Jeremy Weisz 6:04
I have heard you say Kasim, that you have something pops up, like Google suggests.You don’t do that. Right.
Kasim Aslam 6:13
Google’s recommendations are the recommendation. Yeah, yeah, those recommendations are a red flag that you’re about to be taken advantage of. I’ll give you a really specific specific example. When you build a Google ad campaign, Google asks you to define a geographic region. And then they have a very hidden setting that has been affecting performance, maximum times is not available at all. They have a hidden setting that says, There’s a radio button that says you’re targeting people in or interested in this location. And that says in brackets recommended. Here’s the problem. There are way more people interested in any geography than there are people in that geography. That’s a fact. So you want people in or regularly in this location. And I can tell you, I had the highest performing real estate investment campaign on the planet for seven years, we minted money we’re talking to you like so my house fashion investors types. The thing that set us apart, Jeremy was knowing that button, because Google defaults to people and are interested in which means you’re generating irrelevant leads. And when your lead is $1,500, that margin for error is huge. It’s huge. And it’s little teeny, tiny things like that when I don’t buy my course, because it’s out of date. But my Google Ads course was called you versus Google. And that’s the way to think about it. Google doesn’t have your best interests at heart, Google’s not trying to help you be successful, they’re trying to maximize the value of their inventory. So their recommended settings more often than not, are in their favor. Now. Sometimes, there’s a parallel course, sometimes they’re in your favor, and are in their favor in your favor, but not always. And so it’s really worth thinking those things through and then testing them and you know, again, maybe get a little arrogant, listen to the people that have already made those mistakes. I’ve got 200 accounts, under management, we managed $54 million in ad spend, you know, like I’ve been there, and all my education is available for free.
Jeremy Weisz 8:00
The reason it made me think of that customer is that when you mentioned the AI and you know, getting on the car instead of the horse, when I see something like Google suggests it almost has the perception to me that it there’s some AI involved, right, they figure it out, so just let them handle it. But you know that that was my perception of it. Right?
Kasim Aslam 8:23
Well, that’s true. I think that’s the correct perception is is Google is using machine learning in order to make strong recommendations. But it’s interesting that there’s a line of demarcation because so much about Google’s a black box. So Google will do things within the black box that you have no control over. But then it carves out these other facets of campaign management, and it wants your opinion, or at once your it wants your permission. And I almost think that that’s a it’s manipulative, it’s gaslighting, because they almost realize like, Okay, at this point, we’re in the ballpark of actually taking money from you. And before we can do that, we need you to hit the button. You know, it’s like when, when, when, in Soviet Russia, when the communists used to force people to sign the confession before they tortured him. Or you know what I mean, like they had to have your participation in the system that was obviously against your best interests. And I hate to just paint Google with that evil brush, but that’s what it feels like. It feels like we’re being gaslit, you know, taken advantage of in a way.
Jeremy Weisz 9:23
You know, you mentioned the beginning, and I’ve heard you say this before about, you’ve had a lot of failures, right? What sticks out to you as a big learning experience that was that you know what we’ll say learning experience failure. If you’re saying failure, I’ll say failure. But most of the time was a learning experience. I don’t like say, Hey, you, you’re a failure caused them but what do you think back on one of those pivotal points that really shaped you?
Kasim Aslam 9:51
I was 20 years old. I had started a business. I was building software, and I was making more money than most 20 year olds make. And I hadn’t No idea how to use money so I had a big house on the hill I had the assholes car I was you know, picking up the Check everywhere I went. And I and my identity was wrapped up in the fact that I could do that. And when the economy collapsed I realized like I don’t own that house the bank owns that house I don’t own that car that and I you know, foreclosure repossession near bankruptcy, living in squalor going to Costco on my expired card eating free trouts to survive, it was bad. And it’s because I didn’t know how to play the game of money. And I think entrepreneurs need to get written you know, I hate to go Dave Ramsey on you because there’s some things he says that I disagree with. But dude, you should have your work chest, I don’t have any debt. My wife and I drive Hyundai’s the only reason I have a mortgage is because my CPA was like you’re missing out on huge tax break with it, you know, but regard like, I think that you should have. There’s that John Goodman monologue from the Mark Wahlberg movie, you know what I’m talking about, where he says approach life from a from a point of Fu and basically have the foundation that allows you to take risks when you want to take them to make investments when you want to make them but to also weather any storm because the flood is always coming to quote Jordan Peterson, always. And if you’re not ready for it, it’s so easy to be like, gosh, and you know, it’s so unfair. I never saw that coming. And I want to take that excuse away from you right now. There is something sadly, God forbid something catastrophic ly damaging is going to happen to you the economy, the business, your industry, I don’t I don’t know what, but guaranteed on a long enough timeline, it probably dozens of things. And there are some people that are equipped to take them and some people that aren’t and I was ill equipped to take it. And it almost destroyed me. But I’m so happy it happened so early. Because now man, you know, I mean, there’s some things I might not be able to survive. But I’m effectively a prepper at this point. You know, since the zombie apocalypse, there’s very little you could do to take me down.
