Carl Taylor, is a serial entrepreneur, running businesses since the age of 15, he’s the author of 2 books and an all-round genuine guy.
While he’s owned multiple businesses in varying industries over the past 18 years, today he’s the founder and CEO of Automation Agency, a digital marketing implementation service that helps coaches, consultants, and business owners to maximize their marketing while minimizing their tech and team headaches.
He’s also the host of The Future of Humanity Podcast, where he discusses what the future may hold with scientists, thought leaders, and business owners.
In the first part of this 3-part series on business continuity planning for a crisis, Carl Taylor and I talked about how to protect your business from the economic fallout that’s resulted from the recent Covid19 pandemic.
In this second part, we talk about how to adapt to the rapidly changing circumstances by pivoting your business in three main areas.
We talk about examing how you:
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Ash Roy (00:00):
But the interesting thing we realized as we were talking is the market is also receptive to this because they still need the service and they can’t physically get it, so they are willing to change as well. So I just want to point out that at this time it’s a great opportunity to pivot the way you served because it’s not just your business that has been impacted. It is your customers that have also been impacted and they are receptive to this because there aren’t any other options, so recognize that, but create something really Epic and awesome for them.
Carl Taylor (00:29):
Absolutely. I love that you brought that up. No, I think that’s a brilliant point to make.
Ash Roy (00:37):
Welcome back to the productive insights podcast. This is Ash Roy, the founder of productiveinsights.com and the host of the productive insights podcast. If you are watching this on our YouTube channel, I’m really glad to have you here. If you’re listening to this on iTunes, then please check out our YouTube channel at youtube.com/productiveinsights. This was recorded on video. This is episode 193 and it’s part two of my three-part conversation with Carl Taylor about business continuity planning in the coronavirus pandemic or the COVID19 pandemic. So in the last episode, Carl and I talked about the first part of his three-part approach to dealing with a crisis like this, and that was all about protect. We talked about how you can protect your business and how you can take the role of a leader in your industry. You can focus on being the rising tide as it were and take others up with you.
Ash Roy (01:33):
We talked about the four ways to protect your business and that was risk, return, reward and release. If you want to know more about those, checkout productiveinsights.com/192 in this second part, Carl and I are going to talk about the second phase of his plan and that is called pivot. Now, Carl is the founder of the automation agency. I highly recommend it. I’ve been using it for several years now and I am an affiliate and full disclosure. So if you want to know more about that, checkout automationagency.com I am delighted to welcome Carl back to the podcast. Carl, welcome back.
Carl Taylor (02:09):
It’s a pleasure to be back.
Ash Roy (02:10):
All right, so let’s talk about the second stage Carl, this one’s going to be a bit shorter, I think, than the last conversation because the last conversation we did a lot of the contextual thing about how this plan, this approach came about, this three part approach and now we’re well into it. So we’ve talked about the protect, now we’re going to talk about the pivot to tell us about that.
Carl Taylor (02:33):
Yeah, definitely. Look, I mean I’m not gonna, you know, make this more complicated than it needs to be at the, at the end of the day, once you’ve protected your business and you’ve got, you’ve got a good solid foundation, you’re feeling like some of the stresses taken away because you’ve got a plan for protecting. The next thing you need to do is you’ve got to start looking at the future. We’ve got to look at the now, but we also have to look at the future and, and the way we do that is we can’t just go business as usual can continue. We just can’t, you know, it doesn’t mean we can’t go back to how it was, which we may be able to do, but the period we’re in right now, we need to look at everything we’re doing and going, what needs to pivot. And I think that’s a really important that the choice of the word pivot versus like completely changed.
Carl Taylor (03:11):
We’re not completely changing. We’re not like ideally we’re not fully necessarily always completely changing or canceling or killing our business. What we’re doing is going where are the opportunities for us to pivot? What are these small changes? You know, they might be 90 degree changes, they might be 30 degree changes. In some cases they might be this little five degree changes, you know, we’re not making massive shifts and it’s gonna really depend on your particular business. So when it comes to like pivoting, firstly, if you’re not sure what the word pivot is, it is very much that idea of, you know, just kind of a shift of some levers where you kind of, you go from one place and you, you pivot on one in one spot into it, into another direction, right? And so this, there’s really three key areas that I see that all of us need to be looking at where we need to pivot.
Carl Taylor (03:54):
And for some of you it will be all three of these areas. And for some of you it’ll be just, you know, one place you need to pivot. And so what we all need to be looking at is how we sell, how we serve and what we say. All right, so three SS. Sell, serve, say, so let’s start with Sell. We all have to face the reality that right now, if you had any kind of sales process that involved going to someone’s location, someone coming to meet you at a location, you know, meeting up for coffees. Uh, maybe you, you know, a lot of my market are coaches. They run live events to sell their programs. You know, like all of those things cannot happen and function in the society we’re in right now. It doesn’t mean it won’t go back to the ability to do it, but even when we can do it, there may be going back to your point in, in episode one of this, part one of this, you know, where there could be some lag time before the market and public a more willing and open.
Carl Taylor (04:52):
There’ll be some that are like rushing to get back into events. I’ll be like, yes, finally human contact and there will be others that will be a lot more cautious and concerned. So you need to consider what, how do you sell right now? And the ways you were selling may have stopped. May not be working anymore. That doesn’t mean it’s disaster. It just means it’s time to pivot. And there’s a few different ways you can sell. Selling online has been happening for a long time. In fact, my very first business, I was 15 years old and I was selling, I was trying to sell online costume shops, uh, costumes online. And the thing is, back then, no one was really buying online. It was not like it is today. So it is now like the easiest thing to be selling online. So if you weren’t making your products services, something that someone could fill in a form online and buy now is one of the easiest times in history.
