How to Leverage Text and Video Messaging for Deeper Member Engagement: Strategies from Fix Your Funnel Memberium

[00:00] Micah: Hey everybody, it's Micah Mitchell with another episode of the Membership Site Success Show. And today we have Trent Chapman, who's a longtime friend of mine, very smart guy. He runs Fix Your Funnel and Yeti Test. Trent, welcome to the show. Thank you. Yeah, man, I'm excited to have you here. I know, you know, we've known each other a long time and have been running around in some of the same circles, but for people who don't know you and don't know your companies, do you want to give us a brief overview of kind of what you do, how you got started? A little bit about you.

[00:31] Trent: Yeah, and actually we got into software and text messaging. It's kind of a side thing. It was an accident. It wasn't on purpose. As a lot of businesses seem to be like a solution you come up with and it ends up being a good thing. My brother and I started using Infusionsoft, which is now Keep, in 2007 for our real estate training business. We did seminars all over the United States. We do like four a week and had a lot of real estate agents come to our trainings by our coaching programs. So one of the things we try to do is improve attendance, show up great, also to our coaching calls and our membership, get them to show up to those events and online meetings. And one of the things we found was that texting was a great way to do that. Now, we were pretty early on business texting just around 2011. And a lot of our, a lot of our friends in the Infusionsoft Keep world were asking us, how are you guys doing all this stuff with your, your information marketing business, your coaching business? And we said, oh, we built an API connection through Keep at the time, Infusionsoft, and made it to where it works with what we want to do with texting. So we can automate a lot of things that before we had to do manually. And so that kind of like created this people like asking us, Hey, can we do texting with our business using your service? Like, I guess we can turn it, turn it into a product. So that was the foundation of the birth of Fixer Funnel. Horrible at naming companies.

[01:51] Micah: My brother and I just threw out a name like, you know, Fix Your Marketing Sales Funnel, I guess.

[01:55] Trent: I don't know. So it kind of like became a thing that once it got out there and people started using it, we can't really change the name too much. And so we just left it. My brother though, he was really the brains behind a lot of that. He is a very smart marketer, very techie person. He was our, our lead developer and helped lead the guys as far as the direction of the products. Unfortunately, he had cancers, diagnosed with cancer in 2020 and passed away in 2021.

[02:20] Micah: But a lot of the same foundational things that we use to grow that business, we applied to our other business, Yeti Text.

[02:27] Trent: And so, yeah, that's kind of our background. Just more of a texting solution. When you figure it out, what works for communicating with people in a way they feel like it's not an automation or a robot or something talking to them. And then when they respond, being able to take over the conversation as a human and having that human-to-human connection. And I'll just, I'll just kind of round that out with our core philosophy with my brother and I, when we started the company with how do we leverage the power of automation? Without losing human connection or human touch. Because that's really a big part of what we do is how do we increase opportunities for sales, marketing conversion through automation, but seeing personal and human. So yeah, those are two powerful things that we want to match or marry together. And that was the foundation of Fix Your Funnel.

[03:11] Micah: Yeah, dude, Ryan Chapman, rest in peace.

[03:14] Trent: I'll, you know, miss that guy.

[03:16] Micah: He's genius. Nice. What you guys do with text messaging, like you're saying, you were one of the earliest and it's interesting because you're behind a lot of these influencers, right?

[03:25] Trent: They're using Keep, they're using you guys. And I know you, I guess I don't know that much about your real estate business.

[03:33] Micah: I know you guys did it, but I don't know some of the details. So I want to jump into that. I know you guys are doing it. But it's, this sounds like one of those kind of scratch your own itch situations. You built the tool for yourself, like real use case, right? Kind of a weird question, but what would you consider yourself more of? A software person, marketer, sales, a technologist?

[03:54] Trent: Jack of all trades, master of net. No, I don't know. And I, my background is kind of interesting in that I didn't go to high school. I didn't go to college. I was homeschooled. I went to public school until sixth grade, last like formal education in sixth grade. But I've been a student for life as far as like, I love to study and learn about entrepreneurship, investing, marketing lately, interested in crypto AI, of course. Like, so I like to always be at the forefront of whatever's changing. I like to understand it and try to be in it in some degree. But I would say my, I'm more of a business strategist. I can see strategy in any opportunity in any business and help people identify, okay, here's what we can do to really leverage this. And so I did actually do this in other side businesses, help their friends start a business, selling windshield repair done for you. Like how to set up your own business doing windshield repair and insurance comes to pay for rock chips to be repaired on windshields. And it's a small little business, but that one, we grew it to like seven, eight hundred thousand in first year and he was just running it. I did the marketing, helped them with the ads, helped them with the process and flow of automation. What content do they get sent when? So I get involved in everything, sales, marketing, automation. But strategies where I feel like I'm strongest is that I can see an opportunity. And if I have the right team, I can help guide and direct them. And so I've done that in that business. I also have a roofing company that this year will break eight figures in revenue. We started that in May of 21, kind of toward the end of the pandemic. We're like, okay, let's do something that's maybe more resilient. And it's insurance based roofing. So that if the market is impacted, insurance based stuff usually stays pretty consistent. So wind and storm damage is most of what we do. Um, but yeah, so all these things, I feel like I'm more of a strategy. It's like, I've not been on a roof ever. I mean, any of our customers, I intend to keep it that way. And we put on over a thousand roofs now, maybe more than I even. But yeah, my, my whole thing is I want to be more of the strategist in the business. I'm okay at sales and I can do it. I'm not the salesperson. I'm okay at marketing and automation. I can do it. But really it's a strategy is where I like to be.

[06:02] Micah: Well, I think that's why I brought you on the show. Cause you're quiet, right? But you know, you're always thinking and, and I've always gotten along great with you. I think whenever we go places where maybe we're the quieter ones, let's talk about strategy. Let's talk about the strategy of texting for a membership site. Cause like you said, you'd run this, you know, coaching with seminars, selling programs and all of that. I assume you had some sort of portal and we're running subscriptions. Tell me about texting and I'm going to start with a very dumb question on purpose. How is texting different than emailing? Do you just slap your emails into texts and say, go, or what are some of the reasons for texts?

[06:41] Trent: Yeah, that's a great question.

[06:42] Micah: And I see that being a really missed opportunity for a lot of businesses.

[06:47] Trent: So one of the things that my brother, Ryan would always say is you have to think about how do I talk with people, not at people. Cause in email, you're used to just broadcasting messages. You're talking at them. You're not trying to create engagement. You're not trying to get them to respond and have a conversation through email. You're just trying to get them to do something. You're basically trying to push them into buying your product or joining your webinar or whatever. Right? Yeah. So email historically more of a talking at medium, very effective, very powerful. Don't discount email. I'll still have this place, but with texting, it's, it can't be used the same way. You have to focus on how do I talk with a person? How do I create engagement? Because if you sell by text, you've lost the intimate connection that can be through text.

[07:29] Micah: So when I say intimate connection, what I mean by that is the best way to sell is face to face.

