When the doubt gets loud, but answer that call, uh-huh, vision ain't real till you grind at speed, so breathe in deep, then call the damn leads, call the damn leads. Hey, welcome back to Call the Damn Leads, the show by sales professionals for sales professionals. I'm your host, Drew B. Wilson. With more than two decades in sales, I've seen it, been through it, heard about it. Now I'm bringing it to you, my favorite people in the world, the sales community. So let's be honest, this is the greatest job on earth. Doesn't matter where you come from, what background, what personality type, you can create an amazing life in sales. Today's guest, no stranger to the journey, I'd like to welcome Anthony Pritchard to the show. Thanks for having me on your show, Druby. I've been in sales since 2000, and so I'm also a student of the art. Hey, well, I appreciate a guy that's been in the game a long time. It means you're going to have a lot of great wisdom, but I want to start with your craziest sales story. Well, the craziest sales story, I guess, took me about 10 years to figure out that you've got to find a proving ground and an irresistible offer. And as a marketer, sometimes we have resistance to hiring other marketers. but after hitting my head against the concrete myself for over a decade I I decided to reach out to somebody to help me with my own marketing and she helped me create a funnel around an irresistible offer that you know helps me I guess transcend the offer to a holistic marketing service that I really prefer. And I think the customers get more out of it too. And you wouldn't think that a $48 loss leading offer would result in a $5,000 a month client, but crazy enough that it worked. You know, and one of the things I often try to remind sales professionals as they're, you know, I'm working with them is a sales professional who can generate their own leads can write their own paycheck. And it's important to understand that as a salesperson, your personal brand is ultimately who people are choosing to work with. Like, yeah, you might support, you know, a company and be a part of one and have their logo on your shirt because you're wearing the team jersey and all that. But at the end of the day, people want to work with you because they know you, they like you, they trust you based on the brand that you're building, whether that's in online marketing or, you know, the moment that you get that lead and you start having a conversation with them. And so, you know, Anthony, what I'd be curious for you as you made that shift and started understanding from a sales perspective that you had to have the marketing, like what was the thing that made you understand like, okay, here's where I'm actually seeing the results. I guess because I ended up breaking Facebook ads for myself. So I was kind of forced to hire somebody to do the Facebook ads for me. I mean, I could create videos and publish and advertise videos for my clients, but I wasn't able to seem to do it for myself until I hired that other person to ask me the right questions and guide me, you know, through the pitfalls to do it for me. And I think that's why we say the information age is over. Nobody's willing to pay for information anymore because they got access to it everywhere. But what they will pay for is for somebody that they like, as you say, to guide them straight through it and save all that time and energy and effort of trying to do it themselves. So results, you know, that's really what we all look for is the good results. I think early on I realized I wasn't going to get to keep my job unless I focused on analyzing the results I was getting. You know, eventually that will lead you to understand there's a data layer that goes between the advertising and your website. And it's very important to set that up so that you can optimize your spend and your results. Yeah, that's one of those things when you're getting into the world of like starting to market your business, the reason why KPIs and metrics matter so much more. because there's so many layers to understanding what those metrics from a marketing perspective actually mean. And so I'd be curious, you know, you know, Anthony, when you're chatting with some of these individuals that you're helping, how do you like, what are the big mistakes that they're making going to other companies before they get to you? Like, what are the metrics or what are the things that they think are important that maybe aren't? I think they definitely know that there's a bunch of information that they don't know. But I'm sure you've come across somebody that's never advertised before and is exploring it compared to somebody who's already tried it three or four times. It's a much different conversation. and it's almost better to talk to somebody who's gone through the pain of getting ripped off with the overseas freelancer and having no recourse because their business is in a different country and I guess the biggest indicator just to get right to the point is that you're going to be hiring somebody to do something for you. If they can do it for themselves then that a red flag So find this practitioner Do the diligence on the back end Is the person you talking to for your marketing somebody who also markets themselves or are they just like somebody who follows orders and does it because other people are telling them to do it? Yeah, it's one of those things where you really, especially in our 2025, 2026 era, you have to understand what are they actually doing in the terms of like, I believe every sales professional, small business owner should learn marketing to the extent where they know what those numbers are, right? What's your cost per lead? How many leads does it take to get an acquisition? How many acquisitions, you know, what's the lifetime value on each of those? What's the average value when they come in the door? And just really breaking down so that when you go to hire someone, you can say, Hey, listen, here's, here's our baseline. If you can't beat it, then it doesn't make sense for us to work together. And one of the things that I see a lot right now, and I'd love your, your kind of opinion on this, but like, how much does the video play into the marketing campaigns and the process that you're seeing with a lot of your clients? Are they all moving to video or are they still doing static ads? What are you guys seeing right And that was the trend. Well, I think you touched on it earlier. All things the same. People would rather work with somebody they know, like, and trust. And in the world of online screens, video communicates 10 times better than print, text, or audio messages standalone. loan. And so if you can do what business owners do best and put yourself out there, be the spokesperson or the mouthpiece for your brand, because you know your business better than anyone else, you're best suited for this, then you're going to be able to make a lot more of those connections. Somebody's going to be able to look at the video and say, that's somebody I think I can work with right there. Let me give them a call. So yeah, if you believe that the internet, you know, is never going to be satisfied with the amount of content you publish and still yet you haven't published video, well, you're sitting in the back of the line and you can jump to the front of the line by just starting with video and you don't have to publish video either. You