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Clients and Community

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Would you like to build a Facebook Group that consistently gets you clients, month in, month out? How would you like to pull in $30,000, $50,000, $60,000, $70,000 or more organically, using just a Facebook group?

In this episode of Coaching Sales With Mike And Cody, I'm joined by the founders of Clients & Community, Jaden Easton, Landon Stewart, and Chris Stapleton.

I've recently started taking our free Facebook group – 7 Figure Agency Owners And High Ticket Coaches – more seriously. We've made a lot of changes. And we've been trying to build a real community. One that helps agency owners, coaches, and consultants scale to 7-figures.

The guys at Clients & Community have been able to get to a 7-figure run rate with just their Facebook group. So, I figured they're the best people to talk to.

In this interview, you'll discover:

  • The REAL reason why NOW is the best time ever to start and grow a Facebook group for your business (you'll have to listen until the end of the interview for this)
  • How Jaden, Landon, and Chris (Stapleton) pivoted from using paid acquisition to organic “Facebook group” acquisition
  • The gap in the market that led to “Clients & Community”
  • How they first started selling in their Facebook group – early 2019 – and how their system has evolved into what they use today
  • How C&C use setters/closers to hit $70k-$80k MRR consistently – guess who helped them with their sales reps 😉
  • Do you need to post a ton of content in your Facebook group to keep people engaged and make sales?
  • How to deal with “value sharks” and “list poacher” sneaking into your group
  • How to recruit moderators who will manage your community “for free,” reducing your workload to content creation only
  • What metrics to track to make sure your group is moving in the right direction
  • Their brand new software designed with Facebook group owners in mind
  • The line between free and paid: what kind of content should you create?
  • How to make sure you're attracting BUYERS to your group
  • How much you can expect to pay for high-quality group members if you're using paid traffic to grow your group

Helpful Resources

  1. Free case study: discover how our “ATM System” can help you get off the phones and scale from 6- to 7-figures in under 6 months [Watch Now]
  2. Join our free Facebook group, 7 Figure Agency Owners And High Ticket Coaches [Join Now]

Interview Transcript

Mike Mark: [00:00:34]

So we got the guys from Clients And Community here with you guys this week. They are masters at growing their Facebook group. They have really started to accelerate things in a big way. And so, obviously, this whole group's about getting your high ticket coaching or your agency to seven figures, and these guys are clearly on the trajectory.

I mean, when do you guys think you'll be there? You should be there soon. I'm just curious when you guys think you're projected to hit it.

Landon Stewart: [00:01:02]

Yeah, so May will be our first six-figure month, next month. And so, yeah, we'll be on a seven-figure run rate, probably starting next month.

Mike Mark: [00:01:12]

There you go. Dude, that's awesome. And then, where were you guys at before you brought in the sales reps and started working with us?

Landon Stewart: [00:01:20]

Yeah, we were running into some massive problems, man, before starting to work with your team. So basically we run all of our stuff through Facebook groups, and we'll talk a little bit about what we're doing here.

But we ran into a situation where Stapes was basically doing all of the Setting (setting calls,) Chris Stapleton. I was doing all of the closing. And we had more leads than we had like time to communicate with all the leads. So it was basically, we just had so many sales that were just getting dropped every single day.

You know what I mean? Because on top of selling we're also running a company, and so we didn't even have time to like follow up with people. If they didn't purchase on the call, it's over. We didn't have the time or the systems for any of that. And so we decided, let's start looking to bring on some front end sales guys.

So we hired one guy who is a friend of ours. And some of you guys might know how that story goes. You know what I mean? It's a little slow getting going. And so we're like, what are we going to do? And then we were referred to you by one of our friends, who's a client of yours, Aleric.

And he's like, you know, Mike Mark, their team's the best. We were like, we gotta bring this team on. So we started working with you guys, I don't know, maybe three, four weeks ago. We brought on two guys pretty much right away who are just absolute rock stars. We couldn't be happier.

They're starting… we started them off Setting for their first week or two. They hit the ground running and doing really well. And so this week will be their first week of taking some of their own sales calls and things like that. So we're pumped, man. Like right now we're doing about $70,000 a month with me collecting it all.

Our next phase is like $70,000 to $100,000 a month with our guys collecting that revenue.

Mike Mark: [00:03:04]

And have you guys gotten the first one yet where they collect it or is that going to be this week?

Chris Stapleton: [00:03:10]

I think it's this week, bro. And I'm like, I'm looking at the board here, the whiteboard. We all got, you know, those whiteboards when it comes to sales. I think in the first two weeks, we just crossed $24,000 in Sets collected.

So those are sets that your team, that, you know, our new team now have set for Landon that have closed. So now we're transitioning them to setting and closing their own calls

Mike Mark: [00:03:33]

Dude, the feeling when you make a sale and you're doing like something completely different. You're like, “Wow, I was just on the toilet and I closed a $9K! This is awesome!”

It's wild. It's a good feeling. It's really cool.

Chris Stapleton: [00:03:47]

And that's where we're at right now. It's like we've normalized what it feels like to make 70 grand in sales per month with our own personal production. Now we're at the phase in our business. We want to normalize what it's like to make 30, 40, 50, 70 in other people's production.

So it's a new phase of normalizing income that we're really excited to break into. And then next month, $100K. We're going to cross a hundred K with like a hybrid of our own personal production with the guys. So really, really excited.

Mike Mark: [00:04:14]

That's awesome. And so, everything, you guys already touched on it… Everything that you do is really founded on Community, right? And that you guys have really, of all places, you developed your community in Facebook groups, specifically.