Carl Taylor (05:42):
So today to be able to do that, there’s so many tools out there that make it click of a button and you can be selling it, whether that be using something like Shopify to have an online eCommerce store. So you know, if you’re a retail and you haven’t gone down that path, woocommerce and Shopify are two tools that should definitely look at woocommerce as if you’ve already got a WordPress site. And Shopify is just a super simple way of launching your own eCommerce site. Obviously. The other thing too is again, if you are a retail business is if you weren’t already getting on eBay and Amazon getting your products onto these other platforms. Now, I know at the time of recording this that Amazon in the US has stopped taking on shipments of nonessential products, but that hasn’t, as I as I understand it, there’s not happened to all the other warehouses around the world.
Carl Taylor (06:28):
So you can be selling in different markets. Like if you’re in the US right now and you can’t get your product onto the Amazon, us then shipped some of your products down to Amazon Australia or to Amazon Germany or wherever. Right? And get it. So think about where you can still ship that product and be selling through through other people’s marketplaces. I think for Ozzy’s, I only just the other day discovered that Kogan has a marketplace as well. You can be selling your products on Kogan’s website. I only discovered that just the other day cause I was looking at products and it said this is a marketplace item. And I was like, Oh, amazing.
Ash Roy (07:00):
Hey by the way, if you want to also get some more insights onto how to sell effectively online, check out the episode 55 with Ezra Firestone. He’s really shared some great content in there. It’s productiveinsights.com/55
Carl Taylor (07:13):
love that. Ezra is a master.
Ash Roy (07:15):
He is, he’s a master of selling online in, in e-commerce, particularly.
Carl Taylor (07:19):
Ecomm, amazing. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. So definitely check that out. I highly recommend it. I haven’t heard it but I tell you to check it out. So we’re saying they’re like, we need to look at how we sell online. Now for if you’re a more of a service based business, like e-comm is obvious. If you’re a retailer, you sold our products than getting on even Facebook marketplace. Let’s just finish that one out. Facebook marketplaces, if you haven’t been sold selling on that, you can sell on that gumtree, uh, eBay Shopify, so marketplaces plus your own store. There are so many options to do that. Secondly is then going, okay, well maybe you don’t sell products. Maybe you sell a service, maybe you’re a gym. Maybe you are something like how, how are you going to sell now? Well you can run webinars and you can get people on the phone.
Carl Taylor (08:03):
Now there is a third option. You could just send emails to send people to a page where they sign up and buy. And that’s true. That will work if your price point is low and it’s like a mass consumer product, go for it. Have at it. I that that works. It always has worked. It will continue to work. Now what I would say is in this marketplace, and I think we touched on it in part one of this episode, I think you said it ashes, you know, it’s really communicating is important and connecting with people and so yes, it might take more time. Yes, it might be slower, but especially if you have higher price point products and services or longer lifetime value or higher lifetime value products and services that I would be getting people onto a webinar where you either on the end of that webinar, invite people to just buy,
Carl Taylor (08:46):
Or you get people to get you on a phone. And I, that’s the thing that I think, I think that the majority of businesses right now are service businesses. The one funnel and kind of what automation is, he helps a lot of people do. We build marketing funnels for people. The one funnel that I think every business needs is a webinar funnel and most people can sell on the phone. Most of you, if you had a phone conversation with someone who was a good prospect to work with you, you could have a conversation. Even if you are terrible at sales, you had a conversation with them, you understood their need, you understand what they want and you go, okay, well based on what you’ve said, I have this thing that could probably help you. Would you like it? There’s a high chance you’ll make some sales.
Ash Roy (09:25):
A quick word on sales I just want to say is, you know, I’m don’t consider myself someone who really enjoys selling and I don’t think I’m very good at it, but what helps me a lot is to think of it as purchase facilitation. If you can just try and solve a problem and say, look, tell me a little bit more about a situation here. I’ve got something. Would this help you? And then let them make the choice to buy. That helps me a lot because everyone likes to buy, but nobody likes to be sold to. So if you can reframe that from selling to purchase facilitation, that might actually help you and Carl, you also talked a little bit about the webinar to phone funnel, but it can go one of two ways. It can go to an optin and also to a phone call. Can you explain a little bit about that too?
Carl Taylor (10:10):
Yeah, so what the opt in side of things would be if someone registers for your webinar, then that is opting in usually to your mailing list. I mean if, if you want to be really rough and dirty about it, I mean the webinar I ran yesterday, you know the irony didn’t escape me that all I did was send someone a zoom registration link. That’s all I sent. I didn’t create a landing page. I didn’t do everything because I was trying to move fast and I didn’t, didn’t need it to be perfect. And I think that’s something that some people get caught up in. They’re like, I need everything to be perfect longer term. Like if I continue to run webinars like that, we’ll have fancy proper landing pages, but I was going to my existing market and I just shot them the register for this link.
