry, keynote or Google slides that you're going to need a calendar software like Calendly or something like that. Okay. And that's really easy. You don't need the most fancy webpage in the world. Hold your horses. That's later. This is, remember, this is minimal viable assets. Okay. What skills do you need? You're going to need copywriting skills. You're going to need some technical skills because you're going to have to put together these, these funnels. You're going to need some marketing skills and you're gonna need some sales skills. So this, these are learned in sales process sale. We're going to help you develop those skills and we'll coach you and we'll consult on the process.

How long does it take to learn these skills? Like I said, if you're going to learn Java script on your own, you're going to sit in a basement and try to figure out Java script without any, it's probably going to take you some time. Okay. So it can take you years without the proper training or a few weeks with the proper training. Do the assets need to be perfect? No, again, these are minimal viable assets. They just need to work. They just need to generate leads. Okay. So once we have our minimum viable assets created, we're going to be, we're going to run our marketing campaign. So we're going to be starting with a warm audiences and we're going to be trying to generate leads and opportunities. So we're looking for a demo conversion rate or trial conversion rate over 15% with warm audiences. We're looking for a demo or a trial conversion rate over 5%.

If we're doing cold, outbound prospecting. And we're looking for demo to trial conversion rate over 5%, if we're doing cold advertising. Okay. So I'm going to walk through some of this stuff. So you want to use organic sources to validate that minimal viable assets. If the assets don't get appointments that you need to go back and rework the asset. So if they don't get appointments, you got to go re you have to rework the assets. Okay. You have to go back and build the build the the assets and, and tweak the assets. So you're going to start with organic mining. So you're gonna be posting on social media channels. Okay. So you can like go to a Facebook group like this. You go to LinkedIn group. Okay. And just post, like some sort of content, one of those minimum Bible assets that you created and then ask people to DMU if they're interested.

Okay. That's one example. You can also do outbound prospecting to validate your messaging. So you're going to use tools like you Lank and cold outbound prospecting as a, I'm sorry. Cold up on prospecting. Via email. Okay. So I'm going to show you this tool. This is an automation campaign. This is for later on when you're scaling, but I'll just show you the process. So if I go to a campaign, this is over top of LinkedIn. I can define my outbound prospecting messages here. You can see that, and you can see the stats. I'm connecting with thousands of people a month. I'm creating a hundreds of new connections or people. These, these are people who accept your connection. And then we're sending the messages and we're getting a 9% response rate. And then we're booking phone calls from this. So you can see here with outbound prospecting.

This guy says, no, no. This guy says, yeah, email me. So this guy is raising his hand. He says, he's interested, email me with more info. Okay. This guy is teed up a call already. Okay. So essentially you're going to be using, and this is what we're going to teach you how to do. We're going to be teaching you how to do direct sales, how to do outbound prospecting. Okay. And then we're going to start testing, paid advertising. Okay. So this is once you get that down and and you have the messaging down, then you're going to be testing some paid advertising. And this is example from paid ads. We'll go like last month. I spent $32,000 on ads. I generated 264 appointments. And then it was $124 an appointment. And you can see here with, I spent $32,000 on Facebook and we made $284,000 back just from Facebook.

Okay. So when you get that working really nicely, you can, if you want to start the validation process a little early, if you have the money to start spending on ads that's when you that's, when you that's when you can validate and, and, and you started seeing like, this really awesome bright spot. Okay. So you build the MBAs, then you're going to test them. You're gonna run. You're going to run examples, and then you're going to come up with a calendar. Okay. Your calendar should look. Something like this. Okay. Just appointments. Okay. You can see here, just appointments, appointments, appointments, all over the place. Okay. So that's testing the marketing campaigns, and this is what we're really good at. We're going to show you how to get this how to get this off the ground. Now let's go through some questions.

