Podcast Transcript

[00:00:36] Sean Steele: Okay, welcome back to our regular listeners and to anybody joining us for the first time, welcome. We are thrilled to have you on the ScaleHQ Podcast. My guest this week is Cham Tang, Head of Marketing and Co-Founder at Authentic Education BRW Fast starters, BRW Fast 100. You guys fundamentally help coaches build their businesses and in particular build scalable customer acquisition processes as part of that, which is the focus of our chat today. How are you today, Cham? 

[00:01:03] Cham Tang: Going well, thanks for having me on the show, mate. 

[00:01:06] Sean Steele: Mate, it's great to have you here. So, I guess there's a bit of a setup for our audience and for us, Cham, we have a lot of Founders in our audience that are in the 1 to 20 mil range. And one of the things that I observe, I support quite a few Founders personally, but also have plenty of our audience who I chat to, and lots of them get stuck somewhere in the 5 to 10 mil range. And the reason they get stuck is they've got that far because they do an excellent job in delivery. They've got a great value proposition. Like people love what they do. The businesses make sense commercially, like you know, it's profitable, blah, blah, blah. But they're often very Founder led sales. They've built off reputation, they've built off word of mouth. They don't actually have a scalable lead generation and lead conversion system to go out and get new clients. So, they continue growing, but then all of a sudden it just starts to like, you know, it just starts to peter out and slow down. And one of the things amongst many things they need to be able to get to the next stage, one of the things they definitely need is a scalable customer acquisition system. You know, in the way that they generate leads, in the way they convert those leads into opportunities. And they need to obviously be able to get away from the Founder having too much of a role in the conversion side of that potentially. But ultimately, I'm really keen to chat to a range of people that have philosophies and practical strategies in this. And I know you think about this in the context of coaches, but I know that a lot of the things that you'd be doing could be equally applicable to B2B businesses. If people are about to listen today and going; well, I've done have a coaching business, what am I going to learn? I know that from my knowledge of everything that I can see about what you do, a lot of the stuff that you do is going to be super applicable. And so, I thought today we might even just pick an example client. We were talking offline about maybe, you know, using a recruiter or something just for us to be able to apply your frameworks and your thinking to, and the goal is super practical strategies that people can go away and implement today. 

[00:03:01] Cham Tang: Sure, a hundred percent. And I think that's a smart thing to do, to have a look at other industries, especially when people are doing well and see how you can bring it to your industry and then you get a massive competitive advantage. I know the podcast is called Scale Up, but when you talk about having trouble scaling and then the Founder is doing all the lead generation or all the driving business, making it rain. The issue is automation. I find a lot of people don't have anything automatic, so they're essentially trading their time for money or trading their time for marketing or leads. So, automation in this day and age means a lot of things. So as an example, a marketing funnel, if you've heard that phrase before. It also means recorded video content to build relationships with people. There's a lot that goes into it, and even though I come from the B2C space, I always say to my students, because a lot of them want to do corporate training as well and land corporate training gigs. At the end of the day, you're still talking to a human being. You're not trying to advertise to a company. No one advertises to a company. What is a company? It's not a logo. I'm not advertising to the Commonwealth Bank logo. Yeah. I'm advertising to a person that works there. And because the person that works there is a human being, the psychology of influence is exactly the same. The technology might be different, but it's still 80% psychology, 20% technology. 

[00:04:24] Sean Steele: Yeah, I think that's a hundred percent true. And the reality is people have to like you and then they have to trust you before they're going to buy from you. So, to your point, that's a human-based decision. That's not a corporate decision. So could you give me, just before we kick off, maybe gimme like a kind of one minute career history, like how you ended up in this space co-founding, this business. 

[00:04:45] Cham Tang: Yeah, for sure. So, I'm now 45. When I was about 20 years old, I started to get interested in personal development. The mindset was very interesting that you could change your thoughts and begin to change your life. And then a friend sent me this book called Rich Dad Poor Dad. It changed my world because I wanted to have wealth. I grew up extremely poor. Separate story, but I read in that book that marketing and sales was the most important thing. So, I wanted to sell or market something I believed in. I got a job working for Tony Robbins for two years. Did a lot of his courses, met him, all that stuff, changed my world. Worked for another personal development company called Universal Events. Travelled around Australia. Met my business partner Benjamin Jay Harvey in around 2008, and I started Authentic Education in 2009. It was really tough. Didn't know much about marketing at all, and figured it out. 2013 was when we were awarded the BRW Fast Starter Award. 2015 with the 38th fastest growing company in Australia, and since then we used to do in-person presentations. Then the pandemic, obviously. And now we've pivoted to Zoom fairly successfully. And ever since the pandemic, a lot of our competition has gone back to in-person events, but we've managed to crack this thing called Zoom and then recorded content and we have run zero in-person presentation since the pandemic. So, predominantly we help coaches, course creators, educators, to do what they love. And what I do in the business is more from a marketing standpoint. You know, Facebook ads, Google, YouTube, TikTok, social media, Email and SMS, partnerships, event marketing, those kind of things is what I focus on. 

[00:06:23] Sean Steele: It's fascinating that we've, I mean, we're the same age and we probably had a similar start in relation to the personal development journey. And I was very close to, you know, I've done all the Tony Robbins programs. I was very into Brian Tracy, and absolutely. I remember seeing Robert Kiyosaki for the first time and he absolutely flipped my world upside down in about 60 minutes when he had me write down. 

[00:06:44] Cham Tang: He has a habit of doing that.

