Leads & Referrals with Joel Johnson

"Foreign."

Stuart: Hey everyone, welcome to another book more show. You're going to love today's episode. Yesterday, Dean recorded an interview with one of our authors, Joel Johnson. Joel owns an investment company up in the northeast and has been using 90 minute book style books to attract clients with various different needs, all in his business. It really is a fantastic behind the scenes look into his success marketing campaign and then obviously how it can apply to you. So towards the end of the talk, the conversation turns to referrals and there's an amazing breakthrough to orchestrate very specific referrals using Joel's book Forced to Retire. I think that's going to be interesting for anyone that's looking to engage more customers from an existing customer base. As I say, really fantastic episode for anyone considering a book or really for looking at other ways to leverage theirs. So if you're ready to get started on yours, just head over to 90minutebooks.com and hit the get started button. In the meantime, grab a coffee, grab a pen and listen in as Dean and Joel talk about their campaign.

Joel Johnson: Joel Johnson.

Joel Johnson: Dean Jackson, how are you?

Joel Johnson: I am good. I'll tell you what, I am sitting in my evil scheme hatching chair with my evil scheme hatching pad and pen and I'm ready.

Joel Johnson: Well, I'm here at the Renaissance in Boca Raton, Florida, just being a man of the people, doing one honest hour of work today, which is talking with you.

Joel Johnson: Oh, perfect. I love it. So what kind of evil schemes are we going to hatch today?

Joel Johnson: Well, I don't know. How do we come up with one?

Joel Johnson: Okay, let's catch up on what's been happening in your before unit and then we can talk about your. We talk about your after unit too. But maybe bring me up to speed on what's been happening with your, your book efforts because I know that's been a really great lead generator for you and then how some of you talk about how that works and we can see what we can do to.

Joel Johnson: Great, excellent. Yeah, the books have been great. So I have one sort of big book that I wrote a while back before you and I ever met.

Joel Johnson: And actually we should probably set the stage for what. For what business you're in too. Yeah. Because I know you and we know

Joel Johnson: what he helps does.

Joel Johnson: That's right.

Joel Johnson: Yeah.

Joel Johnson: Tell people what kind of business you're in.

Joel Johnson: So I am the majority owner of an investment firm and we specialize in helping people that are either already retired or getting close to retirement invest in a conservative way so they can basically take income off of. Of what They've saved. And so we're a full blown investment firm for those in the business. I'm a registered investment advisor, FCC registered. So we manage hundreds of millions of dollars. And I have six other financial advisors that work for me, with me. And so I'm kind of the rainmaker of the company. I'm in charge of setting the strategic direction of the company, leading the company. We have 25 total employees, including those six advisors. I create and generate all the leads, set the tone of the company. And we market through tv. I have a TV program. I'm on the TV news on a big network affiliate in Connecticut every Sunday morning. I also have a half hour radio show that we market through. And we do public seminars. So we do direct mail. I'm a strong believer in direct mail. We drop about 25 to 30,000 pieces of direct mail every month to drive people to a public seminar. And then we have a after unit program where we generate constant referrals and introduction through our existing clients. So we just do a ton of direct marketing to feed lots of introductory appointments for prospective clients to those financial advisors that see the people in my during unit. And of course then we try to hold on to those relationships as long as possible in the after unit.

Joel Johnson: That's awesome. That's a great summary. Sounds like you. But you know, there's. The thing is, you've been studying this process for a while and we're down the road there. So let's catch up on the book offer. So you're offering people the,

Joel Johnson: the book

Joel Johnson: from the TV show, from the radio show. People go to the website or call in and ask for it. What's your book called again?

Joel Johnson: So we have several books. I try to, you know, I have, I have a book called the Money Map which talks about our financial retirement, our planning process. And that's my big book. And I actually do not offer that through a direct response medium. They get that book when they come in after their first consultation. The books I use to hook people in for that first consultation to generate interest in the business are much more the Dean Jackson oriented type books. There's one called Forced to Retire and Forced to Retire talks about so many people up in the northeast part of the country are getting these early retirement offers or they're not offers. They're, you know, they're, you're going to retire earlier than you thought. And so we just, you know, you talk about having a constant flow of, of new prospects every year. Those are people that find out they're having to retire earlier than they thought. So I wrote a book called Forced to Retire and we offer that. There's another one called the 2016 Guide to Maximizing your retirement income, which of course, you know, once I wrote a 2014 guide, then it's easy to do a 2015 guide. A 2016 guy, guess what's coming out in about three months here? The 2017 guy. So, so let's see what else. So I have, I have a few books like that that when we can't make a direct call to action, like through the radio show, it's a direct call to action for the appointment. But for tv, I'm on the news desk, I'm, I'm part of the news. And we can't do a hard call to action there. So we offer a resource. And many times it's these little books which are just wonderful. They're these easy books. It's your 90 minute book process that before you had that 90 minute book process, I kind of talked with you and you know, before you kind of packaged it, told me how to do it. And it works, it works fantastically. And the key to those books, I think is the title and getting super, super specific about what the book is about. Instead of being general in nature, I

Joel Johnson: think that we've hit on something and you're executing this flawlessly in the fact that you've got the Money map, which is your big book, that is your overriding approach to everything, right? It's the way that you approach the whole, the whole thing. And that book, you know, is something that a lot of times people have the big book in them, as Dan Sullivan calls it. You know, the book capital, Capital B. And it takes a long time to write and to get a book like that together. It's worth doing because it's the culmination of all of your philosophies, all of your approach, everything like that. It really just like you said, when you're meeting somebody and they come in and you sit down with them, it's a great way to kind of set the stage and to get everybody on the same page so they know the way you're thinking. But these little books that we have been talking about, these 90 minute books, have such an incredible focusing power that you can focus on specific segments of the market just to get the conversation started. And I really have seen nothing that works as well as a little, you know, a really meaningfully titled book to compel people to raise their hand.