Jeremy Weisz 11:49
You know, one of the things that I really love he do a full video on this, I encourage people to check out about hiring. And you know, it’s gonna be a good video when you start off with I’m not sure if I want to share. All right. So I want to hear your thoughts on
Kasim Aslam 12:08
offshore hiring. Yeah, so I’ve got 80 employees, and I love them all dearly and deeply. And one of the things that people always say when they get exposed to solutions out there, like why do you find these people? You know, I mean, they’re flabbergasted, the only thing I’ve really done well is just find people smarter than me, and then convince them to come work with me. But I have a hiring system that I call it the Pareto talent system. And it’s built over the course of 15 years of just making massive mistakes. And I won’t go through it on the call, because you can watch the video, it’s not gated, but the gist is, I pay more than anybody’s willing to pay in that ecosystem. So in the Philippines, for instance, a full time VA can get about five 600 bucks, you know, seven 800, if they’re good, I pay 1500, double it. But I make them jump through an insane amount of hoops, and I make sure that they’re a badass. And then I treat them well, I treat them like a real life human being. And I make sure that they feel involved, incentivized. And what’s funny is so many people when they offshore, they think that this is you know, we’re gonna go find somebody to do the grunt work, the data entry that whatever my CTO was a was a EA that I found and he you know, he’s from Ukraine. The gal that was my EA, Julianne is now our director of automations. Like, I have found the most amazing talent. And they just last last the geographic lottery. You know, we like to be in I’m so sorry, I’m about to jump on a soapbox. But it’s an important one. If you were born here, like you didn’t do it, I hate it when people like I’m proud to be an American. I’m grateful to be an American. You know what I mean? Like, thank God, and I’m not just talking about the US, UK, US, Canada, UK, whatever. But if you’re born in like Karachi, Pakistan, or Uganda, or, you know, the Philippines or whatever, you are at a noted disadvantage. You’re in a noted disadvantage. You did nothing wrong, you lost the geographic lottery, but like my EA dude could be the CEO of any Fortune 1000 company. She’s a freaking genius. Poor girl was just born on the wrong side of an arbitrary line. So don’t think for a second that that talent doesn’t exist elsewhere, because it does. You’re just not paying for it properly. And you’re asking for too much people that go offshore. They’re like, oh, I need somebody that knows web graphic design, PPC, SEO can make cold calls. I’m like, What person do you know that lives here can do all that BS you don’t I mean, that would want to work for you. Like maybe there’s an entrepreneur out there. That’s a Swiss army knife. But if you want a high value employee, go get an ultra specific job description. Be very clear about your expectations. Pay them something that’s exciting to them. And you’re gonna find and I’ve gone everywhere I mean, I’m in so I’m on literally, basically every functional continent now. It’s unreal, the talent pool, it’s available and then it’s unreal what they bring to the table when you when you actually allow them to take things and run with them. I have a young man who works for me, his name’s FA he’s in Turkey. And he stalked us on our YouTube channel to come work with me. And the kid keeps coming to me and talking about I want to open alternative ad channels. We don’t manage Facebook, we don’t manage Instagram, we don’t manage. You know, there’s huge opportunities here for solutions. A, and I haven’t taken them up on it yet, but I’m going to at some point, and it’s interesting because FAA is he would be dismissed by a more traditional agency, as though he’s an offshore resource. He’s, you know, he’s a VA, he’s a leader, man, he’s so much smarter than I am so much more industrious than I am. So you know what I mean, like, just born on the wrong side of an arbitrary line. And I’m not trying to diminish people’s culture countries, there’s, it’s not what I’m doing here, I’m just talking about the economic reality of of having the reserve currency and the fact that the US dollar is just going to go in slave everybody. And we benefit from that. And in so doing, I think you as an entrepreneur, number one, have access to a talent pool that most people don’t realize it’s readily accessible. And number two, have the opportunity to change lives, I can pay double, triple, quadruple, and I can afford to do that. And I can afford to do that scale. What what would happen to you, if somebody if you got paid for extra peers, you know, like, what kind of quality of life impact does that have? I’ve got people in Mexico and Venezuela, and even Canada, man, if I paid 50, grand us that’s like 65. Canadian, and they’re not worried about health care. You know, so the world is flat as far as I’m concerned. And you can go get amazing talent everywhere. And I’ve got, I don’t know what 25 employees in India, and I had some guy, he’s in the UK, I won’t say his company names, even though I hate him. He wrote his first bad review of my entire life. I’ve been in business 15 years, and he wrote some review. And he’s a guy hired solutions. And then they just, they just fire me up to some Indian. And I’m like, You mean one of the smartest Google Ads people in the frickin world. I’m sorry that he’s in India. Like that sucks for you. And then I wrote him a really pointed email and he deleted the review. Because he saw you know, I’m like, let me tell you about the kid that you just disparaged. So anyway, that got so boxy to I feel a little like, I’m yelling here, man. I’m sorry, Jeremy. I just, I’m really passionate about this one.
