Eddie, Sales Funnel Professor will turn two a little bit later this year, and it’s been a whirlwind from day one. On most business days, you’re working with people on 5 continents.
Sad that no one in Antarctica has reached out with sales and marketing problems yet, but it seems like it could happen any day.
But in all seriousness, you and I were talking about what a shortcoming it is that while you write origin stories and build brands all the time, we haven’t caught our breath to tell your own.
To say you’ve had a non-linear career would be an understatement. That said, I was excited to ask you some questions but as you do in your guided tour training for clients, you can expect I’m going to throw some curveballs, too.
Table of Contents
A Bit of Background
Pre-Sales Funnel Professor Experience
MBA
The Start of Sales Funnel Professor
Thoughts on The Agency Model & How SFP Coordinates
Who is The Professor?
What Does “Winning” Mean For A Client
Who is a Good Client for SFP?
How Do SFP Relationships Begin?
A Bit of Background
Q: Before we talk about Sales Funnel Professor, let’s rewind way way way back. Where are you from and what do you think from your childhood might have eventually inspired/caused you to do the multi-dimensional problem solving you do with businesses today?
So I’m from Atlanta, Georgia, which, on the one hand, is the heart of “The South” in the United States and there are plenty of stereotypes about that. My dad jokes about how thick my accent was when I was a toddler (I had adopted my nanny’s drawl).
But Atlanta is also the home of CNN, Coca Cola, and Delta along with the world’s busiest airport and hosted the Olympics (1996) when I was teenager (I saw ping pong and field hockey among other things). So it is fairly multicultural while also having that old, conservative side around as well.
My dad was a very successful trial attorney (including medical malpractice) and my mother was a Professor of Radiology and led a number of the early MRI studies in the US. He actually deposed her twice (although she was just a witness). Needless to say their marriage evaporated when I was quite young.
I think growing up in two households with two people that had such drastically different ways of seeing the world was very helpful for what I ended up doing later in life, which is in essence, communicating/translating from one frame of reference to another.
My dad encouraged me to learn to ride motorcycles and other even riskier activities. Have you ever been hard aground where you can’t reach shore on sailboat overnight? I have (multiple times).
My mom had me playing the Cello. To say that I had broad cultural exposure would be an understatement.
The one thing they had in common…they both worked their butts off.
Q: Sounds a bit schizophrenic… glad all that therapy helped you make it to college without too many concurrent diagnoses. Were there other skills you picked up before any “career” jobs that you think help with what you do today?
Negotiation is a big one. My dad loves a deal, haggling, etc. and taught me to do that very young. We would go to farmer’s markets or flea markets or whatever, and he would make me low ball the vendors and bargain, etc.
I later read books from the Harvard Negotiation Project and took a negotiation course during my MBA, but my childhood experience was old school lowball-counter-counter-walkaway-come-back style stuff. So that was really helpful for dealing with ambiguity and “business bluffing” and all those plays that are run within the art of “closing.”
Another was writing. I went to this really academically-rigorous high school that required an insane amount of writing. And then I was an English major and legal clerk during college, so by the time I had my first “real” job, I had written 1000s of pages and proofread 1000s more for other people, with much of it being logic heavy.
Another was an appreciation for how various cultures see things. I did a full semester of study in Spain and finally became conversational in Spanish. That period happened to overlap with 9/11 in the United States and ETA (Basque separatist group) was very actively bombing various locations while I was there. I think getting comfortable communicating within another language and with people of very different cultures was fantastic for the work today, where we’re part of teams from all over the world and commercializing products and services to a global audience.
I also started my first internet business. My friend Wes Finley was always a step ahead of me on tech utilization. We were also both desiring a little more funding for getting in trouble during undergrad and were early adopters of internet gambling. This was before it was regulated and we built an early affiliate site using SEO as top of funnel (along with some guerrilla marketing) while still being full-time students.
I also waited tables and law-clerked… all at once. So somehow the whole “wearing many hats” thing started pretty early for me.