Joel Johnson: Well, correct. The big book. The big book basically represents 12 years and millions of dollars of missed opportunity which, which I could have done with a 90 minute book.

Joel Johnson: Right.

Joel Johnson: And, and who, who knows? I mean I might be nationwide now instead of, you know, it's a northeast. Right. Yeah.

Joel Johnson: I think that's the thing is that you're, I think you hit on something there that people often kind of, you know, sit in the gestation of their big book waiting years and years and years to get it out there. Yeah. So have you read Robert Cialdini's new book just came out called Pre Suasion?

Joel Johnson: No, I have not.

Joel Johnson: Oh, it's so fantastic. It's all, it totally puts like now clinical and experimental support to all the things that we've been doing. And he basically, you know, the book Influence was a tremendous like wisdom book that talks about the six weapons of influence. Have you read that one? I'm sure you have.

Joel Johnson: Yes. Well, I've read bits and pieces of it because, you know, I have this gift of a short attention span. But I've read enough of that and implemented enough of that to know that that book was a game changer, especially understanding things like reciprocity and giving. Giving value before you charge for it. You know, that the whole marketing world, if we can go off on a little bit of a, you know, back in the day, maybe 12 and 15 years ago, and even being in strategic coach, it used to be don't give away your wisdom until you get paid. And I think in my world, if we insisted on that, there would be too many opportunities for us to lose somebody that's genuinely interested in talking to us. That if we just gave them a little bit of value, we get to meet them now. So the whole Chowney book really changed my mind on that. And of course guys like you and the people we hang out with where you, you can add value and you can add really life changing content to somebody and you're not, you're not, they don't, they don't leave saying I've got everything I can from this person. It just makes you more attractive to the right people.

Joel Johnson: And that's. So now his latest, you know, the years that he's been working on this, he's identified what he calls pre suiters, which is things that amplify the effect of influence if you do them prior to the things that he talks about. So some of the things that are like on a meta level, setting up the frame that you're coming into. And I was thinking about like the, the book as a, it pre frames everything. It sets up commitment and consistency. Which is one of the principles that he talks about where if you're, you know, if you've asked for the 2016 guide to maximizing your retirement income and you then are presented an opportunity to meet with someone or come to another workshop or to carry on down that path, you're, you know, it's like you're much more likely to do that because you self selected yourself as somebody who's interested in that or you've self identified yourself as somebody who's been forced to retire. So the fact that they're starting the conversation by raising their hand and associating themselves with a desire for what the title of your book is offering, they're already now pre framed, ready to be influenced in our profit activator three, you know, our lead conversion kind of process. So that's why when you say, now that you've got your book, here are three ways we can help you, you're setting it up to now lead the rest of the way. And one of the other things that you've done with the book is you've framed yourself as an authority, which really has amazing, amazing impact on people's receptiveness to any instruction or guidance or offer that you make when you're viewed as an authority. And a book is just one of those, you know, inherently having a book is a, an indicator of being an authority. People immediately associate you with being an authority. With that.

Joel Johnson: Yeah. And Cialdini talks about that of course, in his first book a lot about positioning yourself in authority and exclusivity and just all that great stuff. So I'm looking forward to seeing that. I did not know he came out with another book.

Joel Johnson: It's so good. So when you look at the profit activator 3, your, your conversion process here, what kind of things are you doing in there now and how's that kind of going? How do you, how do you measure the effectiveness of the long term follow up with the people who ask for the book? How are you handling that right now?

Joel Johnson: Well, so again, that kind of depends on which channel they come in through asking for the book. So when they ask for the book, let's just say they ask for the book on tv. Let's pretend they. Because we do some Facebook ads, we do some other targeted ads where we can really target a certain company when we know there's layoffs going on and so on. But let's say they asked for the book on TV where it's really a soft or it's a soft sell. What's happening is after they get the book, we've captured their email address. And by the way, we're sending a physical book, we're not sending an ebook. I believe there's value in sending a physical book. So we've captured their email address and we've captured obviously their, their address and so on. Sometimes we have the phone number and sometimes we don't. Many times we don't. But we're sending out your letter that you helped me format, Dean, that has the three ways you can help you. So that's the key is at the bottom because especially if they've come from tv, you know, we don't, we don't go hard sell and we don't right away start calling. Not at all. Right. It's not the highly trained people because that, that'll shut that down real quick. So we send them out. A real

Joel Johnson: people are standing by.

