Mike: Hi funnel builders, Mike here from Sell Your Service. Welcome to another mastermind session. Today I’m going to be talking to Jeff Sauer from Jeffalytics. Jeff is an analytics expert but more importantly he focuses on building analytics into funnels and he’s going to teach you how to sell that as a reoccurring revenue based product to your customers. Very, very exciting. Make sure to stick around for the whole episode. Cause this is really good.
Hey there guys, Mike here. Welcome to another Sell Your Service Mastermind. Today I’m really happy to be joined by Jeff Sauer from Jeffalytics. Jeff, how you doing?
Jeff: Hey, I’m doing well. Thanks for having me.
Mike: No, no thanks for coming onboard. This was a recommendation from Miles Beckler. He said, “Look, if you want to talk about funnels and analytics, you got to talk to this guy Jeff.” For those who don’t know you and Jeffalytics, even though you’ve been pushing your 90 day video challenge pretty hard, tell us a little bit about Jeff Sauer and Jeffalytics and what all that is about.
Jeff: Yeah sure so, I’ll give you the really brief run down. I’m a computer science guy by nature and I decided that I didn’t really want to be a programmer my whole life. So I got into marketing. It was sort of accidental. I’d make a website for somebody and they said, “Well, how do I promote it?” I was like, “I’ll figure it out.” That’s how I learned to PPC. While I was doing Google AdWords campaigns, Google said, “Hey, we have this new product coming out called Google Analytics. Do you want to be a beta tester?” So I started beta testing Google Analytics and here we are. Several years later. A decade later and that’s become really my life’s calling. In between I had a very successful agency. Five time Inc., 5,000 award winner Hall of Fame Inc. magazine, Hall of Fame agency.
I left that role day-to-day back in 2013. I’m still an owner but I don’t have the role there anymore. I decided that I want to just teach full time. So basically my life’s work now is teaching people how to accelerate their ability to do online marketing and also to run a successful business doing online marketing.
Mike: I mean, the actual education side of your business, I think we can talk for days on that because of the way you structured that is, in itself, from transition from agency over to educators is absolutely fascinating. I think what I really want to talk about and what I’ve been consuming a lot of your content about is how Google Analytics is installed on 80% of sites. No one knows how to use it. No one’s really using it to their full potential.
But also if you think about funnels, a lot of our guys are building funnels, it’s kind of a bit of a case, we almost want to side step the reporting and analytics with our customers. ‘Cause we’re like, “Okay, we’re done now. This is yours.” And when they talk about reporting analytics, it’s something we don’t really like to talk about and perhaps it’s an education piece. Does that sound about right?
Jeff: Yeah, absolutely. I think that, I’m gonna be controversial from the beginning. I think that funnel builders are terrible at analytics. They don’t know anything about it. And I think that the funnel software is terrible at analytics and I think that it’s a big blind spot that you have. If that’s what you’re focused on is building funnels for your clients. And you can’t tell what happens between point A which is traffic and point B which is maybe a conversion. Maybe a conversion on a few percentage of people. You can’t tell that middle journey, then you’re doing yourself and ultimately your clients a disservice.
Mike: Yeah, and I think part of the problem is now, traffic comes from so many sources. But also, it’s not just … I think a lot of people think, “Well, traffic just goes to the top of the funnel,” it’s not even that simple anymore now. We’re driving traffic to different parts of the funnel. We spoke to a guy called Dan Shure, he says that SEO they’re finding go to the top of the funnel, to bottom of, after they’re a customer and trying to understand those conversions between a thousand visitors to which landing page. And because it’s so overwhelming, I think people ultimately boil it down to a bit like when we don’t understand a product, we boil it down to price. Eventually just boil it down to the number of visitors they’ve got and they go, “Right, well, we’re happy with that now.” That’s obviously a massive waste of potential there.
Jeff: Yeah, absolutely. When you have a lot of blind spots when you do it that way. You’re making assumptions based on your gut instinct or incomplete data. Whereas, if you actually had just more complete data, then you would be able to make an accurate description based on facts instead of just guessing. Instead of saying, “Oh, it’s a coin flip. Either this was the problem or that was the problem. Either it was because of the price or it was this, but we’re not sure.”