[07:33] Trent: The next best way to sell is by, you know, zoom call or phone call, right? Next best way to sell is by an intimate connection through messaging with Facebook messenger text messaging. So there's a level of intimacy that you can look at as far as a scale and where you're face to face. I can feel your, your energy. I can see your reaction to things, even on a call like this, where you lose all that when the written medium. So we have to be careful about, you know, when we're using written medium, we have to try to create engagement, create conversation. And that's why with text messaging is so powerful is we can use it to leverage the opportunity to create more conversations and sometimes drive activity that we want. Right. But we, if we just talk about how do I get people to do what I want and we lose the, the human side of it, then we usually get worse results. So, and that a lot of what we teach is more focused on higher value customers. Right. So if I'm trying to sell a $25 product one time, texting in this way is probably not going to be your best bet. You might as well just tax, text them and talk at them, broadcast your Black Friday sales, all that stuff. Right. So it has a place. It has, it can be used that way. But I looked at it this way. How does my brother text me? How does my mom text me? Like, right. How do I communicate person to person? Email has been used mostly for marketers. Texting historically started out as communication, human to human, person to person, friend or family. Now I've got businesses coming into texting. What we want to do is avoid looking like any other business. I want to build trust, build confidence that they can talk to me, make my messages that are automated, seem personal. So they'll respond because I want to try to create a conversation. It's one of the most powerful things about messaging and text messaging in particular. If we are losing, using a local 10 digit number, I'm communicating with them as a friend would communicate with them. Hey, Micah, I sent you that PDF. I just wanted to see if you got that. People said that that's been going to their spam or whatever. Also, is there anyone else on your team that's just on that PDF too? Just shoot me back their email. I'll send it to them as well. So if I'm going to lead generation from Facebook or something, they're opting in. I'm asking them, would you like to receive this PDF immediately by text? They say yes. And I've gotten permission to text them, TCPA compliant. Now, when that comes through, I don't want to just text them and spam them. I want to create conversation. I want to try to engage with them. And so yeah, the powerful thing with, with texting versus email is it can be used as a way to open the door to a conversation. So if you're in high ticket sales, let's say I'm selling a membership that's, you know, 10,000 a year includes mastermind or whatever. I don't want to just rely on email only. And I want to just talk at them through text. I want to get into the conversation so I can find out what is their key or problem that can overcome. And then how can I present it to them in a way that will solve the problem for them in their mind, where they trust me when I come join my group. So that it's really powerful when you use it in the right way and you think about who am I talking to and how can I get them to engage and respond? Then if needed, I could take this text conversation to a phone conversation. So that's, that's our fundamental belief in, around how, how messaging should be used and why text messaging is different from email.

[10:35] Micah: Brilliant. Let's, let's extend that a little bit into the phone conversations. Cause you're kind of saying, Hey, text is like a little more intimate, a little more conversational, but it's designed to try to probably get them to the phone. What happens when they get on the phone? And I'm asking you, cause I feel like, you know, infinitely more than I do and probably more than most people listening. So let's say you are trying to sell a mastermind or whatever, you know, you text them, you're, you're, first of all, what are you trying to set up? Uh, what kind of conversation you're saying? Hey, let's do a consultation. Let's do what do you think?

[11:05] Trent: Yeah. It depends on the person in their business. Like with software, we try to get them on a demo. If I'm selling a membership, I might try to just say, Hey, I just want to kind of figure out where you are. What is it that what's the main problem you're trying to solve in your business right now to see if we're a good fit. So the messaging part is going to be doing a little bit of that, like peaking their interest. Right. So the text messaging will be more questions. And I do it this way. I like to do a video. That's maybe an automated message with the video I pre-recorded of FAQs or SAQs. So frequently asked questions or should ask questions. Should ask questions are most important because most people don't know to ask them, but if they knew to ask that question, they'd buy my product. So I got to come up with frequently asked questions. I get all the time and then should ask questions and create like one to three minute videos. They'll send out a video via text and email. And then maybe a day or two later, I'll send out a text message saying, Hey, did you get a chance to watch that video? If not, here it is again, by the way, after you watch it, let me know what, what one, two or three, which one's your biggest problem you're facing right now. You're burning your business. So, you know, if you talk about the problem that you're trying to solve and you can make it clear that you're intimately aware of what they're feeling and that you can explain the problem better than they can, they're going to trust that you have a solution for that problem. So in our messaging, I want to do videos and questions, videos and questions and tell you them to engage. And once I get them engaged, I want to take that conversation to a phone call. The phone call is going to be a carryover of whatever we're trying to do. So my mastermind is about how to grow your sales through improved marketing or how to grow your sales through door knocking technique, whatever the thing is that I'm teaching or selling. Then I'm going to have to figure out what is it, what kind of format is going to be interesting to them. Is calling it a demo or discovery call or whatever may not be the right name for it. So that you can figure out for your own industry. What is the, what is the name that sounds like it's a value to them? Because what's in it for them to join this call with me? Because it's for me to sell them that they don't see the value in that, right? They don't care about me and my buying, getting them to buy. That's what I want, but what do they want? And so if I can think about, put myself in their shoes, what do they want to get out of this call? Maybe I'm going to say, Hey, we're going to get a call with you to talk about the three things you can implement to overcome your sales challenges right now in your business. So let me know if I can, we can discuss that now, of course, on that call, I'm not just going to teach them three things and then hang up. What I'm going to do is do some finding out.

[13:20] Micah: So most of these high ticket sales situations, if you want to close someone and have a high

[13:26] Trent: success in closing, you first have to be intimately aware of what is causing them to stay up at night. What's causing them to fear, fear of their business or fear of their success in the future. What are those things that they're trying to solve that are the most painful right now for them? Because most people are trying to get out of pain or true pleasure, but out of pain is a bigger motivator. So, cause I could say, Hey, I can get you to a million dollars a year. That sounds awesome. It sounds like it's a very pleasurable place to be.

[13:51] Micah: I can go travel, do whatever I want, but most people don't do anything about that.

