Two Inbound Engines that Drive 30K+ Leads Per Month – Lars Lofgren – MicroConf Growth 2017

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0:15hey everyone I know I'm the only thing standing between you and an evening of debauchery so we are gonna keep this on point and moving quickly today we are talking about the two inbound engines or when it comes to inbound the two engines that I pretty much break everything into and then how I use that to generate tens of thousands of leads a month well over 30,000 leads a month so first the proof this is our 2016 actuals and lead goals at IWT came out strong in January and basically just widened that gap widen that cushion all year long I was actually super super mad in January because I realized I hit a

0:59hundred and nineteen percent of my annual goal not a hundred and twenty but it is what it is we smashed our goal and I was pretty happy with that my headline was actually a little too humble we averaged 40,000 leads over 40,000 leads last year and it's not the first time I've done this either at KISSmetrics I quadrupled lead counts inside of a year so I've done it a few times now the first big kind of philosophy they they are the mental shift that you really need to take away is you got to stop thinking and marketing campaigns whenever someone comes to me and says they want to run a campaign I hear 60 90

1:43days of really intense effort a pop of leads and then a month after it all goes away and we're right back to where we started I hate running on a treadmill I hate building from scratch I do everything and systems so I hate marketing campaigns we don't talk about marketing campaigns on my team at all someone tells me they have a marketing campaign idea crate how does that scale what is this system behind that how does it turn into a repeatable process that gives me leads this month and next month and every year you're over here if you want to build this kind of volume you

2:19have to start thinking in systems otherwise you're just never gonna get there and this is where a lot of marketing teams kind of the the big mental brayer barrier that prevents them from ever getting to the volume that they could is this single insight how do you do that how do you actually build the systems what system should you even focus on what are the levers to give you that kind of volume so you're not getting stuck in this treadmill and you are building these systems that grow year over year over year well the first big question you have to ask yourselves is already playing a volume game or a

2:54quality game a lot of folks mix these two up and if you mix them up then you're gonna get stuck in that treadmill and just doing the same thing over and over again so first let's go through a couple of examples of where I personally screwed this up at KISSmetrics we got stuck into a PDF content mill we had this bright idea of hey PDFs they bring in some leads for our sales team if one PDF is great why not 50 right so we set up this quota with our team we started cracking these things out it took us like a year or two and basically

3:26this huge resources page I think it's still live if you go to KISSmetrics calm I don't think they've had the heart to take it down yet but um we cranked out all these PDFs and did this increase my lead counts at all during the duration of while we were working on this no they didn't what maybe gave me like an extra ten leads a month but we were doing 8,000 a month I certainly didn't care about an extra ten it's for certainly considering the work that these things took I have a writer spent weeks and weeks putting together each of these things and then the designer working on

3:58the cover it's too much time now the reason that that specific content mill doesn't really work is you know how are those fifty PDFs gonna generate any traffic right you can put them on your site but that doesn't mean anybody else you know if it's not increasing your traffic is not increasing your audience is not increasing your lead flow instead I'd much rather have 49 blog posts and one amazing PDF if I can get that then I have a much more reliable legion system I have something I can scale something that's repeatable another example where we screwed this when I joined I will teach the team was

4:39working on these mini courses basically a really really fancy PDF so front end time was going into this all sorts of landing pages being built by scratch tons of time on the copy and the opt-ins you know week or two we'll follow up content and drip sequences and all this nonsense but essentially we're in the exact same boat right we have an opt-in page like Google doesn't want to rank right that Google knows what we're trying to do our visitors know what we're trying to do we know what we're trying to do everybody knows that we're just trying to get the email address so no one wants to send more traffic to

5:13this so of course it's not gonna work and you know whenever we launched one of these we would send we'd send it out to our email list we'd get like a thousand new leads a pop and then again 30 days later nothing maybe ten leads I certainly don't care about ten extra leads what I'm doing 40k a month so here's the rule of thumb if you're going after traffic you're playing a volume game if you're going after conversions you're playing a quality game don't mix these up and we're gonna break down each of these these are the two engines and I'm gonna show you how I approach each

5:49so the first one let's talk about traffic engine one and really this is all about ramping volume and ramping volume in the right way so a couple examples first SEO post classic classic volume game right you can get a post to rank for a keyword you can do that consistently you're unlimited number of blog posts will drive theoretically in a limited number of traffic right it's all about how much can you crank out and run successfully another example from last year their ultimate guides I know these things are starting to get around I see a lot of people copying them and it's a variation of the the SEO blog post right