[00:06:46] Sean Steele: Oh mate, I remember this exercise. It was like, you know, how many days, essentially, based on how much you've got coming in and how much you've got in the bank and your current cost of living, how many days will you survive if you had no job? And mine was less than seven. And I was like, well that's not a good position to be in. I probably have to do something about that. So, I love that. Can you give us just a sense for people, you know, because you're obviously also a business owner, you're not just a sort of marketing expert. What's the sort of scale of the current business? You know, whatever you're willing to share, revenue, employees, customers you serve, whatever.

[00:07:15] Cham Tang: I think revenue is probably a bit much to share, but in terms of customers, it's like thousands. Like, let's say our mailing list is like 50,000 plus. In terms of team, we've got a team of 20 people. Most of those people are in Australia, since the pandemic. We used to have a head office in Sydney, but we're actually now going to start moving to more of a satellite model because I feel we're in the new normal now after the pandemic. But yeah, things are going well. We started just after a GFC. 2009 was like a year after the GFC. Probably not the best time to start, but I've just found, I mean even now we're going through, you know, how many interest rate rises, economy. Some people even talk of recession, inflation issues, but I have always found that those things aren't the driving factor of business. It is a thing. But I have found, you know, a lot of people find that as an excuse, whereas winners find a way and then everyone else seems to find an excuse. 

[00:08:11] Sean Steele: I was having this conversation the other day with a client about the fact that people don't stop spending money in these environments, including corporates. They just spend it in different places, like their priority shift. And so, you've got to be able to shift with that priority. All of a sudden they may not be growth focused, but they're probably going to be trying to save money. So how does what you do, or how can I shift in what you do help them move to something that is now the new pain point. Because growth will become a problem again in the future when the tailwinds come back in that industry, but it doesn't mean they've stopped spending money. So, you have to be able to move with it. Can you, maybe start with your, I know you've got a sort of an overall framework or philosophy, can we start there around how you think about marketing, and fundamentally the customer acquisition framework?

[00:08:50] Cham Tang: Yeah, for sure. In terms of my mindset, everyone has a different way of thinking about marketing. I've got a specific definition, and my definition is marketing, is building relationships with people until they're ready to buy. So, I'm always thinking, who is the person I want to build a relationship with, whether that is a manager or the end consumer, or the CEO, and how can I build that relationship until they're ready to buy. Now, if I'm talking to people in corporate, let's say it's a recruitment, company, and they're looking to speak with the CEO or the Head of HR, it's still a person. Now, sometimes you can't get to the CEO. They've got like a bazillion different gatekeepers and processes to lock you out, but you can still climb that ladder of trust, so to speak. So, I call it the ladder of trust, because think about the person below them in the organisational structure. Think about the person below them. So, I was working with someone the other day as well that wanted to talk to principals, but principals of schools get pitched all the time. So, don't go for the principal. You can try, but go for the teacher. And then once you build the relationship with the teacher, then they can set up an introduction with the principal. So, always think about climbing that ladder of trust and you start with the person. So, my overarching framework is, build relationships with people until they're ready to buy. But it's a three-step thing, and I call it the marketing MAP. It's an acronym. The M stands for ‘Meet Your Ideal Client’ or the person you want to build that relationship with. The A stands for ‘Ask for Their Time.’ And the P stands for 'Present your Offer’. I'll give you an example. If you want to meet your ideal client, there's typically only seven ways that I look at doing that. I've found are the most scalable and the best. As an example, Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads, that kind of thing. Then on the actual ad, a lot of people make the mistake. It's like they want to kind of ask for the hand in marriage too quickly. You know, it's kind of like a first date. Don't ask for people's contact details for the sake of it. Don't ask for the business. Don't ask for money by advertising some type of a special or a discount you've got going on. I feel the best thing to ask for is time. We need to secure time. Why will they give us their time? Typically, it's because we are giving them something in return in the form of education, some type of advice, consultation, education. When I talk about asking for time, and I guess we're diving straight into the detail right now. We're asking for time. There's only three ways to ask for time, I've found. You ask for time one-on-one. As an example, a free assessment, like I'm going to give you a free company morale audit, if I was doing HR. Or if I was some other type of business. Let's say I was doing business training or something, or leadership training. I'm going to give you a free leadership profile, and I'm going to score you on what type of leader you are. Maybe give you a score out to five, as an example. So one-on-one you can ask for time. One to many. So maybe something like a free zoom event, a free keynote presentation, a free talk. I'll come in and do some, train your sales team, if I was doing sales coaching or something like that, it could be a Zoom event as well, or in person. And then none to many. So, it could be a free 15-minute recorded masterclass or webinar or industry update. Here's what's happening in the industry for this quarter. I'll give you a 15-or-30-minute thing, but all recorded. So, I guess it's more scalable, more leveraged. And then during that, once you have time…

[00:12:20] Sean Steele: Sorry. Before you go on. Out of those three in a, if you are selling to sort of, you know, white collar enterprise client or a corporate client, you're selling to an HR Director or a Director of Sales or Director of Marketing or something like that, have you seen anything that suggests that any one of those three are more or less effective with that kind of client, if we're thinking B2B? 