[13:54] Trent: But if I'm going to lose my house to foreclosure or my kids, you know, I can't be fed. Those things are very painful. I will be more likely to take action on those. So finding out what is the core motivator, why are they coming to me for my products or service and understanding their situation. And one of the best ways for me to do that is just to ask questions about what I know will reveal those core things. Okay. So you've got this business you're doing a million a year. What would it be like if you got to two and a half million a year? How would that change your situation? I'll be awesome. You know, can I future pace them? So, okay, what do you think is the number one thing holding you back from getting there? Like, what do you, what do you perceive in your gut? Like, what is it in your business? So I just want to get them to talk and open up. And more than I do this, that conversation leads to an opportunity for me to identify, okay, this core problem they have, I know I can solve it with like a hundred percent certainty. So now I'm going to help them to see and paint the picture of like working with us. We're going to do this over the next 12 months. Here's the stages. Here's the benefit. Here's the growth that you're going to see. And here's the results we hope we need to get for you. Now, if we're going to be successful, you have to fully commit and we're going to fully commit. Is this a good fit for you? Like I see, I think it's a good fit for us. And a lot of times I'll do just disqualifying as well, because sometimes you've probably seen this in sales. If you try to disqualify someone, they finally feel like I need to prove myself to join your group. Right? So even being open about like, well, there's only a certain number of people we can take each year. It looks like you just, you make the qualification, you're doing a million a year. Our group is a million to $5 million a year in revenue. And people are trying to get to 10 million in revenue. So we're trying to get you to eight figures. You're barely only cut off. I think we can make you, you know, a good fit for you, but I want to make sure before we move forward and then ask questions that will hopefully make them feel like they got to sell themselves and joining the group. So there's some psychology there as well. It's really hard for me to like, give you the exact answer to how do I handle that call without the exact scenario in business. But those will hopefully give you those, those ideas will hopefully give you some things to build on for when you're creating your sales message and how's that conversation going to go. But it's really about, for me, it's finding out what is it that they want. Do they have the ability to fix it themselves? Do they have the finances to do it? Do they have the team members to do it? If not, like obviously we can do that for them. And then the last thing is how high of a priority is for you? So if they need to get it done, they can't fix themselves. They don't know how they have the money to invest in it, but they just don't know where to invest it and I have certainty that I can do it. That's a perfect alignment. And I can say, okay, I have a solution. You have the need and the desire, but not the ability. Let's get together and make this a positive outcome for you. There's a lot of different sales methodologies out there, but that kind of is a general one that I feel like works for most businesses. When I first talked to them about what are you trying to sell? What are you selling to? It's really understanding the core problems you're solving for your customer. And then that conversation is used in marketing messaging and your automations. And then in the wrong conversations.

[16:43] Micah: Yeah, it's an excellent example. I know I'm given vague questions. I think you're doing a good job of winding it into like a membership context. So if, if I could kind of repeat some of that back to you and verify, it almost sounds like the text messaging is to get to know them. It's not really to get them to know you. It's to get to know them. Cause you're saying you're, you've mentioned one where you give them a multiple choice, say, which one, one, two or three is your thing. And of course you are giving them content and you're probably saying things, but you're trying to gather enough info. And of course, if you get them on the call, great, but get enough info to where when you do get them on the call, you know what to speak to. And then you figure out some other questions about their context to be sure it's a match and then kind of make them an offer more or less.

[17:23] Trent: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And it's a matter of looking at it and in any part of the business, you'll see this as accelerators and there's breaks, right? So in some businesses, I want to have just accelerators all the way through because anyone that comes in can be my prospect or customer. Other businesses, I need to have a lot of breaks in the process or filters so that only the best and people really highly motivated to get through that step. And the reason we would do that is like, for example, and that windshield business opportunity, where you can get into the insurance-based windshield repair, we had a lot of breaks in there because we found that $2 a lead on Facebook, we were getting a lot of leads, but not a lot of high quality leads. And so we had to have a lot of breaks in there to show that they're interested and had high intent before we let them schedule a call. Because we just left the door wide open, I didn't schedule a call. Our conversions were like 120. But when we had all those breaks in there, now I've got to the point where it's like, okay, now we have $200 per conversion. So for every 100 leads that come in, we're getting a sale, but we're not having to talk to 100 people, right? We're having to, we're putting a lot of breaks in the process to filter through those. And the numbers work out because our products are $3,000 product, $200 a sale, plus the sales commission. That's a great, great business. But when we're looking at any type of sales, our sales flow or marketing conversion flow, I'm always thinking about, do I need to add an accelerator or do I need to add more breaks or filters, right? And so that's an important part of what we do here is in the messaging, we're looking for breaks and accelerators based on what we're trying to do. And so if I need them to, to do more, like get more of them to do a certain action before they can book a call, then I got to figure out what is a filter or accelerator I can put in here if I'm not talking to too many people that don't convert. So yeah, it's, it's a, there's, there's a lot more that can go into that, but that's, that's something that most people should get an idea for. Like, am I seeing too many people book? I need to add some breaks or some, some filters here. I don't have enough people booking. Look at my process. Do I have too many filters or too many hurdles for them to jump over? It is causing me to have lower conversion to this next step. So that, that'll apply to anything to do with email marketing, text messaging, you know, whatever.

[19:28] Micah: So let's zoom in on that for a minute, the brakes and accelerators, and let's use, if you're okay with it, the windshield business example, because even though it doesn't sound like it's that related to memberships, it sounds like to me, you're selling them information, a methodology, right? Some of these things, which is wrong. They joined a membership.

[19:45] Trent: They had access to the membership group. They weren't paying monthly for it. It was a one-time investment, but yeah.

[19:51] Micah: So tell me about break, like give me an example of a break and give me an example of an accelerator in that context.

[19:58] Trent: Yeah. So for us, in order for them to book a demo, they had to watch a 45 minute webinar. So they didn't even see the link for the webinar until they got through the end of that. And then if they were on that page for 35 minutes, we'd have another button pop up. And at the end of the webinar video, they couldn't fast forward. They didn't have like a buffer thing. They could fast forward. They get to the end of the video. There's a call to action for them to text a keyword to get the booking link. So either they're on the page long enough to see the video, pop open the button below, or they got to the end and they texted in the keyword. So those are, those are breaks. And that just because you, you opted in, we, we did this before a different way. We had the first like 5,000 leads you generated for that business. We had six salespeople that were just piling the phones and just calling the leads. We'd email them, but we weren't getting too much texting. We didn't have a text opt-in. We were kind of uncomfortable with doing that without first having a text opt-in. And then we shipped our text opt-in and then we improved our text opt-in. But the first group, it was six salespeople. Later we got to where we just had one salesperson closing more than the six combined because we had the brakes and accelerators figured out. Try to need six salespeople. I just needed one guy to do all the demos. He didn't have to do any outbound calls because the, there's so much volume of leads that were coming in. The brakes were doing enough job, good enough job of getting rid of people who are just tire kickers or didn't have money that the, we didn't need to add in the accelerators until after they had a demo. So what is an example of an accelerator?

[21:20] Micah: Yeah.

[21:20] Trent: So an accelerator would be like something that we do that we're outreach. We're doing a personal outreach. We're trying to get them to recommit or re-engage. And these are things that are making it easy for them to flow through the next days. So if I'm in a situation where I don't need to filter out, I've got way too many people just dropping off. What I might do is say, okay, as soon as the lead comes in, I'm pushing them. The first thing I'm doing is push them to a booking page. Right? And so I'm making it super easy for them to get in and book a call with me because I know that I have a very high percentage of people that are coming through this lead source will convert. So I don't want to make any friction at all in that process. So I might skip some steps and I'll do the education with them or once I get them on the phone call, you know, filter them out, qualify them. And if they're qualified, then I might add in some breaks at that point where I'm saying, Hey, you have to watch this 30 minute video. Then I'm gonna do a second phone call with you and see which option works best for you. And then I can just move on to the next call and move on to the next call. But if I'm seeing there's a very high drop off at some stage, I'm gonna look at how do I reduce friction? How to add some accelerators in gear by getting them to the next stage faster without making them jump through hoops. So it's all about what are you doing to simplify and make it easy if you're not worried about increasing the intent. So all these are really doing is showing an increase or decrease in intent that's required to the next stage. So if I wanted to be high intent leads, I'm gonna put a lot of breaks in the process. So that only the best of us, the most qualified, the most like I need this problem solved are getting through to a final call. Or if I'm like, you know, I'm just starting out. I don't have any friction at all. I want everyone to come through, even if they have super low intent, I want to talk to everybody. Then I'm gonna remove all these extra steps and just make it super easy for them to come in, either buy an easy $1 product, $5 product, or book a call, whatever the case may be. But the accelerators and the breaks are all about thinking about at what stage am I having drop off? Do I need to increase it? Or do I have too many people that aren't qualified coming through? Do I need to increase the friction and make it so only the best come through? That's what we're looking at. I'm looking at every step of a conversion process of the stage. Stage one, they requested a PDF or video. Stage two, they watched the video or consumed the PDF. Stage three, they booked a call. Stage four, they purchased the product. So at which point are we having the most drop off? Do we want to increase the drop off if we have low qualifications? Or do we want to increase the number of people coming through because we're not getting enough opportunities to actually know if these are converting or not? So that's kind of the big picture view of accelerators and breaks is how am I doing at each stage of the process? And what do I want to increase the flow or decrease flow so that I get higher quality, higher intent?

