475% increase in organic business

Summary

part of this podcast is me documenting what we’re doing. partly so I can go back and ask “what was I thinking, when did I start that, did it work.” and partly so you can take a few nuggets. here’s a checkpoint on the 2023 strategy.

1. back in episode 7 I laid out the poles and water strategy. don’t rely on one lead source. work referrals, outbound, sales, email, ads, and organic in parallel. simple in concept, hard to actually run without the team to support it. it took us until Q2 to truly stand it up because we needed two key hires first.

2. Q2 versus Q1 numbers at PT Biz. referrals up 67%. outbound leads up 63%. sales is closing more deals on lower lead volume because lead quality is higher. email marketing is mostly bolstering other channels this quarter, real tracking on email lands in Q3.

3. ads. this is the one that surprises people. in Q1, online ads accounted for 52% of all incoming deals. in Q2 that dropped to 23.85%. and we cut ad spend by over 50% while keeping the deal flow flat. half the marketing budget, same output. when you stop relying on paid traffic to carry the company, profitability jumps.

4. organic, which is the one my team owns directly, is up 475% in incoming deals. social, SEO, content. yes the starting point was low, that’s why the percentage is dramatic. but the slope itself is real. SEO normally takes months to compound and we’re seeing the curve already.

5. you don’t need a five person marketing team to start. if you don’t have one, do what I said in episode 7. focus on one channel until you’re decent at it, then layer a second. if you do have a team, even three or four people, give each channel a small experiment for the quarter. brainstorm one move per channel. ask your team who could own each. you don’t need to win all six. you need to stop being on one. try harder.

Transcript

documenting the poles and water strategy

The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business. And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself. This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses and also personal growth. My goal is for you to shortcut this journey.

So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe. If you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy. Hey Jerred Moon here and welcome to the Better Human Business podcast. So from the beginning, I’ve said part of this podcast is going to be me documenting the journey of what we’re doing, what we’re implementing partly and selfishly.

I can go back, look, what was I thinking? Was that a bad strategy? When did I implement it? How is it working? You know, what the results look like? So my own documentation, so I can go back and listen. And then also you get to hear and maybe you can pick up a few nuggets, something that you might want to implement.

And I’ll do my best always in these kind of more documentation podcasts to try and give you some sort of action item. But if you go back to episode 007 of the Better Human Business podcast, I was talking about what our 2023 strategy is for growth. And it was the polls and the water strategy. We were just going to try to get good at everything.

And all of the areas were referrals, outbound marketing, which is where you’re reaching out to somebody to try and generate a conversation, eventually turn them into a lead, and get a sale. Then there’s sales, email marketing, ads, and then organic, organic being things like social media, search engine optimization, all that kind of stuff.

the q2 numbers

So we’ve been implementing it, I would say, in earnest, only Q2. So I only have data from the last two months closed out. We were working on it really since the beginning of the year, but it took a long time just to get things set up and get the team in place. We had a key hire, really two key hires that kind of started around Q2.

One person shifted in the company, working fully in my department, and then another one came on board full time. And I will say that was a major part in being able to achieve this. You have to have the team to be able to do these things, and then getting everyone else to communicate in the other departments of the company.

But I’ll give you the quick data. So in all of these areas that we’ve been tracking, referrals have increased 67%. Our outbound, the number of leads that we’re getting from outbound has increased 63% over the same time period, comparing Q1 to Q2. Sales, they’re closing more deals. I’m not gonna have as much data on sales because they have KPIs that they basically need to hit, but they’re closing more deals due to our increased lead quality, and they’re closing more deals on lower lead volume.

And I’m gonna talk about why the lead volume’s lower, but we’re closing more. Email marketing, I also don’t have as much data on email marketing because email marketing really just bolsters all these other ones. That’s gonna be more for Q3, getting into tracking that more. I know exactly how to track it, but we’ve really just been using email marketing to bolster some of our other activities.

Now what’s really cool is advertising in the first part of this year, the first quarter, it had counted for about 52% of our total lead volume. So that’s just deals coming into the company. And we have cut that down to 23.85% of the deals that are coming to the company. So that means over 75% of the deals coming to the company have nothing to do with online advertising, which is awesome.

cutting ad spend by 50%

Because I don’t like relying too much on online advertising. I also don’t like social media that much. I think most of you listening to the podcast know that, but that influencer style, having a huge following, you’re just a slave to the platform. If an algorithm changes, you have to change with it, or you get left in the dust.