Joel Johnson: A highly trained salesperson will pick up the phone and not let you go. So especially during election season, people don't really want to talk to anybody because of the phone calls everybody's getting. But so we send out a very nice letter and it's, it's basically says thank you for, for asking for the book. I don't know specifically what it says, but the key is the PS and the pfo. There are three ways we can help you right now, and one is they can ask for another report of some sort and I'm not sure specifically what it is right now. The next one is they can attend a seminar and the next one is that they can come in for a no obligation visit to get their money map retirement review. And then we say a little bit about what that is, but that's the name of our process that people come into and get if they come in for a first appointment. And so we're generating all these leads and enough people call where we generate quite a few appointments. And those that don't, you know, we'll send in their follow up if we have their email address. We'll do the email mastery thing that you teach, which is, you know, we'll send out just a little email a few weeks later saying, hey, you got my book a few weeks back, by the way, are you working? Are you retired? That's our mm, that's our, that's our question. And then they'll of course engage at it. And then we're in an email dialogue and I pass that off course to one of the other advisors that sort of walks them through a templated email dialogue again, trying to see if they have any interest in talking and if we can engage them in a conversation, then we slowly try to get them offline. Our sale tap takes place. Our during unit is a face to face. Almost everything about our process culminates in that being face to face in the financial services business. Yes. Yeah.

Joel Johnson: That's awesome. And then what happens when you're ongoing. What's your flagship vehicle for bonding with all of the people who've asked for the book and they've got the letter and they haven't maybe taken us up on the offer right away? What's the ongoing. What's the ongoing thing that you're doing right now there?

Joel Johnson: There's a weekly economic update.

Joel Johnson: Okay.

Joel Johnson: That I do, which is sort of a templated update on the financial markets and what's going on in the economy. And just basic. Basically it's not real technical in nature. It's not like a stock market newsletter. It's really just a real basic thing on. What's that. You know, right now I would be talking about, you know, how the election might affect your portfolio or. Yeah. You know, based on what's happening. So it's just a nice, simple weekly economic thing where they're just getting touched. And every once in a while, you know, every. Probably every other time they get one of those, there will be an offer in there to maybe get another resource or a white paper or giveaway or something like that. So it's just constant, real soft engagement where people raise their hand when they're ready and after a while people will go away forever and get taken off the list. But enough people are raising their hand where we constantly fill the calendars.

Joel Johnson: Have you incorporated a super signature in that email yet? What I mean by that is that in every. It's coming back to me now because I remember when Laurie came to. To Celebration, we talked about that your. Your flagship, that weekly email that goes out is incorporating into that a

Joel Johnson: super

Joel Johnson: signature that has your offers like your cookies each. Each time it goes out, like, say almost like at the end of every one of those saying whenever you're ready, here are three ways we can help you.

Joel Johnson: She may have done that and I wouldn't even be aware if she did that.

Joel Johnson: Okay. So I was going to say that that sort of just continually presencing the what to do next, you know, and sometimes those are the kind of magic words is that if you just let people know that's kind of secretly what they're looking for is here's what to do next. And even if you use those Words. Here's what to do next.

Joel Johnson: Well, that's the mistake we made so many years in this business is we just figured people would know what they're supposed to do next. And they don't know. You know, they don't know. And you know, Frank Kern talks about that, about, you know, that's where so many marketing campaigns fall short. You know, we tell them what we have, we tell them how it's going to help them and we forget to tell them what to do.

Joel Johnson: Right.

Joel Johnson: And, and so, and, and so we've really learned that over the last few years, which is our, I can tell you this, our tv, because it's such a soft offer, would not be profitable if we had not learned to tell people what to do next. Yeah, we would just, I mean, we're, we're getting a, we're getting a profitable return on that where when we started that the real intent was just to build credibility for our other marketing channels. But if we hadn't learned that super important lesson, which, which I will still forget to this day from time to time of telling people just in simple terms, here's what to do. You'll pick up the phone or send us an email asking for your book. People won't, they won't figure it out. And then we think, you know, we're failures or people are idiots. Well, they're not idiots. We forgot to tell them what to do.

Joel Johnson: Right. That's exactly right. You got to be explicit. And so that, you know, a lot of times people are sort of hesitant to, they don't want to be pushy or they don't want to seem aggressive or trying to, you know, convince people to do something. And I'm all for that. I don't want to do that either. The way that we can do it is, you know, in every email having the, you know, the end of the email always contain, here's what to do next. Or whenever you're ready, here's three ways we can help you. Or if you're sending out that one email to everybody, like, so you, you've got people who get into that, into that group, your profit activator. Three pool of prospects, right? Unconverted prospects. All the people that have responded to your TV offer or come to one of your seminars or responded for anything, whatever, you get those email addresses, that's what you've, that's what you've got and that's who's getting this, this email every week. So it's might be a nice thing at the bottom of the Emails to include your book offers like the little books that you have. Because somebody who may be called in on the 2016 Guide to Maximizing your retirement, they might not know that you

Joel Johnson: have

Joel Johnson: the forced to retire book or the Social Security book or the annuities guide or whatever, you know, all the, the sort of hot button things that, that people have, you know, and if you had those available as a ride along in every email that you're sending out, you'd be amazed how many people would click on those, you know. So I like, I'll model that with the, the more cheese, less whiskers announcement emails. You know, they're always saying, you know, whenever you're ready, here's, here's some ways we can help you. You know, and I mentioned you can go to Breakthrough DNA and download the Breakthrough DNA book and watch the video to get a real good understanding of the eight profit activators. You can come to a breakthrough blueprint in celebration. I've got two coming up this fall, so I'm kind of like laying it out. You know, I've got one in October, one in December. You can do help. We can help you with a 90 minute book, you know, get your book out there. So all of the things that we're, that we're saying are all present in every email and they're kind of below the PS So you get the main essence of your, of your message which is to announce your weekly summary, you know what your market commentary that you have. And that format is great because you get to kind of make it seem like a real person is doing it and then at the end have all of these resources. I think it would be make a difference in the number of people who kind of take the next step.