[23:55] Micah: And the breaks and accelerators is such a great mental tool, shortcut, whatever. Good way to think about that. It makes me think. I did too, Ryan Chapman on that one.

[24:05] Trent: Yeah, that's great.

[24:07] Micah: It makes me think that like you're saying with the lead quality coming in, you know, that's when you'd add breaks. I feel like some people are maybe in the position where they're saying, well, I'm not getting enough leads, right? And they might be being too targeted. And so I, if I'm hearing you correctly, you could loosen up your.

[24:24] Trent: Right. Yeah. Yeah. That's like, Hey, broaden your net a little bit. See that maybe that helps out. Sometimes it doesn't. It's all, it's all guessing game. It's testing.

[24:33] Micah: Yeah. That makes a ton of sense. That's really cool. So your, we've been talking about sales and marketing here, and I think that's really valuable and helpful for people to get somebody in the door.

[24:44] Trent: Let's say somebody does join one program or, or whatever the VIP program, like I said, maybe

[24:49] Micah: with a mastermind and stuff. What is the role of texting at that point?

[24:54] Trent: Yeah. And it does depend on like if, if I know that people, if they show up to my program and they're in the call of weekly or monthly, whatever I do, and if they're getting into the group and

[25:03] Micah: engaging inside of the membership, however, that package, right.

[25:07] Trent: If I know the engagement increases retention, then I'm gonna focus on retention through engagement. And I'm gonna increase the engagement by making sure people know what's going on. Unfortunately, with today's distractions in the world, emails get buried. I don't know about you, but I'm gonna guess I've got 17,000 under the emails. Let me see 18,000. Now it's gone up since I last looked between like my five different businesses and all these spam. I'm, you know, I get way too many emails. I've subscribed to just way too many lists. I probably need to do like a detox on that. If you email me something, it's very unlikely I'll see it. That's how I am. I don't know about everyone else in the world, but I know that I can't be the only person like that. However, if you text me, I have very few unread text messages because I'm more, you know, cautious about who I give my number to. I'm not on all these texts and spam lists. If I get on the list, I didn't want to be on and market as spam. I keep it pretty clean. Most people that I know are pretty much like that where emails become a wild, wild west, unless you're like my business partner, Devin, he's like very on top of everything. He's inbox zero every day. I'm never that guy. I don't have time for that. But if you text me, I will see that. And so for a lot of the people that you're working with, especially if you work with business owners, if you work with people that are very busy and not getting their occupation, they're not in their inbox all day long, unless they have to, because of compliance reasons or whatever. But most people, they'll more likely to see a message and a text message than an email. So knowing that if I'm doing an event where like, Hey, if I get people to show up this one call a month, I know I'm going to have a higher retention of customers. And they're going to stay with me renewing the end of the year, or over the six months or three months or month to month, whatever it is. Like I know I keep up higher retention. If I get them to do this one thing, then I'm going to use text messaging in ways that is when to do that. So you might be doing it where you're doing a personalized message. It's like if I've got a small tight knit group of like 20 people and a mastermind, I might send a personalized video text to them every, every month. So I might have my list to like, I have an action inside of keep where it says on the 15th of every month, it triggers a task for me for these 20 people. So I'm going to go to my app or my computer. I see inside of fix your funnel. Oh, I've got 20 text messages sent out to my group today. Here's the context. Hey, you know, Micah, this is Trent. Looking forward to seeing you on the call tomorrow. Where are we going over these three things with our guest speaker, John? He's been sharing this a lot of cool things you're doing. Don't miss this one. Look forward to seeing you there tomorrow. Cool. I just spent about probably 10 minutes to send out 20 text messages with a personal video to Micah, to John, to Paul, whoever. And that has super high impact because I took the time as the person they're paying a lot of money to every month to send out this personalized text message with a video saying their name. They can tell it's not AI. They can tell it's not like some made up thing and talking specifically about maybe their business. Hey, Micah, I know you're trying to get your membership site to eight figures. Here's how we can help you do that. We're having John on tomorrow. He's going to talk about this, this, and this. See you there tomorrow. I take 20 to 30 seconds, personalize that super high impact. Why? Because I, one, it's me as the person that they're paying. Two, I'm actually taking time out of my day, not sending a broadcast message. And then three, video has higher impact than text. So they can see my face, hear my voice and the inflection. So we've been, we added video into what we do with our texting. So where you can do personalized videos, deliver it through text, using your business line,

[28:19] Micah: and then have it pre, like pre-decided upon.

[28:22] Trent: Like my strategy of once a month, I'm having this text message, you know, campaign prepared. It doesn't send until I record the video. Then I can send these one off videos. I do this with new customer onboarding. I do this with like 30 day check-in of the new, new person. And you, you don't understand. Like if I am adding like 10 to 20 people a month to a membership site, it's like a few hundred dollars a month in revenue to get a personalized video from the guy that runs the group, the girl that runs the

[28:49] Micah: group has super high impact because I'm showing interest in them as an individual.