Pre-Sales Funnel Professor Experience
Q: Got it. So where did you go after college?
I left college with the idea of taking a gap year and then starting law school. By happenstance, a friend introduced me to an industrial real estate developer from Atlanta who also happened to have been developing a 5400-acre beachfront project in Costa Rica. I sat for a single interview with him in Decatur, GA and he was kind enough to hire me on the spot to be his first teacher in Villareal, a small town near Tamarindo, Costa Rica.
I then flew down there and was driven around to 10 area public high schools to meet with their brightest students and their parents to tell them about a class I would be teaching. My actual training for teaching was a 20-minute talk on lesson plans and then they gave me access to a single sheet copier that happened to be 7 miles by bicycle from where I lived. Each day of the week, I had a 4-hour class with students from 2 high schools. 50 kids from 10 high schools in total.
I had to get the high achievers ready for the TOEFL and a scholarship to schools in the US. It was an amazing program and quite an adventure. I was 22 and some of my students were as old as 20. My mode of transportation was a bicycle and the road to the high school was dirt and became an unbelievable mud pit during the rainy season. I would ride to work shirtless with a change of clothes and my materials in a garbage bag in my backpack, and then hose off and change clothes at the high school and teach, and then do the whole thing backwards at night.
Quite a few of my students finished their degrees in the US eventually.
I really enjoyed the teaching part. Since The Professor hired me, I get to teach again within the realm of sales and marketing.
We’re also developing our e-learning platform for CEO’s and agency owners, so I’m enjoying putting together that material.
Whereas my English class was all about scholarships, I get a similar level of satisfaction helping Sales Funnel Professor clients achieve phase shifts and all the money that comes in when those happen for the companies we help.
Q: You still have a business in Costa Rica. What’s the story there?
I was living in what’s called a “cabina” for $10/night while I was teaching. Surfing was a big part of my life from arriving in Costa Rica to when I moved back to the states, and my possessions of any value were my bicycle, my laptop, and a surfboard. Simpler times!
One day I was hitchhiking and a Brazilian real estate agent picked me up at the crossroads to Tamarindo. We were making small talk and when she heard I was teaching English, she asked if I could help improve her English, especially written English for answering sales emails.
So I started giving her classes and we would basically answer her emails on this dial up modem at the real estate office. The company’s website was built in HTML, which I happened to already know, and so they started asking me to work for the company itself helping them manage the listings and things like that. This was the days of Dreamweaver and FTP. Pretty brutal, especially on a dial-up connection.
But when I was doing that kind of stuff, I was also basically learning the market as I managed the listings and what was being developed, selling, etc. And I happened to be the only one in the office on Saturday mornings quite frequently.
One day this American couple walked in on their first trip and wanted to learn about what was available. We discussed a number of properties that I knew about and then I offered to show them around. I only had a bicycle so they drove, and I navigated. They fell in love with a Spanish Colonial villa and I made my first real estate sale with some assistance from the owner of the company, an awesome Dutch guy that spoke 5 languages that would later become my partner.
So I bought a car and instantly became an agent (eat what you kill), then broker and rainmaker, then had my own firm, then came back as managing partner, then we split the company all before the end of the subprime crisis, and I kept my part, which focuses on high-end vacation rentals for the most part. I have an awesome General Manager that runs the day to day.
Throughout that time, I early-adopted everything sales and marketing that I could: content management systems, SEO and the accompanying analytics tools, PPC, social, paid social, and I even had a sort of hacked together G-drive type thing back before Google bought what would eventually become the Google Drive suite of tools.
I started hiring and managing various marketing agency relationships during this time as well. Web development, graphic design, signage, etc
Eventually broadband internet arrived and I even started building my own SaaS platform that was a competitor to AirBnB and started on the tough learning curve of managing software development projects.
Q: I’ve heard you say a number of times that being a real estate broker and head of a property management company was great experience for being a B2B tech revenue leader… How do you connect those dots?