Jeremy Weisz 16:50
No, I love it. And you know, I want to hear what countries do you. You mentioned a few. Are there any others that you look to go to? You mentioned India, Turkey, Venezuela, Ukraine, Philippines, Canada, because I know, on that particular video, you talk about design pickle, I think it was and they like to go to the Philippines for design stuff. And one of their countries should people maybe that they haven’t thought of consider looking at? If they know it depends on the job. It depends on whatever. But
Kasim Aslam 17:24
yeah, so for this gets a little, I’m gonna get cancelled here, Jeremy ready. I have found in my experience, there are proficiencies that are, we’ll say geographically centered. So in the Philippines, you find really phenomenal creatives. You know, graphic design, web design, video editing, those types of things. If you want the engineering types, I like South Asia, India and Pakistan. But as we’re having this conversation, you have to understand that there are cultural nuances that need to be respected. So for instance, the Indians have more holidays than any group of humans I’ve ever experienced in my entire life. And they celebrate all of them. And they’re all important. You’ll also with Indians, and Pakistanis, if they tell you, it will be done. Friday at two, it’s Monday at four. And you can either beat your head against a wall, trying to move the cultural mountain, that is their weird perception of time, or just account for it, things like that. Filipinos can’t say no, they’re the least combative humans I’ve ever met my entire life. So if you ask them to do something, they’ll do it. And then they’ll suffer in silence. And they won’t tell you that you’re asking for too much. Eastern Europeans can’t do anything the wrong way. Try asking an Eastern European like, hey, the client wants it done this way. Well, no, that’s not right. We need to do it this way. Well, I understand what you’re saying. And I agree with you, the client wants to they won’t do it, they will not cannot, it’s not in their frame of mind to do anything other than the way that they know what should be done. But they’re brilliant. They’re brilliant. I love South America, literally all of it not just that I’ll say Latin America, because basically anything South Texas generally speaking, their names that we can pronounce their accents that aren’t repellent to your more racist clients. They’re working our time zones, you have to pay a little bit more like you know, South American, if you know good salary for a Filipino might be 1500. In South America, maybe it’s two grand, or whatever, you know, and I’m not talking entry level entry level, you can get really phenomenal people for 1000 bucks. And then you want to look at the individual countries too, and some of the nuances surrounding those countries. And then account for the fact that you know, in the Philippines, people get sick more often. Which is sad. It’s a sad thing to say out loud. It’s true in India and Pakistan to people are going to get sick more often. You’re going to have internet outages, power outages, acts of terrorism, you know, this is all but that’s what happens when you go for discount labor and that shit that they have to deal with. And then you have again, what a phenomenal opportunity that is for you to step in and help somebody. So I don’t know, you know,
Jeremy Weisz 19:56
thanks for going through that. One of the things you mentioned in the process. As you make them jump through hoops, see who’s serious. So what will be an example of one or two of those
Kasim Aslam 20:06
one of my favorite, I’ll send you. So first of all, I pay to have them do a trial project always no matter what. And I pay in advance. And here’s what happened to me and say, one in five to one in 10 times depending on the role, they’ll ghost me. So I’ll say, what’s your pay pal? And I’ll send him 20 bucks, and then you never hear from him again. Now this is actually you might think yourself, well, gosh, you know, it’s 20 bucks or higher. Because, you know, it’s the shortlist, it’s getting the child project. But what a phenomenal opportunity, that is to find out your piece of shit before I hire you. You know, I just paid $20 Because now here’s somebody who’s going to access the access to client lists and programs and applications. And you know, they’re going to represent me. So I’d love to pay $20 to find out that you’re willing to, you know, sacrifice the opportunity for a great job just because you found an easy 20 bucks. So I pay him to do this trial project. I also do that because I want them to know I respect their time. Because it the other issue is the fact that I am paying as much as I’m paying, what I get a lot of people thinking is this is a scammer. It’s not really him and take advantage of him or something. So pay him to do a trial project. But then I make it hard. So I’ll do something like I’ll say, oh, log into this Canva account, here’s a username and password, I’ll give him the wrong password. And then I wait to see how long it takes for them to figure it out. Because if they told me I also don’t tell them what to do, I’ll say when do you think you can get this done? Can they manage expectations? Can they communicate? And they’ll say, oh, Friday at noon? Well, if I get an email Friday at 10, saying, hey, the candidate passwords wrong. kind of know, you’re a procrastinator, you know, like this. So just little little things I want to I want to see not just can you do the job, because that’s actually pretty easy to find, generally speaking, especially for niche down enough in your job description. How do you communicate? I like to schedule an appointment and a schedule and then cancel last minute. Do you get mad at me to get pissy? You know, how do you feel? If you know what I mean? Like, hey, so sorry, how to reschedule? Do you even follow up? That’s another thing that I’ve run into is, you know, can you run through walls? If I make this hard? Can you still get the job done? And if you can’t, are you just the type of person who’s like, Oh, I’ve got a really good excuse.
