Ryan Deiss: How to Find Clients Who Are Ready to Buy Now
Are you pitching to people who aren't ready to buy? I asked Ryan Deiss, co-founder of DigitalMarketer, how he finds the clients who are ready now.
After 8.2 million dollars of marketing tests, Ryan found that only 3 to 6% of your list is in buying mode at any time, and pushing offers at everyone burns out the rest. He says it's not a funnel, it's a popcorn popper: most kernels pop in their own time if you keep the heat on.
The lesson works for any consultant or expert who sells what they know. Keep giving value, ask one question when someone signs up ("would you like help with this now?"), and only talk to those who say yes, which is how Ryan's team gets about 10% to book a call, 70% of them to show up and half of those to buy.
Timestamps:
0:00 — Only 3 to 6% of your list is ready to buy now
0:14 — The question I asked Ryan
0:31 — 8.2 million dollars of marketing tests
0:50 — Why the funnel as we knew it is dead
2:06 — It's not a funnel, it's a popcorn popper
2:55 — The two mistakes marketers make
3:39 — Sell every day, but only to the 3 to 6%
4:21 — Ask a readiness question when people opt in
6:00 — 10% book, 70% show up, half buy
6:30 — Send hand-raisers instead of offers
7:34 — What to do if you sell your expertise
8:11 — Want help with this?
Ash Roy and Ryan Deiss's Video Transcript (This transcript has been auto-generated. Artificial Intelligence is still in the process of perfecting itself. There may be some errors in transcription):
Ryan Deiss: There's about 3 to 6% of your list, of your audience, at any given time that is ready, willing, and able to buy now. They crank up the heat and what they effectively do, they get the 3 to 6% who are ready now and they burn out the other 94 to 97%.
Ash Roy: If you haven't met before, I'm Ash Roy, and I help independent professionals build their authority so they can attract high quality clients who are happy to pay their full fees without haggling. I recently asked my friend Ryan Deiss, who's a co-founder of DigitalMarketer, how he finds clients who are ready to buy.
Ryan Deiss: We've spent about $8.2 million over the last three years on just marketing tests to try to figure out what are some things that are working. And we had a couple of really big, big breakthroughs. I mean, most of the stuff that we did didn't really move the needle. But one of our biggest discoveries is that really the funnel, kind of as we knew it, as I used to teach it, is largely dead.
This idea that somebody is going to arrive on your website, let's just say, they're gonna opt in, you're gonna be able to nurture them through this perfectly orchestrated seven-part email series and then they're just going to buy and then they're gonna walk through. It's just not how it works anymore. The reality is that people have the ability to jump in and out of your funnel and all around it because of all of the sources of information that are available to them.
And if they're not doing it with you, they're doing it with your competitor. So whether they're finding you on social media and learning there or asking questions about you on Reddit or other forums or they're looking you up on YouTube, your funnel is irrelevant to them. And so you have to think about it a lot more like an ecosystem. People get into it, they get into your web, but it's not like a spider web that once you caught 'em, you got 'em forever.
That's not how that works, okay? You get 'em on your email list and you have to earn every single day that open. And so what we've discovered as we're going through and as we're looking at the people who buy is that it's not a funnel, it's a popcorn popper. And the reality is that if you think about it, the reason we say that is if you've ever popped popcorn, what you know is you put the kernels on and some of the kernels just pop immediately, right?
Some of 'em never pop. Like you get to the end of it and you're like, why do these kernels never pop? But most of 'em will pop kind of in their own time if you consistently apply enough heat. And this is exactly how leads and customers are. There's about 3 to 6% of your list, of your audience at any given time that is ready, willing and able to buy now.
It doesn't mean they'll necessarily buy from you, but they are in a buying mode, 3 to 6%. And this is just held true across, across a dozen different industries. Now, the mistake, marketers make two mistakes. Mistake number one, they treat all marketers, they treat all their leads like they're in the 3 to 6%. They crank up the heat and what they effectively do, they get the 3 to 6% who are ready now and they burn out the other 94 to 97%.
