Why Systems Beat Charisma for Scaling Sales Online
In 2011, Dave Wood launched a sales campaign that did about a million dollars in its first month. What happened over the next year is the real lesson: the business kept growing, from a million and a half a month to seven million a month, expanding into 216 countries, even after Dave collapsed from exhaustion and stepped back from working almost entirely. In this episode he breaks down why that happened, the difference between selling on charisma and selling on a system, and the specific behavioral-response trick that doubled his front-end email sales. Here’s the episode.
This video is part one of a two-part series showing four steps to multiply your income and sales online, and expand your reach, without spending any more money or adding anything to your business. So the question is: how can you dramatically multiply the money you’re making without adding anything to your business? Over the past few years, I’ve learned how to take an existing, proven, reliable sales process and incrementally increase its power to extract commissions and multiply profits, applying strategic thinking, conversion optimization, and multilingual expansion in a progressive, systematic way. Applying these expansion systems in my own business has let me create traffic that grows in a steady pattern without any more work. And it’s let me tackle new markets, taking the same products and extending my reach far beyond what was possible even a few years ago when I started the company.
Before you expand your reach, though, how do you actually get a business profiting online in the first place? Creating a profit-expansion machine online begins with having something that works and can sustain its own daily and monthly sales production through what I call viral sustainability, traffic processes in your business that sustain themselves. If you can create that, one new visitor turns into at least one other new visitor. Generate a hundred clicks to your website, and the activity from those visitors creates an action-based response that results in an average of one more click per person, another hundred clicks, and that perpetually sustains your sales and traffic. That should be the first concept that overlays on top of everything else you’re doing, because if you can’t sustain your traffic, it doesn’t matter how good your funnel is. Your profits will eventually decline, and it’ll keep costing more to get the same customers.
So what’s the next step once you have something working? Make the traffic system you’re using profit in a consistent, predictable way, whether that’s through paid traffic, blogging, video marketing, or something else. Once you’re in consistent profit and can sustain it without stressing yourself out, you can take these strategies and strategically optimize your sales and traffic process, piece by piece. Realize this too: every process you improve doesn’t just grow your profits by the percentage of that one improvement. It multiplies your entire profit and feeds into a multiplication of the profits in every step that follows.
Why Systems Beat Charisma When You’re Trying to Scale
To do any of what I’m about to describe, you need to focus on building your system, because systems matter more than charisma. And charisma only works well once it’s stacked on top of a system. If you’re selling on charismatic energy with no supporting infrastructure, the moment you stop and get exhausted, your income and sales collapse right along with your personal energy. Because that’s the only thing holding it up.
Let me tell you a quick story about what I mean. I’ve launched a lot of income-creation systems over the years, millions and millions of dollars in sales, to add to our portfolio here at Empower Network. Sometimes I launched something on top of a system that was already proven, one that generated and sustained sales automatically every time we added traffic and customers. And sometimes I simply launched from pure charismatic, ballistic sales energy, with no supporting system underneath it at all. Which one do you think worked better? Here’s the interesting thing: they both work, if you’re good at it. But here’s what I actually experienced.
In 2011, I launched a sales process built on top of a perpetual traffic system that sustained and multiplied itself through existing traffic sources. With every sale sustained through automatic behavioral response systems built into the website, built into every process we had running. For every action somebody took, we had a custom, dynamic response built into a custom communication architecture that I built with my own coders, out of my own planning. Watching conversions and thinking through the ideal way to help people coming into the organization make money quickly and stay in profit.
Then in 2011 and 2012, I went on what I’d call a ballistic, charismatic stampede of sales, creating new income. We got a lot of success stories, and we did around a million dollars in sales in our very first month doing that. Here’s the interesting part, though. In the twelve months following that million-dollar launch, which wasn’t even the biggest launch we’d ever done, it turned into the biggest movement in info marketing at the time, and we did over thirty million dollars that first year. It just kept expanding. Traffic grew to over fifty million page views a month across websites worldwide.