[28:53] Trent: I might've talked to them on the phone when we sold them or whatever. It can be a salesperson. It can be the business owner. It doesn't really matter. As long as someone is, is checking with them 30 days in say, Hey, we're really excited that you're here. I want to check in and make sure you get access to the right tools. You have a success. And this will be a way to reduce churn as well, because a lot of people don't get engaged right away. And then they cancel because they check out. They don't see the benefit. If we can get in front of them again, in a way that's meaningful and makes them feel valued, I can get them to show again, the opportunities to save that sale. I don't know. I could tell you how many times, probably at least a dozen times where in our software, I sent out a text message to somebody about two weeks in, Hey, this is Trent. I'm one of the co-founders of Kitcher Funnel. Just want to check in to see how things are going. Just so you know, you can get support under 60 second response time through a website chat or text. You can call us. We can get on a zoom call with you if you want for help. That's all included. We don't charge extra for that. We want to see you succeed. The more that you use the product to succeed, the more that we're going to keep you as a customer. It's a win-win for us. So we're invested in your success. Send that video out. I got so many people said, you know, I was about to cancel. I didn't know what to do. And then I get your video. I decided to jump back in there. I chat with your support team. They're amazing. They respond under 60 seconds. Like you said they would like all these things that we do. And these personalized video have high impact because it's unusual. It's uncommon. People aren't doing that in this space. Right. And people aren't really being personal because they think it's too much time to invest in sending a 20 second video. It's not. I did a webinar where we had about 140 people register. That was a little bit of much, right? Because I had to send out a personalized video. I had Devin help me with that one. He sent out a chunk of them. I sent about 80. He sent about 60. But we sent out personalized videos to people. And our show up rate was way higher because we took the time to invest in saying their name, you know, talking a little about, hey, I see that you're in the financial services space. My partner, Devin's been in that space for quite a while. We're going to be talking about a few things that will benefit you and look forward to having you in the webinar. If there's one thing you want us to cover, text me back and I'll make sure I'll get those questions covered in the webinar tomorrow. So these are different ways you can have high impact and also create this connection. And the increased connection creates likelihood of retention. The more connection they feel to you or your brand or to your group or to your community, the more likely they're going to stay. So these are ways that you can bring them back in. Now, going back to your original questions, I went on a tangent with my favorite thing, which is how do you incorporate video into text? Because I can't get all of my customers on a face-to-face video chat. I can't get all of them to schedule their time and my time to line it up to do that. Next best thing is a video of me personally talking to them. But the question you ask, how do we use this to increase retention and adoption of people that are joining membership? It's really about thinking, what are the key moments in time where I can send out a message, make it feel personal, but have it be automated where I'm checking in with them. So maybe a week into membership or two weeks into membership, I can send an automated message. And maybe it's me holding up a white piece of paper. You know, I don't get to see this. Like I take a picture of myself holding a white piece of paper. I can merge in a message right here. I say, Hey, Micah, glad you joined our group. Right.

[31:55] Micah: And so I can have that automatically sent out with that merged in first name and then

[32:00] Trent: have a question below that in the text message body below the image saying, Hey, Micah, glad you joined our group. I just want to check in with you to see how things are going. Would you always text me back and let me know if there's anything I can do to improve your experience? Or, you know, did you already get a chance to get into the membership site and check out the video three on day one? That's my most impactful video I've ever seen, like change the way you do this in your business. Right. So that's something that you can think about in my business. Where am I seeing drop off? Where am I seeing churn? And then think about what would be a high impact message I could send a few days or a week before that point so I can engage with the people who are possibly going to be canceling. All these things take a little bit of time and thought, but the impact you have on your customers, when you think about them, you think about their journey, their experience is way higher than if you think about how can I get more money out of them? Because you're going to get more money out of them, the more you serve them, the more impact you have on them. And so that's where I always revert back to what is my customer going through? If I don't know that I need to start talking to them more and asking them. And then if I ask them like, hey, what did you experience the first month, first week? What could I have done better? And be really, you know, authentic with them saying, I want to know how I can improve how I serve you. You'll get actual feedback from your customers. And once you know that now you can create a game plan that really serves them. And then you'll see a lot more benefit of retention, more connection in the community, and more connection with the people.

[33:20] Micah: And once you have that connection, like I've been part of a group for probably five,

[33:24] Trent: six years now, mostly because of the connection I have with the God that runs it. Like he's authentic. He's real. He knows my name. He knows my kids.

[33:30] Micah: Like I'm not leaving.

[33:32] Trent: Like, I feel like I'm part of that community. So if you can do that, you're going to create like raving fans that want to stay there. I want to bring their friends in.

[33:39] Micah: And there's so much there to unpack, but I feel like what you're talking about with the personal videos via text, especially for your higher level members might be one of the best retention things I've ever heard of, especially like if you have a monthly call, like you're saying, just giving them a reach out to be sure they get on the call. And I'm saying this both from, you know, anecdotal, like people who've said similar things to me, but also my own experience and programs over the past few years, you know, missing calls that I would have loved to be on because there wasn't a text, you know, anytime I've gotten. You use automated texts, right?

[34:16] Trent: I'm not saying you can't use that. I'm saying you're gonna have higher impact on that. If you've got a group of 10 to 20 people, it's your small intimate group, be more personal with them. They, they deserve it. They're paying for that. And it doesn't take you much time to do it. But yeah, to your point, any texts would have been better than nothing, right?

[34:32] Micah: Yeah. Yeah. Automated texts where you don't think it's enough to do a personal text, but the personal texting for like you're saying the higher level, and then depending on how busy you are, you can scale it down.

[34:42] Trent: Like, Hey, I'm not that busy.

[34:44] Micah: Maybe I should hit up my normal members this month, you know, do, do thing. Cause like you're saying any deposit almost you can make into them and investment into them and, and their interests, they're gonna stick longer, enjoy the program more.

[34:58] Trent: And I want to talk about that concept in a little bit here. So I'm going to talk about deposits and, and, and, but.

[35:03] Micah: Okay. Last thing I'll say, like I said, a bit of a, almost seems like silver bullet that, that personal texting for the higher end people. And then the fact that you can scale it up and down. You did mention using it in marketing, like on that webinar. I wonder, was that a, a members webinar or were you putting in all that effort just to get people on there? Cause you were going to do sales and you wanted the, the audience for the sales? Yeah.

[35:25] Trent: So that was a mix because it was past customers that were no longer using our service, trying to re-engage them with some new strategies that we've released. It's a video texting, as well as we want to basically eat our own dog food. Right. Like if we're selling you a service, but we're not using it in our own business, it's kind of like, well, that's weird. Like you're telling us to do that, but you don't do it yourself. So a lot of it is like, we want them to see firsthand how it felt to get a message from the guy that's presenting the next day, personalized message. And the way that we do these messages, there's no way it could be using AI or automated. There's, there's AI that won't try to like, you can say the same, do one video and then it changes the words and then looks where it looks like you're saying your name, but it butchers the names, but it doesn't recognize it butchers the name. So it can't say it. Like if I, if I was to say your name and I said, oh, is it, is it Micah or Mika? I don't know. You know, and I, I kind of say that and then I move on. You know, it's just a real human saying it. Whereas AI would just say the way it thinks it's supposed to say it and move on. So I would do stuff like that or talk about, oh, hey, you're, it looks like you're in the membership space. We're going to be talking about that. And I can tailor it to that person based on their domain name, based on their business. And so that's what we do. We did it for is more of a existing customers, but also our, our database of people who hadn't been active for a while to try and re-engage them. So they, it was, it was very impactful because our show up rate was like 20% higher than it normally is. And if you're doing a sales webinar, getting 20% more people on and watch that and hear your message is even, you know, even bigger, so that's, if you're doing high ticket. So yeah, I would, I would use that in any situation where you say the impact of this could be huge on my business, long-term, short-term and retention. Then yeah, think about that. So I, whenever I talk to people about this strategy of using video, I ask them, what is a key moment in the sales process, onboarding process or retention where adding a personalized video would have super high impact. So put yourself in their shoes, think about what they're experiencing. They don't know you from Adam. They came to find a website or through Facebook ad or Instagram ad, and now they're here. What can you do to make them feel like they're part of the community? So that's, that's where I think about, okay, if they are doing a scheduled call with me before the call, I want to send a personalized video so they know who they're going to talk to. They feel more comfortable. My sister is, Hey, I have anxiety. So she's like my, my testing for like, Hey, would this make you feel less anxiety? So like for her, for example, there's a dentist and he sent her a text message before a dental appointment with a video. Like, Hey, here's the parking lot. You walk in, you walk up the stairs here, you go over here, come to find out I was one of our customers. Cause I had been talking about this for years with like local businesses. If you have a, a place, it's not easy to find. It's like the storefront. It's not huge. Obviously you're in a medical complex or whatever, having that video go out to high anxiety people before they show up, that reduces the anxiety. Your show up rate goes up, your, your success and happiness goes up. Your reviews go up, retention, repeat business reviews. So in all verticals in all businesses, there are going to be people that are high anxiety. So how can I think about people like that? So I'm going to send a video before I meet with them. So they know who it is. They're going to talk to you. Once they see a video of me talking to them in a way that's kind, and I am excited about them. Now they're going to know, like, and trust me before they've even seen me. Right. Like some, some trust has been built by doing that video. So in the sales process, you can use it a new customer onboarding. You can use it a month, two months into your, you know, if it's like an annual renewal, make sure that month 10, 11, not just like right before renewal, you're saying something. My month nine, 10, 11, I'm trying to check in and make sure that they're good. So these are all ways that we can leverage video in the moment where I see as a business owner, this would have high impact on my connection with my customer. This would make them feel like they're in my community and that they know, like, and trust me. And I care about them. So that's, it doesn't have to take much time. That's the thing. Like if you have high value members, it's usually your top 10%. They're going to be worth investing more time into keep that relationship tight to where if