So how do you have such high outbound rates? And we use a process called blanketing and spearing. So it's not spamming. It's not just sending bulk emails. And like, I don't know, this doesn't work. Doesn't work. Show me anyone who got tons of traction with spamming people. Okay. And show me them in the last 10 years. Okay. Doesn't work. So get this. If you're entrepreneurs, you think that you're just going to buy a list of emails and then blast everyone. It doesn't work. You're going to have to do blanketing. Okay. Which is a pretty much a nice word for spamming plus spearing and spearing is what's covered in the training. We're going to show you how to get that 8%, 8% demo booking rate from cold outbound prospecting. Okay. What happens if you can't get these conversion rates? It means that the messages off. Okay.

So you need to go back and rewrite the MBAs and your MBAs are probably not going to be perfect. The first go, you're going to, they're going to require some iteration. Okay. How long have you started to see, how long does it start? How long does it take to start seeing results? You should be able to see results with within one day to seven days. Okay. Like, it's like it's cold water on your face when you hit the right message. It just freaking works. Okay. So you're gonna be iterating and then you're going to be validating this. Where should you start? You want to start with organic mining? Okay. Start with your current network. Okay. Start with your current network, then do outbound prospecting. Okay. It's like the, the, the, the three bears Goldilocks and the three bears start with start with start with organic mining, then do outbound prospecting, and then go do paid ads.

Okay. Depending on how you're feeling and how much money you have. Okay. How hard is it to get to this point? How hard is it to get the machine working? So it's pretty challenging. There's lots of moving parts. Converting cold traffic into qualified leads is marketing's main job. This is why it's so important for entrepreneurs to have these marketing skills. Okay. It's very challenging. If you're not trained on these skills, you're definitely going to need to learn them. Okay. So now we're going to validate the sales process and the price. So now that we have appointments flowing in, we need to validate that the sales conversion rate is North of 20%. Okay. And if it's not, we're going to have to, we're going to have to tune this machine. Okay. We're going to have to tune the script and get this get the closing rate over 20%.

Okay. So it could take you one to two months to validate. You want at least 30 data points, you need at least 30 pitches. Like full-out pitches to see what's working. I say a hundred, but that's a lot to really get to really get insights. You're gonna need like a hundred, but I'm going to say 30 because I can do it with 30. Your appointment should be closing at 20%. If they're not, you're gonna need to rework the sales process and the marketing process. So you could be bringing in the wrong leads. It's not, it might not be a sales process problem. It might be a marketing problem. So you have to go, you might have to go back and fix your your marketing messages and your MBAs. So here's an example. Okay. Sales script. I think I already showed you this. Okay.

You're gonna be writing a sales script and you're going to be going through the sales process. Okay. There's a very advanced sales process. How to close deals, even if you're not a professional sales person. Okay. So who should be testing the scripts? Founders, senior people should be testing the script. A junior person. Won't be able to iterate on the fly and make adjustments. So this is really important. You don't want to bring on a sales person when they're, when you're validating your sales process and your offer. You want to be doing this cause you can kind of tweak things on the fly. How long does it take to validate the sales script could take two days. You might be able to get closed in one, two days could take three months, could take six months. Okay. Depending on how long the sales cycle is, what happens if the close rate is not greater than 20%, you're going to need to tweak the pricing, the positioning, the offer, the marketing messages.

There's lots of things you're going to need to tweak. Okay? So once you have figured out this sales process, then we're going to have to do a sanity check. So we're going to determine the cost to acquire customer. So you're going to combine the marketing costs. You're going to be combining the commission cost the cost to close a customer. And you want to make sure that the product is priced in a way that the gross contribution is at least three times the cost per acquisition, over a one year time frame. Okay. That's how you can actually make a business work. That's how you can get investors, their money back. Okay. Because the thing actually generates cashflow and ideally your cost per acquisition should be less than 60 days or 90 days. Okay. Your cat CAC, I'm sorry. Your cost per acquisition payback period should be less than 60 to 90 days.

Okay. So again, we we spend, you know, we spent $32,000, maybe $284,000. Okay. That's obviously falls within range. And we were able to recoup the investment in less than 30 days. And that's why the business can move really, really quickly if you're able to do that. So if you're not achieving these rates, you'll need to rework your marketing funnel and your sales process. So there's a lot of stuff that you're going to need to do. Okay. So what happens if the cost per acquisition is too large? Well, redo your funnel or change up the pricing. A lot of entrepreneurs, they come into, they come working with us and we're like, Whoa, dude, you got to up that price. What are you doing? Selling things for five grand. Like we could get 20 grand there's customers that come in. They're like, Oh wow, really? Nick $20,000 the next few days, Hey Nick, I just closed a $20,000 deal.