Joel Johnson: I love it.

Joel Johnson: Yeah, I think that's a pretty good evil scheme for you to measure that, you know. Now here's something you'll love this because I have just been formulating. This is, I've always been, you know, I'm big on metrics and I always look at how can we monitor things. Like in our after unit, we measure the return on relationship, right? How much business are you getting relative to the number of clients that you have? And that's a measurable, knowable number that we can improve year after year. The number that in the before unit. I've been kind of thinking about how to really get the best way to think about that and to allow for the compounding effect of this. And there's been a few different things that have kind of really pushed Me over the edge on this. Like, it's just. It seems like we're. So we look at measuring the before unit in terms of, well, on a calendar basis, we spent this much on the ads and we generated this much business. So our, you know, we talk about a multiplier, right? We got a 4 to 1 or a 3 to 1 on our, on our spend there, which, which accounts for it, but it does it in sort of a snapshot kind of way, you know, and it never really accounts for the value of the difference in the leads that you generated in January versus the leads that you generated in December. Right. It's putting equal weight on the, on the spend. And to me, that kind of seems like an expense model of measuring the return on marketing that way. And so what I've really started playing with and thinking about is turning that spend, thinking about it as a capital investment and looking at the return on your ongoing capital assets. So what I mean by that is that you've been running the TV ads and you've been doing. Or the TV show and the radio show and spending money on direct mail and all the things that you've done, and you've generated an asset from that. Right. Which is the name and email and the address of somebody who raised their hand to identify themselves. And if we think about. If we think about each one of those as an asset and the collective of them as an asset portfolio, that is like Warren Buffett kind of talks about the snowball, you know, like your snowball is bigger and bigger each year because you're generating and adding to it new leads that you. New people that have identified themselves but not yet become clients. And the value of that. Some of those people gestate for 30 days, and some of those people gestate for 30 months, and, you know, it's different. They would not show up in any sort of regular measurement of how your advertising is working. You know, so it's.

Joel Johnson: If you're not, you're saying if you're not measuring that, if you're, if you're not careful, if you're not careful, they don't. Right. If you're not careful, we've learned to be very careful about that measurement because you can assume you've got all kinds of, like, with the amount of market, you know, our marketing budget this year will be a million and a half dollars, which, which is small compared to some people listening to this podcast. But in my business, for an independent financial services firm, that's a pretty big marketing budget. In fact, it'll probably be 1.8 million. And so we have to be very, very careful. The stakes are much higher now, you know, with my overhead and all the employees. So we've learned to be very careful like we used to assume. You know, the primitive mistake that a lot of people in my business make is you say, I spent. You know, so here we are, we're having this conversation in September. You look at July and you'll say, Well, I spent $10,000 in July and I had 30,000 in revenues in July. Therefore my profit on everything put together is three to one. Well, no, not because. Because the 30,000 didn't come from July spend, it came from marches spend. Now we're so sophisticated, we don't even see it as coming from marches spend. We know that some of it came from the year before.

Joel Johnson: So there's a bell even the year before.

Joel Johnson: And then you write. Exactly. And you start to, you start to track these things. And the more specific. I was just having a conversation with somebody about data and I get really excited about it because there's magic in the data. The more you can analyze the data. And some of us as entrepreneurs, we are not the people that should be analyzing our own data that somebody else there. There are people that are gifted at finding patterns and data that can mean the difference between you, you know, exploding and being a huge business and you just struggling along to maybe have a great lifestyle, but never really coming over that hump to that full potential you could have because there's so much magic. The data, the data talks to you in patterns and things like that. When you really start looking at all these things and sometimes we're too close to the action running our businesses to step back and see it.

Joel Johnson: Mm. So one of the things that we've been doing to measure this now is to measure the cumulative ROI on it, starting with like tracking the spend and tracking the revenue on a cumulative basis. So it goes. It can be three or four or five years out to show how that all comes because it's been really fascinating to observe since I really started looking at it in that long term way. I had a episode four or five with Kenny McCarthy. He's a realtor in Cape Ann just north of Boston. And he's been doing our getting listings program for waterfront homes in Cape Ann. There's a thousand homes there. And so he's been mailing every month the getting listings postcards offering the free September 2016 report on Cape and waterfront house prices. And then each month he mails them the how to Sell your house for top dollar, fast booklet book, along with