Carl Taylor (10:47):
So you don’t always have to make it super complicated for your first webinar. If you’ve got an audience who knows, you could just send them a simple link, but at that point if you were doing it well, you would have a form, a landing page and when they go to that they register for the webinar. It would register them with zoom or go to webinar or webinar jam, whatever like webinar platform you might choose to use and you’d then also be adding them to your active campaign, your Infusionsoft or Ontraport account, whichever, whatever CRM, email marketing tool you use. And so now you’re capturing that opt in. I think on the webinar, when I talked about opt-ins though, I would have been referring to the idea that outside of the webinar funnel you can also still do a standard opt in. You know, standard opt in in marketing is, you know you’ve got a landing page offering or not even a landing page, sometimes a pop up on your website, but you have a PDF or a quiz, you have something that’s getting people to put their email address in, maybe a few other details in exchange for this thing, this result.
Carl Taylor (11:42):
That’s genuinely what an opt in is. And so if you were doing opt in marketing, you could straight after that kind of lead magnet that you’ve opted them in for offer them to register for the webinar. But if you’re doing a webinar to phone type funnel, so that when I say a webinar to phone funnel, I’m saying the whole point of this is you’re getting people on the phone like that. That’s what I’m trying to make a point here is you’ve got to figure out what is the final point, what is the final destination you want people on? And it’s getting them on the phone. So if you want to get them on the phone, do you, you might just need to do a few things to warm them up so they’re ready to get on the phone. Other businesses you can go straight to phone.
Carl Taylor (12:17):
Like, I mean I’ve got friends who run ads, cold ads to a landing page that registers people for a phone call. That’s it. Now they’ve got really good brands in the market that’s it’s really obvious and that there’s a good value prop there, so that works for many of us. Maybe having a longer conversation is more useful, which is where the one to many of a webinar, like if you think about when we’re talking phone as well, I know you asked this question on the webinar yesterday, is that the phone call is about having a one to one conversation would be that on Skype zoom or an actual telephone that’s, that’s kind of irrelevant. It’s just the fact that you having a one on one conversation with someone and it might be a video, it might be over audio. Whereas a webinar, a webinar is far more like one to many.
Carl Taylor (13:03):
Right. The reason, if you’ve never heard the term webinar before, it’s basically a seminar run on the web, hence a webinar. And so you know it’s, it’s one to many. You can have multiple people dial in and listen to you and you can present, you can interact. It doesn’t have to be one way. And one of my favorite styles of webinars that you can run is you just go, Hey, I’m going to have to be running a webinar on this topic. And whoever comes on the call, you just have a conversation with them and you kind of do a consulting session. You know, you don’t have to prepare these amazing presentations and slides. You can do that and that’s amazing. But you can also add value to it. Having 10 20 30 5,000 people on the call, getting them to type in their questions and you just answer them a bit like a Facebook live, but with a bit of process.
Ash Roy (13:44):
That’s very helpful because until you said that, I felt like if I want to do a webinar, I have to do like a 52 beautifully laid out slides and stuff like that. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Like you did your webinar, you just drew on your iPad and it felt very authentic. It didn’t feel polished, but that was part of the charm of it.
Carl Taylor (14:03):
Well I do that because I hate creating slides. Like it’s, it just feels like a lot of hard work. And so all I did is I drew a few things on my iPad to kind of be my title slide and then the rest is just gives me, like when I present, when I, you know, present on stage, I don’t use slides and I used to always feel like, Oh, I hate webinars because you know, I can, I can get up in front of a room with no slides, give me a flip chart and I’m good. I can do an hour long, two hour, whole day event. Like I’m fine, I’m happy with that. Oh but run a 30 minute or a 90 minute webinar like I’m going to prepare. I got it. That was my original thinking. And so thank God for the iPad and the ability to share the screen and draw because all of a sudden I was like, here’s my flip chart. I’ve got a flip chart now that I can use online. So it doesn’t have to be complicated.
Ash Roy (14:48):
How do you share your iPad screen on the computer?
Carl Taylor (14:50):
So the few different ways, if you’ve got a Mac, if you’re using zoom as your webinar platform, you can share the, the iPad directly onto that via airplay or via cable. Also if you have a Mac. So I didn’t do that yesterday cause I was having some tech glitches for some reason. So what I did is if you open up quick time, so if you plug your iPad into your Mac using USB, open up QuickTime on your computer, on the Mac and go new movie. And then when you go new movie, it will default usually to your webcam. Click on the little arrow that allows you to select what camera you’re using. And you’ll see one of the cameras listed is your iPad and so your iPad screen becomes that QuickTime video. And so then you’ve got the QuickTime video on the screen and you just share your screen from the platform. And that’s, that’s the simplest way to do it. I don’t know how you do it on a PC. PC might be the same, but I don’t have a PC so I don’t know.
Ash Roy (15:43):
And if you have a PC, I recommend getting a Mac. Just saying
Carl Taylor (15:48):
I would too. And I used to run an it company. That was all we did was windows eight years. I was a hardcore, and before that I was a hardcore windows machine
Ash Roy (15:56):
and I look, I was being facetious, but I used PCs for probably about 20 years when I was back in the corporate world, I worked as an analyst and I used Excel a lot. And when you use Excel, I find PCs a more friendly than macs. But once I switched across to the Mac, it just just made my life a lot easier. It doesn’t have as many features, but what works works really well, although things have changed a bit since Jobs moved on. Anyway, back to our topic. So webinar to phone funnel and that’s something you guys set up. So I’m making a mental note to put that down as a task that I want you guys to do for my business as a customer of the automation agency. So the webinar devoted followers just about doing a one to many presentation where you’re giving value to several people and then you’re inviting them to jump on a conversation. And the word phone here is not literally a phone call. My personal preference by the way, is a face to face call like we’re doing now. So it can be a zoom call. The idea is maybe you should say webinar tool one on one call.