[00:12:42] Cham Tang: Typically, it would be the, the one-on-one would be more effective for sure, because then people feel that they're getting tailored, personalized support. But that's what we recommend. We call those three things, delivery methods, one-on-one, one to many, none to many. If people are starting out, a lot of people it looks very alluring and ah, yeah, I'll just create this 15-minute video runner on autopilot. But the problem is, that might be where you finish, but that's not where you start. Because if you start there with that 15-minute video, it's very hit and miss. You've never had that one-on-one conversation delivering this education. People could be scratching their heads confused within the first two-minutes and then they stop watching the video. But you don't get that feedback. You never find out why. So, we recommend starting off with one-on-one. Then go to one to many if you want to, and then go to none to many, if you want to. You don't always have to end up with recorded videos. They each have a little bit of their pros and cons, but I very rarely recommend people start at the recorded video phase. It's just too difficult to, to get their head around and change. 

[00:13:44] Sean Steele: And I cut you off there. You're about to kind of then go into the next level of detail, like what makes that work or what are the ingredients there that you've got to get right. 

[00:13:52] Cham Tang: Yeah. So, the formula that I've discovered is when we ask for time, time when you're educating people, leads to trust. If I'm teaching you something, at the very same time I'm teaching you something, I'm building trust with you, credibility or authority, thought leadership in that type of word. And in this day and age, if we're talking about sales, it very much comes down to that. Are you the respected, trusted, thought leader or expert? I'm not looking for products, features, and benefits. That's a little bit old school selling. It's more now I'm looking for expertise. I'm looking for someone who feels that they're the best in that industry to offer me their advice, their philosophy on things. So, Time + Trust = what I call Transaction, because now we've earned the right to ask for the business. We need to build that relationship in order to ask for business. So, if you think about any relationship, be it a friend, family member, partner, husband, wife, we need those two things. We can't have a relationship with our time. You can't have a relationship without trust and education does those things. For me to educate you in a assessment or in a 30 minute webinar or something like that, that requires time. And if I'm doing it right, I'm educating you. That builds trust. Potentially, that's happening right now. Like for, for people listening or watching me, I'm educating. It takes time to do, but at that very same time, you trust me more now as opposed to if I just started talking for 5-or-10-minutes and it was just how great I am on my sales pitch, or I've got a special, doesn't work in this day and age, especially in the digital information age.

[00:15:34] Sean Steele: All you have to do is think about your, the number of hit up you get on LinkedIn. Every Founder on this podcast would get hit up on LinkedIn every day, three or four times a day from, I mean, particularly, you know, Web development, app development, SEO services, you know, blah, blah, blah. And if you look back at your LinkedIn history, and you look at the follow up, it starts with, “Hey, we've got this stuff. Do you need it?” “Hey, we've got this stuff. Do you need it?” And you're like, “huh.” Well, as you said, there's no insight offered. I'm not going to learn any from that interaction, why would I say yes? There's no, why would I trade time when there's no promise of an insight of something that could be valuable to me that I actually either don't know about or want to know about. So, if there's no insight, then there's no value being created. So why would I give my time? 

[00:16:19] Cham Tang: Exactly. If we think about a relationship as well, I also like to turn to the Book of Life to see how people do things outside of business, because a human being, how they behave in real life is very similar to how they behave in business. I don't start a relationship by asking what I want from that person. I start by giving. That's how we build a relationship. I give first, and then if it's a match, then I'll offer my services. Sometimes I give and I never ask for anything in return. Because it's not a match, and I like to say that marketing is matchmaking. I'm looking for people who are looking for me. I'm not out here to hypnotise people or do some NLP trick to get people to do business. I'm looking for people that are already looking for me, just like I'm married with two kids, but let's say I was single. I'm not looking to trick someone into marrying me because sooner or later that trick is going to wear off. Well, what have I got? I've got this failed relationship. So, it's like a pointless exercise. There's already thousands, hundreds of thousands of potential clients out there for you, depending on your niche and how global you are. Just you look for those people.

[00:17:28] Sean Steele: And I'm keen to go to talk about, okay, you've just secured some time, what happens in that time? But if we were to go back, you said there's sort of seven typical ways that you'd do the reach out to get access to the time in the first place. And you gave a few examples. Can you tell me what those sevens would be? 

[00:17:44] Cham Tang: So, in terms of the seven marketing methods, we're looking at Facebook and Instagram ads. Facebook owns Instagram, so it's the same thing. We're looking at Google search ads, we're looking at email and SMS because it would be literally bonkers crazy if you had an email and SMS list and you didn't reach out to them regularly for content or a freebie. We're also looking at event marketing. Like if you think about Steve Jobs, every time he released a brand-new product like the iPhone, the iPod or the MacBook Air, he did it at an event because an event has something really special, you get massive attention which you can't get on email or e-book downloads or Facebook ads. But at the same time, you get massive leverage and trust because there's that live element happening. So, we're looking at that. Let's see if I can remember all seven off the top of my head. We're looking at free social media. Free social media, though for a lot of people not the best because it's not exactly the most scalable. We're also looking at things like SEO over time. It's a long burn but it is worthwhile because it's kind of like free traffic. For years and years and years and yeah, you don't have to believe a lot of these SEO companies that try and charge you a monthly amount that say; oh, we need to do something every month, otherwise you're going to drop into rankings. I feel in this day and age, the algorithms are so smart, they're rewarding good content without needing to go with a lot of SEO trickery. Doesn't mean SEO can't help, but it's not like 5 or 10 years ago, whereas if you didn't have it, good luck to you. Now, it's more about the quality of the content. So those are kind of… 

[00:19:15] Sean Steele: Yeah, I think it's only going to become even more, that'll even be, you know, surely that'll be exacerbated in a world where trust is going to become harder to get because the ability for people to produce, you know, automate just generic content using all sorts of tools, AI, deep fake videos, blah, blah, blah. Like the proliferation of crap content is going to get even more so, and therefore unique content should stand up more and the algorithms will get smarter to look for stuff that's actually not been generated by somebody else. 