Joel Johnson: the

Joel Johnson: report on what's been going on on the Waterfront homes for the last year. And then each month he emails them a newsletter called Get Top Dollar and a cover letter and updates of all the new sales that have happened on the waterfront in the last month, including some information. We have a section called Helping people on the Move, which kind of shows all the different kinds of people that Kenny's working with. So that's all. That's the profit activator 3 mechanism. No phone calls, never calls anybody, just serving, you know, sending that out to them. And in one 90 day period this spring leading up to the summer here, he had three people call him who've been getting that newsletter for three years, who were now ready to sell their house. He sent me a voicemail of one of them. This lady had been getting it. She said she had a bit of an accent. She said, I get your paperwork every month, meaning the newsletter. And you talk about this silent market. I have some questions about that. Can you give me a call? And left her number. And you know, he goes in conversation with her. She's got a $4.2 million house that she's selling and then gets the same types of calls one guy been getting for just under three years is ready to sell his house. Kenny's the guy who's been getting their postcards and newsletters. We're ready to sell. Come on out. That's a $2.8 million house and another $1.2 million house. So all of that on the postcards that he sent three years ago. And so that, you know, the spend, it's almost like the compound interest tables. You know, all the benefit of a compound interest table is in the end that's where it gets like exponential, you know.

Joel Johnson: Right. We could get very impatient as entrepreneurs and quit. You know, there's a saying in other circles. Don't quit before the miracle happens. And you just. Right. I look back at my career and think about, you know, all the revenue that's been left on the table because I decided something. I decided something wasn't working, you know, and if I just would have hung in there for sometimes another month, you know, it would have turned the corner and I'm on to the next thing. Building a whole new program. Right. Building a whole new. Now we're off to something that now it's going to take, you know, sometimes 90 days to six months to even figure out if it's going to work or not. When. If I would have just been smarter about the last thing. It's so true. And now what we do is now we can measure. We know I can go back and say, well, let's look at all the prospects, the little batch of prospects that came in in February of 2015, and let's just sort of look at what happened to all those people. And it's fascinating to look at that because you'll find out that you think, right, as a salesperson, you might think that, you know, everything happened after four months and it was, you know, that's when you got most of the juice out of it. And you'll see all of a sudden that in the 15th month, all of a sudden just a lot of things happen. And then you look at the other batches of people and say, well, is that a pattern? And it's amazing and many times it's very, very inexpensive to keep touching those people. Especially if we're doing email type of marketing. Although I'm a big fan of, you know, you do email for a while, but every once in a while you drop that direct mail piece just because, just because nobody else is doing it.

Joel Johnson: And I think that rhythm, like you've probably got a great case to test a quarterly journal type of mailing that you could do to some of these prospects as a, as a test, you know, mailing like you do every week that goes, every week's going out, the,

Joel Johnson: the email, the weekly economic update. Yeah, yeah, that's a great idea. We haven't done that. We haven't done that at all to our. We could easily do that once a quarter. Just send out something that's a nice two page little piece. Yeah.

Joel Johnson: And that's, that's the thing, right? Is now you've got the opportunity because your asset, your profit activator 3 asset is pretty. It's long term. Now how many people do you have that get those weekly emails right now?

Joel Johnson: I would have to ask Lori, but it's probably 8 or 9,000.

Joel Johnson: Yeah, perfect. So you look at that and you've got that many people right now that, that, you know, at that level you.

Joel Johnson: That would include client. That would include clients, Dean.

Joel Johnson: So we want to separate those.

Joel Johnson: Our 2,300 households that we serve are also in that group.

Joel Johnson: Okay, so let's call it then 6000.

Joel Johnson: 6000 that are not clients yet. Okay, fair enough.

Joel Johnson: 6000 that are not clients. And that, you know, when we look at that, that is your, that's your asset under management right now.

Joel Johnson: Right.

Joel Johnson: You in your before unit. So somebody, Lori or The person in charge of that asset. It's almost like you talk about data and you talk about those. You know, talk about knowing the numbers and mining the data and managing the relationship with those. I, you know, if you take that financial approach, you know, it's almost like you've got an asset that you could apply your kind of analysis and yield analysis to really look at what can we do? And the great thing is that you can actually affect the return on that. Like right now, these numbers are there. Whether that's the great thing about data is that it's all there. But there's a real skill set and wisdom in turning that data into information. And the information is what is kind of where you can be guided, you know, so if we knew, if we had perfect knowledge, like our friend Peter Diamandis calls it, perfect knowledge of all

Joel Johnson: of the

Joel Johnson: data, that we would be able to see how much the cumulative ROI on all of these 6,000 prospects, or, you know, a good number of those 2,300 have graduated into that 2300 from the. Through that process, you know.

Joel Johnson: Correct. Correct.

Joel Johnson: And so looking at that, setting up a metric that. Or a set of metrics that is actionable, you know, that you can measure and hold someone accountable for. If you say, let's treat it like this person is in this role, this person owns this metric and is fully tasked with what can we do to improve this metric, to build more relationships. Right? The whole thing about Profit Activator three, that asset that you have is to deploy offers in profit activator 4, that move people into your during year.

Joel Johnson: Right. And the key there is having somebody that's accountable for it, which remind me, we'll come back to it, but I want to tell you a story about that in our. In our Turing unit.

Joel Johnson: Go ahead. Let's talk about that now.