Carl Taylor (16:53):
You can run it all from the phone though. Like you can dial into zoom on your phone. So you could still do it on the phone. It’s just the main thing is that you know, and and also just like that people can dial into a zoom call. On the phone as well and not have any videos. So there are ways to do it. I agree with you. Face to face is great, but depends on your market. If you’re selling to a less than technical market for them, they might prefer that you just pick up the phone and call them. So figure out what’s, what’s, what’s best for your market and what they like. Like if I was selling to like 60 plus year olds, then I probably wouldn’t get them worrying about zoom. I would just be like, give me your phone number and I’ll call you at this time.
Carl Taylor (17:28):
So yeah, like the webinar to phone funnel is I think is a really great way because one, it gives you something of value to offer people that they can register for this webinar. But you’re also able to then the capture the people who can’t attend your webinar. You go, Hey, we’ll jump on the phone. And the people who do attend the webinar, you don’t have to have the pressure. And I’m trying to sell them something. You can then just be like, Hey, if you enjoy what we’ve been about, let’s get on the phone. Now. That’s one strategy. There are also plenty of ways, and I’ve done it in the past where I’ve run full on slick webinar presentations designed purely to get someone to make the decision and they often will convert better. Not always, but they will often convert better. But the reason I encourage you to not worry so much about having the perfect webinar is right now, if you’ve never run a webinar before, you don’t have all that time necessarily right now to be going, how am I going to figure out?
Carl Taylor (18:18):
Because every week that you spend trying to figure out how you’re going to sell on a webinar, the longer you’re potentially hemorrhaging cash or I don’t, again, I don’t know your business, but essentially in a bad situation, and you know, this is one of the things that came clear to me when I was having these one-on-ones with some of my clients who were looking to cancel is it was really clear that a lot of them were focusing on the wrong things. You know, one guy was like, I want to build, I need to build a website, I need to do all this, and I was just like, dude, no. Like you need cash. All you need is a funnel. Yes, longterm, we’ll build you a new website. Cool. But right now that is just shuffling paper. That is the equivalent of coming to your desk and just picking up a pile here and moving it over there.
Carl Taylor (18:57):
What we need is we need a mechanism to get people, people who don’t know you, to know you and then ultimately be invited to have a conversation with you so you can solve their problem by offering them they buy something from you. Like that’s all we need. And you don’t need a website to do that. You can run a Facebook ad, you know, you don’t have to run Facebook ads, but I just, I use it. You can run a Facebook ad to a landing page telling people to register for a webinar. They, whether they attend the webinar or not on the next page, you can invite them to a phone call. If they jump on that phone call, you’re now having a conversation. If they don’t jump on that phone call, but they attend the webinar, you’re having a mass conversation and you’re now getting the ability to have a conversation.
Ash Roy (19:35):
I was talking to one of my members yesterday, to your point, and she has a thriving business. It’s a digital marketing business, but she doesn’t have a website because all of her referrals come through word of mouth and she builds funnels, but she doesn’t need a website.
Carl Taylor (19:51):
Yeah. It’s actually quite ironic. If you talk to a lot of, I mean even back before automation agency became what it is today with our subscription service concierge. I used to be more of a higher end funnel builder. You know, we, my website used to be very basic, didn’t have many funnels in my own business because I didn’t need to. I was doing it busy doing it for other people. Let me make this really clear. If you’re sitting, if you’re listening to this right now and you’ve never sold anything online at all, or maybe you’ve been selling online all the time, the biggest thing I can tell you is any business can become a huge success.
Carl Taylor (20:28):
Whatever you want to choose on that, $1 million or your next million dollars or whatever, you can do that with one good funnel. More funnels are great, but all any business really needs is one great funnel that ultimately brings someone who doesn’t know them into knowing them, building a relationship and ultimately leading to a conversation, whether that be an email conversation, a chat conversation, a phone conversation, um, face to face, months down the line when we’re through this conversation that ultimately will then lead to someone going, Hey, you know what? I’ve got a problem. You’ve got the solution. Can I buy the solution please? That that’s really all it is. There’s, you know, there’s, there’s fancier ways we can talk about it, but if you boil it down just to that, you just need one way of capturing these people, building that relationship and getting on a conversation with them. And that’s why I like this webinar to phone approach because it’s, it’s a way of going, here’s some front end value, but ultimately, Hey, let’s just jump on the phone. Let’s have a conversation. But so the people who are ready for the conversation, they’ll go straight forward. The people who aren’t, they’ll check you out on the webinar first and it’s just, it’s just a nice way of starting that process.
Ash Roy (21:32):
Sure. So just to remind our listeners, we’re talking about business continuity planning in the Corona virus pandemic world. Carl Taylor, the founder of automation agency is sharing with us his three-part approach to pivoting. So this is the second part of a three part series. The first part we talked about protect the second part, we are talking about a pivot that is now and we’re going to be talking about profit in the next part. And within pivot we’ve got a three step approach and as you can tell, Carl and I are fans of alliteration. And so the three parts within pivot self, serve and says we are, I believe on the sell part right now. And this episode is brought to you by the productive insights membership program. You can find out more at getmetodone.com and if you want to learn more about the automation agency, you can go to productiveinsights.com/automation. So Carl, webinar to phone, what’s next?