[00:19:45] Cham Tang: Well, well that's an interesting point because we all know ChatGPT and then Google had released recently their version called Bard, which isn't as good as ChatGPT. And then we do start looking at things like now mid journey or AI generator images and then videos, and then even combining voice, like voice.ai can mimic presidents and everything quite easily. So how does that now lead into building a relationship? How does that lead to people having some type of uniqueness or authenticity? It's like a totally separate topic, but it is also very interesting because if we aren't utilising AI to help us in our business, we do kind of get left behind right now, especially when it comes to marketing and copywriting, but totally separate topic. We can talk a bit more about that later potentially.

[00:20:34] Sean Steele: Yeah, absolutely. So, you've talked also about a lot of paid strategies. I guess there's also, you know, people often use VAs for personalised LinkedIn outreach or do it themselves, but that's not super scalable, or having the salespeople do it themselves. But, you know, in some way, shape or form, you have created the opportunity to draw somebody in or that you've proactively reached out, you've offered some value. They see the benefit in that value they've created. You know, let's say it's, I know, half an hour for this one-on-one opportunity where you can deliver some insight and you've now got this opportunity to sort of start to build trust. What happens then in your process? 

[00:21:16] Cham Tang: Exactly. Let me backtrack a little bit. Just to give you some of the finer, nuanced detail. I definitely am the one that is feeling that the devil is in the detail. You can listen to a lot of high-level things, but sometimes you get a little bit confused with some of the decisions you have to make. So, as an example, a lot of people want to speak to the CEO, the manager, et cetera, and they feel the best place to start is LinkedIn for ads. I would offer you a different opinion on that. I've tried to invest as much money as I possibly can in LinkedIn ads, even when we're trying to target managers. And then I've done the same thing on Facebook and Instagram. Facebook and Instagram is like giving money to a professional, and LinkedIn I feel is like giving money to a toddler. Because the algorithm is not that smart. One of the reasons is because LinkedIn is not as big of a company, but also it doesn't have as many data points. If you think about the CEO or the manager, how much time every week or every month are they spending on LinkedIn? You cannot advertise to someone who is not there. So, everyone has a LinkedIn account, that's great, but that's pointless because you actually need to watch that person and look at their behaviour to see what they're in the market for currently. Facebook and Instagram can do that. You don't have to update your Facebook and Instagram profile and say, “I am a HR you know company”, or “I am a recruiter at KPMG”. For them to know that's who you are. They've been watching you for 10 hours a week for the last 10 years. They look at your WhatsApp messages, they look at your circle of friends, they look at the messages that come in, they look at the videos you scroll, what you're interested in and what you're not interested. You don't have to update that. Anyone who's just about to get married or something knows you're going to get a ton of ads all of a sudden about weddings and all this stuff. You don't have to have updated your status to do that. It knows. So likewise, people are missing a massive trick by not advertising on Facebook and Instagram because they think LinkedIn is the place to be. 

[00:23:15] Sean Steele: So, if you're a recruiter and you are looking for, you know, fundamentally trying to expose yourself to HR directors, you would still go via Facebook and Instagram, even though they might feel like that's the sort of more personal, non-business place that they hang out, they're still there. And so, your view is; well, that's actually still an opportunity to grab their attention? 

[00:23:34] Cham Tang: Yeah. You're after the person that has a problem, not this LinkedIn ecosystem. I'll give you an example. If you were trying to sell to a bunch of CEOs and then there was a golf tournament that had 50 CEOs, would you go to that golf tournament or would you say; ‘Hang on, that golf tournament has got nothing to do with business. I don't want to go.’ But there's 50 people there. Likewise. The people are there on Facebook and Instagram. Doesn't matter that LinkedIn is some professional looking space, we need to unwrap ourselves from that kind of mindset, and also do something different to your competition. For people who are listening to this right now, that'd be like, that's so different to how I was thinking. Yeah. So now you're going to be separating yourself from all these 50 InMail messages that the VA probably gets every week and do something a little bit different. So, LinkedIn I think is quite different. And also, I feel that people, they don't understand what building a relationship means. Building a relationship, if I was to place a Facebook ad, we invest about close to half a million dollars a year on Facebook ads. So, let me put it out there from my experience Over the last however many 14 years, it's kind of ramped up. I get mentored by Facebook as well, because once you start investing so much money, you're on the high value kind of target. And I get invited to their head office in Barangaroo just so they can help us spend more money, help us improve our Facebook ads. But my point is, video is the best for building relationship. You can do it with image and text and other stuff, but the problem with image and text is you don't separate yourself from the pack. You don't build a relationship. In this day and age, social media pushes video more and more. YouTube is all video. You talk about TikTok. That's all video. Instagram reels, which is really just a copy of TikTok, Facebook Stories, which is a copy of Snapchat. It's video, video, video. People want to see video and they say a picture paints a thousand words. Well, a video paints a thousand pictures. It builds that much trust. Five minutes of watching me on video or even a podcast, that's going to be a lot better than image and text. But five minutes of watching me on video builds so much more trust than reading like a whole industry report or article I've done, it is not the same thing. So, I'm very heavy on video, but the video needs to be giving educational, giving some awesome tip for a few minutes. Then we can talk about the free leadership profile or the free assessment, or the free 30-minute masterclass you're doing. But begin with video because of that definition of marketing I had before. Building relationships with people until they're ready to buy.