They burn the kernels. And we've seen this, we know marketers that just over mail, over offer, over promotion, false scarcity because you burned them. We have to treat these leads differently. Now, the other mistake that some marketers will make is they won't follow up at all. They'll turn, they'll be like, "Well, nobody's buying right now." And so they'll turn the heat off completely and they'll never pop and they'll wonder why they didn't pop.
So what's the solution? What's the tactical application? What do we do? We are selling every single day of the week, every single day we are making offers and every single day we are selling across all of our lists. But we are only selling to those three to 6% who've raised their hand and signaled that there's a degree of readiness. So how do you do that? This becomes the question that every marketer should be asking.
How do we determine the 3 to 6% who are ready now? This is the great big question that marketers need to be asking. 'Cause if you know who the 3 to 6% are, you can crank up the heat for them and kind of leave everybody else alone and let them nurture. So there's a couple of ways that you can do this. Number one, when leads opt in for the first time, you can simply ask them a qualifying question on the other side and you can ask them, "Hey, are you ready to do this thing now?" So if you think about, and it really can be that simple.
So at The Scalable Company, our kind of flagship service, we work one-on-one with teams to build out their company operating system. It's about a $25,000 engagement. Okay, this is not an inexpensive engagement 'cause it's us working one-on-one with their team for about 16 weeks plus then ongoing optimization. So we're not gonna say, "Okay, you opted in for this template. Now can we have $25,000?" That would be stupid.
Okay, that's cranking up the heat. And we're also not gonna put them in a countdown series where it's like, "Well, today only get it for $20,000." That would also be stupid and brand degrading. So what we do after they opt in is number one, we wanna know, are they even qualified? And so we're gonna first ask a qualifying question. And for us, it's revenue, right? 'Cause we can't work with everybody.
And so now maybe for you, anybody that's coming in is generally qualified, but we're gonna first ask a qualifying question, then we're gonna ask a readiness question. And so the readiness question is you got this thing, would you like some one-on-one help actually implementing it? Or would you like to just try it for yourself first? If somebody says, "I would like some one-on-one help," we say, "Great." Then book a meeting to learn how to get some one-on-one help with us.
Only the people who are generally ready now are gonna book that meeting. It is a remarkably small percentage of the people. It's like around 10% of the people who opt in book that meeting. And guess what? About 70% of them show up to that meeting. 'Cause only about 3 to 6% are ready now. But we wind up closing about half of them.
Ash Roy: Sure.
Ryan Deiss: 'Cause they're ready now. And they've indicated that degree of readiness. So that's one way you can do it. You can ask a readiness question upon opt-in. The other thing that you can do is when you're doing email marketing, instead of making direct offers to your list, ask readiness-related questions. So you can send hand-raisers, "Hey, I'm looking for five people who want this result "within this period of time.
"If you're interested, respond, tell me more." So for the people who respond with, "Tell me more," you tell them more. For everybody else, you tell them nothing. You can have people re-opt in for things. We got this new lead magnet, and then march them through the same process that I just shared with you. Only those people who opt in, who answer the readiness question go through. And so we're always adding value.
We're always sending stuff to our list. But the only people that we sell to are the people who offer a signal of readiness. And so that's how you can make this work today. I do not believe that email is dead as a channel by any stretch of the imagination. I do believe that attention has been scattered. So I do believe that, yeah, as business owners now, we've got to figure out how to be in more channels.
It's harder, it's more complicated. But the people haven't gone away. They're still out there, they're still buying. But to think that, yeah, we can sort of dictate the way that they're going to buy, that's just a joke. That doesn't work anymore.
Ash Roy: So if you sell your expertise, then here's what I think you should do based on the conversation that I had with Ryan. Stop pitching to everyone on your list. Most of them aren't ready right now. And pushing them just burns them if they're not in that buying window. So what's the solution? Keep giving value and then ask one simple question. Would you like help with that now?
And only talk to the people who say yes. If you haven't met before, I'm Ash Roy. I've got a CPA, which I've held for about 30 years now, and I have an MBA from the leading business school here in Australia. If you'd like help doing this in your business, then just email us on team@productiveinsights.com and we can set something up to help you out. Ciao for now. [music]