Carl Taylor (22:23):
All right, so I mean there’s not much more to talk about it really. Like I don’t want, as I said, I don’t want to make this more complicated. It needs to be, you just need to be getting people on the phone and one of the best ways to get people on the phone warmed up who don’t know you, is to just invite them on a call where you add some value. You just serve them, you just, you’re just giving great value. You share some case studies, maybe you, you, maybe you even just, I mean, Dean Jackson, who I know is someone that we both know, right? Dean, you know his whole podcast is he just consult for free and you can do the same kind of thing, right? Like it’s get them on a webinar. You could basically consult him for free.
Carl Taylor (22:56):
You only might do that with one of, or two of the, you know, 50 people who have attended and the other people might then go, I want to, I want that. And you can invite them to whatever the next step is. And so it don’t need to combo over-complicate the webinar. You just need to find a way to make it add value to your audience and just know that your ultimate goal though right now and like this is my opinion, is you want phone conversations with people. Um, there are other ways to sell online. There’s plenty of ways to sell online, but a phone conversation, especially if you’re in a tight cash and you’ve got lots of time on your hands, fill that calendar, just fill that calendar. So that’s kinda, that’s kinda sell. So we’ve talked about you need to pivot how you sell.
Carl Taylor (23:35):
Let’s talk about though, the pivoting on how we serve because all right, well that’s all well and good to, to change the way we sell. What if the way we were serving our clients is no longer viable. You know, lots of businesses have had to literally because of government rules have meant they have to shut their doors. They can no longer run and deliver their products and services the way they used to. You know, cafes can only do takeaway. There’s a lot, there’s a lot of cafes and not all of them are going to be able to survive purely on takeaway. So there’s going to be businesses closing. And so how do you protect yourself or your friends or your family or your clients, whoever you might be able to help with this content is by looking at how you serve and the pivots that you can make.
Carl Taylor (24:14):
The first pivot you can make on how you, you serve would be in your medium, right? So if you previously were, let’s say a dance school and people came into your dance studio, well the dance studio is no longer viable, but we could potentially pivot that medium to a webinar, a zoom call, or you might chat, pivot the media instead of a lot. So that would be if you kept it to be continued being live, you do it live over like a live stream of some kind that people continue to pay for. So their classes are still happening as usual. You’re just delivering it over zoom or go to webinar or whatever platform you might choose. And the other option is you might choose to go, okay, I’m going to make it a self paced online course that you sell directly on your, on your own website. And so now it’s instead of coming into your studio for classes, it’s a self-directed program that they can do online. So with videos and other resources, that might be the way you pivot the medium. So you’re looking at what is the medium in which I currently or I used to sell in, and then what are my options if I was to pivot that medium. So that’s pretty simple.
Ash Roy (25:23):
So I just want to add something to that. Carl, one of my members is in the healthcare space and he was providing a service that involved physical contact. And of course that’s now come to a standstill. But we’ve been brainstorming over the last couple of days and we’ve come up with a three tiered structure where you can have a membership program and then what he was delivering in person. He’s not obviously able to deliver the same service virtually, but he is delivering for a discounted price, something online. And if they’re members they get it at an even further discount. But the interesting thing we realized as we were talking is the market is also receptive to this because they still need the service and they can’t physically get it. So they are willing to change as well. So I just want to point out that at this time it’s a great opportunity to pivot the way you serve because it’s not just your business that has been impacted. It is your customers that have also been impacted and they are receptive to this because there aren’t any other options. So recognize that, but create something really Epic and awesome for them.
Carl Taylor (26:26):
Absolutely. I love that you brought that up. No, I think that’s a brilliant point to make. I think another really important point to make here, we haven’t touched on it yet, is that there are still plenty of people with money. In fact, there are many people who have more money than they used to. Like, don’t get me wrong, there are people who have lost their jobs and not one individual, but entire households. And some of them are my clients. I’ve had conversations with people in that and my heart truly breaks hearing what’s going on for, for them. But there are also lots of people that are still, you know, they’re in corporate jobs or whatever, or for whatever reason they can just keep doing as they’ve been doing from home, they’re just now working at home, but they can’t go out and spend on the weekend at the pub.
Carl Taylor (27:05):
They can’t go out to the fancy restaurant. They can’t. They’ve got all this extra cash that they’re building up that they were previously spending. And so there’s, in fact, there’s a whole group of people who have more disposable income than they ever did. So don’t think like, Oh my God, I have to discount prices. Oh no. All my market is completely wiping out. Like sure there are people hurting and be mindful of that and see if you can serve them in certain ways. But also you might pivot who you’re talking to. I mean you might look at who you’re serving right to, to the people who have the money. If you were, if currently the people you’ve been serving are now not in a position to pay you, there are a lot of people right now who are going, Oh, I can’t deliver what I used to do online at the same price.