6:32so what we're just going all-in we have a mini site these things are seven nine different pages maybe ten thousand words lots of design time infographics ton of front-end time maybe even tools built into them the whole nine yards and the whole point of this is okay ramp up quality go after a high-volume keyword and if we get the quality you know high enough theoretically Google will finally allow us to rank for the traffic that we're going after I have a confession for you guys this is the ultimate guide to habits this thing has been out for about a year now yeah right about it twelve months it is

7:16currently on page seven of the search results for the keyword habits all right that's not exactly a recipe for success these things take a month to write they take two weeks of design time they take two weeks of front-end time all four page seven on Google that's I don't about you guys but that's one profitable strategy if I ever saw one no that's like a [ __ ] terrible idea so I killed the program shut it down there is not a single ultimate guide in our queue right now not one what went wrong well a lot of things went wrong but what's the one thing that really went wrong I assumed

8:05the team could keep iterating when we were trying alternate guides year and a half ago the first one popped the first one did really well try it another couple or two or three I sort of missed they didn't really you know we get we got a Papa leads when we launched it to our list but after that it didn't really get the rankings we were looking forward and get the traffic the ongoing traffic wasn't helping us build our system we were just getting sucked back into that content mill just with more resources dedicated to it so you know we were scoping out the 2016 plan I was like

8:43well you know these things some of them were working some of them arts I'm going to assume my team can crack that playbook right that they can figure out that playbook we're going to keep iterating on all the SEO tactics the content the structure these things how we launch it and I'm gonna make the assumption that we will get these two click soonerlater I've seen enough evidence to see the potential now let's dial it in and scale it up then I set an annual quota I want one of these things every other month for all of 2016 and that's exactly what we did the problem is they also stopped

9:19iterating my team stopped trying to refine the playbook I really that's on me I didn't give him the right structure I didn't set their goals correctly all that stuff but we scaled too fast we tried to go after volume too early before we had that playbook dialed and we ended up wasting an entire year's worth of effort even I think are our main winner that used to rank I think that ultimate guy doesn't rank it anymore I think our best ultimate guides maybe hit page three so I mean at the end of the day it was a complete waste of time for the entire year luckily

9:52other programs did work last year so when you're thinking about traffic I now separate thing into two very different steps and my team's run through very different programs before they're allowed to run to the next step the first one is to keep iterating on the tactics until you crack it like consistently not just a little bit but every single time dial that in these playbooks are always changing to write the PlayBook that we ran to KISSmetrics was very very different than the playbooks that run that or would that work now I had to throw all that work down and basically start from scratch when you have the PlayBook that work then is when

10:35you put on the gas and truly scale and you want to push these things too absurd volume and this is what we did at KISSmetrics years ago you didn't have to do much in the way of SEO like do the basics and just publish great quality content and that worked really really well that's exactly how the KISSmetrics blog got started people think we you know neil patel is a founder and we have all this crazy SEO like no we didn't do any of that stuff all we did was get great quality blog posts we started that to a week that was going well we scaled to three to four then we did one every

11:08business day then we did seven a week ten a week every time we scaled up the result got better right for a couple reasons one the playbook worked right the playbook was easier back then all we needed was great content posted to the blog going and and - we know we pushed really really hard on the volume we pushed it a lot further than most people would ever even consider going after and it worked for us it worked phenomenally well that's how we got to a million visitors a month at KISSmetrics and we did that for eight years and that's you know their blog drove the entire business so

11:47this works for Facebook this works for YouTube this works for if the SEO and the rankings change in Google whatever channel you're going after whenever you're in a traffic game a volume game you're trying to crack that engine go back dial in the playbook then scale to absurdity so the second big engine you're getting your traffic that's working now you want to go drive conversions and when I'm working on this engine the thing that I'm constantly thinking about or the thing I'm always paranoid about is choke points I need to go find my choke points and I need to drive quality on those choke points and all it

12:26is is a be testing your leech out points to death right just doing it over and over and over non-stop relentlessly for nine to twelve months back-to-back a/b tests around the clock if you do that some nice results can happen here's a couple examples KISSmetrics home page conversion november 2013 our conversion rate from visitor to free trial signup was two point eight five percent by august 2014 eight point seven one it's about nine months we tripled lead flow traffic didn't change we tripled lead flow simply from the home page SAS business your home page is one of your core choke points don't spend a lot of time

