Brian Johnson - Strength Mastery & Strategic Profits
By: Tammy Votz
Having attended Harvard Business School, Brian is a highly motivated diversified leader with extensive business experience in small- to medium-sized companies. He has outstanding skills in operations, management, marketing, sales, team leadership and technology.
Before taking the helm as CEO of Strategic Profits, Brian was a corporate turnaround expert - the "go-to guy" major banks would bring in when one of their big clients was in jeopardy of defaulting on their multimillion-dollar loans. Today, he strives to improve the lives of the 85% of people who are either employed by or dependent on a small business' success.
RIC THOMPSON: To jump right into this, what would be the number-one thing that most new people trying to start an online business are just not doing that is keeping them small?
BRIAN JOHNSON: We actually get that quite a bit. That's one of the things we're definitely spending a lot more time on with our clients. One of the big things is that they're not getting stuff up and running fast. There are just too many folks out there who are spending too much time on what I call pontificating on the next year's plans and making sure they get the perfect niche and the perfect everything, as opposed to getting stuff up fast.
However, more importantly, along with getting stuff up fast, is to understand where you are right now today while you're putting that stuff up, and being able to measure the metrics on each one of those steps of putting it up fast. That's the big picture, but let me give an example to try to run through something that's important. Some of the clients I'm working with right now are extreme newbies in the business.
I'll say to them, "Let's simply map out, right now today, what your funnel is going to look like from the time you have traffic from a blog or traffic from PPC, you have an affiliate mail for you, you mail to your own list, or you use your Facebook or YouTube, whatever it is you're using, let's look at that point. What are you going to bring them? Get that page up, and let's understand and start to test the conversion of that.
"Let's decide on the one, two or three emails that are going to go after that, which then drive them into a purchase at some point." There are variations of that process, whether you're showing something right there on the front page versus a free report versus a video, and then maybe a bonding sequence of emails to a sale, whatever that's going to be. It can be as intricate as some of our maps.
There could be 40 touch-points that we actually track. Did they opt in for the webinar? Did they not? Did they show up, but didn't stay? If they stayed, what did they do? How long did they stay? There are all kinds of things we can get into more detail on, but when it comes to just getting something up and going fast, to me that's a priority for new businesses.
It could be three emails. It could be a squeeze page to three emails to a sales letter. Whatever it is, let's do it. Let's get it up, and let's make sure that we're measuring every one of those steps so that we understand the habits-what we call 'behavioral modeling' and in some cases 'demographic modeling'-of the clients who are coming into that funnel.
Then we'll look at it in the next week or two weeks. Then we have our baseline to understand where we are and what changes we now need to make. I know I'm going a long way, Ric, about what's important and what people don't do, but to me, that's one of the most important things, because people can't make decisions on where they're going unless they know where they are right now.
I jokingly say, "If you don't know where you're going, you'll likely end up somewhere else." This is the main component of how to get there fast. Don't over-think it. Don't over-analyze it. In the online world, let's just get something up. Let's get it tested. Let's know where we are, and now let's start to work from that point forward, tweak it, build it out, and layer it.
That's it in a nutshell. Ric, if we want to get to more details, let's do that, but that's the big thing for us right now when it comes to actionable-oriented stuff that people can do right now that they're not doing.
RIC THOMPSON: I have to jump in here, Brian, because I have a bunch of things. I think the first thing that comes to my mind is that I'm used to hearing that type of advice from boot-strapping types of entrepreneurs. "Let's just get it done. Get off your butt. Get something in place." Here you are, coming from Harvard Business School. I think most of us would expect to hear, "Let's take time to lay out a business plan." That's off on a tangent, but I have to ask. Is that something you learned in school or did you learn that in real life?
BRIAN JOHNSON: No, that's in real life online. People have to at least understand who they are as a human being, and understand what their strengths are, understand what their weaknesses are, and have a passion for something. There is a lot of stuff that can come before that. Before people even decide that they want to get into business online or sell something online, I assume that they have somewhat of a passion or an understanding of something they're excited about and want to do.
You talked about the planning and things like that. Some of that is definitely done. The people from our customers' standpoint who really want to take things to the next level, we definitely dive into understanding if they have their vision and values in place. Have they gone through understanding their strengths, what their strengths are, the strengths of their team and the strengths of the outsourcers they're using?
How are they getting those people? How are they are jobbing out? How are they delegating? What checklist are they using, and what processing systems? We definitely get into a lot of that with some higher level people. For somebody who is fresh and brand new online and wants to start to do something online, I tell them, Ric, like you said, "Hopefully you already have some of those basics."