So Tamarindo is a tiny beach town on the Pacific side of Costa Rica, but it’s a very popular tourist location. Although I represented a North American REIT, most of my work was with private investors seeking 2nd and 3rd homes or looking to do multi-family development projects.
Professor’s Note:
A Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) is a company that invests in and manages income-producing real estate. REITs pool investors’ money to buy, manage, or finance properties like office buildings or apartments. They are required to distribute at least 90% of their taxable income as dividends and often trade on stock exchanges, providing liquidity. REITs offer diversification and generally avoid corporate income taxes by meeting specific regulatory requirements.
We were often establishing relationships in-person via our office on the main road or for those that had been to the area and fell in love but not met us yet, we had to establish the relationship digitally.
So on the marketing side, I was a huge early adopter of SEO as a top of funnel and then organic social media and then SEM/PPC as tops of funnel as soon as those really came into existence. So that all ran through a custom website (middle of funnel) and we later adopted various content management systems to make the maintenance of an accurate database of listings easier.
If there were cloud CRMs available in those days, they weren’t on my radar so managing all of the deals out of spreadsheets being emailed back and forth was how we handled that part.
With inbound, I was feeding 8 agents across two offices with buyer and seller prospects.
On the sales side, I was managing my own clients and also the closer and pipe manager (inspections, contracts, lawyers, etc.) for the rest of the agents. A real estate “broker” license in the US is a more complex set of skills that is mostly used to rubber stamp contracts for agents. They don’t generally provide lead generation or marketing support apart from the credibility that a brand brings. In Costa Rica, a broker has to have all the inbound funnels flowing. You can’t network in the local area to find buyers that aren’t in the country yet.
We also had a really complex sales cycle that a BANT purist would despise. A lot of people would walk into the office that a BANTist would call “tire kickers” or “looky loos” and disqualify immediately.
Professor’s Note:
BANT stands for Budget, Authority, Need, and Timing. It’s a sales qualification framework used to assess and prioritize potential leads or prospects.
- Budget: Determines if the prospect has the financial resources to purchase your product or service.
- Authority: Identifies if the prospect is the decision-maker or has influence over the purchasing decision.
- Need: Assesses whether the prospect has a need for your product or service and how it aligns with their requirements.
- Timing: Evaluates the prospect’s timeframe for making a decision or purchasing.
In a scenario where time is scarce, using BANT helps sales teams focus on opportunities that are most likely to convert.
It’s not just that they didn’t have a particular property or type of property in mind. A typical first conversation would be with someone who didn’t even know that foreigners could purchase property in the country and hold it fee-simple.
So like many things SaaS, you have to explain that the broad desire is achievable via software in the first place, and then why a particular solution is the right one for that client.
I read business books prolifically and sales in particular during that period: Napoleon Hill, Dale Carnegie, Zig Ziglar, Brian Tracy, Harvard Negotiation Project and the list goes on.
So I got really good at educating clients about the country, owning real estate as a foreigner, and our particular area and properties. I was one of the top agents in the whole region by sales by age 25.
Q: But you’ve been back in the states for quite a while now and been working with tech directly for over a decade. How did that come to pass?
By about age 28, I had two residences in Costa Rica. One at the beach and one in the capital of San Jose, but I felt really challenged to find the type of education and mentorship that I needed to take my career to the next level in either location.
Around the time that the subprime mortgage crisis hit and all residential real estate sales in our area essentially came to full halt for over a year. I also had a relationship coming to an end and a number of my family members in the states developed cancer and passed away within a short span. Something about all that made me feel like a chapter was closing and the next one needed to open.
I really enjoyed real estate, but I was even more excited about putting all the pieces of the company together. I would later find out from industrial psychology testing that I’m a synthesizer with strong spatial reasoning skills, so that’s probably at least part of the reason.
We had adopted quite a bit of software and cloud services in particular, especially on the property management side, and I liked that business model and wanted to move in that direction.