13:06refining pushing the quality on that page to the absolute extreme more recent example the I will teach confirmation page so our business runs off our email list we're always driving email subscribers any new email subscriber has to double confirm or they won't get any emails from us right we're trying to protect the health of our list July 2015 shortly after I joined the double confirmation rate was 63% it's only 63 percent of new email subscribers actually double confirmed to get on our list I spent a little time on it with my team and we got it up to 82 right page look radically different again took about a year of non-stop a

13:47bee testing that's a 30% increase across the border cross every channel that we're working with all lead flows on one page that's a choke point that's leverage that is worth the time to push quality on another classic choke point especially if you guys are working on blogs or inbound funnels at all or pop-ups this is pretty much the CTA like nothing is even in the same order of magnitude when it comes to converting traffic from a blog into an email subscriber or a lead or a sign-up of a kind audist 2015 we were doing about 1,800 leads off of this thing August 2016 we're doing 70 100 right there's a

14:26huge bump so my ultimate guides you know that completely biffed on me and failed but we were pushing really hard on conversion rate increases and that engine clicked right and that's how we hit our goals early and stayed strong throughout the entire year so when you're working on your second engine you're going after your choke points it's really just using a/b tests to drive quality right and just doing this over and over and over again you guys want a taste of the kind of the a/b testing program that I typically set up with my teams to search for seven rules of a/b testing or just go to my

15:02blog Lars Lofgren comm good chunk of the programs there the rule of thumb I tell people is if you have a choke point and a set whatever the lead flow is on that asset you can double it so doubling the conversion rates pretty much within nine to twelve months so it's April so it's a little tight but if you guys got going tomorrow went full speed and really like I said back-to-back non-stop a be testing throughout the end of the year you could double your lead flow by December but what about those of us that don't have traffic or don't have the resources or don't have the infrastructure to go

15:43after a/b testing or we're building something from scratch so you don't even have anything to work with yet what do you do well we also have a process for that this is the same process that we use to find our best-performing hook which happens to be a quiz called what's your earning potential this thing just demolishes my other CTAs every time we run it it just wins that's if you guys have done a lot of conversion optimization you know how rare that is this thing just wins and wins and wins and wins it's fantastic but that was not an accident there was a whole process behind this to actually produce this

16:22hook this headline it didn't just come out of thin air from a moment of brilliant insight the reason you can't just come up with amazing hook or amazing headline for one of your chokepoints homepage a pop-up whatever it happens to be is that your first headline is almost always a terrible headline and this is even true for world-class copywriters I work with many of them and their first around a copy is generally not that great takes a couple rounds and then on top of that most of us are terrible copywriters certainly marketers most marketers are awful people tech are generally pretty bad most most people have not spent the time

16:58to get really good a copy so just acknowledge that I acknowledge it you know I'm a verage at best most of the folks on my team aren't any good at this stuff so it's ok use the process to find the gold and here is that process step one is you're gonna take about five people five to seven people on your team get them into a meeting get them onto a call have them all do a seven minute silent brainstorm write set the the clock watch they can write notes wherever they want to write notes their goal is volume just sheer volume on headlines coming up as many as they

17:33possibly can you can do designers you can pull engineers into this call I've had amazing headlines come from all sorts of different backgrounds and skill sets so you don't need to do it with just copywriters the key to making this work is to give them one main constraint you can't just walk into a meeting and say brainstorm headlines it's too too open-ended the blank page is too terrifying people need something to kind of hinge that creativity on so give them a constraint you know core benefit you want to push a core target markets a type of customer you want to go after or whatever it may

18:06be and give them one constraints then the ideas start flowing now have them take all of their ideas dump them into a Google Doc the same Google Doc that you're all looking at you're gonna give each of them three votes they can go through the entire list and they are going to +1 the three headlines they like the best it can be their own it can be someone else's they have total freedom and what you'll find is that a couple of those headlines that you guys just spend a bunch of time brainstorming are gonna stand out they're gonna get far more upvotes than everything else but what you're doing is just a quick

18:43screen right you spent a bunch of time you had a bunch of volume now you just want to pick out a couple of the potential winners all right so you know where to spend more time on where to keep investing in that list of ideas take three to four kind of winning themes winning concepts I got the most up votes now we're gonna invest the time we are gonna take the the person has the best copywriting skills on your team whoever that may be and turn those three to four concepts those initial ideas into 10 to 15 really solid headlines spend some time in this if it takes you 20 minutes