A lot of times, the answer for a funnel builder would be, “Well, let’s just do an AB split test.” Which is totally cool to do an AB split test, but sometimes doing a split test on very little traffic, unless you’re building a funnel for somebody who’s doing 100,000 a month or $1,000,000 in revenue a month, you’re not gonna be able to get conclusive evidence from those funnels you build right away.
And so, analytics is sort of an in between gap from pure AB testing to giving you short term answers that can tell you where to look.
Mike: This kind of segways, very beautifully into our next point. Why is it so important for funnel builders to get a handle on analytics, understand analytics and also, to me, begin that process of translating those analytics to their customers? Why is that such a big deal? Because it seems a lot of the time, I might eventually understand the analytics myself, in the funnel, but then it’s also passing that back over to the customer. Why is this journey so important?
Jeff: Let’s think about it. So, say that, best case scenario, you create a funnel that has a very high conversion rate. You do everything right. You do the copywriting, you have a template that’s been proven to convert based on your funnel platform, you’ve done everything right. You have a good email open rate, you have all these things in place. And yet … That’s best case scenario. You can get maybe a 10, 20% conversion rate from people who go into your funnel and you do all these things.
What happens when the funnel doesn’t work? What happens when you do launch, you spend all this time building something, when you charge your clients a boatload of money because you’re the expert, and you’re entering a new industry or you underestimate the value of that client’s brand name and the quality of their list? What happens when things don’t go the way that you expect them to go? You’re guessing, right?
Mike: Yeah, you’re guessing.
Jeff: And you’re saying, “My best guess is this.” I’ll give you an example. I had a funnel that I did for one of my courses and it did terrible. And if I would have just said, “This didn’t work, let’s go back to the drawing board,” and we spent some time doing it. Green screen videos, I did all the things that they recommend in a funnel and I followed a gurus formula and it didn’t work. Didn’t work at all. And if I wouldn’t have had analytics in place, I would not have known how to improve that. And so, it was about a one percent conversion rate. Somewhere around there.
And then, I did the same list. I did a new funnel where I made adjustments, I even surveyed people which was a form of analytics, asking a quantitative survey like, “What would the price point be?” Asking people what it would take for them to buy from you. I did all that stuff and the conversion rat 10Xed. So 10X as many people bought. And the revenue was higher. All the key metrics were higher. And it was the combination of doing analytics and a survey that helped me do that.
So, let me give you some examples. It was a video funnel and it turns out that people, about 90-95% of people dropped off by the end of the first video. And I was supposed to be doing a four video funnel in order to get somebody there. Well, and also, between video one and video two, a drop off was very significant from email. Because of the email platform, delivery metrics and everything like that. So, basically, I lost about 90-95% of the people who signed up for the funnel by video two. And there’s all this other stuff you needed to accomplish in order to fill the funnel.
Well, your funnel, if you’re using an all in one funnel software, it might tell you these things, but it just tells you that it wasn’t working. It tells you your conversion rate is down or it tells you you have a one percent conversion rate when you projected five percent. You really, like Google Analytics in particular, helps you understand how many videos were played, how far they scrolled on the page, whether or not they downloaded your lead magnets or your additional materials that you have inside of your funnel, whether or not they’re engaging. It helps you track if they clicked through on the email and if your email subscribers are the ones who ended up doing this activity or if it was new people coming in through your organic Facebook reach or if it was paid ads. You wouldn’t know all of that stuff if you didn’t have Google Analytics installed in your funnel.
Mike: I think, as well, part of the problem is people see all the potential. Google Analytics is a funny thing ’cause people get very excited for about five minutes because we could find out all of this stuff and then it’s overwhelming. And they’re like, “I don’t really know where I should be starting, particularly.” Because analytics to me, I think a lot of people confuse data with analytics. And data is the thing and analytics is being able to figure out what’s the relationship between those two or three or four metrics. And how are we going to, ultimately, like you say, improve it without guessin. And that’s what analytics, you so beautifully put, basically removes that blind guessing. But when we have all of these numbers, it can become a little bit overwhelming.
Jeff: Yeah, for sure. Well, and I think that, part of it, it eventually becomes strategy. I fell like if you’re a funnel builder, you spend a lot of time on the strategy of your funnel. But you spend zero time, probably, on the metrics of the measurement of it because, it’s enough of a work, it’s full time job. And what you sold your client on was the fact that you were gonna build a funnel. You didn’t sell them on that you were gonna analyse it.