So sometimes there's a lot of room on the table. There's a lot of money on the table for you to increase your pricing. And we have strategies on how to, how to do that and how to validate the price. So what if the payback period is too long? Okay. So which means you're going into like this cash trough. That's not a nice place to be. It's like, you're, if you want a stomach ulcer, then have a business like that. But what if the payback period is too long, you want to front load your contracts to sell annual deals, sign larger contracts, get paid up front, incentivize your customers to get paid upfront. And if you don't have a higher ticket offer yet, then spend times spent some time developing a high ticket offer and we'll show you how to do that as well. So if you're selling something for like a hundred dollars, well, let's tack on something high ticket at the back of the back of that funnel.

Okay. So once we validate that we're going to redo the marketing and with our new customers, we're going to update our marketing funnel. Okay. And we're going to just make it a little bit more shiny here. And then we're going to start scaling lead generation is scaling sales. Okay. So scaling lead generation means you're bringing on sales development reps. Okay? Outbound prospecting reps and scaling that up, paid advertising. I already showed you how to scale paid average. I showed you an example of scaling paid advertising. We didn't start with spending 30,030 $5,000 a month. We started with like 2000 a month and then we scaled it up. Okay. Channel partners. So press advantage is a great, so this is another way to do it. Go to a channel partner and say, Hey, we're going to run an affiliate promotion with you or channel promotion with you.

We're going to split the profits with you. And a lot of people are going to be open to doing that. So this isn't the growth packages. This is like sales process, a black package. How to scale sales teams, how to scale a advertising into the tens of thousands a day. Okay. How hard is it to pay to scale paid advertising? It gets extremely tough. Once you're spending more than $500 a day, you'll definitely to be trained on this skill or someone on your team needs to be trained on this skill. How do you comp SDRs or sales development representatives? Give them a small draw and a commission. Okay. So give them for like 700 bucks a week. And then give them a commission on whatever they sell. And here's an example of a sales game. Okay. I think I already showed you this. This is the sales team against time.

So you can see here, you, the founder, this, the founder needs to be the sales person or the CEO needs to just prove it out. You're in the trenches selling. Then you bring on a sales person. Okay. Then you bring on another one, then another one, then another one. Okay. And then you can see the ramp period. It usually takes three months or so to ramp up a sales rep. Okay. So Ken here's some questions. Can salespeople work on commission? Yes. The best people in the world are going to want to work on commission because that's where the earning potential is. Okay. They're going to want to work on commission. How do you convince salespeople to work on commission? Again? You want to be the best sales person yourself, and then you can just, they'll just follow you if you're really good at it, they'll just follow you.

Okay. So you need to be really good at sales. You need to hone those skills. It might, it might only take you one to two months to really hone those skills. Okay. So then the next step is you're going to raise growth capital K, and then you actually turn into a business. You start installing managers, raised some growth capital, create a customer community, start doing bigger media buys, start doing more content and being this octopus in the market and just you're everywhere. Okay. You're omnipresent. I know a lot of people like that word omnipresent. Okay. I like octopus. Okay. So you can see here. Let me just recap this process. Cause we did cover a lot. So the lab program at the lab process, pick a person, pick an outcome, build a mock up, get appointments, sell it, sell the mockup, validate it with the manual process, build the MVP, validate that people are going to pay for it.

Okay? They're not. You got to go back and figure that out. Then we get into the accelerator process, right? The MVP MBA's minimal viable assets. Test the campaigns for leads and opportunities. Test the closing, validate that the economics make sense. Scale lead-generation scale sales start doing some pizza parties with your team. Okay? No pizza parties before we get this thing. Okay. I know there's a lot of startups that throw pizza parties and they try to build this great culture before the fricking unit case is even built. Do not be doing that. You got to work your butt off. It could take you a year in the trenches and it's not fun. Okay? It's not fun. It's a lot of work. There's no pizza parties in this, in this part gets your pizza parties. After you have the unit case figured out you have the sales, you have the marketing channel figured out you had the sales channel, figured out and cash is coming in faster than you know what to do with, okay?