Jeremy Weisz 22:00
Love it. From a culture perspective, right? You have people all over the map? You know, how do you maintain that, that company culture,
Kasim Aslam 22:09
it’s hard, it’s hard, what I’ve started to do is be a little more distributed within specific departments. So I’ll give you my skunk, which is a large majority of my Google Ads specialists in India, because Google has three offices in India, and I just go poach Google’s people. And they’re brilliant. They’re industrious, and hardworking, but you take the company of 80 people, 25 of them are Indian. This is this is the lunch room in high school, do, you know like, people sit next to people that are like them, and they talk to people that speak their language and understand their culture and eat this and you don’t I mean, so it’s not even. It’s just a natural inclination for, you know, herd mentality for people to kind of clump, you know, like, with like, and so what I’m doing now is, you know, my Google Ads specialist, I’ve got one that we just hired from Colombia, and one that we heard from, to get where she is, she might be from Brazil, but you know, I’m splitting it up. And when you do that, the culture that is adopted, is the company culture because Sans, you know, indoctrinated birth culture, you need to, you need to grasp onto something, and then the company culture becomes much, much, much more accessible.
Jeremy Weisz 23:17
One thing, Kasim that I see that you do, which is really interesting, if you go to the website, is, I’m going to pull it up here, so we can take a look at it. One piece of company culture is you have a employee spotlight pitch.
Kasim Aslam 23:36
Yeah, yeah, I wanted people to feel important. And people that are used to offshore jobs are used to not feeling like they’re really a part of the team. And so we go through in every single employee, as long as they get what we’ve got kind of sad is, you know, we’d write a spotlight blog on somebody right away, and then we end up letting them go on. It’s like, what do we take it off. So I think they have to have been with us for six months, I forget what the marketing department decided. But there’s a spotlight on everybody, and we want people to get to know him. It also helps with the humanization. Like if you’re gonna work with somebody offshore, and I’m gonna assign them to your account. Everybody has. And I’m not talking about unconscious bias training here, Jeremy, because I don’t believe in some of the more woke bullshit. But everybody really does have a level of prejudice that I think we don’t necessarily recognize. There’s a quote by Sojourner Truth that I really love, which is we’re all victims of our own experience. Nobody can eliminate prejudice when they recognize it. So if you feel some type of way, because you’ve had way too many call center calls from somebody in India, I don’t blame. You know, maybe I feel that way too. But if I send you an article and say, Hey, here’s Onkar on cars, 23 years old, he loves to play badminton, and he might be one of the smartest Google Ads strategist on the freaking planet. And here’s a video of Unkar talking about it. Now. I think I just broke down that wall. And, you know, it’s just, it’s just humanizing your staff in a way that allows people to see a distributed team can still be a team
Jeremy Weisz 25:00
Thank you. Yeah, because I feel like this is missing, a lot of people don’t have this piece. And there’s just another part of your website I want to talk about, which is the pricing page, which is also, I would, I would venture to say a typical in the agency space in general. But I do want to start just to give people a better sense, a stronger sense of what you do over it. Solutions, 8 You know, people can check out obviously, there’s a case studies page here. But there was one econ brand that you worked with, I’d love for you to talk about what you did with them. Yeah, so
Kasim Aslam 25:33
there, I can’t use them by name. Sadly, however, we were able to achieve and maintain that’s a really important part because everybody likes to actually pull out their case study of oh, I spent $4 made a billion this weekend, you know what I mean. But we were able to achieve and maintain a 15,000% return on adspend 15,000%, return on adspend. It was insane. It was literally minting money. The only reason it stopped is because they ran into supply chain issues. All their products are coming from China. And you know, the container stopped coming and they’re still having problems. Had they not run into that. I don’t know where that campaign would have gone. But it would have been, it would have been insane. And that’s just a I can’t even take all the credit for that. That’s the power of Google ads, when Google really learns who buys from you. Especially if you’re in a blue ocean industry. There’s nothing that can stop it, it goes out and finds more buyers.