So how did you guys decide that you know… Or how did you end up, maybe it wasn't a decision, but it was a happy accident… But how did it start where you realized that like a Facebook group is the thing that we really need here and that you guys went all-in on.

Landon Stewart: [00:04:43]

Yeah, man. I mean, we kind of stumbled – just like you said, a happy accident – we kind of stumbled upon it. So the three of us, we all met each other through a mutual mentor of ours. His name is Mark [inaudible]. Since some of you guys on the line might be familiar with that name. And Mark had Buyers' Communities, like communities for the clients to cultivate clients.

And so the three of us kind of got our start with Facebook groups, but actually working with client groups. Not client acquisition or lead generation Facebook groups that are kind of public. And so we started our first Facebook group in January 2018. We didn't know what it was going to turn into. January of 2019 is when we really started selling inside of this Facebook group.

We grew the group up to like 15, 20 grand a month, pretty much all organic without running ads to the group yet or anything like that. Pretty much all organic. And we had other ads that we were running. We were spending like 80% of our time on ads and like 20% of our time on our Facebook group. And the Facebook group was making us more money than we were making with our ads.

And so we're like, “What would happen if we started focusing on this Facebook group?” So we went all-in on the group like mid-2019. We started going all-in on the group, got the group up to like 30 grand a month in revenue, and then it was like September, October of 2019 when people started hitting us up and were like, “What are you guys doing?

With Facebook groups. How are you doing this? How you're growing your groups so fast. How are you able to monetize the group?” The engagement in our groups is some of the best engagement I've seen inside of Facebook groups. So people are like, how are you guys doing it?

Chris Stapleton: [00:06:10]

Cause we weren't teaching groups yet, Mike. We were just, we just had existing offers that we were promoting. So we were not yet teaching groups. But then this is where it came to fruition where everyone's like, “How the heck are you guys crushing 30 K a month consistently, like every month, with your group?” So Landon, you can continue on there.

Landon Stewart: [00:06:28]

And so that's when we finally started taking on clients and started teaching Facebook groups to the public, in about October of last year. And then what happened, so that was all on a Facebook group called Social Media Entrepreneurs, which is our first Facebook group. And we actually grew that group from zero to about 20,000 people over the span of about two years.

The problem that we ran into though with that group was a lot of the people in the group weren't really in our target audience. The folks that we like working with the most are like coaches, course creators, agencies, you know, people with like real businesses. And a lot of the people in the group were kind of like network marketers, MLM’ers, just people that we didn't really want to work with.

So in January of this year, we started our brand new group called Clients And Community. We launched it, had like 500 people join that pretty much right away, did like 70,000 with that Facebook group the very first month. Now the group at about 2,000 people and we're doing 70-80,000 a month consistent with that Facebook group.

Mike Mark: [00:07:25]

That's huge. Okay, so the question I have is how did you guys start selling in your group? What was your first strategy and sales process? And then how has your sales process evolved now that you guys have really gotten the opportunity to refine it?

Landon Stewart: [00:07:41]

I love it, dude. So essentially in the beginning with our Facebook group, we made all of the money in the group through promo cycles, which is basically for those of you who are in kind of the internet marketing world, which most of you are, it's basically like a mini launch.

You know what I mean? That we would do like once a month. Where we would do like an anticipation post, like, “Hey, something big is coming tomorrow. Keep your eyes peeled,” and then the next day it's like, “Here's the new thing.” You know what I mean? And we would do that about once a month and we'd have bonuses and then we'd have a deadline and scarcity and these things.

And so once a month we'd kind of do this big rally and promo cycle and that got us to about 20- to 30,000 a month. The problem though with what we were doing then was that all of the money that we were making each month was made within like a two- to three-day window of the month. And so there became a lot of pressure to where it's like, Holy shit, like…

The expenses of the company have grown. If we don't do 20 grand with this promo cycle next month, we're fucked. You know what I mean? And so there's like a lot of pressure around for almost cycles. And so a big adjustment that we've made is we still do around one- to two-ish promo cycles a month.

The other things that we're doing today though is we're doing like a setter/closer process. Which has really been the thing that's taken us from $30,000 a month in our group to $70,000. It's also what's going to take us to a hundred grand. But the end of the year, our goal is to be at a quarter million a month inside of the group. And that's like the Setter process, which I can kind of explain if you want.

It's pretty complex. There's some pieces to it, but I can kind of go through what we're doing right now in our group that's crushing.

Mike Mark: [00:09:16]

Yeah. And, and I'd be curious to know, kind of, cause we see a lot of people do it different ways. So some people will have the question on the weight and like, do you want to have a conversation about X, Y, Z?

We actually do that in this group. some people have the process where they're doing a lot of two step posts. Like, “Hey, if you want this free thing, comment ‘Gimme.’” And then they comment “Gimme” and then they reach out that way. What are you guys doing specifically with Setters?

Landon Stewart: [00:09:39]

I love it, man. So, with our group, the whole goal of the entire group is to essentially initiate conversations just like it would be inside of your Facebook groups.

And for a lot of you guys on, we have a us that sell over the phone. That's how our sales process works. So the entire group is designed to generate conversation. So yeah, when people join the Facebook group, we do have a question that's basically like, “We help blank and blank. Do blank. Would you like us to private message you the details?”

So anyone that joins the Facebook group has the opportunity to answer YES there. Right now it's, Jaden probably have the exact stats. It's probably like 50 to 70% of the people say yes to that.