Carl Taylor (27:48):
I would challenge that. I’m not saying you, I’m not saying you’re right that you can’t. I would just challenge that. You might have that thinking that I can’t deliver what I used to deliver. It might be different, but you, I would challenge the thought of going, Oh, just because it’s online now, the price needs to change. If the value has not shifted to what the result, the claim gets from it, then the price does not need to change. You might have to change the way you communicate that to the client to understand it. But it does not need to change because if they’re still getting the same result and the value is still exactly the same. Yeah,
Ash Roy (28:18):
so this brings up value based pricing versus cost based pricing and cost based pricing is where you just have a cost and you add a profit or a margin on top of that. Whereas value based pricing is, it’s more a function off the person to whom you’re selling. And I’m really glad you brought this point up because I’ve been agonizing over increasing my prices. I was actually planning on increasing the prices around about last week of my membership program. It’s currently only ninety nine us dollars a month. I was playing to make it a three tier thing. So what is currently 99 a month will become 349 a month and I was very worried about increasing the prices, but after you’ve put it the way you have, I might actually push forward on that. So if you’re listening and you want to get in at the $99 a month level, get in now because you get grandfathered in for the life of your membership. Just saying, so these people, there are people who have money. There are people who aren’t able to spend because they can’t go out and they actually do have the disposable income. This is a great point. So how does our listener hone in on these people and how do they find a way to pivot to these people?
Carl Taylor (29:23):
Yeah, exactly. And so it’s, it’s about pivoting. So we’re talking about pivoting the way we sell. We’re talking about how we pivot the way we deliver and how we, like we serve these people. And so a part of that may be shifting who we’re talking about, right? Who we’re serving as well as how we’re serving. So the who we’re serving, do you make that pivot? You look around at your market. If all of a sudden everyone that you’re attracting, everyone you’re talking to is saying, I can’t afford it. I can’t afford it. I can’t afford it. And you have these conversations. That’s the other beautiful thing about getting people on the phone. You get to actually have real conversations. You get far more context. Whereas if you just put up a landing page and you’re sending people to go buy and people don’t buy, you have zero context about why they didn’t buy
Ash Roy (30:02):
that landing page. Data is quantitative information, whereas the phone is qualitative data and you need some of that. I think till the day I die, I’m probably going to be doing some element of qualitative stuff. It’s like a doctor, you know who’s under administrator in our hospital often likes to do some clinical work because she wants to keep in touch with our patients and understand what is happening on the ground so that she can run the hospital better or the department she’s running better.
Carl Taylor (30:30):
Definitely. So you just that that’s how you’re going to start to know, but you need to maybe shift who you’re serving is based on the conversations you’re having. You’ll start to notice that there’s a trend and then you’ll have a choice to make. You’ll have a choice of going, I’m going to pivot the way I serve. And maybe that means I can do it at a lower price in a way that they, I can serve them and that’s great. Or you might go, okay, I need to pivot who I’m serving. And that also brings us to the other type of pivot. So we’ve talked about like, you know, changing your, your method, right? The medium, sorry, the medium that you are delivering. Well, the other way that you might pivot the way you’re serving is by changing your model. Okay? There’s a difference. There’s a difference between, I’m taking what I used to do and I’m now just delivering it on a new medium to your model where you might be completely almost shifting your entire business.
Carl Taylor (31:16):
And the example that I gave on the webinar, and I’ll give to you now as well, is that there’s a cafe. My friend loves this cafe and he was talking to the owner and the owner, obviously he’s hurting, it’s a cafe. And you know, everyone in the Eric pretty well can’t go there. They’re doing a little bit of takeaway, but that’s it. Now they’ve got amazing healthy food. It’s great food. And so he’s come up potentially with this idea of a subscription type, turned into a subscription for meals for people who need meals. Cause lots of people at home. Yeah, maybe they can cook but not all the foods they might want are on the supermarket shelves. And there were still people who were happily coming and buying from the tech. Like I’m one of those people, I haven’t yet found the joy of cooking, let’s put it that way.
Carl Taylor (31:56):
So what before this would go out daily buying food, you know, it wasn’t necessarily great for my bank account, but it was good for me. And so if there’s an option where I can just have these foods delivered to me that I used to go out and get and I can still continue to eat that, probably healthier, better meals. This is an opportunity. And so this is the kinds of opportunities that this is what would be an example of a shift of the model where I’ve gone from, this is my thing, but you look at, well, what are the resources I have? I’ve got a kitchen, I’ve got staff, I’ve got chef, I’ve got menus, I’ve got clientele that used to like me. So is there a different way that I could have this motto? And the beautiful thing, if you choose to shift your model or medium, one of the coolest things here is this is the kind of stuff that may be able to continue longterm.
Carl Taylor (32:40):
And I think that’s what one of the things we’re going to see is that there’ll be a number of businesses that make their pivots and shifts now that even once this is cleared up, they might start to go, you know what? I’m going to get rid of my lease. I’m going to get rid of these things. I’m going to change, you know, I’m going to shift completely. So all they’ll choose to do that and what they used to do and it just becomes a whole new revenue stream. So this is not just an, Oh, I’m pivoting my whole business just for three to six months. You might do, but there’s a high chance that when you see how well it works, that you’ll just be able to continue on that trajectory that you’re doing. So that’s kind of what you want to do when you’ve pivoted, the way you’re selling, now you’re pivoting the way you sell.
Carl Taylor (33:13):
So selling is basically changing either the medium or the model and it’s also changing the other type of way you might pivot or who you serve is the who rather than the how. So that’s kind of comes under the serve. And so then the third thing that we really all need to pivot right now, and this goes for every single business. This is the one that is crucial is what you’re saying, right? The third S is what we say. So we’ve got sell, we’ve got serve and we’ve got say so right now, the conversations that we’re having with our clientele on the phone, but also in our marketing, on our website, in our emails, on our videos, on ads, you need to audit everything that you’ve got going on. If you’ve got email automations and things, if you’ve got automated webinars, you need to go back through all of that right now and look for what may be tone deaf, what emails are in your automations that are being sent to people that if someone got that right now, it would be absolutely disgusting and turn a turn off that there’ll be degrees of of where they’re at, but you need to go through everything and figure out if there’s anything that’s tone deaf.