Joel Johnson: For a long time. Because I am so good in my company, and we've gotten so good at filling the funnel in 1, 2, and 3 and feeding these financial advisors these appointments where they're just set up to do these appointments. The idea of generating consistent introductions, referrals, we call them introductions in the, in the during unit for a client that's been there for a year, two years, three years, or four years, they're not. They're not motivated, they're not incentivized to do it because it's not a quick payoff, right? That the quick payoff is I sit with somebody today, and out of every four people I sit with today, one of those people or two of those People is going to become a client in a week or two. That's a quick rush for somebody that's in a. In the mode of a hunter. Right. And so, so the mode of sitting with somebody that's been a client for four years and getting a referral or an introduction and then cultivating that referral or introduction and so on. Well, it's a lot easier for those, those guys, which are sales guys at heart, to just wait for me to feed their calendar for the next week. Right. So we said, well, let's, let's make somebody. So we've got this during unit, this asset that's all these clients, most of them happy. And so I just took a person that's in Lori on Lori's team. She has five people on our team, marketing team, and said we're going to have her own this program. This is going to be a program. We're going to incentivize her for it. She's going to track her own data and she's going to talk to the advisors about it. And we're going to have a little contest and we're going to set up the same competition that the sales guys love to have with each other. Any sales guy loves, you know, he's not a true sales guy, I don't think. If he doesn't like to compete with other sales guys.

Joel Johnson: Prize is a Cadillac second prize, the set of sticks, right?

Joel Johnson: Yeah, well, yeah, quite like that. We have to be careful here in the financial services business about that kind of stuff. But they love to compete. They just love to compete. They like to know at the end of the week they did better than the guy in the desk next to them. So we said, okay, well, let's build that, but let's have somebody else responsible for that. And so we've got Cindy, who was responsible for helping with my help and Lori's input, building that program out. And it's working wonderfully. And now all of a sudden, we've built this culture of that. But we've made it easier for the financial advisors to. Because they don't want to follow up. You know, they don't want to follow up. I mean, yeah, I'm a sales guy. Okay, you tell me that you're gonna give me five appointments tomorrow and, and, and, or, or call the five people you saw last week to see how they're doing. I'm gonna just see the five guys tomorrow and lie to you and tell you that I called the five people yesterday. Right, right. So you've got to take you got to treat them like big babies and take it off their plat. And part of that, I say that facetiously, but part of it is just like, you know, any superstar athlete, a good coach knows you keep them doing what they're great at doing and take the things they're good at. And maybe they shouldn't be doing the things they're good at, they should only be doing things they're great at. So we took that entire process and it's real fresh and it's real new, but it's working amazingly well. I mean, we're getting, you know, we're getting now sometimes one or two new clients a week through that process where before it was, you know, maybe one or two a month. Yeah. And we haven't even, we haven't even started refining it yet. So it's very, very exciting. I don't remember why I started talking about it, but it's very, very exciting when you, when you take something like that where, you know, oh, I know why, because we're talking about this asset. So we have this asset that's our port clients that we can mine for these introductions.

Joel Johnson: But yeah, I mean, there you go.

Joel Johnson: You have to create a process that runs by itself because if you have to, if, if you're a fast running sales guy or entrepreneur and you have to go into the office and start a process every day, left to your own devices, if you're like me, you're not going to do that. It's got to be automatic. It's got to be somewhere. I show up and I perform. Like Dan Sullivan says, you know, you just show up and perform because everything is there, set up for you.

Joel Johnson: Yes, that's exactly right.

Joel Johnson: Yeah.

Joel Johnson: I mean you're. So we've been talking about your, you know, the assets that you, you have that profit activator 3 is the pool of assets that are of prospects that have not yet turned into clients. And then in your after unit, that 2300 or 2600.

Joel Johnson: Did you say 2300?

Joel Johnson: You got 2,300 families under management right now. And that process, that is your after unit. And when you look at that like the metric that we look for is your return on relationship. And so if that 2,300 families, you know, there's two ways that that can grow. Number one, they can add more assets or you know, bring. Sometimes people start out with maybe a portion of their assets with you and then they can bring the rest of them kind of thing after you prove yourself. Or they can refer their friends and family or people they know. And that's one thing that you're kind of describing there that you can focus on. And so we count that number. That's your profit activator.

Joel Johnson: 8.

Joel Johnson: Orchestrating referrals. So we measure the return on relationship as the number of new clients that were introduced by people in your after unit year over year. So what we look for is in the. And each. Each business, you have to set a metric for yourself. But when we look on the real estate side, where real estate agents have a. They may know 150 people, you know, as the people who know them, like them, and trust them and that they are, we're looking to manage that relationship portfolio for a 20% annual yield, meaning that if you're, if you've got 150 people, you should be able to generate 30 transactions from that group of people. And so we see that happening again and again. Now when you look at. As a firm, that's your. You've got a lot more families under management than like an individual advisor would. Because an individual Advisor currently have 100. They may have 150 people more like.

Joel Johnson: Right. An individual advisor. If you can officially manage 200 relationships, that's pretty hard to do as an individual advisor.

Joel Johnson: Yeah, right. So when you look at your 2,300 families there, do you measure a return on relationship that formally like we do,

Joel Johnson: we measure it two ways. We measure it on how many introductions we get, how many of those introductions convert. So that's one way. The other way is we measure how much, how much new money those people are bringing to us, which, because the larger financially, the larger the client. For instance, if you have a household that has $400,000 total in savings that they're able to invest, we may get that right away on the first commitment they make to us. But if you have a household that has $2 million to invest, it's rare that you get that whole thing on the first commitment. So constantly measuring, you know, that person might commit to you a third of their assets and then see how the relationship goes. And then after six months to a year, then you get another piece. And then maybe after two years you have it all if you do a good job. So we're also constantly measuring how much do those people give us in additional funds, which, you know, we need to be a little more sophisticated in that because there are some people that just can't. Don't have the ability to give us more. And we don't really separate that out right now, but we absolutely measure in Two or three different ways. The yield on our existing relationships in that during unit. Mm.