Jaden Easton: [00:10:16]

Yeah. We have anywhere from 60 to 70% and we track that on a weekly basis. So if we make adjustments to the question, we can kind of like track whether that makes the versions go up or down.

Mike Mark: [00:10:25]

Dude, I love that. So question for you on that, right? When they're coming in, like how many people are typically coming in on an average day or the average week like or however, what cycle you're tracking it on.

Landon Stewart: [00:10:37]

Great question, man. So we can talk for a second about group growth and then we can really chat about selling in the group.

So how we grow the group is in a couple of ways. Some of the growth in our group is purely organic. Probably like what you would find inside of your Facebook groups. People just talking about our group or we show up in the search or in someone else's group in the suggested section. So part of our growth comes through organic.

Jayden, how many people are we grown by on a day right now? Maybe 30 40 50?

Jaden Easton: [00:11:04]

Yeah. So we're scaling ad spend on a weekly basis right now. At the moment, we're going by about 30 to 35 per day.

Landon Stewart: [00:11:11]

30 and 35 per day. And about half of that, probably not even half, probably 5 to 10 come from organic, and then the others are coming from paid ads.

So we are running paid advertising right towards the Facebook group.

Chris Stapleton: [00:11:24]

Beautiful thing about growth, Mike, and I know, I heard your response there like, “Oh, okay, 30-35 a day.” Not all members are created equal. You know what I mean? You don't need super high volume to make 70 grand to a hundred K a month.

There were times in our business previously where we were growing at 150 to 200 people a day actually making less money. Because of leads slipping through. So you want to find that balance with the systems and processes that you have to make sure that you're squeezing the juice out of the fruit. You know what I mean?

And you're not, there's not a lot of wastage. So 30 to 35 a day with our current systems right now are yielding about 70 to 80 grand a month.

Mike Mark: [00:12:04]

Yeah, that makes sense. And that's like with us, we're the same way. Our email list is tiny, like tiny, tiny email list. And we just kill it off of our email list.

Like, we're usually doing $300 per lead, which is like insane compared to what people are used to doing. And it's a big part of that. And like every time we let our list grow really big, we find that when we cleanse it and we keep it smaller, we're generating more money off of it.

Chris Stapleton: [00:12:33]

Very similar philosophy there.

Mike Mark: [00:12:35]

Yep. That makes sense. Less but better.

Chris Stapleton: [00:12:37]

Yeah. Less is more.

Mike Mark: [00:12:39]

Yep. Okay, cool. So with the group selling process, if we go back to that, you guys said you implemented the Setter/Closer. And then I think we kind of veered off when we started talking about how they're coming in.

We mentioned that they're filling out the answer and that 60 to 70% of the people are saying, “Yes, I want to have this conversation with you guys.” And then, what other sorts of levers are you guys pulling to help push that set/close model that you guys have been really pushing lately?

Landon Stewart: [00:13:09]

Love it. So that's number one is right on group join.

We get 60-70% of people saying yes to that. The other things that we do are a couple of things. So inside of our Facebook group, we don't do a ton of content inside of our group. Like if you check out our group, we do less content than a lot of groups out there. We maybe do two, three, four posts a week, on average, if that.

But one thing that we do every single week is we host a weekly live stream. That's every Monday at 8:00 PM Eastern, so it's every single Monday at the exact same time. The morning of that live stream, we do what we call an anticipation post. So it's like a post that is like, “Hey…” kind of like what you did for this live stream here today Mike.

Where it's like, “Hey, tonight we're going live with one of our clients to share with you, blank, blank, blank, and blank and blank.” And it's like, “Comment if you're gonna attend live or if you want the replay.” Many people comment replay so we can get them the replay if they're not able to tune in live.

And then on top of just the posts in the group, we also blast it out to our email list and our ManyChat list. So we get everyone going to one post to really fuel the post in the mornings. And so then we'll host a live stream. The live streams that we host are typically pretty like basic. It's a lot of like stories and beliefs or interviewing clients, kind of like, you know, just what you're doing here today.

And then at the end we'll just have a call to action. You know what I mean? To basically spur up conversations. So like at the end, it's like if we're doing a client interview, it's like going to the comments, like “If you want to be the next so and so, and you want to start working with us directly, we have programs…”

And then we'll do a couple of qualifiers to where it's like, “So if you're watching this and you're,” and so ours are like courses and coaches and things like that. “You're an active coach, you already have a little bit of revenue coming in…” We'll do a couple of qualifiers. “Drop I'm next in the comments and one of our specialists will reach out to you and we'll see if what we have is a good fit.”

And so we'll do that at the end. We'll typically, we get 50, 60, 70 people tuning in live each Monday to that. And we'll get like 20 to 30 comments every single Monday that our specialists will reach out to and cultivate all week. And then usually once every other week we'll do kind of like a two step, we call it a Honey Pot, which is basically just like a post in the group that's like.

Here's either a free lead magnet. So it's like, “We have a free training on this, who wants it?” Or “Who wants a phone call with us?” But we do that about every other week. We find that if we do that every single week it can kind of become gray and background, kind of, white noise.

Mike Mark: [00:15:39]

Interesting. Interesting. So, some of the things that I think, one thing that you touched on that I find really interesting and you, like almost took it away from me, but like the big objection a lot of people are going to have is like, well, “I don't want to be creating content all the time.” Or “I don't want to have to be like babysitting people in the group” and like some of those things.

So what do you see in terms of the actual, I think you've already touched the content creation part, but what about the community management part? Like what needs to happen in order to make sure that the community is really protected and that people aren't… ‘Cause I mean, we all know what it's like to be in a Facebook group where every asshat is just like posting the value posts and trying to like get clients.