[39:14] Micah: they think about canceling, they're going to second guess it.

[39:17] Trent: Cause like, oh, you know what? Mike has been super awesome with me. Now I'm going to give it another year. You know, I'm going to, I'm going to still stick with the program.

[39:23] Micah: Jason Wong- It's amazing how much, I'll use the word forgiveness, but like forgiveness, a customer will give them, you know, if something goes wrong, if they feel like there's been some personal, some care, they'll, you're a human, they care about you. Right.

[39:38] Trent: Yeah.

[39:38] Micah: So let's, let's get back to the idea of deposits. You wanted to come back to that. What does that mean to you?

[39:44] Trent: Well, and that's something that my brother and I used to like think about a lot in our, in our working with businesses. Like how do we teach them in a way of what makes sense to visualize it and make them see it. So we, we look at our relationships with our customers as like, we have a bank balance with them, right? It starts out at zero. We have no deposits. We're not negative, we're not positive, it's zero. So in order to get them to comply with future requests, they've got to have a balance there of my deposit I'm in there so I can withdraw some of that. Right. So compliance comes with positive balance. So if I'm working with you, Micah, we have friendship, we have relationship. And I asked for something from you, I've already got a positive balance. I can probably take that. But if my ask is too big and you're going to go negative, your compliance goes way low. Right. So I can't ask you something huge for me unless I've had a huge amount of deposits. And it's like, oh yeah, I'd do anything for Trent. I owe him my life. Right. So I have some friends that are like that because I've done so much for them. They've done so much for me where like anything they ask, I'm going to do for them. Anything that I ask them, they'll do for me. But with relationship with business and customers, it doesn't start out that way. And it takes a while to get there. So when I'm asking for like reviews, referrals, repeat business, asking to renew for a $12,000 a year subscription or whatever, $20,000 a year subscription, I bet I had a lot of deposits in order to be able to ask them to do that and afford that. And I noticed this first in my mortgage business back in the early 2000s, the high compliance people were the people I took time to explain the process to. I took time to understand their family situation, their kids, where their goals. And when I understood that and I asked them, hey, I need this document. I need it by 5 PM today. They would just get it on there to get it done. The people that I just like talked to once on the phone, it was everything through transactional through email, compliance was super low. They didn't know me. They didn't care about me. They didn't think I care about them. And my, my ask for like, hey, I need to get these five documents by 5 PM. Nothing, this goes to, and then it probably went on to someone else with a different loan officer. So that's when I first started to notice this, this phenomenon on, if you don't have deposits, you can't ask for compliance. And this goes along with what you guys are focused on with membership sites. And if you want people on your membership sites to show up to calls, to do the things, you know, that would be good for them and their business, but also good for you for retention. You have to think about how am I depositing into the relationship so that when the outcome comes that I asked for their renewal for another year, they're going to say yes, because I made enough deposits. And this is an easier one for you, maybe you guys to picture. Like my friend, I funded a startup of a carpet cleaning business. And one of the things I made sure he did, I'm like, look, I want to make sure I get paid back. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to work on your automations and make sure that you're doing this process to create a great experience and add deposits. So what he did is we had automated techs go out the day before the cleaning with, Hey, make sure you have these three things ready. Your pets are put away. If you're not going to be home, send me your door code. So that'd be disruption and service. And then three, if you're moving furniture off the carpet, you have to do it before I get there, because it has to drive for five hours. I can't move it off and move it back on. That's going to be on you. So that got rid of a lot of frustrations from people that were like, why don't you put my bed around and make it my couch. So we took about all these things that were happening that were bad. And we thought about them and sent that message beforehand to preemptively do something about that. Now, after the fact, he would leave, he'd leave a pineapple, pineapple carpet cleaning, his name of the company, leave a pineapple on their countertop with a thank you note. And that was an unexpected gift, right? So it's a deposit to the relationship. Hey, thanks for choosing pineapple. We're a small business and we really appreciate you. So all the reviews coming on, on Google were about, oh, it's so awesome. They came and left the pineapple. Everything's awesome. But the reason we got so many reviews was we had a process post that night or the next day, he'd send a message and a video saying, hey, just want to check in, make sure your carpets are good. We have a free comeback policy. If the city spots come back in the carpet, I'll come back and hit it for free. I want you to be super happy with the results. Let me know. And then occasionally we'd have people call back, but what happens with those people? Like they're super happy. Like, oh, you're the first carpet cleaning company that like stood behind your product and you were to come back and fix it. If it's not right, this is amazing. So now what are they? A customer for life. They review, they give it out reviews. They leave referrals. And then after he did all these deposits of like telling what's going to happen beforehand, leaving a pineapple, sending a video, checking in. Now a week later, an automated text goes out. Hey, we're a small business, small local business. We're just trying to get that going. Your reviews mean the world for us. Please leave a review for us on Facebook and Google. Now we just do Google because Facebook doesn't really have as much impact. But the bottom line is that the deposits in that relationship were so high that almost every single person in that first year would leave a review. Now he since has gone off on his own. I'm not part of that business anymore. And unfortunately he stopped doing that. I'm just curious to see what his reviews are right now. He still had really good reviews last night checked, but he doesn't have as many coming in. It was consistently several every month. But the point of that is, is that by doing that consistently, he was making deposits in relationships. So when he asked for reviews, referrals, repeat business, the answer is always yes. Yeah. He's still at 5.0, perfect reviews, 190 reviews on Google. So two years into it, it's pretty well. That being said, it's exciting for me to see businesses think about the customers and think about what are some deposits I can make that are unique and unexpected so that when I ask for compliance, like, Hey, would you buy my product? They're going to say yes, because I took the time to invest in them. I looked at their business, gave them some ideas, shared with them. So I'm giving way before I'm asking for something to return. And by doing that, those deposits are making it more likely that they're going to say, yes, I will comply with buying your product. I will comply with doing this thing so that I have success in using your, your training. I will show up for you at the call because I trust you and I like you. So that's, that's where this, this idea of thinking about now, I don't want to think about like customers as a bank and money and deposits really, but from a, of a standpoint of understanding how it works, compliance is low and there's zero balance. Compliance is high and there's a high balance. So what are the deposits I can make so that when it comes time to ask for a draw, Hey, are you ready to renew your membership for another $20,000 that the compliance is super high because I've made enough deposits into the relationship. And those can't, can't be automated all the time. You can automate some of those deposits and make them feel personal, but it really comes down to what are the things I can do personally that will be a huge deposit for this person.