Jeremy Weisz 26:26
Let’s talk about your process for a second. But let’s start with the pricing. Right. So again, we’re on if if you’re listening to this right now, we are sharing a screen which is Sol8.com/pricing. And you know, they have a bunch of things about transparent pricing, long term can no long term contracts, complete ownership, and control your account and use you could check this out. But if you scroll down what’s really unique about this page, at least, cousin when I find unique about this page, I don’t know if you’d agree with me or not. But it there’s a calculator here, this is curious to find out what your fees look like. So there was a definite conscious thought of why even put this on there, like they could talk to you, you could do it. But you can, there’s this nifty slider that you can actually do. And it has, again, if you’re just listening this first month, total fee with bass and fee as a percentage of spent and so you can move this on this is an ad your, you know, your monthly Google Ads budget below. And so I can add, if I’m gonna spend whatever here, I can slide this around, type it into the field there, type it in here. So tell me about why put this on here. And above this pricing calculator,
Kasim Aslam 27:48
I believe marketing should attract and repel. And I think that if you really want to scale your agency, and some agencies don’t want to scale, by the way, that’s okay. But if you really want to scale your agency, you should productize your service offering, I’m not the first person to say that Jason talks about it a lot. If you can’t price, your offer, you haven’t productize your service offering. That’s a fact. I’d be open to somebody challenging me on that. But I can’t think of an instance where that wouldn’t be true. So I like making the pricing publicly available. Because if I’m positioning my value proposition well enough, and this price is made out of your market. Well, that’s great. I’m glad you know that. I’m glad I know that. And I was able to save us both some time. I think it’s hubris to think like oh, all I need to do is get you on the phone. Why? So I can talk you into something that you don’t want to do. You know, we’re not, we’re not salespeople, and we continue that narrative throughout, we do nothing but negative selling, here’s why this might not work. 50% of all Google Ads campaigns fail in the first 90 days, you know, you’re in a competitive ecosystem, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So I like people to know everything they need to know in order to make an educated decision. And what’s funny is Jeremy, I can’t tell you how many times I hear people say, Thank God, you have this you know, I’m so grateful like this made it so much I’m going with you because just tell the truth. Those are our three core values, solutions, a truth responsibility, love. The website says heart because love turns people off. But I mean, love. Just tell the truth, tell the truth about what it is. And if they’re not. If it’s not right for him, that’s okay. And if you’re afraid about well, you know, maybe they don’t understand the value, then fix that. You know, like, that’s not hard to build the content. We’re live in the age of the educated consumer, and they’re going to consume the content if they’re really interested in buying. So I’m pretty bullish on this point, too. I don’t think it makes sense not to include the pricing unless all you do is custom and bespoke.
Jeremy Weisz 29:31
Talk about yield this pricing calculator. What’s the typical customer? You know, someone there, you know, I’m going to spend, you know, I don’t know if maybe you do get startups that want to start slow and scale up or maybe not what what is typical.
Kasim Aslam 29:46
It’s changed since I’ve grown. You know, in the very day we were so little and scrappy because we started from the literal ground up but now that I’ve gotten a little nerve famous, we attract some larger companies and some larger names, our minimum ad spend to put in perspective used to be three grand a month. Now it’s 10 grand a month, I will take clients under 10 grand a month, but in what we call our incubator program, and we only take them if we think there’s a very strong opportunity. But you know, 10 grand a month at my price ranges, 2500 bucks, and 2500 bucks a month on a 10 grand spend is not inexpensive, that’s 25% of your ad spend. However, there’s nothing more expensive than a cheap media buyer, you know, because I’m going to be able to amplify the value and the efficacy of your spend so and it gets way more efficient. As you scale up, if you’re spending a million dollars with me, then, you know, we’re 4% of your ad spend. So it’s structured in a way that incentivizes growth that ties us to the results that a client experiences. And so far, it’s worked out really well. Sometimes I get people that just can’t reconcile themselves with the fact that I make more money as they make more money. And, you know, because there right, there is an economy of scale, and I do improve efficiency. And it would be at some point, you know, we could put a cap with just a small kicker, but I have a limited number of resources and bandwidth. So I want to grow too. And this is the best way that I think I can tie us to results without actually asking for equity.