But look at it this way, if you’re running a business and the focus of the business is one, to make as much money as possible or two, to retain your customers, I would tell you that adding analytics to your mix and adding that component, one is it can make your average deal size with your clients higher. Because you can have a line item on your statement of work that is analytics and reporting and you can probably charge somewhere between 20% to 50% of your original retainer on top of it. And say, “Hey, we’re gonna add this service on top of it.”
And the cool thing is, when you call that out in your statement of work, now they understand that that is not included. Because if you say, “I’m gonna do a funnel for you,” guess what? Every single person in the world thinks that you’re going to be reporting on it or give them some sort of basic reporting, whether you call it out in your statement of work or not.
And so then you can say, “Do you want me to do this? And here’s the line item for it.” You can figure out the profitability of reporting, you can figure out if you want to outsource it. Unless you define it, then how do you know that you’re doing it. And also, it’s the unwritten expectation of your client that you are going to be doing that anyway. ‘Cause that’s what they expect. That’s absolutely what they expect.
So, that’s one thing. You can charge more for it. Two is, it makes you stickier because guess what? If you deliver a funnel to somebody and it has a one percent conversion rate, you’re gone. You’re dead to them unless you have really good account management and salesmanship skills that you can say, “Okay, give me one more try.” But basically, you’re on a tilt and there’s almost no way that you’re gonna be able to survive that unless you just really fully understood what went wrong.
Well, how are you going to fully understand what went wrong, unless you have analytics. And so now, you’re talking about stickiness. Do you want to be somebody who’s always doing one off projects for people and you’re always trying to find new clients? Or do you want to make your existing clients more profitable? ‘Cause in my agency programme, that’s exactly what I teach is that recurring revenue is the key to winning in the agency business. If you’re doing one off projects and you’re trying to get one time projects over and over again, even if they’re 20 grand or 30 grand, you do not have a sustainable business, it’s gonna be really hard to hire employees, you’re gonna be living check to check and it’s not gonna work out very well. And so what you really need to focus on is saying, “How do I keep people longer? How do I stay sticky with my clients so that I’m building a funnel a month for them and I’m learning on what they did?”
I think that analytics is the bridge because now you can say, “Hey, our analytics tell us that if we just make this simple tweak in the funnel, we think we can double conversion rate. And if we can double conversion rate … Do you want to take that journey with me?” Analytics are actually selling your next project. So, if you’re wondering what you’re going to do next and if you’re wondering how you’re gonna get your next income coming in? Analytics sells your next project and you can get paid for it. So it makes everything better.
Mike: I knew Miles wasn’t bullshitting, frankly, when he said, “You’ve got to talk to this guy,” because selling funnels is what we’re all about. And helping people build and sell more funnels for their customers. And I could not agree more with your statement that when you have some kind of insight, it’s actually easier to sell and position your products because you can say, “By the way, this product actually comes with clarity. Like, we can actually help you understand better your business, your customers, your products, your competitors. All of these wide scope of things.”
And we have found, particularly, exactly the same. That where we start, comment on this in a second, where we started with a lot of our customers is actually asking them questions about their analytics first. And because they weren’t able to answer them, instantly that’s a lead in. I’m like, “Cool. Well, we’re going to do an audit. We’re going to take care of that and we’re gonna see where this goes next.”
So, when we start there then, let’s say that I’m pretty comfortable building funnels. I am an agency or one or two people saying, “This has kind of whetted my appetite. I like the sound of this.” Where do I need to start? What’s the first step I need to do as an agency towards my customer?
Jeff: I think that if you’re doing a very similar funnel across your customers and you have a set of components that are pretty much your standard. Say that you’re on Click Fnnels or your use Leap Pages or if you build it on Word Press with Thrive Leads, which is what I do for my own funnels. Because, first of all, if you don’t standardise platforms, it gets to be difficult to have any kind of profitability because you’re reinventing the well each time.