Carl Taylor (34:11):
Because when you automate things, it’s amazing, but you, if you’re like me, you’ll forget about it. That’s what I do. I did the work once. It’s why I love automation. I did the work once and then it just keeps working. The challenge is that some of those things I did the work once was like five years ago, so I have no recollection of what that says, so I need to go back and just double check if any of that needs being updated. Definitely if you use automated evergreen webinars, you 100% need to go back and see if you need to tweak your offer. If you need to tweak your messaging, what you’re saying, because also when it comes to our messages of what we’re saying right now, we really need to realign our offers to a now pain point.
Ash Roy (34:49):
It just changed my to do list for the next two weeks.
Carl Taylor (34:53):
Good. You’ve got an action list you wanted to action list for you and you want an action list for you for your listening.
Ash Roy (34:58):
I haven’t audited myself. I need to do that. You’re right.
Carl Taylor (35:01):
Yeah. It’s, it’s very easy to, to kind of to forget that these things are there and you might be fine. You do the audit and you go, there’s nothing to change. Right. But at least you know that everything’s good. What I would say is if you do need to change anything, don’t feel like you need to delete the old message. Feel free to keep your old email, keep your old ads because you might be able to bring them back but you’ll need to insert something new so save them somewhere so you can come back to them and then you update them with the new ones because the new ones might also need to shift when this is all over as well.
Carl Taylor (35:30):
That’s one of the questions I know someone asked me on the webinar is like, Oh, what do you think about evergreen versus live webinars? I’m a fan of of evergreen webinars. I think it’s great. The challenge is in a time like this when things are changing so rapidly, my preference would be to be running live webinars because you create an automated webinar and then something changes. You’ve got to go and re-scramble and change it all over again. Whereas if you’re just running them live, you’re on the fly changing and you’re tweaking your message, especially if you don’t regularly run webinar. Like if you’ve mastered webinars, maybe go and just do a new updated evergreen webinar, fine. But if you are new to webinars or you know this is kind of fresh angles you, you gives you live, gives you feedback, it gives you that conversation.
Carl Taylor (36:10):
You get to see what works, what doesn’t. You get to ensure that it’s updated based on like what I’m sharing with you is similar content to what I shared on the webinar. But with the way I’m delivering it now, because this is live, this is a different conversation. Yes, it’s, it’s slightly different. Like there’s similar frameworks to whereas I could have gone, Oh yeah Ash, here’s the recording of my old webinar here. You can just really set as part of your podcast, it’s not going to be quite the same. So, so it’s really important that we look at what we’re saying and we need to align what we’re saying back to the now. I mean it’s good in any marketing to be connecting to people’s now conversation, their pain. But now there is a certain conversation like what your clients may have wanted.
Carl Taylor (36:50):
It’s like let’s, let’s say you’re a business coach or a consultant of some kind. You know there’s a lot of people and I’m guessing a lot of your listeners are probably in that boat. Yes. If you are selling like how to build a business that, well actually I’ll link it back to me. I’ll talk to my, I prefer to speak from my own experience. So if I for a long time had been contemplating getting back into coaching, providing some sort of training like, and I’d been thinking about that for a long time and if I did that, it would be under the idea of building a business that works without you. That’s I’m very passionate about building a business that gives you the choice, the power to choose of freedom, financial freedom, business freedom and then emotional freedom and building a business that works without you.
Carl Taylor (37:26):
That’s a really big thing for me. But if I go out there and go, Hey, build a business that works without you right now, that is like the furthest thing from anyone’s mind. Like right now people are going, how do I make sure I survive? They’re not going, I want my business to work without me though I want my business to work. Yes, I want to. I want to still be in business in three months time. I want to still be business in 12 months time. I don’t care whether it works with me or not. Yeah. So you need to really look at what is the message that you’re doing out there? What’s happening? So you need to audit your entire messaging. You need to look at everything that’s going on. It’s really important that we change this messaging to to connect and right now I would recommend against aspirational messages, right?
Carl Taylor (38:07):
Building a business that works without you is an aspiration. People want that long term, but right now everyone’s feeling so uncertain. They don’t know where they’re going to be. No one’s committing to wanting to do anything for the long term. Everyone’s, you know, how do I short term survive this? What do I do right now? So that’s what we need to be connecting with is what’s going on right now. How do we help a client? So if what you sell is about longterm aspiration, maybe you need to sell something new, maybe you need to go, okay, I’m going to take a module out of my course and I’m going to sell a course that’s specifically how to make cash fast, right? Or how to pivot to what, like I don’t know what you choose to do, but you need to look at what you’d help clients with.
Carl Taylor (38:43):
And you might still allude to longterm when we’re through this, here’s the benefits. But really they don’t care about that right now. They just care about ensuring they’re gonna be around in three, six, 12 months. So that’s really what it’s about. We need to pivot the way we sell. We need to pivot the way we serve and we need to be pivoting what we’re saying, making sure our messages and our offers connect properly with what’s going on right now. That’s where we come to when it comes to pivot. If you can make those changes, it’s really gonna set you up for a better level of success moving forward.