Or your competitors are in there like trying to comment on shit to steal your own leads and like stuff like that. So like, how do you guys curate the community? What are things that you don't tolerate? What are things that people sometimes might not tolerate but are actually good things for you? Like I'm just curious about that part of your community management.

Landon Stewart: [00:16:43]

For sure.

Chris Stapleton: [00:16:43]

Yeah. I could share some on that. So, you know, in the beginning stages it was just us kind of monitoring the group, right? It was us like monitoring spam and doing the best we can to keep our eyes on the pulse of what was happening. Over time we had a lot of people start rallying around like what we were creating.

So we were able to get some volunteers to help out. Moderators. So we have full-time moderators on staff right now. About six to seven people have their eyes on the group and they just take rotations and take their time looking through and monitoring spam. And we've trained those people to really spot like who we're looking for and what we tolerate inside the community.

And they do a really good job of that. Like, we couldn't do what we do today without, you know, a good team of moderators in place.

Mike Mark: [00:17:28]

So when you said full-time moderators, you mean like you pay them for this or are they community volunteers?

Chris Stapleton: [00:17:33]

Volunteer only and how we do that and people might be asking like, “I can't get seven people?”

You actually can, when you have a good vision and you have value to provide these people. So every Monday, what we do, we do our executive meetings with the company. Our sales guys, our customer service, we do all our meetings on Monday. And on the end of that meeting cycle, we have a 15-minute window where we spend time with our moderators. Where we ask them if they need insight or help in their businesses.

And we plan out. The week with them, and we give them strategy, behind the scenes strategy on what we're doing to build a seven-figure company. So they're getting a lot of value being in our presence and being part of a group that is producing six figures a month. They love being a part of our world.

Mike Mark: [00:18:18]

That's super cool. Yeah, that's a great value-add. And so, do they just join at the tail end, or do they get to attend the whole meeting, and then the tail end is really dedicated to the conversation?

Chris Stapleton: [00:18:28]

We have a 15-minute window at the end of our meeting cycle where we do just spend time with the moderators.

They're not really plugged into all of our vision in the business. But they do have a 15-minute cycle where we're kind of retrace what our plan is for the week. We do it every single Monday. We haven't missed it for like a year now. And they love it. They love being a part of it, and it's just our way to give back to the volunteers that put in the work.

So they're approving people, they're declining people that aren't a good fit. They're going in there and eliminating spam posts. They're really good at seeing the value sharks, the people that go in there and drop the value for just like clients and stuff like that.

Jaden Easton: [00:19:03]

The other angle that's really valuable about this is this almost becomes like a staff funnel. Because what you'll start to find happen is there'll be a few volunteers that really kill it.

They'll take it seriously, and we've had like our best staff members, like our current client success manager, our executive assistant. It all came from the evolution of like first stepping into a volunteer position, seeing how they operate, and then because they've been operating as a volunteer for so long, they have such like niche… they have such wisdom unique to your company, that they just make really, really solid employees.

Like some of our, some of our best friends, some of our employees, some are the people who absolutely kill it in our business have come from the community, which is the other really valuable thing.

Mike Mark: [00:19:41]

Yeah, that's huge. Wow, that's a really interesting point. Especially because there's something that you can't replace when it comes to that level of intimacy and trust and like shared values that can only be built over time.

You know, there are people that can quickly join your organization and plug in fast, that you don't know or that you recruit. Like, just if you've done a good job of having a big enough net. But for something like that, there's still an element of time and time is always a factor in building consistency and trust over the relationship.

And so that's cool. It's a really good way to build that in. Now, what about the “tolerate?” What do you guys just say, “Fuck you. You can't do this in our group?” Like, what are sort of the non-negotiables that you've seen really bring down the group?

Landon Stewart: [00:20:31]

For sure. So when it comes to like content in the group, you've got the people that will provide value and they do it in a really cool way. And they're generating leads from it, we know they're generating leads from it and we're like, okay with it.

And then there are other people who provide value and then will private message every single “like” they get, every single comment they get, and that always comes back to us. Like, they think they can get away with it. It comes back to us every time because one of our moderators will like their post or someone on our team will do it.

And so, anybody that private messages in that format, it's 100% ban, kick out. We've got a really quick trigger. ‘Cause we're not, like, we have 50 new people joining the Facebook group every day. So we're not worried about taking somebody out. So anybody that does a direct pitch, it's an automatic take-out.

Then there's other people that just might not know. They might just share a video from their page in the group and we'll just delete the post and send them a little message that's like, “Hey, no outside links inside of the Facebook group.” And there's other people though, that they're blatantly selling and pitching and we have a really fast trigger on that and we just ban and delete.

Jaden Easton: [00:21:37]

A lot of this too, it starts from when someone makes a request to join your group. Like one of the first questions we ask them, and it's like a pre-qualifier is like, “This group is for [blank]. Are you an active [blank] now? Or you are aspiring to become one?” So for us, it's like this group is for coaches and course creators.

“Are you an active coach or course creator or aspiring to be one?” And like based on that if they say no or if they don't answer that, typically it's just an automatic ban. And then our moderators also check up their profiles and you can get, after 10 seconds looking at somebody's Facebook profile, you can typically tell like whether this person's like a value giver or are they a value taker.

So like when we've implemented more stringent measures on like who we approve into the group, that's also like reduced our overall workload as opposed to just being like approve, approve, approve. Just cause like we're desperate for group members.

Mike Mark: [00:22:22]

Ah, that's interesting. Yeah.