It doesn't have to be written in a 40-page business plan. I hate to see our clients who want to get a product online spend that much time doing that. What I'm talking about is that happy medium. Don't spend six months to a year going through that and doing that. Hopefully, you have a good feeling and are passionate about where you're going. Just get this up right now, so you can start from something and measure to see where you're at and the changes you're going to make.
Also, Ric, for a lot of companies that start, usually a year to two years later, their vision has really changed. Until they get things running and start to feel out the market and start to understand the personas and behaviors of their customers, and if their product is going to convert or is it missing things or not, that will change a lot. Spending too much time in the beginning on all that pontification and not getting something up and done, in most cases, turns into people not doing it at all.
The medium that I'm talking about is getting over that hump of not doing it at all. Let's get it up running and then know where we are. Then we have a baseline to start with. Hopefully, that clarifies it and makes sense.
RIC THOMPSON: Yes, it absolutely does. I was just curious. The other side-benefit here that you're not mentioning is that when people get off their butts and they get real-life data and real-life feedback, that also happens to take the form of sales and of having money coming in and having profit coming in. For someone just getting started, it's pretty darn critical to race with the clock. How much time, effort and energy can I put into this thing before I start getting money back? Here you are saying to focus on doing what it takes to get the money in right now.
BRIAN JOHNSON: Exactly.
RIC THOMPSON: Let's talk about this. You are saying, "Let's get off our butts. Let's get this thing going. Let's start getting real-life data and results." However, you're also saying to take a step back and map out what's going to happen at that point of contact once you've driven that traffic. How fast can you do all that? How much is involved in mapping out that first step?
BRIAN JOHNSON: We can do some pretty intricate things in a week to two weeks. Is it the mapping out part that you're asking about or the implementation part?
RIC THOMPSON: That's a great question. We probably ought to cover both points, if we can.
BRIAN JOHNSON: Okay. Mapping out is relatively simple and easy. I'll walk you through how we do it here at Strategic Profits. Typically, if it's a major project, we'll have the marketing team in here and product development. We're not a huge company, but we have a good amount of people who get involved in it. If it's a small project, it might be just me and one of the marketing guys.
We'll white-board a very simple process. We'll look at and ask, "Where's our traffic coming from? It's coming from 'A' and 'B'. Based on the fact that A and B traffic are people who don't know us, what's the first thing they need to see? Now let's map out that page." We'll say, "Okay. It's going to come to a landing page. Because they don't know us, we need to bond with them to get them to know us. Let's just give them something for free so we can get them into our process and start to bond with them."
We'll say, "We're going to send them to a landing page with a free report." It will be something with a tremendous amount of value that is-and this is important-relevant to the traffic that we are sending to that page. That's why I said 'Traffic A and B'. From there we have our page on the whiteboard. We know what we're going to put on that page. We know what the product is.
Our copywriters will write the copy on that page. From there, we'll say, "These are people who don't know us. What do we want to do with them? Ultimately, we want to sell them into our $400 a month program. That's really difficult to do with somebody who just comes to meet you. Based on that, let's do a series of three to five emails. In those three to five emails there will be no pitching."
We'll totally respect the people who were nice enough to give us their contact information. It will just give them our best information. It will be a total benefit that will help them in their business today. It will drive their business and make a major difference in their business. In that process, we're going to bond with them. We're going to show them who we are.
We're going to give them the history of Rich and our team, where we've come from and what we've done, the people we've helped, the mistakes we've made, and the stories we have. We're bonding. We're getting them to understand we're real people. We know what we're talking about. We give them examples of how we've made differences in our company. We share all that with three to five emails. No pitching.
We'll just give them tremendous benefits. From there we're going to say, "Why don't you now join us on a webinar, and let us talk to you more about what we've just shown you." Or, "Why don't you come to a teleseminar?" Or, "Here's a video. Check us out." Whatever that may be, map it out and put that on the whiteboard. Then we'll drive them through a sales sequence from that standpoint.
To keep this short, we'll whiteboard a process like that. We'll get that down and understand who the person is and who the traffic is. Then I'll take that and simply put it into a nice flowchart. There have been times in the past, Ric, when we've actually built the products right from leaving it all on the whiteboard, and then we built it in a week. We make tweaks on the whiteboard.