[00:26:21] Sean Steele: If you to think about that. So, let's say that you've worked to understand how to create a really compelling video that's going to build that trust. Because to your point, the beautiful thing about video is it gives you almost the same opportunity as if that person was in the room in front of you and you think, how quickly you make an assessment of whether do I like this person or not? Like, am I even willing to kind of get past the first few seconds? Video gives you that opportunity to get that connectivity very quickly based on all the nonverbal signals and stuff that you're giving off based on how you're presented, and how you smile, and a million other things.

[00:26:56] Cham Tang: I don't smile much, but yeah. 

[00:26:58] Sean Steele: In Facebook, when you're doing Facebook ads, let's just say you're going down that path and you think, ‘Hey, I can find CEOs or HR directors on Facebook.’ Can you actually target HR managers? You're fundamentally targeting demographics or, you know, things that they like in their lives.

[00:27:15] Cham Tang: Yeah. It's the interesting thing, let me talk to you about targeting. Targeting is not what you think it is. Targeting is not going into Facebook or LinkedIn and saying; I'm going to target someone that is interested in leadership or interested in management or in Facebook, you can actually target by job title cause some people update that. I'm going to target managers. That's not it. Targeting is not just two or three things you decide to put down like age, sex, and interests. Targeting is your content targets people. More than your content targeting people, your content should qualify people as well. So qualifying is even more than targeting. See, general targeting like age, sex, location, you can never qualify people. So as an example, I'm meaning, if you are in the financial services sector and you are looking to scale your team right now and take control of that and not outsource it but insource it, listen very carefully. I'm going to give you the three critical steps you must do. What have I done right there? I've said financial services sector. I've said you're looking to do it right now, which no targeting could ever do. And I've also said you're looking to take control of it in-house as opposed to outsource it as an example. Listen to all of those things I could not get int no targeting in the world because I'm now qualifying people with their mindset. Because I don't want to have to do all of this work, and then I set up a session with them or do traditional advertising and do all these ads. And when I finally talk to them, they've just got the complete wrong mindset and philosophy. So, the best type of education you could put in an ad is explain your philosophy or strategy of how you go from the problem they're currently facing, to the goal or the desire they want to achieve. If you explain that path to them, you are here with a massive problem. Let's say you can't find good team members, because you're doing HR recruitment, you can't find good team members. You're over here where you want more. Like Jeff Bezos says, “I don't want mercenaries, I want missionaries”. So, now I'm educating, Ooh, that's interesting. Missionaries, not mercenaries, people who believe in the mission, here are the three steps you have to do, and here is why those other processes are incorrect. Now you're starting to set yourself away from the pack of all those other recruiters. All these recruiters do this. Our first step is this. What is the mission? You want to attract people who believe in that mission, if the mission is not there, doesn't matter if they have the skills, they will leave. What's the point? And you said you wanted people to stick with you. So, now at the same time, I'm building trust, but also at the same time I'm qualifying the type of person that wants to work with me because we've got a certain niche of how we do things and it's doing all this great stuff at the same time. Done through video. I'm building time, establishing trust, and at the end I've set myself up if they resonate with that style to book in for that session. But now that person who does that session with me, They're quite qualified. They've already bought into me as the person, the philosophy, the methodology. I don't have to explain that to them. So, a really interesting point that the content you put out there, whether it's free content on your website or a Facebook ad, that content qualifies people. It's attracting people, but a lot of the people listening probably aren't thinking about repelling people. It's two things. Any salesperson would tell you, I want qualified prospects, not just any prospects. What does qualification mean? Qualification is a filtering or a sifting process. The content should attract people at the same time as repel the incorrect person. Otherwise, we're doing ourselves a disservice. A bit of a disclaimer, your CPA or your Cost Per Acquisition will go up a bit. But who cares, because if you look towards the future, your ROI or return on investment or ROI as they sometimes call it will increase. And that is more important than initial metrics at the beginning. 

[00:32:28] Sean Steele: So, let's say, I mean, I love this thinking because actually I've never really considered that, you know, people can rush to going, they hear this and they go; great, new platform for me to try to find people on. Going to rush into Facebook and they just put up some terrible, crappy ad that just starts with, “Hi, we do solar panel installation and blah, blah, blah…” And you've switched off in less than one second. You're just like, move on, move on. And that's a great way to waste money. But this is saying actually the design of that ad must be thought of in that process so that you are qualifying people so that if yes, you know, it's never going to be the cheapest place to… if you're going to build something scalable, you have to have something that is scalable. That sounds a bit crazy, that's pretty obvious, 

[00:33:16] Cham Tang: Which means utilising technology, like a Facebook ad, like a video to do that heavy lifting as opposed to human beings, direct messaging or picking up the phone or so on.

[00:33:25] Sean Steele: So, then you've got a call to action at the end of that, which is the invitation to the free time, or the one to many. or the zero to many. What is your experience in what is a good conversion rate? Or if you think about like, how many people have actually clicked on; yeah, I'm going to do that meeting, versus, how many show up. Just to kind of think about like if there's a hundred people that go through the start of that funnel just to get to the next stage in the funnel, which is; okay, I'm actually going to get some one-on-one time with you. What do you think that sort of attrition looks like or that conversion rate? 