Jeremy Weisz 31:14
Do you get people who I don’t know, in your world or other agencies that offer equity?
Kasim Aslam 31:20
Yeah, I did. I have so many frickin stock certificates in my filing cabinet that are freakin worthless. I’ll take it. But we had a guy, I hope he never listens to this. We had a guy recently offered his point two 5% in exchange for free services. And I’m like, Well, number one, you think very highly of your business. You know, i we i need needs to be a tax relevant sum of money. And I need to know that. That you’re actually in it for the long haul. Because most of the people that offer equity, they don’t believe in their business enough, or they wouldn’t be offering equity, you know, so it’s kind of a chicken and egg scenario there. Yeah, I’ve got buddies that, you know, play the performance based game solely, and they do really well doing it. But it’s a little stressful for me. And I don’t know that it’s a scalable model, per se.
Jeremy Weisz 32:05
It’s risky. Again, yeah. Talk about the referral program. How did you come up with the referral program? Because I know that you, you get a large number of referrals coming in from from other people.
Kasim Aslam 32:17
Yeah, our best clients come from referrals. And most of our clients come from Google ads, obviously, you know, in dog food, but our best clients come from referrals. And the referral program was a very natural evolution, people started sending us work and you know, some people ask, some people don’t, but you always want to pay. I feel like you know, in the agency world, pay First, pay more pay often. People want to send in don’t stop paying either, you know, like people I’ve seen agencies do like a one time shot in the pocket. Thank you. You want them to see your name show up in their mailbox every month. That’s another little pro tip. Don’t automate your payments so that it hits their account without them seeing it. I noticed people hate snail mail and they hate checks because you actually have to go to the box. You have to get the envelope and you have to unwrap and go to the bank, make them do that. Send them a snail mail check what you can automate on your end. But you want them to see a check come from you every single month because it’s it’s a month by month reminder of oh yeah, this is what happens when I send clients to solutions. Hey,
Jeremy Weisz 33:12
love it. You know, the I wanted to so after the the hire you what happens next? As far as the onboarding goes, what are some things that you recommend and do
Kasim Aslam 33:25
this is also in my YouTube channel somewhere I’ve got the most robust onboarding process of any agency I’ve ever seen in my entire life. I’m really, really proud of it. All Chat this to hear Jeremy, if you want to include in the show notes or something, I call it the world’s greatest onboarding process. Onboarding is your client’s first real interaction with you. And it’s the most painful process. So it’s, it’s sucks because it’s like, the worst thing happens at the worst time. And if you can streamline your onboarding, and I’ve been told multiple times, like, Man, that was the most painless onboarding I’ve ever been through, then you have the opportunity to really wow your client and then move quickly into monetization, like actually make things happen. A lot of agencies I feel, try to bring a lot of pomp and purpose to their onboarding, in order to justify their high fees, that’s flawed. You don’t want clients to think things take long people don’t want to pay extra just because it’s long, you actually want them to feel like oh, my goodness, y’all move fast. You’re a well oiled machine, you’re super efficient. And so within our onboarding, we have something called the Go form. When you fill out the Go form, it goes into air table and an air table alerts every member that’s relevant on my team, your dedicated client manager strategies and specialists get an alert saying and new clients coming. The dedicated onboarding manager gets an alert saying please shepherd them through this process. The billing team gets an alert that says create a record inside of QuickBooks send the invoice charging for the first month. And then the client gets an invite to our onboarding portal which we host inside of Tallo fi t a l l y if y it’s a SaaS product, I’m not an investor or an affiliate. I just love them dearly and deeply and halophyte walks them through everything that we need access to in a sequential tasklist manner that then triggers my onboarding manager to check. So you give me access to Google Analytics, she checks and confirms that we have access because there’s nothing more frustrating to the point of my interview question than somebody giving you access to something, you coming back three weeks later saying, hey, Analytics doesn’t work. And now the client goes, What the hell have you been doing this whole time? You know, you’ve been working. And that wasn’t necessary until just now. But you might as well make sure that there’s a system of checks and balances. Also, we don’t do an ounce of work until after onboarding is complete. Because I’ve gotten to trouble so many times where it’s like, oh, yeah, I know, you’ve got to go redeem your account or figure this out to where it’s okay, we’ll start building and then I end up in no man’s land, to where I kind of have this half built thing, and I’m waiting on you, and you’re taking forever, and then I go put resources elsewhere, and then you come and you’re hot to try it. And then and it’s always combative, and you never ever, ever rewarded for that ever, stick to your guns. We don’t start until onboarding well, I’ll go no, we don’t understand. Our biggest season is coming up and I got a huge event, I have a big show. So I’m not the resource for you. I’m not there. I can’t start until onboarding. Also onboarding takes five to seven business days. No, you don’t understand, I just put a big ad out and think I’m so sorry, I’m not the resource for you. Like, just stick to your guns, stick to your guns stick to your guns. And what ends up happening is they respect you for it. Don’t let clients push you around because they actually need to be coached. They need and want that discipline.