19:22you didn't spend enough time on it take a couple days and if you're if you don't have any copywriting background or whoever's doing this is completely unfamiliar with copywriting that's fine just give them the book called great leads it's a great crash course on headlines and hooks and how to draw people in this is your starting point so 10 to 15 really solid headlines that's the goal now you're gonna take those headlines dump them into Facebook you're gonna get a budget of 500 to a thousand dollars and you can use the same same target group and Facebook you just send these folks these ads should go straight to your home page

20:02okay we're not building funnels we're not building land pages we're not even fulfilling the promise we're not going to keep this this campaign running for very long all we're doing is buying click-through data that's it so the photos the saying the description is the same everything's identical except for the headline so you can see which ones get the strongest click-through rates and what you'll find is that a couple of them will stand out and in this example the wing for this round of testing that we did our winner happened to be make 1000 dollars in the time you'd spend watching Netflix this weekend so whatever your winner is go build that

20:42right that's your last step we had no idea how to fulfill this promise when we came up with this headline had no idea we didn't even know how long people spent watching Netflix in a weekend we figured it was a lot but we didn't really like do we have three hours we have six million no idea this PDF did not exist right and the landing page didn't exist know that but we knew it was the winner we knew it got the most attention so then we spent the time and we went and built that PDF I said it's not our biggest winner right now because we actually ended up finding a better

21:14hook a better headline that'd be even this but the conversion rates whenever we ran traffic on it were still strong for a landing page that had not been a be tested that hadn't spent any time on it dialing it in this thing was really really strong on day one you don't need any traffic you don't need any infrastructure you can do this even if you're a solo founder right now and on day one you'll be stronger than the vast majority of people are well most people don't do any of this stuff but you'll come out swinging on day one so let's do a recap first make sure you're playing

21:54the right game okay what engine are you really working with if it's volume or yeah volume or quality if it's traffic you're playing a volume game if it's conversion you're playing a quality game do not mix those two up or waste a ton of time when you're going after volume first get the tactics right especially when you're working with teams if it's just you and you know you need to get the playbook right you have a good feel for this you can skip most of this but if you're working with a team and you're trying to coach them through it insist that they iterate on the playbook and are getting

22:26the results day in and day out that you're really expecting before you even talk about scale or quotas or repeating any of this if you're going after quality conversions all right those are not volume games if you're doing something to drive conversions keep refining what you already have you don't need dozens and dozens of PDFs you just need one good one then check a be test if you have the the data the infrastructure the resources take those choke points and just a B test them to death any site of consequence this is like the first thing I do because I know I can just run wins all year long and

23:00get those conversion rights really really strong so that makes everything else easier down the road and lastly if you are working on a new funnel a new homepage you're doing something from scratch or you just don't have the time and resources to actually do that full a be testing program but you still want to get maybe 80% of the way there even if you can't get a hundred percent of the way there go ahead and just brainstorm some headlines get them into Facebook buy yourself some click-through data take the winner slap that up I don't even critique headlines at home pages anymore I just run these tests and we

23:35take the winner and we use that that's it really appreciate it I will definitely hang around for any questions that you all have the slides are on bit dot Lee slash 30k leads you wanted me on email Lars Lars Lofgren comm and I'm on Twitter at Lars Lofgren and I'll be at the party if you guys have questions

24:02Thanks it was very interesting so you mentioned your team a lot I wonder what what is the size of your team for KISSmetrics what's the what are their roles what's the structure of this team and how did you go about hiring them where did you find them how did you wear them Wow okay how much time with the team for IWT probably yeah so I'll start with KISSmetrics really briefly since that was your core so when I ran the growth team there I think I had seven folks underneath me six or something like that a couple folks on the blog I had an engineer and a designer working with me

24:41at one point that was based the basic structure and then currently the structure is a little bit more intense that I will teach so I have four teams underneath me each one with their own manager and then the team size varies from three people up to about eight seven or eight something like that depending on how intense that piece of the funnel is each team goes after a different piece of the funnel so I got a team running our launches I got a team doing automated launches I got a team doing inbound and traffic SEO and then the fourth team would call our optimization team it's actually more of

25:19an actual growth team based on my definition of it which is more of a product based team focused on acquisition so its designers and engineers there's no marketers on that team and they just go after whatever metric is the biggest bottleneck in the business so they don't have kind of an annual quota basically they ask me hey Lars what what are you most worried about what is keeping you up at night they'll most at this moment's what metric is failing behind the most and they go spend a bunch of time on that and then I have some copy editors and QA folks also underneath me so I think it's