And so assuming that you have realised the need to standardise and the platforms that you offer and you have a pretty similar offering. It’s really just the content that you put together and the arrangement and the copy that ends up changing. Then you basically, what I would recommend is you get a Google Tag Manager container that you have that has the common functions of video tracking, scroll tracking, form tracking. You might even subscribe to an agency account for Crazy Egg or Hot Jar, which are on page analytics tools. You might just make that your stack for analytics. Google Tag Manager’s free, Google Analytics is free, Hot Jar and Crazy are gonna cost you a hundred bucks a month and you can use that, maybe, across multiple domain names and do it.
Okay, now you have this stack that’s a hundred, thousand dollars a year, and you just instal it and you do it on every single person’s thing through Google Tag Manager, which Hot Jar and Crazy Egg are supported in Tag Manager. And now you have your standard list of tags that you put on everything that you track. You automatically have form tracking, video tracking, all the stuff that happens within a page that usually gets taken for granted or it’s guess work. Even the buttons. Even clicking on your buttons, you can make Google Tag Manager always recognise your button class and just do that.
And so you can put all these things in place and then, suddenly, you have installed, at a very efficient rate, on top of your funnel, a world class tracking mechanism that can get you the answers that are happening in between. Now, you might not have to use these things all the time. Maybe you just collect it. But you’re collecting it consistently because you are doing business consistently. And now you are, instead of, like I said, reinventing the wheel, now you’re coming up with these insights and you’re spending maybe 75% of your time on analysis and 25% of your time on the technical pieces of analytics.
Mike: Interesting. I absolutely love that the first step is to standardise your stack. Again, having all these components all over the place and using different platforms, that itself just makes it harder to read the data because you kind of get used to the way that different packages present stuff. But then, you’re actually saying that the majority of the stuff, Tag Manager, obviously, is free, Analytics is free, Hot Jar or whatever, there’s a bunch of different ones we use. Personally, we use [inaudible 00:16:30]. We’re just testing that out. But they’re pretty inexpensive, particularly if you then make sure that you’re customers are on a recurring revenue basis with yourself, because they should be paying for that ultimately, right?
Jeff: Exactly. And you can mark it up, you can charge them for it because, ultimately, they see that as a value add. And they’re not gonna want to buy it themselves. I don’t know about you, but I’ve had clients … I’ve been in the agency business for a long time. And I have clients who can’t get budget to spend $100 on a tool.
But they can spend a crap load of money on labour. They can spend a lot of money on other stuff, but they can’t even get a tool on their site. And then, even getting somebody to put it out there and the governance of getting code on a website is almost impossible. And so you have Tag Manager, which, yes, it might take a little bit of time to get it onto the site. Or even if you’re using third, if you’re using a subdomain through a funnel platform, then now you have that in place. And that’s where the standardisation can really save you.
Mike: So, let’s just go back to Tag Manager for a second then. For those who aren’t aware of Tag Manager as its own platform, where does that sit in with Google … I mean, obviously, you’ve got your own YouTube channel and stuff where you talk a lot about this, and the podcast as well, which we’ll link below. Just briefly, where does Tag Manager sit in relation to analytics and what is it that I’m actually tagging? What is the manager?
Jeff: Yeah, so I have one of those guy walks into a bar stories where I was in a bar at the Google Analytics Summit about five years ago. And I bought a drink for the guy who invented Google Tag Manager.
Mike: Pretty cool.
Jeff: His name is Brian Kune and he’s a great guy. If you tweet him, he’ll answer any question you have. He’s awesome. And I was like, “Why did you create Google Tag Manager? Did Google say, ‘Hey, we need you to create a tab management solution?’ Or why does this thing exist?” And he said, “Even though Google Analytics is on 85% of websites,” 80 whatever the number is. It’s hard to get a concrete number but it’s in the 80 plus percentage of websites. He said that, “even though we’re on all these websites, it’s still hard for people to implement any kind of tracking that’s not the standard code.” And he said, “So we tried to make it so that, basically, you could do Google Analytics codeless.” He’s like, “I want to create a codeless version of Google Analytics,” and he did it. And he’s like, “This is so cool that the rest of team said, ‘We should just turn this into a product.'”
So, it was a skunk works project to make Google Analytics codeless in Google Tag Manager. And it’s really taken on a life of its own and has a tremendous community. And it’s become a product that’s formidable. It’s like a real thing that they actually … They have a premium version where you have to pay money for [inaudible 00:19:10] to basically the way that most people get tracking on their websites. And so the relationship is really that it was a better version of Google Analytics. An easier version. But then it turned into its own product after that.