Chris Stapleton: [00:22:25]

Doing a little bit more heavy lifting on the front end helps us really save a lot of time and energy on the back end, so we don't allow people that have like 500 groups they are part of, we don't really do a lot of crazy international third world countries.

So we, you know, we typically stick with US, Canada, UK, like the main core countries. And yeah, we have our moderators literally look at people's profiles. They're trained to look at quality and find people. So we really do a good job with that on the front end to save time on the back.

Mike Mark: [00:22:57]

Cool. What about like for you guys, obviously growing groups is sort of your specialty. What are your guys' sense about other people who teach people how to grow groups? Do you bring them into your community? Do you exclude them from your community? How do you think about that and how should the viewers think about that?

Landon Stewart: [00:23:15]

Yeah, that's a great question. Yeah. I, I assume that we have people inside… We definitely don't have a rule against it. You know what I mean? I assume that we have people inside of our Facebook group that also do a similar thing to what we do. We're just really not too worried about it.

You know what I mean? Like, we believe in becoming friends with our competitors, you know what I mean? Not allies, not enemies. You know what I mean? And so we're not too worried about it. And it's kind of like. If someone wants to come into kind of our group and kind of like poach from our group, it's kind of like “Good luck!”

You know what I mean?

Mike Mark: [00:23:48]

Yeah. That's a good approach. And like, I get it… With most people, you know, like a lot of sales reps will come, they'll try and work with us or try to reverse engineer a process and then go do it. And it's like, “Please try it.” Like, please, you have no fucking clue how hard and shitty this is.

Like, this problem sucks so bad and you think I'm just here making easy money. This is the hardest fucking money I've ever made. So go for it. If you're not in love with the problem. You're not going to stick with it anyway. If you're just in it for the payday, like that also shows up in your work, you know?

Whereas like when you really are obsessive on the problem, that's another thing. It just shows up in your work and people can see it and the word of mouth and like everything that comes out of that. It's such a massive distinction, but it's very subtle and it's something that's there from the onset. But the end result of it is so far apart, it's crazy.

Chris Stapleton: [00:24:49]

Yeah.

Jaden Easton: [00:24:50]

The other, thing, I mean, obviously as business owners our time's so valuable. And we could be spending our time trying to like create a protocol and try and monitor that. But really like we just understand that's the thing that's never going to go away. So what we focus on are the things that are in our control, the enhancements that we can make on a weekly basis.

And because we're making so many enhancements week to week, like even if somebody is copying us, like we're always going to be ahead because we are constantly focusing on innovation, like within our company, which is also the kind of value that we share.

Mike Mark: [00:25:14]

Cool. Yeah, that makes sense. Now I know a lot of people who are growing groups, they're using some sort of tool or software. Is there any sort of tool or software that you guys have found has been really amazing for you?

Landon Stewart: [00:25:28]

We just developed, we just finished creating our own technology that we've been working on for like the last like eight, nine months now called GroupKit. Which is kind of like a CRM for Facebook groups combined with taking… So when somebody joins our Facebook group, one of the things that we do is we ask for their email address, like, “Yo, we'll shoot you this free lead magnet, type in your email, we'll send it to you.”

And it's just really hard to get that email address from Facebook into an autoresponder. Before we were using some technologies that kind of did it, but not really. It was using like Zapier and Google spreadsheets. It was pretty complex. And so like eight months ago, we're like, let's just build our own.

And so we've been developing it. It's finally done. We just, we just released it to the public last week, I think. That'll take the email address directly from Facebook automatically entering into the autoresponder allows you to retarget group members and all that.

Mike Mark: [00:26:19]

That's awesome. Yeah, that's really cool. What about like, what metrics are you guys tracking? That's something that I'm sure a lot of people here would be wondering. It's like what are the important things to monitor?

It sounds like Jaden, that's kind of where your, you're going hardcore on the numbers. You're like “Yes, 60 to 70%, we know exactly.” So I'd be curious to know what you got your eyes on there.

Jaden Easton: [00:26:46]

Were tracking the number of members joining each week. That's important. So you can see if it's going up or down, kind of baseline marketing. We're tracking the number of people that give us their email addresses. And also the number of people that say yes to private messaging.

So again, that that lets us associate like a conversion percentage, with the emails we're collecting, with the messages that we're engaging in. And that lets you diagnose problems. Cause like if you're sitting 20 to 30% of people giving you their email address, I mean that probably tells you that the lead magnet you're offering in return for that email address isn't converting very well.

So you can make a tweak and then you can measure that progress. So those are probably some of the biggest, obviously, we're also paying attention to the backend when it comes to sales, like how many conversations are our Setters initiating? How many triage calls are they booking?

That lets us kind of start to associate like a value to group members. So those are probably the biggest things. We try to just pay attention to the biggest columns. I mean, there's so much data that Facebook gives you, so much data you can really look at. But at the end of the day, data is only as useful as the decisions and the enhancements it allows you to make.

So now those are the biggest things that we're finding kind of works best for us.

Mike Mark: [00:27:56]

So for you guys, when you're tracking the setters and how many people they are reaching out to and whatnot, how are you guys actually verifying that? Cause I know that like in some instances when people are dealing with setters – you know, they're messaging directly on Facebook – so they don't have quite the optics to know that, hey, this is a real number or this is kind of a fudged number.

So what do you guys do to monitor or verify that? Or aren’t you doing anything?

Jaden Easton: [00:28:22]

Yes. So we have a Google sheet that all of our setters use. And we have a protocol where at the end of the day, they just count up the timestamps on the number of messages that they've sent. So, I mean, there's definitely room for some human error there.