So that's the process. Now let's talk about some common problems that people have. So this is where a lot of entrepreneurs struggle. So they struggled to find the niche and the outcome. They don't know that they don't, they don't understand that customer development process as well as they need to. Okay. So they could be going down the wrong path and they don't even know it. This is very common thing. There could be no market for what you're building and you don't realize this until years down the road. And it's because you don't understand this customer development process as well as you need to, you could struggle to generate opportunities. Okay? You don't have those direct sales skills. No one was ever, no one ever trained you on this. You didn't spend summers being a door to door sales person like me. Okay? You didn't, maybe you didn't have the the opportunity, actually, those companies that they have a mirror test and they they'll hire you.

If you put a mirror up to your face and it there's condensation on the mirror, guess what they're hiring you. So you probably could have done that when you are in your, in, in when you're 20 years old, if you want to do. But a lot of people don't have those skills. A lot of people don't have the sales skills. So their pricing is too low. Their sales cycles are too long and they're not able to close deals. Okay. You might on a, be unable to raise capital. You can't convince investors that your thesis is actually valid. Maybe customers don't want to give you testimonials. That's another problem. Okay? Because they're under NDA. You don't, you're unsure how to build your minimum viable assets using a using that. Okay. That's a, that's a problem that comes up your assets. Don't convert traffic to lead.

So your minimal viable assets don't work. Okay? The message is blurry there. It's not, it's just not working. It's not generating leads. Okay? Maybe paid ads work, maybe your sales team, you're starting, maybe paid ads don't work and your sales team is not closing. And the whole thing is burning money. That's a big, big problem. And you're going to want to fix that a set. Okay. maybe the LTV over CAC ratio is not greater than three and the CAC payback period and the cost per acquisition cost to acquire a customer is way too long. The recoup of the payback period is way too long. And you see you're having trouble scaling your business without raising like $40 million. Okay. That can, that's a big problem. You want to get those? You want to make sure that the economics make sense. Okay. So those are some common problems I can go on for days.

There's a million things that can go wrong and to attack this stuff on your own is crazy. Okay? So that's why we actually exist. Sales process IO lab, press X plus accelerator consulting program. So we give you a 12 month intensive program. We're going to be working with you and your team members. If you're, if you need help with the customer development process, we're going to help you get to that customer development. We're going to help you go through that process and help you get your first case days and get your first customers. Okay. You'll be able to find the niche and the outcomes we're going to help you find that you'll be able to generate appointments. We're going to teach you direct sales and marketing techniques. To start. You're going to be able to develop mockups and products. And this is in the customer development process as well.

You can quickly create minimal viable assets are going to teach you marketing. This is bad-ass marketing. If you're going to learn marketing from someone, learn it from someone who's actually made a shit ton of money marketing. There's lots of people in marketing and sales. There's lots of people that are like showing marketing, but they're broke. They're poor. Why? That means they didn't. That means they're not, it didn't work. So if you're going to learn, if you're gonna learn marketing, you want to learn from just a wizard who knows how to make money with internet marketing or with with these, these machines. OK. You're going to be able to validate the lead channel generation channel in weeks. You're going to be able to close your appointments over 20%. I built an I've been built tons of sales teams, and we have a script. We have a formula.

This stuff works. Okay. And I've, and I didn't invent this stuff. I'll get, I'll just tell you straight up. I didn't invent a lot of this stuff. What I did, I was just a very, very good student. And I crushed so many books and I had like tens of thousands of sales calls. And so imagine combining the sales calls and the and the, and all the reps with the best material, I was very a diligent student, which is read, read, read, sell, sell, sell, read, read, read, sell, sell, sell, buy programs, get help from masters, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell. So I was able to hone those skills, using that using that feedback loop. Okay. You're going to save years of time and millions of dollars. Okay. We have saved businesses. Okay. There's a one instance where this, this company had 120,000 a month contract.

