But today is all about follow up and speed to lead an ai Kala. Pretty excited to have this guy on today's show. How you doing buddy? I'm living the dream. How you doing? Rough? Yeah, We're good. there's a disclaimer because I don't know if I asked you this in the pre-record, but I believe you're a customer of our guest. Who is gonna be talking today, Ralph? I'm not just a customer. I'm the fourth highest ranked affiliate for high level, or at least I was at one point. I think I've since been usurped and or dethroned. But I've sold the daylights outta this damn thing a super fan dude. the guy we're about to talk to is probably at the risk of pandering. I think he's the most engaged founder I've ever known. He's got 10,000 plus customers, probably more, I bet. Now that's years old data and he's still inside of the Facebook group answering like, support, ticket, ticket, tech, bullshit. what he needs is a handler. Like he needs people to protect him from himself. Cuz I don't know what he's doing. It feels so far beneath his pay grade. But at the same time, It's how he keeps his finger to the pulse. It's why the, product moves as quickly as it's moved. I think it's the most disruptive system in all of marketing. And if you're a cmo, a director of marketing, an agency, an entrepreneur, you have to know this thing exists because there's nothing I've seen more robust, and I'm not giving you my affiliate link. I'm not selling it to make money. I'm selling it because I've never seen anything that can do so much. like you say, Ralph, it's the little hinge that swings the big door. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. There's a lot of hyperbole in there actually. And good use of the word usurp by the way, in the first 30 seconds, hashtag the source of the show. So I just wanna get that out there. That casa is a shill for this guy. but not in a bad way because what we're gonna be talking about here is the stuff I find. Just conceptually, not even the company that he runs, he's co-founder of, high level. Obviously we're talking about Sean Clark here, which we're gonna intro in just a second. It's all the stuff that's important to the business that they don't really care about until somebody like a Sean Clark or high level actually comes along and shows them the error of their ways. So many. I always go back to this, and this is a, Probably an overused example, but one of my first Facebook ads clients was an accounting service. It was a virtual accounting service. They did bookkeeping accounting, I got them I was doing amazingly well, like I got them 3000 leads in less than, I think it was six months. Name, phone number, email, a bunch of other information on like a seven form field, and I was fired. After three or four months because I asked them, all right, well I got all these leads for you. Like you guys must be just rolling in it. And they had none of the stuff that we're gonna be talking about here today. And that I think is where so many businesses go wrong. they maybe even listen to this show, Casom. Hmm. The name of this show is about traffic and traffic is sexy and it's cool and there's all kinds of tips and tricks and hacks. When in fact if you really wanna grow a business, you actually sometimes have to talk to people and follow up with them in a humanistic way. We're gonna be talking about obviously, what Sean does for a living here through high level, but just the concept of it, if you can shift your focus, if you're a cmo, director of marketing, and you're reaching out, you're watching your either watching or listening to this show, it is not all about traffic. It's all about the follow up sequences. And obviously with the changes that we have right now with ai, it makes it even more interesting. So without further ado, you can sense our excitement here. Casa, maybe a little bit over the top. I'm gonna have to bring you down a little bit. I know you love this guy. There's a lot of like, bro, love hanging here. I think, on today's show, it's a little stalker-ish, if I being honest. It's a little stalker weird. So if that turns you off, I don't know, go listen to the HubSpot podcast or something like that. But today we're gonna be talking this stuff. So welcome to Perpetual Traffic, Sean Clark. Hey. Nice to be here. Thanks. Thanks for having me. He's like what do I say next? That's awkward intro. Yeah. Awkward intro. Casso. Yeah, we're just like pushing it all out there. So with every. Guess that comes on perpetual traffic. there's a lot of stuff that you know and do on a regular basis, but give the PT listener a little nugget, something they can implement today that'll make a big, big difference in their business. Absolutely. So missed call, text back. How many times have you called a business and they didn't pick up the phone? All the time. and then what do you do as a consumer? You, you call their competitor right down the list on the next one. Yeah. So, exactly. so how about this? Make it so that next time when somebody calls your client and they don't pick up and text them back and says, Hey, we're on the call with another customer right now. Would love to help you. Would you like to book an appointment? Would you like to book an estimate? Would you book like to whatever? And guess what you'll do? You'll save that person. And you'll be able to actually automate the next step and actually get them to