I then collapsed from energy exhaustion about six months in, from working all day and night. And I didn’t work nearly that hard for the next couple of years. But the sales kept expanding, systematically and ballistically, even better than when I was actually there working. We grew from a million and a half dollars a month to seven million dollars a month with almost zero work from me over the next year, sustained entirely by a behavioral response marketing system built into a perpetual traffic machine that eventually expanded into two hundred sixteen countries and territories. While I was doing very little.
The Behavioral Trick That Doubled Our Front-End Sales
So what were the actual strategies? Strategy number one is creating behavioral, dynamic responses in your sales architecture. If you simply have a sales video, and everybody who buys experiences the exact same process, that will work to a certain level. But if you want to dramatically enhance your sales, you want behavioral changes built into that process, so it changes based on what your visitors actually do, or don’t do, creating custom pathways of communication and sales depending on their behavior. Ask yourself, for every part of your process: if I sent a different response based on whether someone clicked, didn’t click, where they went on the page, what they watched or didn’t watch, would that increase sales? The short answer is: you need to test it to find out. The second answer is yes. Playing with behavioral responses, and automating them, absolutely increases sales everywhere you apply it, and I don’t want to limit that to one channel like email, although email is a good place to start.
One of the things that doubled our own sales, something you could do in your own business, is simply re-emailing people who don’t open an email we send, with a slightly different subject line and a message that says something like: Hey Frank, did you get my email? I noticed you didn’t open it. Then we just repeat the same message. That process alone, something that takes ten minutes to set up, doubled our front-end sales from daily promotional emails. That exact process wouldn’t necessarily work in another part of the funnel, but it worked there, because we tested it. We also have custom responses built into every step of our funnel, responses nobody could ever map out even if they tried for ten years, because they’d have to actually buy a hundred times and choose a hundred different paths to ever see all of it. Somebody who watches a video and doesn’t buy needs a different response than somebody who does buy. And somebody who clicks on one thing in the next video gets a different response than somebody who clicks something else, all feeding the same core process. The more you can customize your sales responses, the more your sales increase from the exact same amount of traffic.
Here’s a quick example before we move to strategy two. Think about a really good car salesman, not the pushy, oily kind who tries to force you into something you don’t want. If that salesman behaves the exact same way with every kind of customer, he’ll only sell to the people who happen to match that one approach. But if he changes his behavior to match what each customer is actually looking for, he can sell a lot more. That’s no different than what a behavioral response system does for an entire sales process automatically.
Split-Testing What Already Works
Strategy number two is split testing each part of your business’s behavioral response sales process, once you have it in place and it’s proven to work. Once a system is working in every part, you can go through your entire sales sequence and try new things at each step. If it’s sustainable and you’re not going to lose anything, you have a good chance of increasing conversions. Test things with small segments of traffic first, then roll it out across everything else once it wins.
For example, I suspect a two-step opt-in, a button that opens a capture form, will convert better than the process we’re currently using. I also believe dynamic social sharing mechanisms will improve traffic sustainability, turning one visitor into another, and another. And I believe putting the episode transcript directly on this page, instead of only on a separate bonus page, will get more people to opt in, because they can see the value right there before they ever have to hand over their email. Why do I say I believe those things will work? Because I haven’t actually tested them yet. I don’t know for certain that they’ll perform better. They’re educated hunches, based on data and market research, and I won’t know for sure for a couple of months.
But every single small thing I improve in this process creates a multiplication effect across the entire perpetual sales system. And it improves everyone’s income in my community. And it improves my own income as well.
Full episode transcript
Lightly edited from the original recording — fillers removed, nothing added. Income disclaimer.