[00:34:00] Cham Tang: Yeah. Well, obviously it depends how it was done and who you're targeting. But if I gave very rough examples, let's say I had 10 people book in for an actual, 10 people click rather. And on the actual ad itself, it was very upfront while they were clicking. I've given some value. Explained the three steps to hire Superstars or A players book in for your free assessment tier or strategy session. Then for every 10 people that book, I would say in between 20 to 40% would be a good conversion rate if it's done properly. 

[00:34:30] Sean Steele: Conversion to sales from the meeting, you mean?

[00:34:35] Cham Tang: No, conversion to booking. So, they watch the video, they click, they understand why they're clicking. It's not a surprise. So, when they get to my landing page, the page on my website, two to four people would do that. Just a small thing. You can place Facebook and Instagram ads without a website. It's called an Instant Form. The form pops up on Facebook and Instagram, but let's say they go into the website. Two to four people would do that. That's making the booking. Assuming the booking was done correctly and you had sufficient time slots and not booking for like two weeks into the future, I would say about 65% of those people would actually show up, about two thirds. And this depends once again on your reminder sequence if you gave value. Hopefully as soon as they booked in, it went to a thank you page and on that thank you page was a video of someone once again explaining what they're going to get from it, also covering out the objections. Let me pause on this point. When it comes to influence copywriting, sales, marketing, whatever you want to call it, a lot of people just think attracting clients, but not about repelling. With marketing as well and influence a lot of people think about the green light. Here is all the reasons why you want to show up to this session. But you also got to think about the red light. You got to address the reasons they will not show up to this session. As an example, they're going to think it's one massive long sales pitch. They're going to think, who is this person I'm going to speak to. They're going to think, is this worth my time? Am I actually going to get at anything out of it? Because if they see that meeting in their calendar, Let's say 11:00 AM and now it's 9:00 AM they think, oh, I've got such a busy day. Ah, I could really get back an hour of my time if I exited that meeting. Should I? Should I not? Here is the thoughts that start going through their mind. Is this going to be a waste of my time? Is it going to be a sale… We need to address those concerns in the thank you page as well. Otherwise, if we don't, and we are only thinking green lights, the red light is what stopped us. Sometimes success is not just about acceleration, but removing that handbrake, that blockage to the sales pipeline. So, our content and our education has to do that. It's not all about the green light. The red light, as you can see, is just as important as having a green light. If there is no green light, I've got no reason to do anything. But if there's a whole bunch of green lights, but there's one glaringly obvious red light, which is I'm scared of the hard sale, I won't get on either. And now you're kind of done for. 

[00:37:03] Sean Steele: Okay. So, let's assume we've gone from our 10 that have clicked. We've got 20 to 40% have come through to the form and you know, half of those have decided to show up. So now we've got maybe one or two people showing up in the actual meeting. We've now got a one-on-one opportunity. Is there a framework that you think about as to how to run those sessions?

[00:37:23] Cham Tang: Yeah, for sure. I mean, in terms of the overarching percentages as well that you probably were going to want to know about before, it would be probably looking at 1 in 4 to 50%. So, any anywhere between 25 to 50%. Now that is fairly high, and that's a rough estimate, but that person is heavily qualified. If the qualification has been done correctly, it's not just I'm giving free advice to anyone. It is if you are this type of person and you want to go from this problem to this desire, you understand my methodology of how we're going to get there, it hasn't been just such a random thing. Then let's jump on this actual call and we can see if we can work together. I'll also explain what you're doing wrong and right, so there is a two-way street happening. I'm going to explain the strategy of how to go from point A to point B, and if we can potentially work together, then I'm going to explain that as well. If those things are upfront on the call and they should be, and there's no surprises. And it's all been done through automation. Then that's how we get a very high conversion rate. In terms of answering your questions of what you do on that call. It is a strategy session. It might come under a different name, like a profile assessment, an audit or something like that, but it is a strategy session. The reason I mention that word strategy is, we're not doing actual work right now. We're explaining the steps or the strategy to go from problem to desire. So, in that recruitment example, it's all right. A lot of people are focusing on the wrong thing. They've got an incorrect philosophy. Here's what we do; First, we'll look at the mission. Then, we look at maybe action-based interviewing. Ooh, what is action-based interviewing? Let's actually do something in the interview that shows me that you have the skills to do something so it's measurable. A lot of other recruitment agencies do it this way. We do it this way. We found it's the best. And then step three, whatever the, the third process is, maybe the third process is how do you find the best talent? It's not all just about being lazy and advertising on seek, as an example. So now they understand the path. It's very important for people to realise people pay for that path. I'm explaining the path in the form of education, but that's what people are paying for. When I get to the end of this freebie, the implementation of the path is what I'm asking for. I'll give you an example. They're on board with the three steps. Would you like to implement those three steps? Well, this is my services. This is my program, this is my product. What does the product do? What do you do in this, this package of services? I implement the path I've just been talking about for the last 30 to 45 minutes. So, one could actually say you've been selling your services the entire time, because for someone to spend $50,000 on your services, they need to be on board with what happens. Here's what you get for your 50,000. Step one, we look at the mission. Step two, we look at the action-based interviewing. Step three, this is how we advertise, but it needs to be done in two steps. Step one, I explain the path to go from problem to desire. Step two, I explain the service or the product that implements that path. What I give you for free is the why you should do something and what it actually is. What you pay for, is the how. If you want the 'How’ that's paid, the 'Why’ and the ‘What’ I give you for free in this session, you still get value from that because you, you'll be like, ah, that's such a different way of looking at things. I understand. Or I've got personal assessment on where I'm going wrong. So, I still got value, but it is not just giving free advice willy-nilly. And then you come to crunch time at the end of the conversation, and now you've got to re-explain something from scratch. If I tie it all together…Well, that's what most people do. If I start explaining now my services and my methodology and what you're going to get from scratch at the end, I have neither the time to do it, nor the trust. I have neither the time to do it. As in that end part now, I don't have 15, 20, 30 minutes to do it justice. I can't be pitching and pitching for so long and I don't have the trust because now people feel I'm explaining why I'm so different. Like if I explain that part about action-based interviewing, at the end, while I'm pitching my services, the wall goes up. And now people feel you are just saying that because you're pitching your thing, that the trust isn't there. So, it needs to be done in education throughout. And that is, I guess the, what we've discovered over the years of doing it, the best way to do it.