Ash Roy (39:12):
Okay. So my biggest takeaways from this and the action steps I would be taking is one, I need to go back and audit my messaging. Actually I have a question about this, Carl. Where do you even start? I mean I’ve got a gazillion things, automations and stuff on my website. Do you have some kind of a process where you follow to do this?
Carl Taylor (39:32):
No, I don’t. Where would you start? Like where would I start and look at my website? That’s the first thing I look at. I’d go travel the path of your average lead and customer. So go to your website. I would also, anything you’re running ads to, like if you’ve got a paid ad going to an opt in or a webinar or whatever, like I’d be checking those automations first and I think that I’m actively driving traffic to, I would be ordering those. Some people, I’m not a personal fan of this, but some people have like nurture automated nurture sequences. So they’ve created these 14 day or 365 day kind of mapped out automated sequences. I would 100% be auditing that. Because for this exact reason that they can be very, like my nurture process is broadcast.
Carl Taylor (40:18):
We send out active broadcasts every week for our nurture list. We don’t have these automated sequence. We have automated sequences related to like specific opt-in things. But when it comes to just ongoing nurturing, I do not leave that to automation I did many years ago. And yeah, it just, the content goes stale soon. It doesn’t, it doesn’t change the context of what’s happening. Whereas a broadcast, we can, you know, I was able to say to my team this week, I said, Hey, we need to check any of our upcoming blog posts cause we’re like months ahead with our blog posts. We need to check all our blog posts, schedules and make sure that none of them are tone deaf based on the what’s going on right now, like whereas if that was all automated, I wouldn’t be on top of that.
Ash Roy (40:57):
Do you do both? Like I have nurture sequences when someone subscribes to my nine-step mind map and there’s a nurture sequence that goes around each of those nine steps, but then if I do this episode for example, I’ll send it out as a broadcast email, which then could mean that somebody who’s in a nurture sequence gets two emails in one day, which doesn’t sit right with me. Do you actually do something to avoid that or do you just let that happen?
Carl Taylor (41:23):
No, not really. I mean, a little bit like in an automation, we’ll just say when they get added to the list, the nurture list, but yeah, generally I still do have automated sequences. They’re generally shorter. You know they’re like three or four emails long or they’re very specific to a specific use case and so the messaging is very specific to that use that action they took rather than this ongoing broader messaging, which are, a lot of people have those automated just every week nurture content that they’ve just built up, which is smart. I get it. They built out this content. They’re just putting it out there. I’m not saying if you’ve got it, turn it off. I’m saying go through it and just make sure there’s nothing in there you need to remove.
Ash Roy (42:01):
Sure. By the way, if you want to learn about automation sequences from the master, check out episode140, productiveinsights.com/140 with Andre chaperon. He really is good at this
Carl Taylor (42:14):
soap opera sequences. That was one of the best things I ever learned from Andre.
Ash Roy (42:18):
He’s brilliant at it and Ryan Deiss raves about him and Ryan Deiss knows a thing or two about marketing. Well so step one, audit your website, your ads, your automations, make sure its not tone deaf. Make sure it’s not crass in the current circumstances. Think about redoing your offers. In some cases you’re going to have to do that and when you’re making the switch from a physical service or offer to an online version, which we are seeing a lot of people doing, consider repackaging your products, consider a membership model as well. This might be a good opportunity to do that. It seemed to work extremely well with this one member. I’m actually brainstorming with mind you that we’re still in the process of making that transition so it’s still a work in process, but definitely worth considering. Combining packaged offers in a tiered membership form is really a great idea and I have discovered that of late so I’d definitely recommend thinking about that. Any other action steps you think our listeners should be taking away from this conversation, Carl?
Carl Taylor (43:16):
Yeah, if you haven’t already, create ways for people on the website to book in for a phone conversation with you and consider launching a webinar that you know, don’t worry so much about what the presentation is right now. Sure. Longterm, learn how to do really slick webinars. It’s a useful skill, but right now just offer a webinar to get people on and then with the goal of those that like it, those that are interested will lead to a phone call. But yeah, I think that everyone should just be aiming for phone conversations unless you’re already still at a massive scale that that’s not worth it. But for if you’re a service based business consultants, coaches leading to phone calls right now is really agencies, you know, getting people on the phone
Ash Roy (43:54):
and we’ll have a full transcript of this podcast on productiveinsights.com/193 if you haven’t already checked it out, I highly recommend checking out automationagency.com it’s an excellent service. I recommend it. I’ve used it for the last three or four years and I don’t see myself stopping. You can check out productiveinsights.com/automation I recommend the service and I recommend Carl. I stand by what I’m saying. He’s a really genuine person and he puts his money where his mouth is. So we will call that a wrap on this episode and I look forward to seeing you guys again on episode 194 at productiveinsights.com/194 that’s the next one and that will be about profit. Be sure to tune into that because that is probably the most important part of this three part series. So thanks for being on Carl.
Ash Roy (44:40):
And do you want to just quickly share with our listeners how they can find out more about you?
Carl Taylor (44:43):
Yeah, no problem is look, it’s been an absolute privilege and honor to be able to share this stuff with you. Please action. If you’re listening to this, please action this. Please don’t let it go in one ear out the other. If you want to find me, connect with me, Carltaylor.com is where you can find me. If you want to connect with me and a bunch of other entrepreneurs. I got a free Facebook group called entrepreneurs by the pool. You can search for that or you can go Carltaylor.com/pool they’re probably the best ways for us to stay in contact.
Ash Roy (45:13):
All right, thanks for being on call and I’ll see you soon. Bye for now.