This week’s Misfit Entrepreneur is Alan MCkenna. Alan is the President and CEO of Business Acceleration Strategies, a firm that has generated over $30 million in additional revenue for clients through implementing funnel optimization, producing 6 and 7 figure evergreen, automated sales and marketing funnels.
Alan has worked with and provided expertise to everyone from John Assaraf, T.Harv Eker, Success Magazine’s Darren Hardy, Lisa Sasevich, and a number of INC 500 companies.
Alan has done the impossible. From adding $600k in additional revenue and shortening a client’s sales cycle by 66% in just 6 months to helping clients go from $0 to over $200k a month in revenue in just 4 months – he is a master at growing a business. So, I wanted to have him on to get his best tips and secrets that you can use to turbocharge your own income.
www.businessaccelerationstrategies.com
www.highprofitsalesfunnels.com
When Alan was 21, he was working for a company making good money, but kept seeing a guy a few years older than him that was doing exponentially better. The guy was the #1 sales guy in the company. Alan approached him and asked him to mentor him. The guy took Alan under his wing and taught him how to sell and get leads. Alan, sold for a few years and then went into marketing.
The owner of the company then purchased another company in New Jersey and Alan moved from the UK and was asked to come open the office to run marketing and build the sales team.
After a few years, Alan went back into selling because it was very lucrative. He did that for a while and had put away a significant amount of money. He then moved to California and started to study internet marketing and immersed himself in it.
His first clients came by word of mouth and things just grew from there. One of Alan’s secrets is the way he looks at a business and where sales and marketing fits in from end to end.
What was the #1 piece of advice you learned from your mentor in sales?
- How to get people to a yes before you get to the money
- How to sell payment plans and structure payments so people can afford the things they want.
What is your best advice for creating a great, consistently producing funnel?
- First, you need to know who your ideal client really is. You have to get laser-focused on who they are.
- Once you have your ideal client, it then becomes easy to go out and get joint ventures with others that have those idea clients and grow.
How do you setup a good joint venture?
- The most important thing is to show the partner how you are going to look after and take care of the client they are introducing to you. It is more important than the revenue share.
- Make sure that the joint venture partner has no work to do other than “copy, paste, and send.” Make it easy for them and give them everything they need so they don’t have to think.
- Revenue share – there is a value exchange, so take care of them.
How do you find a good JV Partner?
- One of the easiest ways is to look in Facebook groups and LinkedIn groups
- Joining the group will give the ability to get an understanding of the members and their needs
- The group owner is always looking for how to give value and good content to the group, and in a lot of cases, monetize it if possible.
Brian Tracy taught you a great way to double revenues and you created a system for it, what is it?
If you want to double your sales, you have to increase the face-time you have with people.
- What this means is that you are either meeting with someone in person, on the phone, on a web- meeting. The more times you can have a conversation and look into someone’s eyes, the more you will sell.
- So, you have to constantly look at your database and the clients that have spent money with and look for new ways for them to engage with you and continue to help them.
- In short, create more solutions to sell to your clients that you already and to take future clients on the journey with you not just once, but in multiple ways.
At the 20-min mark, Alan talks about his 9 simple sales conversion strategies and gives us some of his top ones with examples on how they are implemented.
- You must have a good script with the correct language and verbiage for people to take prospects through a process to a decision point.
- Make it obvious that if they have questions, they can call or email and get answers. Make it visible on every web page, communication, etc.
- Email them that you are available for questions as many times, people are just a few questions away from buying.
- There is so much gold in anyone’s database and there is so much opportunity to harvest it. Don’t neglect what is already there.
Alan gives a FREE 1-page infographic on the 9 Strategies
Best methods for generating more leads
- Paid traffic works (Facebook, Google, etc.)
- Joint Ventures are the easiest, simplest, and least up-front cost way to drive traffic
- Being endorsed by people who have a trust with an audience greatly enhances your credibility.
List size thoughts?
- It depends on the relationship people have with their list
- A list that is nurtured through giving great value is much more engaged and does not have to be big to drive great revenue.
- It doesn’t need to be big, but it must be solid with your “ideal clients.”
- Building the trust and connection is most important
What are the biggest mistakes that are made when it comes to funnels?
- It is one thing to know who your ideal client is, it is another to really understand their pain points and the things they really want to move towards.
- You need to fully understand the needs, wants, worries, and pain points that your ideal client is looking to have solved.
- Make sure you are going and marketing to where your ideal client is hanging out.
- You must have a very solid process to capture, nurture, and convert leads – most fall short. You have to build the relationship and educate first. Earn the right to make an offer.
- One of the biggest things that people miss is the gold in their existing database. Don’t get hung up and chasing the “new.”
At the 38-min mark, Alan talks about how people can create a virtually unlimited marketing budget and how do it… (You’ll want to listen to this a couple times!)
Best tips for maximizing marketing and sales on the following:
- Facebook: If you are going to do paid ads, the most important thing to have in place is retargeting from your website.
- Google: With paid Google ads, people searching have “buying intent.” They want to resolve a pain
- Instagram: Any business that people can engage with beautiful photos needs to use Instagram. If you can evoke an emotion with a picture, then you should be using it.
Best Quote: "One key thing every business must have in their marketing to find the best way to consistently communicate with their perfect audience. You must spend the bulk of your time there."
Alan's Misfit 3:
- There is absolute gold in your database. Do not neglect it.
- Build a complete strategy to capture, nurture, and then make offers to the marketplace. Think this through and do the work ahead of time.
- Have a strategy to pre-qualify and sell with a specific script that still ads value whether they choose to buy or not.