[00:42:10] Sean Steele: Do you find there's a sweet spot in how long that whole session should go for? 

[00:42:15] Cham Tang: Yeah. So, the amount of time that you want to ask for, it depends on how long it takes to go from cold to sold. Like let's say no one knows you, cold. Now you're asking them to take some call to action. How much time would you reasonably expect you need in order for them to take action? If it's going to take 60 minutes for them to invest $50,000, then take 60 minutes. If it takes 30 minutes to have that initial conversation and now you need another meeting, how long does it take for them to have that second meeting with you? Well, if you feel that you could get to that second meeting phase where now they're talking to their boss or something like that, if you feel you could do that in 30 minutes, take 30 minutes, because the more time you ask for, the harder that time is to get. It's harder to ask for two hours than 30 minutes, but there's no point in asking for 10 minutes if that's not going to do it justice. You're going to have a lot of these half conversations. Getting someone half sold, would means no sale. Does that make sense? Whether or not that sale is by now, or have a second meeting or scope it out, or introduce you to their boss. So, however long it takes to get to that next call to action is how much time you ask for.

[00:43:27] Sean Steele: So good. And so do you consider then in the MAP process, this is fundamentally the P stage. 

[00:43:33] Cham Tang: Yeah. Present your offer. 

[00:43:35] Sean Steele: Yeah. And what do you find when Founders hear this and they go, I imagine one of the first things they think is; geez, like that really takes a lot of thinking to do this properly. Like, I imagine they're kind of going; oh, like I've just kind of been doing it a bit slap dash up until now and I don't know if I want to, like, it sounds like a lot of thinking and a lot of customisation and really got to get it right. What would you say to them if you kind of heard that objection?

[00:44:04] Cham Tang: I think it's that analogy of building a pipeline. I sometimes say to people, do you want to be building buckets or do you want to build a pipeline? You can hold buckets every day. That's quite a short-term thinking. But then after a while, the easy road gets hard and the hard road gets easy. This other person that's thought about the future a little bit, Like, I think every visionary CEO, like I've been studying Jeff Bezos a lot more lately. He spends more time in the future as much as possible, play the long game. It takes time to build that pipeline. But when I switch on the tap, I'm laughing at you over here holding your buckets around, because you're always thinking about this month, this quarter. So, build that pipeline. It will also set you apart from the competition. When I start talking about video or when I start talking about other things like that, sometimes there's a bit of fear that kicks in. Like fear of public speaking or fear of presenting to camera. But therein lies the competitive advantage. If you are not fearful of it, I probably wouldn't do it. Because if people have zero fear, everyone does it. And if everyone does it, where's my advantage? I do not have a competitive advantage. So, the greater the fear, the greater the competitive advantage. 

[00:45:17] Sean Steele: What about who should be doing it? So, if you're in a Founder led business and you know the Founder doesn't want to be in every one of these calls, but I don't know, maybe the Founders the best at articulating the proposition. How important, if let's just say someone's really good in front of camera and makes a great person on video, but then you've got a sales team of 10 people that are going to be ones taking these calls, how do you make sure that sort of transfer of trust is happening because they now want to speak to the Founder, but the Founder can't speak to everybody. How would you think about that?

[00:45:49] Cham Tang: It depends who it is. A lot of these days we find that everyone's trying to build relationship directly. Like if you have a look at the Twitter following of Elon Musk versus Tesla. Elon Musk has more followers. Same with Richard Branson and Virgin, because they want to see that person. But that's a famous person. So obviously everyone's going to rather see Richard Branson on a video than anyone else. But for most Founders, their face isn't instantly recognisable so it's not a huge thing. The person who is best on camera would be better. If that happens to be the Founder, then that's great, but obviously their time is at a premium. So, whoever is best on camera and ideally someone that is going to be sticking with the company for a while because you don't want to be kind of changing the face every now and again. But the person who is most compelling on camera and has time to work on that skill, and it is a skill I've had to teach myself. For those of you listening, you probably heard my name at the start, but I'm Chinese. A typical Asian guy, whatever you think of, a typical Asian guy who used to study I.T, that was me. And I always thought that maybe I was just naturally an introvert, but I found after a while, all these labels and personality profiles, they're good to an extent. But underneath all that, we are human beings and we're capable of almost infinite potential. So, I like to thank the famous quote from Marcus Aurelius. He said that “If a thing is humanly possible, consider it within your reach.” And I found that to be true. After a while, this presenting to camera thing or talking or public speaking or educating, even though I didn't initially want to do it, it's just a skill just like snowboarding or riding a bike.