I started applying to MBA programs and landed on this amazing program at The University of Georgia. They had fantastic funding so I was able to do a full-time program for two years on scholarship and fellowship with a stipend and that allowed me to keep things going in Costa Rica, keep working on my AirBnB competitor, and meet some amazing people both in my class and within the faculty and guests that the faculty brought in.
MBA
Q: What were you looking for from an MBA and what did you get?
I had been somewhat successful and built up my company to 23 people when the economy was strong, but I also felt like there were plenty of areas where I was just winging it. I had a lot of frustration about people management as well.
I wanted to be able to talk with people who were 20 years older than me and had tons of experience and really fill in some gaps in my education but also get some confirmation on some things that I was actually doing correctly.
I wanted to build a network in the states and to learn a lot really quickly, which is why I opted for a 2-year, full-time program.
And I got most of that. My first semester marketing class was with a professor who had great corporate experience and talked quite a bit of strategy. We also did a group project where four of my classmates were willing to actually work on my business for the semester project.
I learned a ton from Molly Garrison and Ivey Evans in particular.
There was an Entrepreneurship concentration, so I visited Silicon Valley both years and met VC firms, startups and saw the Google campus twice in their golden era. I also took tons of marketing classes and the two innovation classes that were available. So all of that background has been really helpful in building the revenue side of businesses here in the states.
I was also a pain in the ass and arrogant and wrong about certain things in that era and realized later that I was completely incorrect on a number of things.
Q: Can you give examples?
I was super gung-ho about entrepreneurialism and a lot of my feedback was about how to make the program better for that. That’s not really what most MBA programs are about or what people who choose to do them are looking for, so I should have shut my mouth quite a bit more than I did.
I was also a “brand denier” in that era. When I was working on the early version of my AirBnB competitor, I did the graphic design of the home page myself and I really wasn’t good at it and it was overall just classic “logic only” based presentation. Megan, another classmate, actually did a mid-definition rewire of the whole page with beautiful photography and iconography and I was almost insulted. I didn’t get it. I didn’t understand why we spent time on it when the logical reason to use the site was “obvious” in my eyes and my crappy design achieved that.
Having done so many sales funnel audits and achieved huge gains on CRO for firms that have poor branding, I actually believe my take was inverted in those days. Great branding creates so much trust that its relative weight in a conversion rate optimization exercise is probably multiples higher than just getting the logic of why someone should purchase stated correctly.
Professor’s Note:
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is the process of enhancing a website or marketing campaign to increase the percentage of visitors who complete a desired action, such as making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or filling out a form.
A Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) is a senior executive responsible for overseeing and driving a company’s revenue generation strategies. The CRO’s role typically involves:
- Revenue Growth: Developing and implementing strategies to increase the company’s revenue streams.
- Sales and Marketing Alignment: Ensuring alignment between sales and marketing teams to maximize revenue.
- Customer Relationship Management: Enhancing customer relationships and improving customer acquisition and retention.
- Strategic Planning: Identifying new business opportunities and markets for growth.
The CRO plays a crucial role in shaping the company’s revenue strategy and achieving financial targets.
Q: For what you do today, how applicable is what you learned during your MBA?
A ton of it was very useful. My ability to translate with people of different mindsets opened even further. My class was multinational and that was fantastic.
I also had a lot of classmates that were on more of a finance or accounting track, and I needed to learn those disciplines and how their voice would be heard within companies I would later help.
It came up in my MBA, but there was zero actual sales training, which I think is systemic in MBA programs even today. It wasn’t a problem for me personally because I had already been doing it for 8 years, but a lot of my classmates wanted to learn at least a little bit of sales or more about the marketing and sales interface/handoff.
And especially in B2B, so much business gets driven by true sales activity.
On the marketing side, it was very quant-oriented, which is a good thing to understand but much more applicable in consolidated markets. Multi-variable correlation models are awesome if there’s anyone around to maintain them but that’s not common outside very large marketing departments.