Now we take it to a sheet like a flowchart; we use SmartDraw. From there I'll make a very simple list, based on the flowchart, of all the things that we have to do, one through 40, to complete that chart and make it work appropriately. It could be: "Make the opt-in page. Write email-one. Write email-two. Write email-three. Create a web form for the product. Write copy." Whatever it is; there are a number of things.
That's it. I can have all that done in a day or two. Then it's a matter of taking it to the next point, which is why I created more of the one-two-three list. I will take that list and say, "Who's going to do each one of these? Who has the strength in it? Do I have outsourcers? Do I send it to a vendor? Do I do it all myself? If I do, then I need to prioritize. Which ones need to be done first? What am I the best at?"
I'll use that as my project management sheet to complete the project. That, in a nutshell, is how we do it here. There could be better ways people do it. In some cases, that could be overkill, but for us that seems to work pretty well. Hopefully, I gave you a good picture of how we walk through that process.
RIC THOMPSON: I think it's crystal clear. Actually, we use a very similar model internally here when creating lists, breaking things down and mapping things out. There are a couple quick things to clarify from the beginning. You create a system based upon your certain sources of traffic and your mapping of the traffic. You say you only do a three-step email process, or maybe a five-step email process to warm them up.
However, there is no pitching. Your first actual opportunity to see if you can close the sale, you mentioned, is teleseminars or webinars. Is that typical for you? Is that the first, real-life sales interaction they're having with you?
BRIAN JOHNSON: Right now we are doing that. There are reasons that we're doing that. I can explain, but I think a better explanation for everyone listening is that you really have to test it for your industry and for your market. It can be totally different in different markets. As an example, we tested something last week that we saw in the auto-selling market and the real estate market.
It was a special web form, an opt-in form, in which the client or prospect's information is woven into the copy of the web form. It works really well in real estate and really well in auto. It was absolutely the worst-converting form we ever did in the history of our company. This goes to show that every market is different. Every company is different. Even who you are as people is different. You have to test it yourself.
It's one of the underlying important elements of everything we're talking about as to what people aren't doing right now and need to do when they start. We're talking about this process and how important these things are. To answer your question, we're doing webinars and teleseminars right now because it seems to be working well for our industry and because we've been testing it.
The second component is simply because we've been in the process for the past 12-months of focusing on a total automation of our selling process. Too many people think you simply buy traffic, send it to a sales page, hope it converts, and that's it. To us, it's a lot more than that. There's the process of them getting something for free and the bonding process we talked about.
Then when they buy a product it's the sequence after that is assuring them that they made the right decision. We enhance the product by giving them more things to help them with the product they just bought. We have retention strategies. Then we sell them into an ascension program where they start to buy more expensive products. To us, there are a lot of things that go on. We wanted to automate that whole process.
Doing the webinars and pre-recorded teleseminars allow us to automate that process. When somebody clicks on one of our pages anywhere, they start to go through the whole process we've been talking about all day. It looks like it's a totally fresh process to that new prospect. That's one of the reasons why we are using those. It seems to be working well.
It's a better conversion rate for us with the pricing points that we have because a lot of our products are more expensive products: from $400 a month to $2,000, $5,000 and $25,000 products. To answer your question, it's very difficult to sell somebody a $5,000 product on a web form or a sales page when it's the first time they've come to you. They don't know who you are. You drove them from some traffic.
A J-V might be a little bit easier because J-V will set it up, or an affiliate. However, if they clicked on a PPC ad or a banner ad and came to your page, it's very difficult to sell a $5,000 product without them knowing who you are. They've heard your voice. They've seen your face. That's one of the reasons that we use those tools and prospects, in particular. They seem to convert much better than a simple web page. We do web pages, as well, but most of those are for smaller-priced products, like a $50 or $200 product.
RIC THOMPSON: It's for lower-priced and more lead-generating-type products. I got it.
BRIAN JOHNSON: Exactly.
RIC THOMPSON: I think the biggest theme everybody should be picking up at this point is that you have gone through an evolutionary process. When you first started you threw something out there and you've learned over time the different retention strategies that maximize people going from a free information seeker to a buyer. All of this wouldn't be possible if you weren't tracking and testing.
BRIAN JOHNSON: Definitely. In the beginning a lot of people don't track and test. They may get some results but they don't know what worked.
Want even more tips and tricks? This article was just a small portion of an hour-long interview. And this interview was just ONE of 24 top interviews conducted by Ric Thompson for Internet Marketing TNT. If you'd like to get your hands on ALL 24 interviews, simply click here and check out Internet Marketing - Very Important Profit Systems.
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