[00:47:28] Sean Steele: And I think if there's Founders listening today who've never actually experienced the benefit, have never been in, have done SEO, for example, for long enough, it's hard to get your head around how powerful that is. Like I've run a lot of education businesses where good SEO strategies, as you said, take time to pay off. Like it might not be for three years until you really see the benefit, but all of a sudden, you know you're getting half your leads without having to pay for them because actually you've been doing the work for the last three years and your cost of acquisition go through the floor. Like it can make an absolutely game changing. You're all of a sudden not dependent on all the paid channels and all the cost per lead and how those things fluctuate, because you've actually got this really strong engine of organic traffic that's coming through. It's the same with this, right? If you don't actually put the work in, it's going to take time. It's a foundation building exercise. But as you said, once you get it working and once you can refine it and once you start to optimise it, that competitive advantage, almost like AI, you know, like once it starts to bite, it can really start to build trajectory and momentum. 

[00:48:27] Cham Tang: Exactly, because if we are thinking about competitive advantage, and that's one good kind of frame to look at it from. If you do other things, those other things are easily copyable. Like let's say you produce some amazing industry report and now you run that ad on Facebook or LinkedIn or somewhere, your competition, sooner or later can see that. It's so easy to duplicate a webpage or an industry report or something like that, or your exact ad, they just copy and paste it. But if it's someone on video, it's hard to replicate that now you've spent that time and you can never copy a person. So, as an example, I'll use the example of Tony Robbins - one of the most, or the most famous personal development motivational speaker on the planet. But he's been the most famous for the last 40 years. Do you know what I mean? Or 30. Why has no one copied him yet? Well, they've tried, but you can't copy a human being. You can't copy a person. You can't copy Elon Musk. So, that is why if the Founders are listening, you could see it is all about communication these days. Not only, if you are busy, obviously you're busy and you're going to now spend 5, 10, 20 hours, 5, 10, 20 days mastering this thing of communicating on camera, communicating to people on a webinar or something. Those skills are not lost. It's not just building the pipeline. They will help you every single time you open your mouth at the town hall with your team when you're training five people, when you're speaking at some industry conference, when you're speaking at some annual general meeting. It's all communication. The best leaders in the world have always been the best communicators. You just have a look at it. Politics, it's not the person with the best policies that always gets elected, right? It's the best presentation skills a lot of the time is who gets elected. Now, that's not the fairest thing in the world, but that's how it is, right? 

[00:50:24] Sean Steele: It matters. It absolutely matters. And investing your time into something that's going to give you a medium-term advantage is the entire point of our ScaleUp Roadmap Program. It's actually about helping people build growth strategy. And by the way, you might build a growth strategy that ensures that you've got the right approach from a business perspective, the right propositions, you're going into the right markets, you've got your capital structures in place, you've got a growth strategy. But if you actually can't build an acquisition capability alongside that, you're still going to struggle to implement that because you're actually going to need the resources that come with that growth to continue investing in the strategy. And so, this is a, you know, whether you're using the MAP process and whether you like what Cham has got to say or another method. You need to be building a scalable acquisition strategy. And so, this has been so valuable, Cham, I'm really grateful for your time and just the level of detail and practicality that you've shared with the audience, that's super value giving. I'm just conscious of our time. It's probably feels like a good place to leave it there. Where would you like to, , direct people to, if people want to learn more about Authentic Education and the stuff that you teach Founders?

[00:51:37] Cham Tang: Sure. We've got a whole bunch of free resources on our website, www.authentic.com.au. I've actually prepared as well a special link if people want to learn more about ChatGPT and AI and how that can impact businesses. Because if people aren't using the power of that, then they're missing a massive trick. It's www.authentic.com.au/scaleup. Because the big thing in this day and age is we have these tools like Google. Google when it came out was mind blowing, but after a while, it's not the be-all and end-all for a business, but I find Google now, it's more like a library. It copies and pastes information. Now we've got ChatGPT. A lot of people don't understand the pros and cons of ChatGPT. It is more like a personal assistant, so it is good. And you can ask ChatGPT give me 50 ideas for an ad, but now you've still got a problem, which one is best? You know, you've still got to make the judgment call. It's not going to replace a CEO or a manager. So, you need to understand the pros and cons and how it's different. When I first saw ChatGPT, I thought it was like a glorified Google. It is not that. ChatGPT can actually create unique work, but there are some downsides, like you shouldn't necessarily copy and paste the blog post, you get out of ChatGPT and put it on your website. That would not be what Google would call helpful content. And they did a recent helpful content update, and then you're going to get penalised if it's not helpful content. So there are some pros and cons of how do we utilise this new technology and hence that webinar that I did, harnessing the power of AI and ChatGPT for your business.

[00:53:18] Sean Steele: Sounds great. And just to reply, where, where do they go to get that? 

[00:53:22] Cham Tang: www.authentic.com.au/scaleup and you just register for free. For all transparency's sake, that is an example of what I would do as well of meeting your ideal client, asking for their time. I'm asking for time right now, and then there will be a short offer in the last five minutes at the end of that presentation to be a thousand percent transparent. I walk my talk, if you want to see how I do it. Attend that event as well. 

[00:53:47] Sean Steele: Beautiful. Cham, thank you so much. I'm really grateful for your time, and I'm sure we'll be getting you back on in the future to really unpack some of the other strategies that are clearly no doubt evolving with the advent of ChatGPT and more. Thanks so much for your time, Cham. 

[00:54:01] Cham Tang: No worries. Thanks for having me.