25:51about 20 folks right now split between four teams and a couple direct reports basically it's the whole marketing department and then as far as recruitment and vetting I spent there's actually regardless of how good I may or may not be with marketing and acquisition I spent way more time getting good at recruitment because that is actually the biggest bottleneck on any team it's not the skillsets it's not the marketing channel it's not the acquisition it's can you recruit the people you need with a really really high success rate and make sure that the people slowing you down never make it on your team so I got really paranoid about

26:30recruitment how those systems work I have an entire playbook for how I run recruitment on my teams as well as how we manage the teams how we grow the teams well skill set wise how we set goals check-ins performance the whole works I spend much much more of my time doing all that stuff these days as opposed to in the weeds and you know trying to you know Google or whatever yeah I could go on for hours about that that's that's a days and days of workshops and sessions come back to Micro Kampf 2018 and here large talk about that for hours thanks Lars it was

27:08great - quick tactical questions short first the Facebook the testing the headlines news driver to the homepage where okay perfect second the kiss metrics we're talking about the traffic to conversion to trial conversion is that new traffic use that stat your bedroom is that all that was just total traffic okay have you ever tried AdWords to test those headlines instead of Facebook Ads yeah it'll work just as well a lot of people do it we did Facebook because we were running a lot of Facebook ads at the time and I had two guys at new Facebook inside and out so spinning up that campaign was super super easy they

27:49already had everything in place right so it's whatever is easiest for you already running AdWords go through it there if you're already in facebook do it there if you're not in either just pick one how do I know if I need to work on traffic or conversions um yeah I do both that's the simple answer yeah that's an ant question not an or know so I'm always here's the way I look at it if I'm looking at a funnel or a piece of funnel or a business the first thing I'll do is go ask around I'm like okay how serious is this team or how serious has this team been with a

28:30be testing conversion optimization this is a really methodical program and if it's not then I assume I have a year's worth of really straightforward massive wins right in front of me so the the team has not been disciplined with a/b testing I assume I can double bottom line just working on that and I also have a program like I started developing at KISSmetrics refine it and I will teach like that whole program we manage every step of that process is so dialed in then I can just kind of drop it train the team and it just goes and then I can get get out of it and go work on

29:07something else so it's easy for me to implement and I know there's big wins staring me in the face if the team hasn't focused on it yet so I'll probably just jump straight into it because you know it's right up my alley but sooner or later you're gonna hit diminishing returns right like our double confirmation rate I can't get another 30% increase off the board sooner or later I'm gonna hit a wall all right I'm just not gonna be able to get like a I can only get the conversion rate so high same thing with you know blog traffic straight to an email subscriber you can you're only gonna get

29:39the conversion rates so high start getting five 10% like those are already crazy conversion rates you're not gonna get 20 or 30% so you kinda have to make a call of where are you in kind of that that bell curve of conversion rates if you're starting to get on the upper end and you know the winds are gonna come slower and harder and you've already done all that work it's okay spend a lot of time on traffic which is what we're doing right now say you have a solid down funnel conversion pipeline is that at that time is it a good idea to invest in developing a high quality asset that

30:16you then direct to paid traffic to to solve that traffic problem to then play a role when you say the the down funnel is solid what's the channel feeding into it right now what Facebook Ads okay so the channel was built off of Facebook to begin with and it's working and now you want to scale it up that's correct I would go talk to one that knows paid ads better than I do yeah so that's here's what I hear about Facebook and paid there are folks that can make it is this an info product or e-commerce its e-commerce okay so ecommerce generally from what I've seen is a lot easier to make work

30:56on on Facebook I'm not as paranoid about it I would just run every Facebook play but I would just try every tactic and push it to the absolute extreme was that the guy that runs what Frank Kern's program I don't know if he still does like jason horn or something you shoot me an email I can dig up a link to his site he's the guy that we followed my guys you know got learned a lot of their stuff from him so yeah yeah there's people that are much much better at Facebook than I do you got to be careful the the main trap that I've seen and

31:30we've actually hit ourselves is when you have an organic funnel working really well and then you try to slap facebook on top of that or some other paid acquisition engine on top of that you got to keep your tracking and attribution super super clean because just because something works on organic the dynamics on Facebook all the way down the funnel are actually entirely different and sometimes it works a lot of times it doesn't and you can act like confession I've burnt millions and millions of dollars trying to crack facebook and then like walked away from it so be careful with it the main like I said the trap that a lot of people fall