I remember a particular marketing test question made no sense to me. It was correlating advertising spend with revenue directly, and I was looking at it thinking the test question must not have been completed or something.
In my brain, revenue was much more tightly correlated with how good the advertising was (in part due to viral possibility) but the question was written from the perspective of a finance department under the assumption that the creative was exactly as effective as that of the competitor. In other words, it was treating the creative as commoditized such that the only way to influence revenue was via spend.
That’s not the case for companies outside the Fortune 500. You absolutely can make enormous gains with better marketing (not just more).
Tight spend to revenue correlation type of thinking is more applicable to Coke vs Pepsi or airlines, where the brand is already locked in.
I generally work with firms where there’s a lot of room for huge gains via creativity and even choosing the company’s paradigm.
Q: So what was next after your MBA?
Via one of the UGA professors, I was able to get a seat in the Atlanta Tech Village, which was just coming online.
There’s an Atlanta-based entrepreneur that created a product called Pardot that was acquired by SalesForce. He used some of the proceeds of that exit to become a venture capitalist and convert an office building into a startup incubator. I was still working on my real estate platform and it really didn’t align with what was coming out of there at that time, in part because it wasn’t designed for a large enough audience. My idea was that I could build a platform and clone it country by country. Investors were more interested in a straight line approach that could service a huge audience from a single product.
In those days, the investors were also always talking about how they only wanted to invest in “technical” founders, meaning people who were coding their own projects, so I wasn’t really a fit. I had taken computer science in college but never been in love with actually writing code.
I also freelanced for a startup at Georgia Tech’s ATDC that had a small investment from Mark Cuban. It was interesting but was more of a feature than a company and struggled with capital, but I learned quite a bit about mobile app marketing while helping them land their first B2B client, which would eventually lead to the company becoming a small acquisition in the automotive marketing space.
Overall, I was realizing that my AirBnB competitor wasn’t going to make it and feeling like it might be a good time to just go work somewhere full-time. Luckily, I was introduced to a company that was a really good fit for my skill set and something I could get passionate about.
Q: Sounds fortuitous…what was the company and the play?
I was introduced to a founder who was creating an all-in-one, SaaS Fintech cloud competitor to QuickBooks (and Bill.com and ADP).
QuickBooks is owned by Intuit (huge market cap, established public company) and had been around forever. When I was starting my property management company, I had to use QuickBooks desktop to bookkeep each property and it was just incredibly cumbersome and idiosyncratic in my opinion. I hated it but there wasn’t really an alternative.
So the idea of playing giantkiller to this company that hadn’t innovated their product in a decade was really appealing, and I totally understood the pain points of the small business customers who would love to get hours of their lives back each month.
My original title was VP of Business Development, and I resigned after 7 years as the Chief Operating Officer. I was a revenue-oriented COO and wore the head of marketing and sales hats as well, and was also a reluctant product manager when required. So our Head of Growth services, that combine sales, marketing, and product guidance come from the experience.
So on the direct to end-user side, I built and ran the stack, first in SalesForce with lots of add-on apps and later consolidated a significant portion of that to HubSpot. I built and managed the inside sales, biz dev, marketing, support, implementation, and rev-ops/billing teams.
I also was the closer for banks, credit unions, and accounting firms and managed those relationships and the technical integrations we built to support 100’s of bankers per bank reselling our software with our CRM being able to talk to theirs. This work has been really helpful for our HubSpot-centric sales stack buildout and helping get APIs integrations flowing and things of that nature.
Q: What did you learn from all of that?
Across the whole company, we covered both inbound, high-velocity, low-ticket marketing and sales (individual small business subscribers) and extraordinarily long outbound sales cycle work closing partnerships with banks and credit unions. So it was a phenomenal deep dive on everything B2B, and we were able to run a very tech-enabled go-to-market because I had a great relationship with our developers.
We integrated the SaaS/platform with HubSpot via API and FullStory, so we had fantastic marketing, adoption and churn risk metrics and amazing visibility into the customer journey.