book an appointment and your customers will love you for it. And it's incredibly simple today. That's really brilliant. Yeah. There and that's enough value for most people to pay your bill every month just for that one thing. If you could just do that. Yeah. Now there's obviously a service that you offer that can do that. There's lots of vendors that do do that. Yes, correct. Yes. But the idea is find one if you're missing those calls. Yeah. And it doesn't matter who you are. So if it's like, if you're a, notorious is like the trades industry, like the plumber, the electric. I just met with my electrician today and he actually, I believe he actually has your system. I have to double check. But if he doesn't, he should. I. The point is, he does respond. They do have an actual answering service so that it's not missed calls, but for a lot of people, they feel like, all right, I'm too small to be able to do this. Like, I'm a one man show, or maybe I have an admin, or my sister is answering the phone for me. how do you do it so that it's, economical for those types of business owners, which do listen to the show here. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's why you need to use software, right? So, you need to have software that can see that call coming in. it knows whether or not it was answered, and then if you didn't answer it, it just sends off a text. I mean, it's just that simple. It's very easy to do these days and, and it's incredibly effective. And quite frankly the funny part is for most people, they don't want to actually call anyways. And when you text them, they're thrilled to find. That that's an option because they're not calling to ask you about your favorite color or what you think about the weather. Most of the time they're trying to just get some piece of information and then make it as a purchase decision, right, because I need my toilet replaced. I saw you on Google. You have good reviews. I just want to know if you can come out this week, that's all I'm calling for anyways. And so if I could do that all over text. Well, thank goodness I got a thousand other things I gotta do today. absolutely. Super good point. We are going to dive deep, I think, into the infrastructure that is serving traffic. And Sean, most of our episodes are about how do I get the traffic, which is probably, to be honest with you, disservice to our listeners because there's such an important aftermath it comes to serving traffic and you've built an entire. What would I call it? An ecosystem. It's not even just a SaaS product any longer. It's like an entire ecosystem meant not just for this, but I'd say especially geared towards serving traffic, nurturing pipelines, funnels, et cetera. So curious, how many customers do you have? How many end users to your software? Ooh, I don't know that one, but I know end small businesses and that's half a million. So 500,000. 500,000 people using. so it's safe to say that 500,000 businesses, if they, on average they had two employees. That'd be a million users. A million users, okay. 500,000 businesses. Which I think qualifies as proof of concept. well, we're getting there. If it's one day at a time. Yeah. I mean, it's a small country at this point which is, dude is pretty cool. You gotta be pretty proud of that. it's, it's amazing actually. Yeah. what are the things like if you were to prioritize, we're talking to, and remember we're talking to director, marketing, cmo, we're talking to people that probably aren't gonna do it. They're gonna point and they're gonna say, Hey, you go do this. if we were to give them five punch list items to give to their minions to go execute on, which would they be and how would you prioritize them? Well, I think the vast majority of people are terrible at nurturing leads. So if you look at most people, they have leads. Even people who come to you and say, I need leads, have leads. Whether they know how to capture them correctly, whether they know how, to really assign them to the right channels correctly, Maybe that's stop number one is just looking at their existing inflow and making darn sure that they're actually accounting for that. So that's inbound phone calls, that's people coming to their website, that they're not converting into a lead. Right. So all those capture points, capture, nurture, close, that's how I always think about it. So are we capturing everything? If not, that's step one. when anybody calls that business, we gotta know when anybody hits that website for that business. We gotta know when somebody goes to the Google My Business profile and takes an action, chats, something like that. Gotta know Facebook page, Instagram feed, whatever. Gotta know. And then from there, once you're cap. But most people have capture at some level. And it's really there where most people fall off because agencies are great at spinning up more leads. Even if they jump to things like, let's run an ad campaign, tons of traffic coming in that generally are good enough to put a form on a website, you're gonna get leads. It's what happens after that where everything goes to pot, because from there it's speed to lead. So somebody raises their hand and says, I'm interested in your plumbing services. You have five minutes or less. To contact me and move me down the pipe or down the funnel if you really want me to convert. And most people leave that alone. And