32:05into is if something's working on organic that doesn't necessarily mean it'll work on paid but if it's already working on paid then just do all the standard tactics all the Facebook advice no stone unturned to do all of it you asked him to email you what's your email lars at lars Lofgren comm wondering if you could just touch on communication so you have a fairly decent-sized team just wondering and you talked a lot about your playbooks and you can come in and drop your playbook or and just kind of step back like how is your team communicating the things they're learning how are you yeah another big

32:41giant nasty question so yeah something else I could spend you know hours and hours and days and days on so communication this pro never goes away ever every team complains and whines about communication and sigh and you know this team doesn't know what that team is working on so it like it never goes away entirely the question is is it like a massive fire like are you doing it like is it out of control or you guys generally aligned and it's different at every stage right so the way that I handle communication when I'm the direct manager of a single team of you know three to seven people I look at

33:16communication and I'm running multiple teams each of them has their manager I'm running the departments I gotta interface with kind of an executive team you know my peers running their departments and they have their own managers like our entire team's about 60 people right now all right so it's there's quite a few folks we spend a lot of time just communicating that's essentially my whole job is synthesis coming up with the vision and then talking about it until I'm so bored of it that I just can't stand it when I'm sick of it then I've generally said it enough times and that's when it starts to sink in but you know everyone has a

33:54slightly different cadence some people do like weekly All Hands meetings each of my teams does a weekly kickoff call then they do daily stand-ups Tuesday through Friday although we killed Wednesday we're doing we're testing no meetings Wednesday's right now ship team meets once a week for an hour and a half I do kind of a funnel call with all of my managers on Thursday just to talk numbers what's behind what's ahead what's the next step how are we iterating if you want kind of a if you want a book with a lot of frameworks with like just how I think about it and how kind of that high-level what I try

34:31to build everything up into the book I found most helpful is certain to win it's about the I think it's pronounced coup de loop oo da observe orient decide act so I think of everything in feedback loops and whenever I'm thinking about communication I'm thinking about okay how can I help my teams be aware of where they are in the feedback loop you know the Lean Startup cycle where are they in that loop and when they complete the loop how can I make sure that they're pausing reflecting and then moving forward with the next best option and prioritizing appropriately you basically have to like break each of

35:09those steps down into a system we do a ton of post-mortems everything gets piled into confluence every a/b test gets a document on it every campaign I've every ultimate guide that we did we have this like ten page report on how badly it failed all those things got depressing after a while but yeah there's a lot there's a lot so you moved from some KISSmetrics to IWT does that say anything about your thoughts on software versus information publishing no it doesn't so I I love sass I think the last micro Kampf I gave a whole talk on just the sass business model and look the core levers and how to avoid a

35:54plateau which is very very common in sass freaked everybody out with my churn benchmarks so I love sass you know I was just as a stirrer to talk there of a month ago or two months ago I love that community love what they're doing I actually take a tremendous amount of inspiration from tech consumer tech and sass and all I think there's a tremendous amount to learn and you know I definitely could see myself getting back into sass at some point so I don't I don't think sass or info products are what it's not necessarily one is better than the other they have their strengths and weaknesses info products are a lot

36:32easier to get off the ground they are much much more difficult to scale sass is sort of the flip you know just hitting product market fit on sass is so hard you earn it if you don't get product market fit on an info product it's like ok you convinced a bunch of people to buy it but none of them really finished it anyway so who cares although we care but sass if you don't really have product market fit what do people do they cancel and you feel it really soon but if you get it click if you get the unit economics to work if you get to negative churn if you

37:06get those upsells expanding so your cohorts are actually making you more money over time every time you know you bring another cohort in and then you layer on a world class like sales and marketing engine on top of that like it just scales and scales and scales and you won't stop right but there's a couple core pieces that you have to dial in so it's just a different beast right ones not necessarily better or worse it's just like what flavor do you want and what's more up you're at like everyone in info products is trying to get into sass and everyone's ass is trying to get

37:33info products actually it's really ridiculous I just pick one and go like they're both hard alright go pick one and if you have questions about well which one might be better for your goals come talk to me if you want to build a billion dollar business go do sass if you want a nice lifestyle income if what products are great but they're not going to take you to 100 million in revenue sorry if I missed this you said you're focusing on traffic at IWT what channels are you guys focusing on so what I think about channels is one at a time especially at kind of our stage or you