Hey there, my friends. This is Dave Wood and I am in front of my swimming pool in Costa Rica with a special message for you today. As you're watching today's content, I'm going to be giving you step-by-step strategies that I've personally used to multiply my own profits over and over again without spending any additional money, getting more traffic, spending more time, or adding any products to my business. Now this video is part number one of a two-part series that will show you four powerful steps to multiply your income and sales online and also expand your reach without spending any more money as you're building a better and also more powerful system in your own business. So the question is, how can you dramatically multiply the money that you're making without adding anything to your business?
Well, over the past few years, I've learned how to take an existing, proven, and reliable sales process and then incrementally increase its power to extract commissions and multiply profits by applying strategic thinking, conversion optimization, and also multilingual expansion in a progressive and also a systematic way. Applying these expansion systems in my own business have allowed me to create traffic that grows in a steady pattern without any more work involved. It also allows me to tackle my own business. It also allows me to tackle my own business. I can tap into new markets and take the same products and dramatically extend my reach beyond what was possible even just a few years ago when I started my company.
So the question is, though, before you expand your reach, how can you actually get started in profiting a business online? Well, creating a profit expansion machine online actually begins by simply having something that works and can sustain its own daily and monthly sales production through systems that produce something that I call viral sustainability. Without revealing the core of some of our most coveted secret strategies that we don't actually train to the public that you'll learn inside the Total Shortcut System, what I'm going to tell you right now is that the simple explanation for this concept of viral sustainability is simply creating traffic processes in your business that sustain themselves. What exactly do I mean by that? What I mean is that if you can create a viral sustainability process, you can make one new visitor turn into at least one other new visitor.
Meaning if you generate 100 clicks to your website, the activity by those people who click creates an action-based response that results in an average of one more click per person or 100 more clicks in that case. And that perpetually sustains your sales and traffic. So you can just continue to multiply your reach when you add traffic. Now years ago, I actually sold a course on perpetual traffic systems and I actually took that off the market years ago because it got outdated. And then we currently teach strategies that work inside of our core products in a simple and a dynamic way that actually work with a lot of people from different backgrounds.
I'm going to talk more about that later in future episodes here at The Daily Shortcut and also inside the membership site. But in my opinion, this should be the first step. This should be the first concept that actually overlays on top of what you're doing. Because if you can't sustain your sources of traffic, it doesn't actually matter how good your funnel works. Your profits will eventually go down and it'll keep costing more to get the same customers.
So my question is, what's the next step in a process after you have something working? Well simply put, it's to make it to where the traffic system that you're using profits in a consistent and predictable way. Whether it's initiating your perpetual flow of visitors through paid traffic strategies and that's generating profit, or whether your blogging is profiting, your video marketing or some other sort of online hack that you're using to get traffic online. And when you're in consistent profit and you can sustain a certain level of profit without kind of stressing yourself out, what you can do is you can take these strategies that I'm outlining today and tomorrow and strategically think through optimizing your sales and traffic processes piece by simple piece. And also realize this, that every single process that you improve will not just grow your profits by the percentage of the increase in that step.
It will actually multiply your entire profits and feed into a multiplication of the profits you're actually creating in the next steps in your sales process as well. However, to do any of what I'm about to describe, you actually need to focus on building your system. Because if you're not doing enough, systems are more important than charisma and then charisma needs to be added on top of them in order to make it work right. If you're using charismatic energy to sell things with no supporting infrastructure, the second you stop and get exhausted, your income and sales will collapse from the collapse of your personal energy because that's how it's maintained. It's not maintained through systems.
And to illustrate what I'm talking about, let me actually tell you a quick story to demonstrate what I mean. There's been several times over the years. Millions of millions of dollars in sales that I've launched products and income creation systems to add to our portfolio of income streams here for the members of the total shortcut system and also people in Empower Network. Sometimes I've launched those things with a system that was already proven and already had processes that were generating and sustaining the sales every time we added traffic and customers. And sometimes what I've simply done is launch them from a charismatic ballistic sales energy, not any supporting system infrastructure.
What do you think worked better? Well, here's the interesting thing. They both work if you're good. However, here's what I've experienced and learned. In 2011, for example, I launched a sales process that was actually built on top of a perpetual traffic system that sustained and multiplied itself through existing traffic sources.