Jeremy Weisz 36:17
Thanks for that. Love it. Now, I figured it’d be fun. And I just sprung this on you right before about to pull up something just to poke around and, and you know, kind of just show up? And we’ll see. We’ll see if this actually will work for us. But on the front end. What are you seeing here we look at you know, obviously there’s a bunch of ads up here. I want to get inside your mind. Kazim and what are you seeing here? But yeah, by the way, if if someone’s listening to us and not looking at my screen, we see outreach.io We see gong.io We just called that IO, the Digi DAC and actually, some and then we get into the not paid area. And Pipedrive is actually the first one I have had one of the cofounders of Pipedrive on but Pipedrive is the first nine ad related with the enterprise sales software. So congrats on your SEO with that.
Kasim Aslam 37:13
Yeah, well done. Pipedrive. First thing that I noticed is you search for enterprise sales software. Now, this is an unfair indictment, because so much of search ads are now fully automated. However, if we’re going to play best practice, I’m gonna ignore the fact that there might be some of this, it’s outside of everybody’s control. So hopefully, the traditionalists are gonna like what I’m saying, but the people that know what they’re talking about are gonna just have to forgive me because I’m looking at a search result not looking at a Google ad campaign. I was adding a Google ad campaign to be very, very, very different. That said, you search for enterprise sales software. I don’t see the words enterprise sales software, any in this anywhere in this ad copy. I see invest in sales, execution tech, it’s not what I want. Revenue intelligence. The Gong is number one, revenue intelligence revenue intelligence platform. Yeah, you said that. And that’s probably dynamic ads, by the way, sales automation platform, just call it Oh, 6000 customers. If you search for something, give them what they searched for. It should be in the ad copy, it should be in the landing pages to be in the collect. And and if it’s not, then maybe you’re reaching too far, or your your semantic index has two broad. There’s a strong neural association to language to consistency and continuity and language. And that’s why salespeople are taught to pace. You know, if you start speaking at a certain speed or volume, or you start using certain words, a good salesperson starts doing that, too. And you might see like, oh, that’s manipulative. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. But there’s a reason that it works. You know, there’s a psychological profiling connection that we’re making, and they’re missing out on doing that. So that’s number one. Number two, I like what outreach did here when they have the plus plus equals, when you use symbols, signs, numbers, things other than just text, it actually draws your eye so you want to use that. The problem is, is they went off and said maybe missing on a 9% of potential revenue. There’s nothing compelling about 9% of potential revenue go find a better case study fools. You know what I mean? Like, give me something tax relevant. I can tell right out of the gate. So here’s the thing is that outreach.io has the highest placement. And Google is based off of the Vickrey auction model, which says the highest bidder wins the bid with paces that pays the second highest bidders price, but highest bid includes money and relevance. So you’d assume outreach is relevant. And they also have some extensions shown here. One of the extensions, that’s a site link extension that’s says pricing. Here’s the problem that money Jeremy, if you click on pricing, they don’t give you pricing. And you can even say request pricing today that does nothing but piss me off. If you offer something, give it to him. Don’t add a site link extension for pricing because you know, people are interested in seeing your pricing and you don’t actually give them the pricing. So ding against them. A note for them is download buyer’s guide. I really liked the fact that they have a traditional call to action. Sometimes I might Say, Hey, you’re diluting the efficacy of your offer. For something like enterprise sale software. That’s a long sales cycle. Nobody’s clicking and buying today. So offering a transitional call to action right out of the gate, especially for somebody who might be doing an early stage search is a good opportunity to capture an email address and then market to them in a silo. gongs. I like the number one for revenue intelligence. I don’t like to redundancy, but that’s probably not their fault. They’re not occupying a ton of real estate, these last three ads, but that might be Google to none of the copy. None of this is compelling. You know, there’s nothing here that really makes I noticed
Jeremy Weisz 40:33
right away, you really go after the copy? Oh,
Kasim Aslam 40:36
well, you kind of have to that’s yeah, I mean, that’s all we have to go off of. You know, they’re not even using title case. Every letter you and actually the folks at the top who is that again? Outreach. So you notice how outreach says Find out why your org and FOWY Oh, are all capital. That’s called title case. And when you do that it a occupies more real estate and B, it draws your eye. None of the other three ads are using title case. Super small thing, but WordStream has a case study on how title case increases click through rate, I think by 11% or something really substantial? How also like that outreach as a question looking for outreach pricing. Question Mark, when somebody asks you a question, you’re more likely to answer that question, even if it’s just in your head. So I think some of what’s happening here is just pour in now I’m actually talking about the other three applications here. None of this copies compelling. And that’s all you have in search ad is just is copying the offer. What’s the offer? What are you giving me? You know, Gong is telling me about them. I don’t care about you. What about me? You know, what about fulfilling my needs? That’s that’s one thing that outreach did well here improved prospecting, increased daily velocity and measure success. Now I hope that somebody’s searching for what it is that they’re offering knows what all that means. Because all that internal buzzword nomenclature BS that just, you know, just a confused mind says no, it’s going to repel people. Yeah, how was that Jeremy’s is help.