Mike: Yeah, and I know that the way that we use it, we’ve personally found Google Tag Manager an easier way for us to start thinking about goals, conversion rates between pages. And also, it’s kind of forced us to start thinking about what we want to measure on a page as well. Which was also, previously, was very, sort of blanketed. And now I’m sort of thinking, well, actually, these are the two or three things that really matter on the page, so let’s actually start measuring those instead. Again, that was personally how we started using it. And again, it was interesting because we’d standardised our stack, we’d standardised the market we go after, standardised the delivery, standardised the type of funnel. Even the type of products we were helping people sell. And wouldn’t you know it, we now standardised the analytics and the types of things that we want to start reporting and measuring to people.
Jeff: Yep, absolutely.
Mike: So, okay, we’ve installed Google Tag Manager. We’ve standardised our delivery platform. What’s next for us as an agency then?
Jeff: I think the next thing, once you have a standardised delivery and you are on Tag Manager and you are tracking it, it’s really … It’s basically building it into your plan that this is, when do you consult your analytics? When do you use this? Do you do it the during a launch period? Or a period when you have it going? Do you do it monthly? Do you do it weekly? How often do you look at this thing and how do you make adjustments?
‘Cause, as I said, analytics is ultimately going to form probably the next six months of your funnel building activities. ‘Cause you’re gonna be able to see how things are working and suggest improvements and make changes to it. So I think that … I’m not sure how your audience looks at funnels, but it’s probably a one off project where you deliver a funnel and then it’s sort of over. Or it’s like, we’ll do the next one. This would shift the relationship to being we’re gonna deliver the funnel, but that’s just the beginning. And so then you would inform, based on what you’re seeing, how to make improvements.
So, some examples of what your analytics will tell you is one, that if you’re over reliant on video, maybe you need to shorten the videos or make them shorter or longer. Or if you have long copy, then it can help you understand if people are even making it down to the offer period. Or if you have, you know, 10 buy now buttons in between everything, you can see whether you need 10 or not. Whether they actually get any action or if that’s just a best practise that was rooted in the template that you chose.
And then even stuff like, where’s our drop off points in this funnel? Is it happening at the point, the level that we want it to? Or do we need to use better, more remarketing? Do we need to use more behavioural type things to bring people in? Should we have more email hits driving people there? Do we build in some kind of scarcity? And how does that scarcity impact things?
So you can do a lot of segmentation within Google Analytics. For example, you could segment based on the email headline that drove them there. Whether or not they spent more time on the site or not. Or if you did, like if you teased something, or if you did a short email versus a long email. You can pretty much … Anything you want to test in segments. Ultimately, I think the problem that most people have is the mentality that a conversion rate is fixed thing. Because a conversion rate, they say the average internet conversion rate is two percent. That’s complete BS because even if you do a segment of your own traffic, maybe your Google organic search conversion rate is one percent. And your email conversion rate is seven percent. You just get more organic search traffic. Okay, that averages to two percent, yet neither of your segments actually are at two percent.
And then you decide, okay, well, we’re actually doing pretty well in email, so maybe the goal is to increase our organic search conversion rate as an email collection or something to be higher. And so now you’re looking at your analytics and you’re saying, here’s where we can place the bigger bets. And actually, a lot of the times you can get better results without sending any more traffic at all. It’s really just using segmentation to say here’s how we made the things better for this segment of our population and here’s where we should be focused on.
So, then if you say, okay, our organic search results are that we’re getting tens of thousands of visitors a month and we’re getting .01% email collection rate, then actually maybe your funnel project is to funnel people from organic search into your email list. Because you know that everything else, once they get onto that email list they’re golden. So it’s like, okay, that’s what the analytics is telling us is that our front end’s the problem. Actually, our funnels are fine, we just need more people in the funnels. Here’s the best bet we can place to get more people into the funnel.
Mike: Yeah, you’ve touched on such a vital point there. And this is, again, what analytics allowed us to see is that, for example, our conversion rate from new subscriber to splinter product or trip wire was crazy good. Like, way higher than anyone else at that average two percent. You’re absolutely right, it was way higher than that. And on the other side, though, our conversion rate from trip wire to some kind of core offer, was pretty low. And initially I was like, well, we need more traffic then.