It was, it got canceled. Okay. And they had 90 employees and they had to, they were going to have to lay off everybody. This was a company out of India. They're actually an American company, but a lot of their employees were in India. And then they came to me and they're like, Nick, we're going to have to lay off all these people. We need to figure this out. We need to get more customers. So in four months we were able to get the revenue up to a place where they only had to lay off 10 people. So instead of laying off 90, they only laid off 10 people. And K. So we were able to save a ton of jobs. That way the LTV over CAC are going to be is going to be greater than three of the payback period is going to be less than 90 days.

So we're going to show you how to do that. And you're going to have less anxiety because you're going to know what to do. Anxiety is like the definition of anxiety is like anticipation of future pain, right? So if someone is, they're showing you, Hey, this is what's going to happen. And this is what the outcome's going to look like. And they have real proof to show you that you can do this while your anxiety goes way down. And the quality of life improved improves you will get rich. I threw this in there just as a joke, but no, seriously, you'll get rich. And it's not a, it's not a get rich quick thing. It could take you a couple of years, but when you do have this financial freedom your family life improves. Like for me, my family life improved like crazy.

Once I, once I made my money I was my family life was so much better. I don't know how people anyway, that's a very, very, very big thing here. So once you figure this stuff out, your family life improves your relationships improve. For those of you who are already rich, good, you guys know what I mean? For those of you who are still on the journey trust me, it's worth it. Okay. So again, we have tons of case studies, like I said, venture capital home services, retail development shops. Okay. Anyone who's in a, a development shop or a marketing agency, marketing agencies do really well with us. They learn how to close. They ha they learn how to generate leads, how to close deals, how to tune the machine. Okay. Enterprise big enterprise folks. Same thing like people ask, Oh, does this work for selling to CEO's?

Does this work for selling to VP HR? Yes. It works. If you're selling for people, it's the same underlying principles. Okay. The only difference is the messaging. And obviously you're going to need a deep, you're going to need deep domain expertise to get the messaging right. Works for retail. Okay. It works for online courses. Obviously it works for online courses works for healthcare. Okay. It works for HR works for marketing tech and works for FinTech. Okay. Or it does work. Okay. So how it works is the the program and the, and the services work like this. So you're going to get a training. You're going to get the training program, all of our assets, all of our documents, all of our maps, everything is super organized. It's very, it took us like a year to build this stuff. The blueprint, the scripts, the asset templates, the code, the examples, the process diagrams, everything that you're going to need to, to hone your skills is going to be covered.

You're going to get a Facebook group. You're going to be joining our community. We have live events in Toronto. So you, if you want to be a part of our community, come meet other high level entrepreneurs. Then, then you can do that. We have private webinars every week as well. So there is a community. And the reason why, like the community is so important, like 50% of the results come from the actual training, the consulting showing you exactly what to do, helping you write, copy all that stuff. But then the other 50% comes from you just sticking at adherence. There needs to be adherence. And it's very easy for entrepreneurs to go off and wander around and try to do something else are a lot of entrepreneurs are like add. So with this mechanism in place, the weekly calls, the events, it gives you that accountability.

And I know it's a little soft and a little fluffy, but Holy guys, it does matter. It matters a ton. And when things get rough, you're going to want your community. Okay. We're going to have one on one coaching calls, copywriting, revisions access to our investors and firms, or we have a network of investors. So if you have an awesome company, we'll help you, we'll push out your companies who are enlist discount codes for software. You're going to the price of the program is a, it can be justified in the software. Okay? Like we can save you a ton of money on software. You have, we have tons of companies. We have, we have a ton of businesses and we just go to the software companies and say, Hey, can you give us a discount? And they're like, yeah, sure. Just push it out to your list, guys.