Joel Johnson: Or then your after unit. Because the during unit.

Joel Johnson: In my after unit. I'm sorry, right. My after unit. My after unit.

Joel Johnson: During the serving the new. The people. Right. What. Doing what you do. So one of the things that, I mean, do you know any of those numbers in terms of the referrals?

Joel Johnson: I know the referral number. I'm embarrassed to tell you. It's way too low. It's about 4%.

Joel Johnson: Okay.

Joel Johnson: We get introduced to about 120. We get introduced to about 100 to 100. Last year we were introduced to about 100 to 120 new households. Okay.

Joel Johnson: And those were.

Joel Johnson: It should be much higher than that.

Joel Johnson: Those were the ones that turned into clients or that those.

Joel Johnson: No, about. About half of those turn into clients. And it's interesting there also, Dean, is we take. The other thing that's interesting, is an interesting dynamic in my business is that there are. Our average revenue per client from the referral channel is the lowest of all our other channels. And here's why. Because if somebody refers me their friend or their family member and they're maybe not somebody that we would normally take on as a client because they don't quite have the assets, we're still going to take them on. Which is kind of an interesting. But that's just a sidebar. But I think, you know, you've always given me this 20% target. So when I look at the fact that, you know, 20% of 2300 is 460. Right. So that's kind of the thing that. That's the number we're kicking around the office is how do we generate 460 introductions. Yeah, right. From these people.

Joel Johnson: Well, you want me to help you hatch an evil scheme for that?

Joel Johnson: Yeah, let's. Let's do it. We got a little time here. Right. We got five more minutes or something. Let's come up with some schemes. We're working on them right now.

Joel Johnson: I mean, you know, this is very interesting because I was in London in June and the fifth breakthrough blueprint I did in London and I have this financial advisor there who's come to all but one of the breakthrough blueprints there. And each year he takes like one major idea and focuses on executing that. And last year the idea was focusing on this return on relationship. And so he added in the world's most interesting postcard to his. To his group. Now he's a. More like a traditional financial advisor. I think the 140 people that he works with single, not a, not a big firm, a single financial manager working with regular people, not the not high net worth people. And he.

Joel Johnson: And that's how we are too. We like to say we're Walmart, we're working with regular fans.

Joel Johnson: Perfect, There you go. And so he added in the world's most interesting postcard, sent that out each month to the 140,000. And then when we got back together in June, did the tallying and found that that turned into £80,000 extra business after you had increased by that much year over year. And part of that is that it's so focused on actually orchestrating the referrals, you know, like the mechanics of how they actually happen. You know, I would say like that referrals. And you think about your 2,300 people here, that every one of them are in conversation all the time. And that's where referrals happen. Referrals always happen as a result of conversation. So in those conversations, in order for a referral to take place, three things have to happen. They have to notice that the conversation is about money, they have to think about you and then they have to introduce you to those people, right? Connect you. And so the thing that we've been doing is using a formula that is kind of the power of suggestion in a lot of ways, right? Like we just want people to be aware that these conversations are going on. Because if we can get the first two things firing, if we can get them to notice that the conversation's about money and to think about you and that trigger calling you, that's where the magic happens, right?

Joel Johnson: Because, and this, this is great because we're actually using the postcard idea, but we've probably drifted away from this fundamental a little bit because we've been doing it now for two years. That's probably where 80% of those leads that we're getting are probably coming from our postcard. But I can almost guarantee what we're talking about right now, we've drifted away from this fundamental into, into other things and the postcards become maybe a little

Joel Johnson: cutesy or just sending a postcard. And there's the thing so now have.

Joel Johnson: Well, it's saying, you know, saying, you know, you probably know somebody that needs our help and they'll have a little comic on it. But I bet it's not targeted enough. I bet not specific enough.

Joel Johnson: Well, it's the thing that you want to do. It's not about getting them to refer people, it's about getting them to look like a Hero.

Joel Johnson: Right.

Joel Johnson: The reason that people refer anything is because it makes them look and feel good. That's something wants to be an insider.

Joel Johnson: Right.

Joel Johnson: Everybody wants to, to bring things of value to people. So when you, when we, when we presence it in a way that is going to let them be a hero, you know, so if you say like what just happened in Connecticut, GE moving.

Joel Johnson: GE moved to Boston. Right.

Joel Johnson: There you go. So a lot of people were forced to retire. Right?

Joel Johnson: Right. So that 800 highly paid jobs in an area where we just opened up

Joel Johnson: a new office, do you think that there is conversation going on about that?

Joel Johnson: Absolutely.

Joel Johnson: So if we were looking at that, paying attention to what's going on in the news, what might people be talking about right now? So a postcard. On the back of the postcard, the message would be, hey, just a quick note in case you hear someone talking about forced retirement or being forced to retire early or debating whether they should retire or move. You probably heard GE has been closed. The office there. If you hear someone talk about that, give me a call or text me and I'll get you a copy of my forced to retire book to give them. And that is now you see what's happening there is you're not asking or expecting your clients to turn into salespeople for you. You're turning into somebody who's giving them an opportunity to be the bearer of a gift.