38:12build out a an actual marketing team even with a couple of folks what does everyone do go create a Pinterest account go create a Facebook account Coco Twitter accounts go start a YouTube channel do a podcast I'm so sick of podcasts the next person that we're gonna is we should do a podcast I'm but um like everyone just starts stacking channels and every channel is so so so hard to make it click both on the result side and then to figure out how to really scale that thing to give you a sense at KISSmetrics I built out what ended up being our second most popular lead gen channel webinars I built that

38:54from scratch so I did the very first webinar I did all of them until number 32 I think and then I also built the entire system all the SOPs to run that whole program and then handed it off to someone else that took me like a year and a half to two years to figure out and I was spending like half of my time on it that was not easy what are people gonna sign up for how many leads can we generate what's the most effective method to generate a lead or a BB lead in this case off of a webinar what are the landing pages need to be how do we

39:27drive traffic to these things what variables matter which ones don't how can we get people to stop asking me for the record I spent two weeks on that cuz I got so angry at it but anyway these channels like it they do not click very easily so spend time and dial in one channel when that playbook is rock solid and you see it and you feel it then go on to the next one and to be honest there's a lot of play books that we have that just aren't working the way that we need to so over the last two years that I've been with I

40:01will teach I've just cut cut cut cut that program isn't working we're not gonna do it right now this program isn't working we're not gonna do it right now that program is it working we're not gonna do it right now so we're just going back to basics and I've told my team multiple times I keep telling them like look like no one should be better at us than high-value content on Google that's all I want and every week my inbound manager director of inbound comes to me with all these random ideas I'm like no no no no stay focused on this and when we crack that and when I

40:31can just do it all day long and I know what Google's looking for right now and I'm giving them exactly what they want then we'll get into Facebook Amazon YouTube whatever maybe but I always just pick one whichever is either working the most right now or has the most you know you're most comfortable with or most excited about just do one and cut out all the other crap so right now you're just focusing on Google search results that's absolute okay how 2005 of you I'm just kidding that's a compliment actually more like yeah if you can get Google search results to work for you you're set

41:11alright maybe one or two more

41:25awesome talk Thanks how did you go about picking that that channel what was the thought process when you listen to your universe of of tactics you could have sir roll with and you went for that one as far as Google that's just what's working right now all right and also what I'm most comfortable with right so it's especially when I'm talking to folks and they're asking me Lars I have the sass app we wanna start working on marketing and what channel should we go after first look they all work usually more work than than we and we think but you want to just pick one that has your

42:00really most like personally most excited about and if you already have some data if you're already established and something's already working to some degree you ask yourself well what's working right now what's working the most the best go do more of that at a certain point I'm gonna have to have an honest conversation with my team or we're gonna and we're gonna say to ourselves there is not a whole lot of traffic to keep going after right there's all these terms we're number one number one number one number one the longtail we've just demolished like we there's no stone unturned there's no more searches to go

42:34after and when we come to that conclusion then we'll start thinking about the next champ well I'll probably start working on it you know before then so I have something spinning up when we come to that point but if there's still room to grow in that channel just keep doubling down over and over and over again don't get distracted with everything else going on like any channel like the like the returns there's outsized returns to the winner right whoever is really owning it and going all in they get 10x the results of second place and you are going to have to go the distance if you really want to

43:10be first place otherwise don't even play and maybe it's just a personality quirk of mine but either I want to win or I don't even want to play to begin with and I just want to stay focused Leila's so just further down the funnel you mentioned that oil teachers is basically driven off to email list mm-hmm so I've had feedback from some my customers that basically young people don't use email you know these these damn Gen Y kids and so I was wondering if that's something you have an opinion on is that something you're seeing and if it is where do you go beyond email yeah I don't know so we don't have any

43:50problems but we have a pretty big audience so if Gen Y is causing issues and it's not working for them that's not necessarily gonna roll up into my numbers and what we're paranoid about right now so maybe there is a segment in there maybe it is on a younger demographic that that isn't resonating with and if that's the case like yeah I'd be going after social hard but that's a different beast it's a different layer of the the funnel writes more awareness there's not nearly as much intent it's a it's a different ballgame so if email dies I don't know what I'll do of a very stressful 12 months me too

44:31yeah thanks again lars thank you [Applause] [Music] you