It will save you a lot of of money on software and we'll get insights on trends and patterns in the market. So again, who is this for? This is for entrepreneurs that really want to take their game to the next level. They're dead set on building an amazing business. Okay. Maybe they're at zero. They want to get to 10,000 a month. Maybe they're at 10, K 20 K. They want to get to a hundred grand a month. Maybe you're at a hundred thousand. You want to get to a million a month. Okay. And, or maybe just a young person you really want to, you want to make money in your twenties. Like let's just be straight. Okay. There's, there's very, there's there's easier professions out there than entrepreneurship, but the benefit of being an entrepreneur is that you're able to accumulate capital if you're good at it really quickly.

And, and you can accumulate a lot of it. Okay. So that is pretty much how it works, guys. So if this interests you and you want to sign up to talk with us, we'll go through your business. We'll see. We'll come up with a plan for you. We'll give you some very valuable insights on the call. And and then if it makes sense, we will give you an offer. Okay. So if you're fired up, then book a call with us, get the decision makers on the call with us. Okay. So we don't like, we don't like drawing out the sales cycle for you and for us, it doesn't, it doesn't make sense to get the decision maker on the call, show the decision makers, these, this video before the call, if you can. And and then get ready to pull the trigger.

Okay. If it makes sense and you're fired up, do your research, do your research there's companies that are doing extremely well. And then also there's companies that didn't do well. Okay. And here's, this is a question that a lot of, a lot of prospects ask and they're like, Nick, you have great case studies. Right. But what about the not so great case studies? Well, here's the thing. We provide the training and the consulting. We can't guarantee that you're going to actually do it. So the people that fail, they are, they either run out of money. Okay. Like here's some instances, so one guy ran out of money and he's like, he of came to me asking for a job. Okay. And so, and I was like, no, you can't like, you can't just do that to someone. You can't just take services and then not like, and then not even do the work and then come to me for a job that doesn't make sense.

That, so that is an example. There's another guy who, who had a a death in his family. Okay. And he wasn't a, it wasn't that rocked his boat real bad. Like obviously that's the worst thing that can happen. So that is something that it's not, it's not like a hundred percent guarantee. There are circumstances in which this doesn't work. Sometimes entrepreneurs, they go through the customer development process and they realize that what they were building is not the right thing. And they run the calculation in their head. They're like, crap. I just spent two years building this thing and that, and there's not really a market for it. I'm just going to be doing, I'm going to do something else. And so that, those are the failure. I don't think that's failure. I think that's that's because they, we would have saved them years, years of time going through that like going through, going down the wrong path, we're going to save them that all that time.

Yeah. Another, another instance of people not being successful. They're just not doing the work. Like it's a lot of work. Okay. It's a lot, there's step by step instructions. It's a lot of work. It's not a, it's not a walk in the park. So some people they'll they'll start and then they'll, they won't execute the campaigns or they won't put they won't put in the reps. Hey, it's not going to work if you don't put in the reps. So you're gonna, it's not a silver bullet. Okay. It's damn good. It's really, really good. But I'm not going to sell you a silver bullet. It's a very good bullet. And it's going to require a lot of effort. But this thing, if you do put in the effort the thing's going to work, we've made people very wealthy using this process. We've taken businesses to the stratosphere using this process.

It's it freaking works. We stand behind it with a guarantee. If you go through all our stuff and you do all the work and it doesn't work for you, we have a crazy guarantee. Okay? Not only will we refund you, we'll pay you. If you actually go through the process and, and do everything. And you're like, Nick, this doesn't work or sales process IO. This doesn't work refund and we'll pay you. So that's how confident we are in our process. We wouldn't have been able to get this baby. We wouldn't have been able to get this many case studies if our stuff didn't work. So I'm, I am very serious about this. Everyone on our team is very serious about helping our clients. We know that if we help our clients do well, we're going to do well. So our main thing, but even, even before marketing and sales is client results.

That's it. We focus on client results because if you get client results, it goes back to the lab process, right? If you get client results and case studies, the marketing is pretty damn simple. The sale is pretty damn simple, as long as we get client results. Okay, well guys, I appreciate the time and the attention I look forward to speaking to you on the sales call. And if it's, you're not speaking to me, at least speaking to one of my team members, and again, I appreciate the time and attention, and we'll see you on the call.

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