Joel Johnson: Right? They're turning into. Yeah, exactly. Right.

Joel Johnson: So now they, they've had that conversation. The. Maybe the two, maybe the wives were talking. One wife is your. A family that's under management with you. And she's talking to her good friend and they're concerned because Bob's trying to figure out whether he should, you know, whether they should move or what's he gonna do. He's, he's 60 right now and it's, you know, do we want to uproot and move everything or whatever. That's a conversation that's likely going on.

Joel Johnson: Right, Right, exactly.

Joel Johnson: Now that your client Betty gets this message from you, she remembers that you said that and you've got this book forced to retire and she, she can text you or email you or call you, get a copy of that book to give to her friend. That's what we're facilitating there. We're not saying tell them to become our client.

Joel Johnson: We're baby stepping or give us their name so that we can stick our highly trained salespeople on your friend.

Joel Johnson: Yes, that's exactly it. That's why, that's why saying that's why having them call you or having the offer, the instruction be you call me or email me or text me and I'll give you a copy of the book to give to them. Now, again, what's going to happen is as soon as they email you, that has now done its job. Right now, the conversation can be, well, tell me about your friend. Would you like to us to. Do you have their address? We can send the book and I'll actually send something else along with it. Or would you like me to send the book to you to send to them? I mean, you know, Evelyn Best, how do you think we could get connected so that we could help them? I love it. Now you're in that conversation and you're at least aware that the conversation has happened, because that conversation of all, I mean, I would find the odds inconceivable that among the 2300 families that you have, especially where you are, that some of those people are not in that exact conversation.

Joel Johnson: Oh, oh, a hundred of them.

Joel Johnson: Fifty now.

Joel Johnson: Absolutely. If it's not that, if it's not GE, it's Aetna or Cigna or MetLife or. Or all the other companies that are constantly early retiring people in Connecticut and moving to South Carolina or Tennessee. Absolutely.

Joel Johnson: Yeah.

Joel Johnson: That's why. That's why in some ways, you know, Connecticut's a tough state to live in. I hope we're going to block this for anybody that lives in Connecticut. Can you block the podcast? Any other. Any of my competition in Connecticut? So Connecticut. Connecticut's a tough state to live in, but in my business, it's a wonderful state to be in because there's. It's like your. It's like your stop your divorce book.

Joel Johnson: There's a lot of.

Joel Johnson: Always a new batch of people that are in this traumatic transition many times having to make the biggest financial decision of their lives and they want help. And all we've got to do is be the people that are there at the time when they need our help. Yeah. And do a good job and, you know, do a good job and keep our promises and do the right thing by the client.

Joel Johnson: That's a big. That's a big thing. Like my, my. If I were really gonna advise you on the after units, you know, maximizing your return there, I mean, that's really somebody whose full responsibility to seek out, orchestrate this whole thing. I mean, there's so much room there to go from 4% to 20%. I mean, it would be a huge difference to go from 4% to 8%. Oh, yeah.

Joel Johnson: 4% is 3 or 400,000 in revenues, I'll tell you that. So figure. Yeah, figure out. I mean, that's, you know, it's like a hundred. That's 20. That's 20% of our market. That's 20% of our marketing budget. That's six or eight new employees. I mean, that's a wonderful. That's a huge boost. And, and the, the irony is that the cost of this is so low. The hard cost. Hard cost is so low.

Joel Johnson: Exactly. It. That's.

Joel Johnson: Here's the thing. And I want everybody on the. And I want everybody on that podcast to hear this. Here's the thing. So it's a little harder to figure out. It's a little more effort. It's a little harder to do this than throw another dollar at a direct mail piece. And so most guys in my business just throw another dollar direct mail piece instead of take a little more time to figure it out. When. When I could be getting a 20 to run return or a 30 to 1 return on those dollars where I'm excited about a 5 or 6 return. 5 or 6 to 1 return on a direct mail piece.

Joel Johnson: Yeah, that's exactly it.

Joel Johnson: Good stuff, Dean.

Joel Johnson: I think that's. That's the big. I think we've uncovered the opportunity for you two of them. You got, I mean, you got it under in profit activator 3, a big asset in profit activator 8. All very exciting. Listen, are you going to be in Toronto at our strategic coach session next week?

Joel Johnson: I am, yes.

Joel Johnson: Okay, perfect. Well, I will see you then and we'll talk a little bit more about it. But I think that's. I think we've uncovered it for you here.

Joel Johnson: All right, thanks. I really appreciate all the work that you do. Thank you.

Joel Johnson: Awesome. I'll see you next week.

Joel Johnson: Okay, bye.

Stuart: Okay, there we go. An amazing episode. Hope you took lots of notes there. There really is a lot of opportunity just in that last 60 minutes. So if you have any questions about the strategies that Dean and Joel talked about, then just shoot us an email@podcastintyminutebooks.com and we'll be happy to answer them. If you're ready to get started collecting leads yourself with your book, then head over to 90minutebooks.com and click the get started button and we'll be here ready to help you. Okay, thanks, guys. Enjoy the rest of the weekend.

Joel Johnson: Sa.