that's where the failure occurs. Cause the business owners are not set up to do this for themselves. You'd think they are, but they're not and so what we need to do there is we need to automate and make that just a seamless automatic transaction. You know what's funny is my experience with A lot of larger businesses is they seem to think that they've outgrown this problem. it's like, oh, I sell enterprise software solutions. I've got an e r p, I've got people I can call 'em back next week. I can get you on Monday. my response to that is like, no, people are people. Everybody's impatient. We're all in I instant gratification mode, and I don't care what you're selling. Time is of the essence. Time kills sales. And so yeah, not implementing this, this could double the efficacy of your traffic, if not more Exactly, easily. and it works for everybody. you show me the biggest sales department in the world, and I'll show you that. this will save you money in efficiency, at a massive scale. Even if all it does is make it so instead, you're a hundred salespeople, you know, operate like a 200 person sales department because all that initial outreach is automated right there, you're making tons of money. So this works for every size of business, but I think for the vast majority of people, it's really simple. Reach out to them and try to buy something from them and find, and just start the watch and see how long it takes. And most of them will fail that five minute test and some of 'em will fail. Things like the 24 hour test, it's abysmal. But why that matters is because there's, the data shows that the likelihood of closing that sale doesn't go down in a straight line. it's logarithmic. It declines dramatically off the back of that five minute mark. So it's on everyone if they wanna make money to get back to those leads quickly. No. I might be stepping outside your realm of proficiency, but given how much access you have, I'd just be curious. Have you noticed common denominators when it comes to. you're saying in the nurture, cuz you can't just email and be like, do you wanna buy? You wanna buy, you wanna, you know, do you wanna schedule, like what are we saying? What's the narrative? how do you capture that attention and serve? It's actually simple. It's sticking to yes or no question. first of all, these are inbound leads, right? Vast majority of them and these people are really responding to something and really what you want to do as an organization, whether it's a small business or a large business, it's almost always the same. You want to get connected to that person via some, generally an appointment as the conduit, but you want to get them booked on something. It's almost always the situation. Right. And they might reach out with a very specific question that's absolutely true. But your goal as an org is to get them on an appointment. And so it's always being simple. It's saying like, basically, do you want to book an appointment now? Like recognize them, say like, Hey, I saw that you requested more information about x. Do you want to book an appointment to talk about that? And it's a yes or no question. That's important because human beings. Almost instinctually will answer yes or no Questions like un commanded their brains will answer them. But if you go long, if you asked me my life story or to tell me that one time that I went on vacation and had a good, my brain falls apart and it just can't comprehend. And so you just don't get people to take action. And this is kind of like, remember like why we have buttons on websites that pop forms versus just showing forms, right? Mm-hmm. Because we know it like mentally, it's like breadcrumbs. It moves us down the path. Same thing here. if I say, do you want to book an appointment? I say, yes, I've clicked that breadcrumb, and now I'm moving my brain farther down the road of se of doing something you want me to do. So then when you fire back and say, great, here's a link to my calendar. Grab a time that works for you, or something like that. I'm way more likely to actually take the action and book the appointment. Dude, this is such a massive golden nugget for our listeners, and I think this applies to so many things in marketing. You wanna make it binary, so I love stick to Yes. No, this could be true, yeah. For service space. But I think this could be true for e-comm too. if you've got a cart abandonment sequence, it's like, Hey, I noticed she jumped ship. Just curious like, are you still looking for whatever? Yes or no? Are you still interested in, right. You want the larger, the small, like you can start to just, and it's so funny. Yeah. Because it's so simple. If you keep it simple for people to respond, you keep the conversation going. everybody knows their product, right? Like e-com, let's say it's a really expensive product. You might not lead with the buy because, you know, buys are hard cuz it's a $20,000 purchase. But you might say, Hey, would you like some more information on how this can be used? Like X Cuz you know, you're, like, hey, it's like an off-road vehicle. Like, hey, you wanna see how this can be used in mud, sand, and water. People are like, oh, that'd be great, and you're like, cool, and you can automate the sending of that information. You're just trying to reel me in. The more you can keep me engaged, the more likely I am to make that purchase decision.