Jeremy Weisz 42:00
I love it. Love it. I’m gonna pull up for a second. I know, we only have a couple more minutes. And I there’s two things I want to talk about when talking about this. And one of the things so maybe we’ll look at this in a minute. But when we go to Gong, here’s what we see. A any initial thoughts on this when we hit the page?
Kasim Aslam 42:20
Yeah, so first of all, there’s not a call to action up there it goes, it just loaded in even, that’s not great. So they have booked a demo in the header. But top of fold, there’s nothing for me to do. There’s no phone up. There it is, again, look how slow this loads do. This is nuts. So probably my fault. I don’t know what it is, you know, I don’t know that we’re able to play my ISP, you need a page that loads lightning fast, lightning fast, you’re paying for traffic. And if it doesn’t load within, you know, a fraction of a second people are going to jump ship. So here we have the primary call to actions book a demo they have in their header, then they have it above the fold. And then let’s look at their offer conversation, intelligence. Stop losing winnable deals. So they’ve coined it our own term. I think conversation intelligence isn’t a term that I’m familiar with. And now they’re saying stop losing winnable deals. So conversely, now then there’s just way too much blocks of text, your main conversation intelligence is how sales leaders find out what separates the best from the rest and build a winning playbook. I’m confused. I don’t understand. I don’t know what the offer is. I don’t know what you can do for me. I don’t know what this is. Do you know what I’m actually asking? Honestly, do you know what Gong is? Or what it does?
Jeremy Weisz 43:24
I mean, only because I come across them before but uh, but not in this instance.
Kasim Aslam 43:29
I have no idea what they’re offering. So they need to go and simplify their offer down to the smallest point of understandable value at the very beginning of the funnel. Yeah, so it might be something like, improve sales intake speed. You know what I mean? Like the easy early, understandable, bam, improve sales intake speed by 51% in two hours, find out how,
Jeremy Weisz 43:54
you know, like, quickly cost them I know you have to jump in one minute, and I didn’t I Oh, I want to just talk for like 30 seconds on the drivenmastermind.com What’s going on here? What can people check out and expect? And there’s a you know, I know some of these people that are Steve Sims. There’s 20 Grebmeier, Vinny Fisher Rich Goldstein some amazing people on this page. I mean, Jason Flowers and just just a wizard anything marketing so talk about this for for a bit before you have to hop off.
Kasim Aslam 44:26
Yeah, they sunset well room, which is my favorite place in the whole wide world. To be honest with you. It’s the number one marketing mastermind for 13 years. And Perry wanted to continue the legacy. So he reached out to us as if we wanted to partner and we’re going back to the roots of what will room was, this is what I like to call mastermind with teeth. So if you want to make money if you want to grow if you want to scale this is for you. You can’t send your EAA. I don’t want to sit next to your kid. We’re not here to be touchy feely heartfelt, dude all that’s great. I love all that. All that kumbaya stuff that’s awesome somewhere else. If you want to grow, if you want to scale if you want to learn to invest if you’re like, This is the place where the sharks go, and if you can swim with us that’s it. I mean look at the faculty man, there’s just, it’s a who’s who truly. And I’m not trying to repel people, I guess I kind of am. I kind of am trying to repel people, like, you know, if you can hold your own and you bring something to the table, we want you and driven if not, I hope you apply someday, but you gotta go kind of earn your entrepreneurial stripes first.
Jeremy Weisz 45:25
I know you gotta hop. Calm. Awesome. Thank you everyone. Check out Sol8.com Check out drivenmastermind.com more episodes of the podcast. Thanks, everyone.
Kasim Aslam 45:36
Appreciate you Jeremy.