[45:52] Micah: It makes me think, you know, obviously all the automation and I love the concept of deposits. It makes me think of doing things that are not scalable, right? Cause automation is, but you're kind of saying like, Hey, if you sprinkle in like seasoning, these non scalable touch points where it makes the most sense, it goes a long way.

[46:12] Trent: Yeah. And that's, that's exactly the point that if they can see and identify, there's no way this is automated. That's going to feel like a bigger deposit. The more likely it is that it was you doing that thing personally, one-to-one, the more likely you're going to see that as, wow, they took the time to do that for me. That's not just like something that any other business owner would do. This is unique. This is special. That's I'm going to honor and respect that. And like, I see that. And so what you mentioned earlier, it does buy you forgiveness because I've made mistakes. And when I've sent a video to someone, those mistakes aren't like negative review. You're the worst company. They're like, Hey, Trent, I'm kind of frustrated about this. They have the confidence to come tell me before it becomes a bigger issue. So now I can squash it by making them feel heard, solving the problem and moving forward. So that's one of the biggest things that I've learned from this is like being personal buys you goodwill, but also buys you forgiveness when you make mistakes. You make mistakes. We all make mistakes in business. We're human. But when you are a human that they see as another human and not just a machine or a brand or a robot, there's a lot more forgiveness, a lot more opportunity to make things right. And then those people end up being my best customers because we had a personal interaction. They saw my character and how I took care of it. And now they trust me more. So a negative thing can always be turned to a positive if we've built some rapport and some established trust, or at least they can come to you with that versus just expressing it somewhere else. Because people want an outlet, whether it's you or Google or Facebook, somewhere they're going to have an outlet that they can't talk to you and at least express it to you. So that's one of the other benefits of having those deposits and having that relationship built up ahead of these things that happen. Yeah.

[47:45] Micah: I couldn't agree more with our company. We have software as well doing support and things. And it's almost striking how many people will give us reviews and we ask for them.

[47:57] Trent: But when they have a support interaction, of course, we pride ourselves on support and whatever,

[48:02] Micah: but it's almost like a slingshot where they have some sort of issues. So there's some negativity maybe there. But then the interaction with support is so great. It like over corrects the issue to where they feel, you know, like other companies aren't doing the same thing for them. And yeah, it is interesting if like you're saying, turning a negative into a positive, just how well that works. What have I maybe, what should I have asked you that I haven't, you know, what are some things that you think about that would be good for membership site and course people?

[48:33] Trent: I think one of the things that maybe is not as common is people thinking about their customers and segments and identifying the people that are the most engaged, are the raving fans, are your, you know, they'll be there for life as long as you're around. And how do I create better connection and engagement with them and then motivate, encourage them to be an advocate and spread the word. Because a lot of the people in membership groups that I see, there's like, you know who they are. They're the ones that rise to the top. They're always active.

[49:07] Micah: Like, it's almost like a little too much.

[49:10] Trent: Like they're a fanatic in a way. And like, it's a little like, do you have a life outside? Is you have a wife and kids? Like, do you have something else going on? Like what's, but those people can be some of the best assets you have. And if you can bring them in, one of the ways of doing that again, is like, how do I personally outreach to them using phone, text, zoom call, you know, email, whatever, and identifying new people in segments and say, okay, here's my A plus people that are rating fans. And they also pay me a lot of money. Here's my B people that are good customers. They're my top revenue customers. How can I turn them into these A plus people where they're paying me money, but they're also promoting me because they're seeing success and they want to share that success with their friends in non-competing markets. Right?

[49:50] Micah: So when I think about it that way, I think about what every business is doing to segment

[49:56] Trent: their list. Like for us, it's easier for us in SaaS, I can see what are my customers spending the most in texting? How can I interact with them more to help them, encourage them and make them feel like they're appreciated. So that might, that would be one of the things I would do is identify your high value customers and how do I retain them the best? Because that's the core of your business. If you have like, you know, 20 to 30% annual churn to that group, that can be painful. If you get that down to like five to 10%, awesome. Now we've got a really good core group of people that pay my bills every year. So that's what I'm focused on, segmenting into different groups. And how do I communicate with them differently? So that at the bottom 60 to 80%, maybe I won't personally reach out to them as much, we have a large list, but I'm going to think about how do I re-engage them and get them to see opportunity, maybe do a special webinar for them or special training for them. To help them see the success and highlight the success of the top 10%, maybe do some interviews with them and show the top 10% success. Hey, how did you guys start out in this membership group? Okay. What did you do to succeed and to succeed in Excel? Oh, you taught me this, this, and this. I did this exactly. I didn't even deviate and got this result. Awesome. Now I'm showing and giving evidence of that. And I'm going to shoot that out and send a text message to everyone, the link to the video, or have them go through like webinar. If they miss it, text out a link to replay. There's a lot of different ways in the medium, in the medium of texting.

[51:12] Micah: I love that medium, but I'm not just married to that one thing.

[51:16] Trent: I know you can do that with email. You can do a text, you can do a messenger. But the reason why I talk about it so much is it has the highest opening read rate of the medium that I use. And so I'm going to continue to use that. But yeah, that would be one thing I would do is how do I segment and talk to or with different groups in my database in a way that's going to have the highest impact on where they are right now. So the new people getting started, if the consistent thing I'd say is that they fall off because they don't believe the product's going to solve their problem. How do I reinforce that belief by interviewing and sharing successful people, sharing the story of how they fall exactly what I said and got this result. Cool. Reinforce the sale, keep them there. So that's, that's where I think there'd be an opportunity that if you are not currently segmenting your database and your customer list, try to figure out how do I segment them and identify these people in different groups?