I was concurrently managing 6-7 teams and helping them set the table for each other was quite a fun challenge.
At the same time, I was building and closing relationships with bank and credit union resellers, so I learned quite a bit about financial institutions and fintech in the US market. They are extremely risk averse and the larger relationships required educating multiple committees over periods of years. Understanding how they think is very helpful for our bank marketing work.
That said, when I look at sales funnels that clients need, almost everything looks simple in comparison.
Developing careers was extremely rewarding during that period as well.
We also had lots of agency and reseller relationships so that was even more great experience understanding what works and doesn’t work with those types of relationships. A couple of them blackboxed us, and I was eventually able to internalize what they were doing, which reduced costs and increased efficiency significantly.
The Start of Sales Funnel Professor
Q: And then there was Sales Funnel Professor… how did that happen?
Taking the SaaS platform from prototype to distribution by publicly-traded companies was the magnitude of project I prefer, and we had won lots of distribution partners, so it felt like it was time for a new chapter.
There was an Atlanta-based tech company that was recruiting me to be their CEO and unlock their next phase of growth. They wanted me to acquire most of the company as well. That seemed like a right-sized project, so when it felt like we were close to going to contract, I resigned from the day-to-day at the fintech and gave them some time with advisory services.
But then the company I was working on purchasing got cold feet and basically took a lower offer, all-cash deal to be merged into another company. I wasn’t open to putting in a competing offer because most of the value of the company to me was what I could turn it into, not what it actually was historically. The ownership wanted to keep a piece of the company in order to ride the upside from my work, which would have been okay if the terms were reasonable.
So as Bob Ross says, Sales Funnel Professor came to life from a “happy little accident.” Once I had stepped down as COO and was actively negotiating the purchase deal, I was bored and started consulting for friends, sometimes even giving away services.
Pretty quickly, our sales funnel audit product came together and the results of acting on those started rolling in with remarkable results. People were asking if I could actually coach them through the deployment of the recommendations or deliver them directly.
So when the deal fell through, I went ahead and created the Sales Funnel Professor brand, launched the website, etc. and started actually building sales funnels for people. Rebecca Ati manages the art and does an amazing job.
This was when the realization that I should start documenting all the crazy jargon I use daily for people that haven’t lived in those types of organizations came to me. I started the Sales & Marketing Jargon Encyclopedia and Stef Symeonides in particular has been a huge contributor.
A number of folks I had worked with in the past asked if they could join, and I also met some fantastic new folks, living all over the world. As a unit, we can fill any gaps in a particular clients’ go-to-market and help them hire the right people if that’s their desire.
It’s been a rocket ever since with many of our year-1 clients having already referred multiple fellow business leaders (and we’re not even a 2-year old company yet). I’m glad we finally sat down to tell the company’s origin story!
Q: So is Sales Funnel Professor a marketing agency?
Not exactly. Most marketing agencies work a particular top of funnel (technical SEO, link building, organic social, paid social, etc. and many are even more narrow such as only being adept at gaming Instagram’s algorithm or similar) or have expertise in a particular type of content (graphic design, video production, WordPress site building, podcasts, etc.).
They only work within tops and middle of funnels.
And most really struggle with directly impacting revenue because they don’t work end-to-end or have the expertise to diagnose problems within the rest of each funnel (top to bottom).
True strategy or messaging firms rarely know the delivery platforms inside and out.
We’re funnel builders so we have to understand the deal attribution and actual revenue produced. That holistic ability makes it a lot easier for us to communicate with sales and marketing teams, but also finance teams and do true money-in-money-out analysis…which means we also get to avoid blame-game dysfunctionality.
Thoughts on The Agency Model & How SFP Coordinates
Q: Do you think there is a problem with the agency model?
Not necessarily, but I think there is an expectation gap, especially from executives who haven’t commercialized lots of products. When I was working on my earlier projects in Costa Rica and hiring agencies, what I really wanted was more revenue… period.