But we feel like some data is better than no data at all. So that's what we use right now. And then we're also working on kind of improving our GroupKit software. So that a lot of that could actually be done internally and tracked automatically because obviously when a robot's doing it, I mean the chances of error goes down significantly.

So we're also kind of looking at ways to automate that moving forward. But right now it's just counting the timestamps of the day inside of messenger and just reporting that on a spreadsheet for each center.

Mike Mark: [00:29:00]

So when you say counting the timestamps, you mean of like that first outreach of the day? And then, so it's like, okay, cool, “I had X number per day today,” and then they plug it into the sheet. Yep. Cool. And then do you have them, like are you doing anything to verify that? Or do you just kind of take their word for it?

Landon Stewart: [00:29:16]

We don't verify right now the number of messages per day, but we do verify triage calls and then actual sets, of course.

And those are really the numbers that matter the most, so it wouldn't really benefit a setter much to fudge how many “reach outs” they're doing. While that's something that we want to see, obviously, at the end of the day, what really matters is triages and sets and closes. You know what I mean? And so I don't think we have a process of verifying unless I'm wrong, Jaden.

Jaden Easton: [00:29:44]

No, I mean…

Chris Stapleton: [00:29:46]

Nothing concrete.

Jaden Easton: [00:29:47]

It becomes pretty obvious, like if there was fudging happening, cause we will look at the number of new members that are joining and at the end of the week, compare that with the number of reported messages. And like if there's a huge disconnect, clearly there's something weird going on there.

So we're kind of cognizant of that, but like, we're okay if the numbers aren't perfect. Because, as Landon said, we're more concerned with the triage calls and the strategy session than everything else.

Mike Mark: [00:30:07]

Yeah. And I think that you know, especially as you have multiple setters, then you kind of know that, “Hey, if there's X number of messages, I should get this percentage of those to book triages.” And then, so, you know, when someone's math is way off and it's like, “I've done 300 messages, but only book two triages.” Kind of like, “Hey, we need to look at something here.”

Right. So that makes sense. Okay. Some of the questions that people had asked. So one was, how do you know what type of content to produce for your free Facebook group versus your paid Facebook group versus your personal profile? And I also will kind of add to that question, which is like, what's your guys' belief about where the free line is?

You know, a lot of people say, give your best stuff away for free. A lot of other people say, you know, tell them the what, but not the how. What's sort of your belief on free content in a group and the different channels of Facebook being your paid stuff, your personal profile in your group, and then how do you differentiate there?

Landon Stewart: [00:31:09]

Love it, man. Stapes talk about it, bro.

Chris Stapleton: [00:31:12]

Yeah, I mean, this is a question we get a lot. And this is something that through practice, I mean me and Landon have done a live stream inside our free group for the past two years straight every single Monday and haven't missed a single day. So think about that, guys.

Like, everyone watching, like, put in the reps and you'll figure this stuff out fairly quickly. What we've found is there's a balance, right? There's a balance of being able to, on the free side of content, really keeping things principle-based. Keeping things fairly broad, but not teaching so much the strategy or the how. It's more of the why and the what.

So like for example, tonight we're going to be interviewing one of our clients that just cracked, I think $28,000 in her free group. She's fairly new to our program and we've been working with her. So what we're going to do tonight is we're going to bring her out. We're going to talk about what she's doing and why she's doing it.

And we're going to dive into that. We're going to open up things to really provide a lot of value for people. And then what we'll do inside of our paid program is we'll actually bring her into our paid program and teach the how behind it, the real granular strategies to execution. Because you can only do so much in a 60-minute live stream, right?

And there's only so much you can provide. So we really do a good job of teaching big principles, overarching principles, in the free content, and then really bringing people into more of a refined process inside of our paid strategy. Very streamlined, very step-by-step, very “execute.”

Like, “Go execute and go crush this thing.” But typically in our free stuff, we'll give like one practical strategy, a couple of things that they can go and get results with right away. But there's a balance. I mean, we pour our hearts out, either way, and people feel that. Landon, I'd love to hear your insights on it cause we've done a lot of these calls.

But I will say like. People watch our free stuff and go make money. But if they want to really create big business, if they weren't really want to scale and have that foundation, they joined our programs. But what would you say on top of that Landon?

Landon Stewart: [00:33:16]

That's perfect. I would say a lot of our free content is belief-based.

So it's basically like what beliefs do people need to have to become a client? So like they need… For us, we're teaching Facebook groups, so like they need to believe they need a Facebook group. They may need to believe they need to purchase quickly. So a lot of, even… Whether it's on live streams or content in the group, it's a lot of like belief based around like the beliefs that we're teaching.

A lot of beliefs they must have that would aid them in purchasing our stuff. And the content we're loving right now in terms of live streams is exactly what you're doing right here, Mike, which is client interviews. It's like some of the best, like, 'cause it's like really valuable. Where a client's sharing, you know, the things that they're doing.

And so people, they're learning a ton, while at the same time they're edifying our paid curriculums. It's showing our clients, that our clients are getting results. So people love watching it. They get value out of it, and it sells better than almost anything else out there.

Mike Mark: [00:34:13]

Yeah.

Chris Stapleton: [00:34:14]

One thing I'll layer on, Mike, I think it'll be valuable for your audience too, is like right now we're in a phase of our business where we do have clients winning, so we're able to bring people out pretty consistently.