And it was interesting when looking at the analytics I was like, actually we don’t need more traffic. What I need to do is close the loop on this bottom end here. And that’s where the value is. And again, that was maybe 15 minutes spent in our analytics platform, looking over a couple of numbers. I was like, oh man, it drops off. Like, they’re engaged, they’ve already bought, why aren’t they interested? And it was actually because we weren’t making the offer clear to them. We weren’t saying by the way, you can buy this. So it had nothing to do with traffic. But analytics allowed us to solve a sales problem.
Jeff: It’s almost always how it goes, right?
Mike: Yeah.
Jeff: That’s usually what it comes down to. I think that more traffic is rarely … Traffic is an amplification strategy. Optimization is a getting more with what you have strategy, right? So, I think that usually you want to, your own stuff, you want to optimise your yield before your existing place.
I just did a coaching call with my agency course students yesterday and that’s what I said. “Do you want to maximise the yield for the land you have? Or do you want to go and buy more land?” Well, I would say that buying more land, once you’ve figured out how to optimise yield is a much better idea. So, same with getting more traffic. Getting more traffic when you know that your conversion rate is a malleable thing and you’ve increased it to the level you want it to be. That is a much better proposition for yo than it is to go after more traffic.
‘Cause basically, throwing good money after bad funnel, throwing good money at bad is a short term strategy that … It’s a great short term strategy because usually it gives you the dopamine rush that you want. But it’s not a great long term strategy because you become addicted to the paid. You become addicted to something that is a resource and becoming more and more expensive. And that’s the thing is like, yes, you can optimise unpaid media, but paid media … The cheapest that you’re paid media is going to be is probably [inaudible 00:25:59].
Mike: Yes and I think, as well, when traffic is … When you invest in it at the wrong time, it doesn’t scale. Because you end up wanting to pump more money into it. And because it never results in the yields, despite the fact that that’s got something to do with way further down the funnel. It ends up not scaling it and kind of has this exponential law of diminishing returns.
Man, I like that a lot. I particularly like optimising your current yields. I don’t hear a lot of analytics guys say that. You said you’d be controversial and you’ve stuck to your word.
I’m just conscious of time here ’cause you’re a busy guy. The big thing I want to talk about here is this shift over to a recurring revenue product. We’ve got analytics installed, we understand how to read it. I’ve delivered the project to a customer. How can I use analytics clarity insight to begin to say to someone, “Hey, for an extra $200, $300, $1000, $25,000 a month, we can start offering you this.” How do I make that transition? Any advice?
Jeff: I think a lot of this comes down to account management and understanding where you’re … Account management, your business model, and where you want to play with your clients. But essentially, I think that a lot of people have trouble selling analytics just outright. It’s hard to get somebody to buy into the idea of analytics as just like, here’s the thing that you should invest in. Because it’s a cost centre. It’s not a profit centre. Even though it very well should be, if you act of the data you should be able to create a lot of profit for it. But traditionally, it’s created as a cost centre. And so, there’s no quantified expected return on it.
So, how do you shift the conversation? That’s where the account management and the people skills come in. And ultimately, you need to prove out that by looking at your analytics and by doing this, that you’re gonna increase the return on investment of the project that they think is going to return the investment. That would be the funnel.
So, it’s really just framing up the problem to say, “Okay, well, here’s the deal. We think that your funnels gonna produce this much. If we can use analytics and we can increase conversion rates, here’s the impact of a one percent, and when I say one percent, I mean from two percent to three percent increased conversion. It’s this much money.”
And then, a lot of times, it’s framing up the argument in comparison to what they would have to do in order to get that same amount of topline revenue. “Okay so, if we go from two percent to three percent conversion rate, that takes us from 50,000 in revenue to 75,000 in revenue. Okay, well what would it take for you in traffic costs to get from 50 to 75,000 in revenue? Oh, that would cost you $10,000. Well, our cost to do analytics is a retainer of only this much per month. That’s $1000 on top of it per month. So it’s 12,000 and that’s actually something that we’re gonna … You spend 12,000 to make an extra 50,000 or 100,000.” You basically frame it up as saying, “You want to pay that money to Google or do you want to pay that money to us? Do you want to pay that money to Facebook? Or do you want to pay that money to us?”