So I don’t really like playing with them too much. And so I’m really happy about being able to decrease that down to 23.85%. And we also decreased our ad spend by over 50% over the last month. And we’re able to maintain the same lead flow, same deal flow for the company, which when you’re decreasing marketing costs by 50% and you have not changed the number of deals the sales team are touching, that’s a huge win.

I can’t even truly express, unless you’re doing this as your job, how hard that is. And really, it’s a big part on our team. So very happy about that, because with a significant decrease in ad spend, that’s just made the company more profitable. Now the one that I’m most proud of, because that’s specifically my team that’s working on this, is our organic lead and deal flow has increased 475%, 475%, which is just incredible.

So that’s things like I mentioned, social media, search engine optimization. So overall, the strategy is doing awesome. And it’s a strategy I’ve always wanted to implement, but it’s very hard if you don’t have a team and really you don’t know what you’re doing in all these areas. And another reason I like it is because it’s just given us a huge competitive advantage just in the marketplace, because you can’t mimic this.

You can try, but oh, I’m just going to do all the things they’re doing. I could have a direct competitor listening to this, but if you don’t have the team, if you don’t have the talent and you don’t have the know-how of all of these different things, how to train your team to do it, it’s just, you’re not going to be able to do it.

organic up 475%

And it makes the company way more bulletproof when you have all of these different lead sources and not just one that you’ve relied on. If you’re a company that, or a business that only has one kind of lead source, it’s just such a dangerous game. You don’t want to be in that game. You want to try and get, spread it out as much as you can.

Now if you don’t have a big team, my recommendation is the same as it was in episode seven. Just focus on one of these, try and get really good at it before you move on to a second season. But if you do have a team, like maybe you have a team of two people, three people, four people, whatever, start thinking about all these areas.

Just like what’s a small thing that you could do in each one of these areas to start to increase it? Because we’ve only been implementing this for a short amount of time and I wouldn’t typically pull this data until the end of Q2, but it was just looking so good right now I wanted, I was like, where are we at?

And it’s looking awesome. And I’m sure in this month, in June, it’s already going great. And I’m not just sitting here to say, hey, we’re doing so awesome, like you should be jealous. It’s just that when a company strategy works, I definitely want to share it with you guys because we can get into how to do all of these things.

Maybe I could do an episode on each one of these, like how do you get more referrals? How do you do more outbound? How do you get more sales, email marketing, ads, organic, all those kind of things. But I really just want to urge you to start brainstorming what you think you could do in each one of these areas and who on your team could be responsible in each one of these areas to start and spread out your lead flow.

start with one or two areas

Because it’s a very slow process, been chipping away at it since January. I didn’t know if we would honestly see organic results until the end of this year, but the fact that we’re already at 475% increase, and the reason that number that is so big is because the starting was so low. It wasn’t zero, but it was just so low of what we were getting from organic.

But we started implementing all these organic strategies, and I know from experience, SEO, all these things, they take a long time to gain traction, but they’re actually gaining traction very fast. So just start brainstorming what you can do in each one of these areas, and then be like, okay, I don’t honestly have the time or resources for all of these.

Pick two, pick three. What could you do to get more referrals? Could you ask? Could you just simply ask for more referrals, would that work? Could you have someone on your team go back to past leads and reach back out to them? That’s a simple form of outbound that you could work on. Could you implement some digital advertising, Google ads, Facebook ads, something like that?

Could you be doing some more search engine optimization? Could you hire a company to do SEO for you? Could you start to learn that yourself? And then also, could you be doing more on social media, getting calls to action, those kind of things? So that’s what I want you all to start thinking about, because it is working for us, and I’m not saying that it 100% will work for you, but this kind of strategy makes me feel a lot better as a business owner, because I know that, hey, if any one of these just got cut off, you’re like, hey, you can’t do any more online advertising starting tomorrow, we would be okay.

And I think that just is a very comforting position to be in. So start brainstorming those things, and try harder. Thank you.