In the beginning, it was me and Landon saying, “Hey guys, here's how we're growing our group by 10 members a day.” You know? It's like, “Hey guys, here's how we made our first $10,000 in our group this month,” and “Hey guys…” It was like, more proof based on our results. Taking it to the next level is when you show proof for your clients.

You know what I mean? And one more thing I'll layer on around content is your community will teach you and train you what's hitting them. Mentally, emotionally and psychologically. So use your group as a testing ground to throw out different messaging, to test different hooks and angles on the things that you provide.

Over time like, Landon had a great tip here, like we really talked a lot about beliefs. And we found out the beliefs that needed to be cracked by testing in our group. Like we just would throw out messages and all of a sudden, “Dang, this post blew up by like 200 comments today. Let's turn that into an ad.” You know what I mean?

Or “Hey, people really like this messaging around, this strategy when it comes to Facebook groups, let's build this into our curriculum.” Like, so use your group as a testing ground. ‘Cause they will teach you and train you what's hitting the nail on the head. You know what I mean? So we listen to our community a lot.

We look at feedback. We put content out and we look at data and how they respond to that. And make tweaks inside of our marketing moving forward.

Mike Mark: [00:35:42]

It makes perfect sense. Yeah. And for me, when people will try and skip the sales call part of the scaling, especially if they're running some sort of service-based high ticket business, it's like they're missing exactly what you're describing, which is that testing ground. And like, there's just… You try to say something a certain way and then it hits, kind of, and then you just tweak it just a little bit. And then it's like, you'll see, you say this one thing every time. And every time you say it, people are like, “Oh my God. Yeah!”

And so like for us, one of the things that we often tell our clients is like, you know, you can train a chicken to climb a tree, but it's a lot easier to hire a squirrel. Right? And every time you say it, it's just like, “Aw, shit. Yeah, that's it.” And so, and it's like, you guys kind of even experienced it too, right?

You brought your friend in. He's a good guy. I'm sure he's not being a douchebag. And he gave it a valiant effort, but you're trying to train the chicken to climb the tree. And it's like, once you got a couple squirrels in it's like, “Fuck, this thing's working way better than I would have expected.”

And it's just kind of finding someone who does that thing naturally already, and the pace picks up. So, but that's interesting and like, a group is a great place to figure out what is hitting and then be able to take it to scale. Especially because, like, with the sales calls the challenge or the bottleneck of it is that you can only have one conversation at a time. But it's also the benefit of it, right?

Because when you have one conversation at a time, you really have that intimate feedback loop to know what's working. But with the group, you get that scalability of that feedback loop in the messaging, figuring that out and dialing it in. So that's cool.

Landon Stewart: [00:37:21]

Cause we still, we run paid ads right to our Facebook group. And a lot of the paid ads that we run started off as posts inside of our group that hit, you know what I mean? That does help refine your paid advertising a lot.

Mike Mark: [00:37:34]

Yeah. And that's, I mean, same thing here for us. What we did was people will oftentimes will invite us in to teach in their programs. ‘Cause what we're doing is like so different from what most people are doing. So it's a really good compliment. And then we would go in and teach and I would listen to that feedback loop and it was like…

There would almost always be in one presentation this thing that everybody latches onto, and it was like, all right, sweet. Then we're gonna build that into our pillar content, or we're going to build that into our ads and really start to lean on that heavy. So that's cool. Okay. So a couple of other quick questions.

One would be… How do you bring in traffic if nobody knows about you? So, especially in a way to avoid freebie seekers, free content seekers, so you have that higher quality of people. So how do you avoid, or how do you build that reputation when nobody really even knows who you are?

Landon Stewart: [00:38:29]

Cool. Let's talk about that. So I think there are a few ways that you can do it.

There's the organic method, which is kind of like the classic method where you join a couple of Facebook groups that have your ideal audience in it, and you go into that group and provide value that, like, people that you would want to be your client would find useful.

We don't believe in going into other people's groups and pitching or going into other people's groups and framing every single person who likes your post or anything like that.

But you'll just get some natural play. You know what I mean? Where people just naturally friend request you. Then on your profile, you talk about your Facebook group, and people just naturally come over to it. I think the faster way to do it, and the way that we do it is through advertising, through paid ads right into your Facebook group.

We do use, so we run ads to a bridge page, then into a ManyChat, then into the Facebook group. Or running ads right into the group is probably the fastest way to do it. The main thing you want to do there is you want to do a really good job of using verbiage that like your ideal client would be attracted to.

So for us, when we first started running ads into the group, it was like. “Want us to help you, blah, blah, blah, for free?” And it was just like this big freebie thing of like the big claim, you know what I mean? Easy as can be.

And so we had people joining the Facebook group. We were getting people joining the group for like $1.50 a piece, growing the group at like a hundred people a day, but we're looking at the profile pictures and we're like, “Who are… like, where are… who are these people?”

Mike Mark: [00:39:55]

There are so many dogs and cats on Facebook. That's weird, man.

Landon Stewart: [00:39:59]

Like a truck, you know what I mean? Well, what we do today is… we still, obviously the group is still free to join, so we talk about that in the ad. But a lot of the verbiage is like more high-level, that like a higher-level person would be attracted to and that our ideal client would be attracted to.

So today we're paying, you know… we were paying a $1.50 or so per group member then… today we're paying $5 to $7, maybe $8 per group member. But the group members we're getting are just so high quality that like the return on ad spend is still way higher. Even paying more per lead.

In the beginning of our business it was, “let's get the cheapest lead possible.” Now it's like we couldn't give a fuck about the lead cost. Like, let's get the best lead possible.