[52:04] Micah: And how do I talk and spend more time with the people that are the top 10% that are going to be

[52:09] Trent: my rating fans that can bring other people in. They're going to keep the community active and strong. They're going to solve problems for people coming in that I don't have a pain you want to solve. So that's, that's what I'm going to look for is if I have a online community where there's some engagement, maybe use them to help get that engagement for the membership side of things. Think about key points and where I say, okay, by week two, they should be here. If they're not, I want to push them to say, Hey, make sure you get in and watch this video. If you're not here right now, maybe skip ahead to this one. That's going to have a high impact on your business. Then go back to where you were. Things like that. Just like thinking about the process and the flow. If I can get them to video five on week two, they're going to have a huge impact. Okay. Push them to that on week two, if they haven't yet got there. And there's a lot of things you can trigger with automation based on how far they've gotten into whatever content trigger this, if they haven't got very far. And this, this is, it might be funny to you, Micah, but Ryan actually built their own little membership portal training thing. Very ghetto. It didn't really, you know, do much except for one thing. And if people watched video one, but not video two, it put them into a campaign where we send emails and texts, you can watch video two, video two, video three, same thing. And so we just thought about like, if we get people to consume this content in a membership site, they're going to stick longer. Cause then we have the next stage up. And so that was back like in 2011, 12, we're first getting into selling through video, our same webinars and trainings we did live to our real estate training, uh, in our real estate training business. We started doing those on a membership type site thing where they'd have to create a membership log and they just got in there and it pushed them through based on them putting in their email address to the different videos. But yeah, that's something that with what you have is way easier today than what we had to custom build back then. I think Ryan didn't know about your service or product back then. Otherwise you probably would've used that to make it even easier.

[53:54] Micah: I'm not even sure it was around in 2011. Yeah. No, I mean, back then, yeah, you pretty much had to build it for yourself. So we're talking a lot about, you know, we're assuming there's some flow in the business, right? We're talking about automation and like scale and whatever. What I do love though, about this whole conversation is you could apply it to your first member so well, meaning you could like over personalize it just to make sure you keep them right. And you could over personalize it to your first leads to make sure you get those sales. So I think having that as an accelerator when you're first getting started, um, to, to, to find your match, right. To figure out, okay, this is work consistently now I'll go automate it. Seems like a low hanging fruit as well.

[54:39] Trent: You're, you're exactly right. Personalizing and sending a video to every single lead when you're small and getting like 10 leads a day or five leads a day or even less. Yeah. I can afford to do that. I've got the time. I'm a new business. That impacts can be super high. Now, if I'm growing fast, I'm getting like 500 leads a day or 100 leads a day and I'm filtering through and pushing them through different funnels. I might not do that the very first stage, but when I get to stage two or three and they show high intent, then I might trigger a video to go out. But yeah, any, any size business you are, one of the best accelerators is to be more personal and that's a phone call or video or something. And oftentimes it's hard to get people to get on the phone when they're new lead. They don't know you. There's no trust. And so seeing your number and answering is very unlikely. People screen their calls nowadays, but we also do have in our dialer, we do a pre-call text. So I'll text someone, push the button, like list of 10 people. Let's say I got 10 leads, click, click, click the pre-call text. So text them all from my same number I'm calling from saying, Hey, this is Trent from Picture Funnel. So I requested this PDF. I'm going to give you a call real quick to show you three things you want to make sure you, you look at before you move forward, you know, whatever. And so that message will go out and now I start making my calls. I'm calling and texting from the same number. They're going to recognize who I am. If it's something that's crushed in their mind, they just opted in for that. My, my call connection rate goes up like 20 to 40% just by adding that one accident in there. Now, if you can't get them on a phone call, great. I always have no video now. I hang up the call, record a personalized video, and then I move on to the next lead. That, yeah. If you got the time and you're new, you can use these strategies at a much higher level because they're not higher level, but more, more, more of your time is spent there. Cause you don't have time. Or you have enough time and not enough money coming in, but we have a lot of money coming in and not enough time to do that. Then you can use leverage of either people on your team to do it, or even, you know, changing at what point you do those accelerators. But yeah, anyone can do that at any stage. It's, it's definitely a matter of just thinking, how could I personally connect with these people? And what, what do I have time and capacity to do right now?

[56:29] Micah: So Trent, you're like a fire hose of well-connected knowledge. I love it. No, it's actually perfect. It's amazing because it's not fluff. It's just like, if somebody wants to connect with you, connect with Fix Your Funnel, or even Yeti text, what's the best way for them to do that? Because I feel like if you have the time for it, they'd benefit from a chat with you, but even just, you know, experiencing some of this for themselves, where can they go to connect with you guys?

[56:54] Trent: Yeah. Most, mostly what we do is with customers that are new customers for Yeti text or Fix Your Funnel, we have a $1 trial. So if you just want to try it out and see if it's a good fit for you. Cool. Doing that $1 trial period, you can ask for a strategy session. I do a half hour strategy session with every customer. Most people have taken me up on it. They don't know who I am and they haven't realized, okay, I can get some really good in-depth knowledge on my strategy for my business. But our support team does a lot of like onboarding calls, checking in, helping them with their basic setup. But if they want to do a strategy session with me, they say, Hey, can I do a strategy session with Trent? They'll give you the link. And that's something that again, they offer that for free for our customers. It's $500 for non-customers. They want to schedule a strategy session with me. And that's an hour long for paid one, half hour for the free ones, customers. And that allows you to go into depth of like, here's what I'm doing. Here's what's working. Here's what's not working. Here's what I'm seeing drop off. How can we improve this with accelerators or how can we filter better with breaks? And what are some strategies you would use to improve my retention? Again, it's much easier for me about the exact business and the idea of like, here's what's working. Here's what's not working. Here's our, here's what we're selling. Here's our product. Here's our customer. I can really get into the customer mode, customer mode pretty quick. And start to share specific things about, okay, I understand this type of customer. He's probably feeling and thinking, does this seem like it's accurate for what you've seen? Oh yeah, that's exactly it. Cool. Let's do this then. So yeah, it's a very impactful conversation because we can target it very specific to one person, one problem, and then build from there.

[58:23] Micah: Yeah.

[58:23] Trent: So you can do it at picturefunnel.com or yetitext.com, either one. Picturefunnel is for those that use Infuse to stop, keep, for those using HubSpot, ActiveCampaign, Drip, CRMs like that, that's where Yeti text would be. Would come in as a separate company, sister, sister company that serves a different group.

[58:40] Micah: That's perfect. I was going to say, I have a hunch that even though we've been speaking in generalities, if somebody got on the phone with you and told you what's going on, you'd have some pretty specific, good advice to be like, oh yeah, here's what's my superpower.

[58:54] Trent: That's what I was saying earlier. More of a strategist. I can really help identify and implement strategies. I don't like jumping into the day-to-day setting up of automation. I can do all that stuff, but my passion is in strategy.

[59:07] Micah: Well, this has been perfect. So for those of you watching, listening, go to fixerfunnel.com or yetitext.com. Sounds like that $1 trial is a steal. And, you know, just to get to talk to you and, and hopefully they implement some texting. I know I need to implement some texting, so I'll be reaching out to you.

[59:24] Trent: Yeah. Oh, you can set up your strategy session. I'll give you an hour because you know, there's, you've even deposited some missing deposits into our relationship. So an hour. Thanks man.

[59:34] Micah: Well, thanks again for coming on the call. Thanks for sharing your knowledge. It's good to have the trend.

[59:39] Trent: Yeah. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.