My thought process was I need to “do” this thing that I can’t already do with my current team and if I do it, money will roll in. It doesn’t work that way.
Even 20+ years past the dotcom boom and bust, there are still plenty of people that think that building a website is equivalent to planting a money tree. Similar thinking gets applied to each new social media fad: Facebook, Twitter, Vine, Pinterest, Snapchat, TikTok, Discord, and the list goes on. If I just “do” this new thing, I’ll make all this money.
Most agencies are really specialized and reluctant to be crystal clear about what needs to happen overall and outside their expertise for the client firm to have blowout results. In most cases, they just don’t know because it isn’t within their wheelhouse.
So you end up with situations where the agency is saying something like “we grew your organic traffic fivefold” and the client company is saying “you haven’t made us any money.”
What’s the real issue? Was the traffic all irrelevant or does the company have terrible messaging or awful closers? We’re very comfortable diagnosing those types of issues and filling the gaps so that money actually flows quite quickly.
Where I do think there is a problem with certain agencies is the practice of blackboxing and not taking a fiduciary approach to client relationships.
Agencies that try to hide what they are really doing or deliver results in an overly complicated way in order to gin up unnecessary billable hours is quite common and called blackboxing.
At the fintech, we had a WordPress agency that custom-coded every page so that junior marketers couldn’t fix typos without contacting them. What’s the point of using WordPress at all if you’re going to do that?
There’s also a well-known agency that doesn’t offer SEO at all even though they certainly have the expertise. Why? Because they offer PPC services and mark up Google spend as a revenue source…not exactly a fiduciary approach.
Q: When a company brings in Sales Funnel Professor, are agencies replaced?
Not by default. Our goal is to help the client make lots of money. It’s that simple.
If we can steer the agency towards doing work that aligns with the strategy and/or fill in the gaps in the funnel such that what they are already doing can be monetized better, we prefer to go that route.
We also have marketing agencies themselves reach out every month because they need to better understand how they fit in the big picture and/or want help in positioning/selling what they do the right way.
Our agency advisory services are generally under NDA, but we have helped many agencies orders of magnitude larger than us by headcount solve some big problems already, and we’re just getting started. There’s a 400-person agency that provides technical marketing to publicly-traded firms that uses a homepage that is my design and 90% my writing, for example.
Who is The Professor?
Q: You and I are both on Sales Funnel Professor’s About page listed as employees of The Professor, who is an AI who chooses to represent itself as an academic with a penchant for snappy dressing. Is that true?
I can neither confirm nor deny!
But seriously, there are so many businesses that choose to represent themselves in the most “Meh” way possible. Doing what everyone else does is an incredibly fast path to terrible results.
Business closes based on a number of factors and two really important ones are credibility and memorability.
As a firm that also manages the voice and brand of many firms all over the world, we also had very strong credibility from day one because we chose to be so memorable (self-deprecating humor, satire, striking art).
Any business (even a just-launched startup) can be extremely memorable. That just requires doing the work.
To translate for finance people, being a great brand (inclusive of credibility and memorability):
- Increases margins
- Lowers acquisition costs
- Shortens sales cycles
So The Professor choosing to stand out so much, especially among so much generic, corporate noise, has been hugely helpful in how easy it is for us to meet and work with new clients, even as a newborn firm.
What Does “Winning” Mean For A Client
Q: What does “winning” mean for a client of Sales Funnel Professor?
Great question. Our team believes winning is providing:
1. Clarity
We teach or player-coach in our engagements. We want our decision-makers to understand what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and how their teams can do more of it. We want the team members who actually deliver sales and marketing for those firms (either employees or their agencies) to get better at what they do and how they can set the table for the other parts of the ecosystem.
2. Phase Shifts
Companies that come to us want blowout results. If they’re a startup, that means getting revenue and then profitable and then scaling as quickly as possible, possibly without the need to raise external capital.