‘Cause usually it’s a pretty clear distinction and that is spending more money with Google and Facebook, that’s usually not a company’s end all, be all. That’s not really what makes them happy. That’s not what they signed up for. So if you can say, “Hey, do you want it to go to my small business that’s gonna work for you or do you want to just throw it and gamble on a platform, play roulette with Google and Facebook and hope that it works out? I think you’re gonna like the chances of working with us.” And that’s where it can be.
Mike: For all the viewers and listeners when we release this as a podcast, what Jeff’s essentially giving you is the sales pitch there. So, you should absolutely go back, rewrite that out. The mass of it, you are bang on. That is absolutely how these sorts of things should be pitched is by saying, “What does going from two percent to three percent look like for you? Well, actually, we can offer you the clarity of analytics and insight into that.”
So, that’s huge. The ability to transfer to recurring revenue. Everyone watching this should be absolutely making that a priority, in my opinion.
Jeff: Yeah, I mean, it’s the best sales technique you can ever do is to use their own numbers. To use their numbers and their belief in their abilities to set the tone for what you should be doing next. Because that’s really what it is. And most people want a numbers driven argument.
So you had said earlier the difference between data and analytics. Data is just facts. So in this thing where you show them the difference between a two percent and a three percent conversion rate, you’re just telling them facts. That this is the difference. And then the analysis is getting them to analyse whether or not they want to do that or not. So you’re actually making them do the work of analytics but you’re giving them the data in a very easy to understand, in an offer they can’t refuse type argument.
Mike: That’s outstanding, man. I love that a lot. That’s really good. I mean, this has all been … So clear, as well. So pragmatic. Seems so obvious when it’s written down. So, just to quickly recap, the first point when we want to start moving into analytics with our customers and funnels is to standardised our delivery platform, yeah?
Jeff: Yeah, I think that it makes things much easier. And this is just a business decision. It doesn’t impact analytics as much. But just like anything, do you want to have to support five platforms or do you want to standardise on the two or three that you can do well. Or even the one that you want to do.
Now, it does take some of the fun out of doing this work, the discovery and upgrading your technology stack and everything like that. But, is this all about fun or is this about making money? Is this about making money for you and your clients? And so, yes, I think standardising is a very solid business decision that anybody can make.
Mike: Yep, no, I like that a lot. We then start to look at Google Tag Manager, implement that across the site, across the funnel. Again, part with analytics. And then the third point, which is brilliant, is start thinking about when you consult those analytics. So, actually, when are you going to start looking at them with the customer. And also making that a bit of a plan and that allows you to shift over into a recurring revenue model or a retainer model or whatever you want to call it, quite easily. Is that right?
Jeff: Yes, absolutely.
Mike: No, I like that a lot. Number five is brilliant. Focusing on your current segments. So actually focusing on what you’ve got now rather than thinking we can only test our analytics with our new traffic. Start with what you’ve got. Seems obvious.
Jeff: Yeah, starting with your … I’m nodding in agreement. Basically, yes, you should.
Mike: And, yeah, and kind of focusing on those current segments. Optimising your current yields. So focusing, actually, where are the leaks in your funnels at the moment as opposed to, again, just driving more traffic. And then, finally, increasing ROI of your current funnel using their own numbers. That’s a fantastic pitch and method into moving into a recurring revenue model for your own funnel agencies, your customers. Does that sound about right?
Jeff: Yeah, absolutely. That’s the key to all this thing is that analytics shouldn’t be … We’re trying to make it less technical and even Google’s trying to make it less technical, trying to make it less intimidating. We’re trying to make it so that you can use these things to fuel your business and that’s the whole point. The reason why Google Analytics was a free beta back in 2005 that I decided to join, and the real reason why I got into this whole business, was because I was running AdWords traffic and I got charged per click. And then I had a conversion metric. But I knew nothing in between the charge per click and conversion. I knew nothing.