And all the sales were sustained through automatic behavioral response systems built into our website built into every process through everything we're doing. In other words. For every action that somebody took, we actually had a custom dynamic response that was built into a custom communication architecture that I constructed and I actually had it coded with my own coders from my imagination and planning as I was thinking through and watching conversions and I was thinking about the ideal way to help people coming into my organization make money quickly and stay in profit. And then what happened in 2011 2012 is I went on a ballistic charismatic stampede of sales creating new income. We got a lot of success stories and we did around a million dollars in sales our very first month doing that.
Well, here's the interesting thing though. In that first 12 months following that million-dollar sales campaign, it wasn't the biggest launch ever by any means, but it turned into the biggest movement in info marketing at the time and we did over 30 million dollars our first year from that ballistic campaign. It just continued to expand and the traffic expanded to over 50 million page views a month websites worldwide I then after that collapsed from energy exhaustion about six months in from working all day and night and then I didn't work that hard after that for the next couple of years but the sales continued to systematically and ballistically expand even better than when I was there and when I was actually working we grew from a million and a half dollars a month to seven million dollars a month with almost zero work over the next year and that was actually sustained entirely by a behavioral response marketing system that was built into a perpetual traffic machine that later expanded into 216 countries and territories while it was doing very little well how did I do that well I did it by applying these strategies on top of an existing infrastructure that was creating perpetually sustained viral traffic like I talked about so what are the strategies well here's strategy number one and that is creating behavioral dynamic responses in your sales architecture now what do I mean by that well if you simply had a sales video and then when somebody buys your stuff they all experience the exact same process that will work to a certain level if your sales process works however if you want to dramatically enhance your sales what you actually want to do especially today is have behavioral changes in that process where your process actually changed when the behaviors of your visitors change and create custom pathways of communication and sales depending on what they do and depending on what they don't do you can be as simple and as complex as you want with that but if you simply look through what you're doing and you ask it every part what I increase sales right here from this email from this process if I sent a different response whether someone clicks doesn't click where they go on the page what they don't watch what they do watch will that increase it well the short answer that question is that you need to test it to see what's gonna work better the second answer is yes right and playing with the idea of behavioral responses and automating it absolutely will increase sales everywhere you do it where it makes sense but I don't want to limit that to one idea or concept like email although that's a good place to start in your marketing in other words one of the things that doubled our own sales that you could do in your business especially if you're using our systems that have better automation than what's available in other places to the market is simply re emailing people that don't open an email that we send every day or with a little bit of a different subject line and a custom message that says something along these lines it says hey Frank did you get my email that I sent here's the message I noticed that you didn't open it and then we just repeat the exact same email message literally take somebody 10 minutes that process alone actually doubled our front end sales from daily promotion emails now that same process wouldn't work in another area but it worked right there because we tested it however we also have custom responses through every process inside of our funnel that nobody would ever be able to map out if they tried for 10 years from going through it here's the reason why they would actually have to buy a hundred times and choose different options and responses to ever even see that stuff in other words they can't see it in the code they can't see it if they try to look at the website they can't see it from one account they would actually have to respond in a different way to ever see it because if somebody maybe sees a video in our sales process and doesn't buy they're gonna need a different response than somebody who does buy and then somebody who sees the next video and clicks on one thing will get a different response than another that all feeds the same core process but you wouldn't know that unless you actually went through that process hundred times and acted like all of those people but if they don't choose that behavior here's the thing they're never gonna see it because it's based on what they're doing the buyer behavior so the more that you can customize your sales responses the more your sales will increase from the same amount of traffic before I proceed to strategy two I'm actually gonna give you a quick example that this is no different than how a salesperson who's really good on a one-on-one basis will actually change the way that they're selling to different kinds of people for example if you have a really good car salesman that's not dirty and oily and didn't try and force you to do something you don't want to do and that person just behaves the same way all the time with every different kind of customer obviously if you're not like the kind of customer he's talking to you're not gonna buy but if he changes his behavior to match what you want what you're looking for obviously he can sell you more stuff does that make you more that does that make more sense to you strategy number two this is gonna be split testing each part of your business behavioral response sales process once you have it in place and it's proven to work now once you have a system that is working in every part of the system you can actually go through your entire sales sequence and simply try new things at each step if it's sustainable and you're not gonna lose anything that have a good chance of increasing conversions and you want to test things especially feel a lot of traffic with small segments of your traffic and then move it across everything else if you look at this page for example it's on a custom coded content system that has contacts and a lot of traffic that you can actually even when you open it on your phone then you can send emails and what you, In other words the pdf that we give you today is not the same as the previous show and not the same as tomorrow. We give you a context specific workbook that is created five days a week that specifically applies to the message that you're hearing and maybe you'd want one of the bonuses and you wouldn't want another, maybe you actually want to improve your business everywhere and you want to download them all. In other words when you put your name and email in the form below you're gonna get bonunces that you're been having to get and your new endeavor or attribute isn't gonna work completely.