For mid-market and public companies, it’s cracking the code on something that they just haven’t been able to master. We’ve helped huge agencies learn conversion rate optimization and storytelling.
We helped a company that had two agencies working for them for six years prior to us get their first inbound deals and consistently get touch-1 deals thereafter. They’re now top of Google for over 50 money phrases, too.
We’re working towards exits (way earlier than originally anticipated) at certain revenue thresholds for a number of our clients.
3. Lots of Money
At the end of the day we can talk about esoteric metrics like impressions and follower growth, but our clients want what I always wanted from agencies even in my early 20s. They want us to help them make lots of money in ways they haven’t been able to execute without us.
We aim for at least a 10x return on our fees and what we recommend on tools and ad spend.
Who Is A Good Client For SFP
Q: Who is a good client for Sales Funnel Professor?
We only work with clients with big goals.
To get 10X+ results, you need a good or great product or service. If it doesn’t look like that from the outside, we will fix that in month one.
If you’re really not there (or were but are not anymore) on product<>market fit, we’re happy to help you structure research at speed and will provide testing and feedback on feature functionality or services offered, pricing, UX/UI, etc., but we don’t wear the primary “product manager” hat in software companies, and need that person to be willing to collaborate with us.
Our relationships are quite intimate. We’re working with client CRM’s, sales, marketing and support teams, payment systems, project management boards, etc. and teaching both leaders and individual contributors along the way.
We’re often ghostwriting as the company’s CEO or Founder, so you can imagine the stakes are high.
We welcome healthy debate and don’t care who is “right,” but if clients can’t listen to feedback that we believe to be in their best interest on an ongoing basis, we generally terminate the relationship.
We really enjoy what we do and also recognize that life is short, so we only keep clients that have strong communication skills and lofty goals.
How Do SFP Relationships Begin?
Q: How does a relationship with Sales Funnel Professor start?
Our clients are all inbound: someone reaches out via a referral, they saw The Professor doing yoga on LinkedIn, they found us at top of Google results, etc.
We do turn down a lot of prospective clients every week simply because they’re not looking for what we offer. We build sales funnels end-to-end to achieve phase shifts.
If you want someone to audit your Google Ads, we don’t generally have time for projects that small or anything that will only ever be incremental. We work on gamechanger projects.
The prospective client books time with us, and we encourage folks to bring real problems to those calls…Treat it like a case-based interview of sorts. We’re happy to do light research prior to those calls, and we talk about problems and solutions and how we see solving them.
The client wants to understand whether or not we can really solve their initial problems, how long it will take, and what we can accomplish together once we transition from setup/cleanup phase to growth mode.
We want to really understand the DNA of the company, who we would be interacting with, whether we think we’d like to be communicating with them on an ongoing basis, whether we really think we can help, and whether or not we think the client will actually listen.
If both parties feel like there’s a good fit, we put together a formal proposal and budget and then meet again to talk it through.
And then we deliver against it. There’s always a lot of fixing to be done before growth mode starts. We set up a shared project management board in Trello and get the work done at speed, and with the desired level of teach versus do.
We start tracking ROI from day 1 and automate the reporting, so clients are always in the know about what we’re doing and what the results are in actual money.
Q: How does a client set an introductory call?
The Professor requests that I take the intro calls 😉
I set aside a small portion of my week to meet with people who need help. I generally work NYC hours but I make a couple slots available for people in the Middle East, Asia and Australia each week as well.
You can grab a time here and I would encourage you to share where your struggles really are during that call.
I have no interest in offering services to people for whom I don’t think we can absolutely knock it out of the park, but if we meet and we’re not a fit, I’ll do my best to introduce the right resource.
Q: Any parting words for our readers?
Thanks for reading this! The word count is quite high. We really value your time, and the fact that you took the time to read this when you could have also been doing many other things means a lot to us.
We’ll also continue to value your time and that of your current and prospect clients if we work together. That’s what high-velocity sales funnels are all about.
I hope we can meet soon!