And Google Analytics basically said, “Okay, well, if you send somebody to your website, you need to be able to track everything that they do on the website.” And it filled in the gap. So Google Analytics became free because they said that you’ll spend more money in AdWords if you have analytics. And that rings true. Google AdWords in 2017 are just Google’s advertising platforms, $110 billion in revenue. It scales really well. So there gonna continue to give these things away for free as long as people spend more on advertising because they realise that it’s working for them .
Mike: This is so on point, as well. And the thing is, it is becoming easier and easier all the time. Kind of speaking of which, again, nicely going into it, you’ve actually got a course coming out on Tag Manager, is that right?
Jeff: Yeah, absolutely. So, like I said, my life’s passion now is to teach people how to do all these things at my agency and how to run a better business. And so I have a Google Tag Manager course coming out at the end of June. It was something that I just recorded live in Minneapolis, which is my hometown. Where I am right now. I recorded the class. I did a live course. So I did a live one day workshop on Tag Manager and we started with no knowledge at all. And we built out complete tag system for my own website. For Jeffalytics. And we tested it in real time and in the course, I’m gonna teach you, you can watch how we built it out. And you can get all the tools that I use in my toolbox in order to get GTM in place.
Then we’re going to have standardised containers and feedback from the community where we can, basically, if you say, “Hey, Jeff, how to we build a Google Tag Manager container for this,” then we can talk about it and we’re gonna have some live calls as well to work through the different things we’re gonna build out. And, yeah, that’s coming out at the end of June. And I’d love to have you in that.
Then I also have my analytics TPC and agency programmes, as well. They’re really just focused on anybody who wants to get a deeper, complete understanding of these things. And that’s my big MO with teaching is that I don’t do the snackable, 15 minute, learn something in 15 minutes a day. Everything that I do is like 10 or more hours. And if you want to do this thing, if you want to learn it from the inside out, then take my course. If you just want to get the surface level, fly by analytics then there’s a lot of other courses that are out there that might be a better fit.
Mike: Yeah. And that’s at jeffalytics.com?
Jeff: Yes jeffalytics.com is where you can find all of our offerings.
Mike: What’s the best way to reach out to you?
Jeff: You can tweet me @jeffalytics or if you send an email to jeff@jeffalytics.com, happy to answer any questions you have or clarify things or just get to know you. I always love funnel builders and I realise how important the funnel movement is to everything and so it’s always good to talk shop.
Mike: Yeah, man.
Jeff: Let me know if you want to reach out on anything.
Mike: Awesome. Well, we’re gonna, yeah, we’ll put all your links below. Anyone watching, you might be a bit overwhelmed with just how much content Jeff’s got ’cause it’s everything and everywhere. So, I mean I was like, I didn’t even get back to Jeff for so long ’cause I was so busy consuming all his content. Jeff, it’s been an absolute pleasure talking to you. Any idea who I should have a conversation with next?
Jeff: I have a funnel builder who’s in my agency programme who does a lot of email marketing and funnel stuff. His name is Carlos , I think he might be a good fit to talk to. And I’ll see if there’s some other ones that I can think of as well that might be a good fit to add to the conversation.
Mike: Yeah, sounds good, man. That’s great. Well, in that case, Carlos, I’ll look forward to getting an email from Jeff from you. So, I’ll see if we can reach out. Jeff, thank you so much for coming on. It’s been absolute pleasure. I’ll let you get on with the rest of your day.
Jeff: This has been a pleasure. I love boiling it down to some actionable things that everybody can use to get going. And hopefully this helps both with the business part of building funnels as well as the analytics piece. Because they’re really intertwined and they don’t have to be separate. Really, it’s when they work together that you have a more profitable and better business that you feel better about running. You know, when you can tell people the answers and you know where to look to find them.
Mike: Yep, no, man, I totally agree. Jeff, thanks very much. I’ll speak to you later.
Jeff: All right, sounds good. Thank you.
Mike: Bye, man.
Wow, what did you think? I was just really blown away by Jeff’s approach to sales in terms of yeah, well, if you can position the right numbers to them, use their own numbers and offer analytics as clarity towards increasing their revenue and return on investment. Absolutely fantastic insight there on how to position that with customers. Yeah, thanks very much for watching. In the meantime, guys, I will see you later. Let me know how that went in the comments below. If you want to sign up, I’ll put all of Jeff’s details in the comments. And yeah, speak to you later. Keep building those funnels.