Mike Mark: [00:40:40]

Yup.

Chris Stapleton: [00:40:40]

That's again, a great example of less is more.

Mike Mark: [00:40:43]

Yeah, that's it. Comes back to it. And it's a huge myth. I mean, like, there's this sort of fallacy in people's minds that, “Oh, if I get leads for $20, if I cut my lead costs to $10 then all of a sudden I'm going to double my leads and I'm going to double my sales.”

And it's like, “Ehhh, I don't think you've run that much traffic, cause that ain't how that thing works.” Cool guys. so where can people find you if they wanted to learn more?

Landon Stewart: [00:41:07]

Join our group. So we've got our free Facebook group. It's called Clients & Community. It is “&” sign so if you're searching for it I think you do have to do the “&” sign. So Clients “&” Community, and it's a group for coaches and course creators. That's kind of the last half. So “Clients & Community: a group for coaches and course creators.”

Feel free to join it, check out where we're doing inside of our group. Steal some of our secrets. You know what I mean?

Mike Mark: [00:41:29]

Yup. Cool. And any parting words for the people.

Chris Stapleton: [00:41:36]

You know, I think if you're watching this right now and you have a group or you're thinking about starting a group, it's time to double down on it. There's a massive transition happening on social media right now, and you could probably start to see it if you're not researching it on your own.

But you're going to notice a few things. Number one is Mark Zuckerberg as the founder of Facebook, and the team at large at Facebook right now, their number one initiative is to make groups just as central as friends. He's actually announced that at the F8 conference, and there are some reasons why we've got our beliefs on why they're transitioning Facebook into more of a group platform.

But you can see it everywhere. The Superbowl commercials, the radio ads, the TV commercials, the changes on the actual platform itself, the featured groups. There's actually a group newsfeed now, so there's a big transition happening. We feel in the next two to three years you can really get a sense of where they're headed to build micro-communities at large.

So if you're watching this, like double down on it, spend time learning why groups are important, why community's important. We really feel like the people that are going to build big businesses over the next, you know, two, three, five, ten years are going to be doing a really good job of creating culture businesses.

Like community-based businesses that have a culture to it. So we're studying culture at the highest level. We're going all-in on building communities, and we feel Facebook groups are just a great opportunity right now. Especially with the way advertising, with rising ad costs, with just attention deficit at large.

Like people's attention spans are going less and less every day. So we're finding that groups are a really good way to capture that and create that ecosystem. And they've done studies at Facebook that, one of the things that Mark just announced recently is they've done studies that scientifically prove that people are happier inside of groups than they are scrolling the random newsfeed.

So they're like making adjustments to the platform based on data, like, science. So, really just interesting to think where the Internet's headed as a whole and going more from like, “Macro,” where it's like big mass followings, everyone following you, to more “Micro” communities. So we feel that's a huge transition on the internet right now and we want to be ahead of that.

Mike Mark: [00:43:50]

Yeah, there's a couple of guys that we worked with and they were partners, and the one guy had a 1.2 million person following on Instagram and the other one had a 55,000 person following on Instagram. And the guy with the 55,000 follower audience outperformed the 1.2 million audience every day of the week. Like not even a competition, not even close, like 80 to 90% of their revenue.

And they push just as hard on both platforms, but it all came from the smaller audience. So, definitely a testament to the small audience. And like with group growth, I mean, there's a few things just to kind of back up what you're saying. The big one is Facebook transitioned their core principle or core value from “Connection” to “Community” because they felt that community was a higher value than connection alone.

Chris Stapleton: [00:44:39]

Let's add that to our marketing, fellas.

Landon Stewart: [00:44:41]

Yeah, I love that.

Mike Mark: [00:44:42]

Yeah. So that's, that's huge. And then, in addition to that, the actual experience of groups is more fun. You know, like, it's crazy how, I notice on my feed, everything's groups. I participate in some groups, especially more like hobby groups, I find even more fun in the hobby groups that I'm like, kind of like enthusiastic about.

And it's like when I'm in those groups, that's where I get the most joy while being on social media, aside from like, obviously the client wins and stuff like that. But it's cool. And what you guys are saying is a big part of it. And then the third part to back up, just kind of the “betting on community” is the network effects.

So if you study just math and systems and like how we run our shit in our business… Like, one of our biggest principles is “In data we trust.” And so everything's mathematical based. Everything's statistically based. Everything is, we're running on scientific models and math. And, inside of that, like “network effects.”

If you just Google network effects, you study the simple math behind network effects, you'll be amazed and then it will make you want to double down on Facebook groups.

Chris Stapleton: [00:45:54]

Awesome, dude.

Mike Mark: [00:45:56]

Thanks for taking some time out guys. I think everybody appreciated it. If you guys have any other questions, just drop them below in the comments.

If you're catching this on the replay, drop those questions below in the comments. And then we'll circle back and just kind of make sure you guys have all your questions answered. If you joined us live, thanks for joining us live. I hope you got a lot out of it. what I'd like you guys to do is comment your biggest takeaway below.

Just, what was that like “light bulb moment” for you? What was that big “aha” for you? And then share that as well. Partly, just for your own self, 'cause if you document it, it's going to help make it a part of you. But then as well, so other people can see and we can have a better conversation around that.

Chris Stapleton: [00:46:36]

Beautiful. So feel free, if anyone wants to tag us three for questions, let us know. We're in your group now.

Mike Mark: [00:46:44]

Cool. Yeah. And we'll tag you if anything comes in or if you guys got a question in the audience. Tag them specifically if there's someone that you want to ask.