that actually help you apply today's message in your business and that's true every single day as a part of our content marketing system that is just in the initial expansion mode right now in other words we're just starting with this is part of a grand scheme if you will so if you look at this page over the next 30 to 60 days after our initial rollout of the behavioral response system that we call the total shortcut system and that's actually a modified superior version of my existing platform you're gonna see split testing everywhere on these pages as we roll their things out and I suspect for example that putting a two-step opt-in as one example of the thing that we're gonna test right below this video which is a button that opens a capture form that's what a two-step opt-in is I'm guessing that it'll actually convert way better than the current leads process that we're using on this page I also believe that the dynamic social sharing mechanisms that we're going to install are going to create better traffic sustainability and increase of traffic and multiplication in other words if we'll more effectively turn one visitor into another one and then another one I also believe that if I put the transcript of the episode below the video rather than just on the bonus page we'll actually get more opt-ins by simply giving it to people right there on the page and saying give me the PDF version of the workbook in other words they'll get it even if they don't opt in why do I say I believe those things will work on all the things that I said because I haven't actually tested them and I don't know if they actually work better they're hunches based on looking at data based on market research and I won't actually know if they work better in our market for a couple of months but every single little thing that I slightly improve in my process it actually creates a multiplication in my entire perpetual sales system and it actually improves everyone's incomes in my entire system and in my community and improves my own income as well are you following me here I know that this is a little bit of complex thinking however this is how you build a real sustainable business that has an expanding traffic and sales wave that just continues to increase through every obstacle that you'll ever encounter and if you do it will expand your sales now we're gonna get to the exciting parts of today's message which is in tomorrow's episode I'm going to teach you the secrets I'm joking a little bit I want to actually help you implement these strategies step by step so I put the rest of the strategies which to me the most exciting in tomorrow's episode and right now what you can do is you can download the PDF workbook that I've developed for today's strategies and audio download and you can also get the checklist as a part of our total shortcut system which is an act action checklist that will actually give you every day actually improve your business one day at a time in less than an hour of work so right now here's what you want to do next go ahead and put your name and email below in the start applying these strategies in your business today go ahead and comment on your biggest takeaway today below and let's help your business get a little bit better and tomorrow we're going to talk about systemic content expansion to multiply your efforts that you're taking every day also building more lungual sales systems that add new markets as you're growing your system the best part is you can do this if this is too complex for you we actually do it for you here if you're part of the total shortcut system but how you start is by commenting leave me your thoughts share this with somebody that you know on Facebook who has an online business and download your free PDF workbook in your audio below I'm actually going to see you in part two and remember you do have the power to do great things and you can build a great business online, especially if you just keep it simple and build with us as part of the total shortcut. Go ahead and put your name and email in the form below this video, and I'll see you in part two.
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