know, it might take you 20 takes in front of the mirror to get the clip you want. And that's the hurdle that you've got to get over initially as the business owner. You know, start off simple with a 15 second elevator pitch. There's definitely a place for that on your website. Behind the scenes, this is what people want to see is the evidence or the proof that you can do what you say you can do. and what might be mundane or boring to you because you're in front of it all day is actually the interesting component of what you do that somebody wants to see so pull back the curtain show them all the the proprietary you know intricacies without giving away your secrets obviously yeah i think there's um especially in the service business there's so much opportunity to give everybody the why and the what without giving them the how. And that's what great content creators are doing. They're explaining why this is important for you to be aware of or to understand what exactly it is that you are supposed to be aware of and understand. But they're leaving that curiosity gap of like, okay, well, now I know I have this problem. I know I'm dealing with this thing. Like, what the heck am I supposed to do next? And that's where the content creation process is so important because so many people are just giving the pitch without giving the foundation of like getting their attention and their interest first. And so what I'd be interested to know from you, because like I'm a big believer in, you know, using what's new and what's working, and then also trying to avoid wasting money on things that aren't actually working. So like what are some of the big trends that you see right now that people are using, but it's kind of wasting their ad dollars? hmm well a common one is oh hey i'm gonna go try google ads and and you know when you open up your google ads account it will step by step take you through a campaign creation but there's no promises from google that it's going to be a good advertisement for you. You know, they're basically just showing you how to set up an ad campaign. Here's another one. Those same, that same platform will offer you a company representative to help you optimize your campaigns. But they're a little biased. I don't know if you've had any success from that, but I think they just kind of, in purpose, run you around in a circle and try to cover your eyes. so that you can keep giving them money. They're rich enough, though. I have had enough conversations with meta reps and Google reps and all the people that want to give me advice on how to scale my campaigns. Just today, one of my clients posted a screenshot from his notifications. It was like, hey, if you spent $10 to promote this post, you'd get zero viewers. and we're like, the math don't math there, Meta. What are you doing? Why would you even allow your algorithm to send that? But that's something that's going on right now is there a lot of the AI agents and the AI stuff that it just like throw and stop It like yeah give things to try So like what your opinion on AI and marketing Another rule of thumb is anything automated like click this button to automate your audience or something. It's another ruse by the company, I guess, to try and take the lazy people in this direction of, you can spend more money. you don't really know what you're doing just click this button it's fine i always uh i i pick on the boost post function yeah because like on facebook specifically so for those of you that have ever seen that little thing of like hey would you like to boost this post um i will preface this with there are some people that this has worked for yeah however the overwhelming majority of you that are boosting your posts and getting all of these vanity metrics of, oh, you had 200,000 reach or 100,000 people saw this post. A, you don't know what 100,000 people it was. And B, did you actually get someone who reached out and specifically said, I want to do business with you because I saw this post. If you can't track that metric, then you're wasting your money. And when we say wasting your money, we mean that you're paying for Facebook to go find homeless people and usher them into your front door. You don't want that. They can't ever buy from you. That's not helpful. That's such a great analogy. I appreciate you saying that because I'm definitely going to use that in the future. So I'm going to write your name down and I'm going to try to remember to give you a shout out for that one because that's exactly what they're doing. And I think that's also where, you know, you mentioned the video aspect and how people want to do business with people they know, like, and trust and how the video can be such a powerful tool. So, you know, what are some of the ways that a small business owner entrepreneur can actually start getting on video? Are there like certain apps or is there a certain editing tool that you recommend? Like, you know, give them some of that insider knowledge on how to go and crush it. Great. Great question. Because we're in the middle of this huge revolution. And so there's so much information that everybody's got a different opinion. But if you look at it from the 50,000 view on the airplane, 10, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, there was like, you know, a monopoly. Five people could make you a video and they were all the major broadcast news stations. Well, today you have the same ability to publish video that they do. So all of us are our own multimedia broadcasting company. I'm sorry if you're hearing a blower outside. They're doing some landscaping at my coworking space. I always do that in the middle of a show. No, we're good to go. Okay. The thing that we're doing right now I would recommend because it's so easy. Get on a Zoom call with a client, a friend, another thought leader in your industry, and talk about a subject. Ask each other questions, and then pop that video recording into the tool called Opus.Pro. That's going to clip up two dozen different short video snippets, which is enough content for a month. Do an interview like that once a month, and you've got enough content for every single platform. and you should be syndicating these short educational videos to all of them to help you. And you can automate this and you make it really easy and not a big waste of time because that's the other thing people are hesitant about. How much time is this going to take? I don't have that much time. Well, everybody's got 30, 60 minutes. We don't find time. We make time and we only make time for the things that matter. And the one thing I know is that content is king in your marketing strategy right now. Whether you're running organic social media pages, whether you're creating paid advertising, the more like different styles of content, the more exposure you're getting. That's what they want. And so what I'd be interested to know, like, how many times do you have your clients posting? How many creators are they running at one time? Like what are the things that you're seeing from your perspective of like working with some of these high value clients? What's working? Well, I'll talk about the most valuable thing on any website or any platform. And this is an arguable statement, but it goes along with the evidence that we're trying to create to help us sell more. And it's the video testimonial. are i mean 90 of businesses in the united states don't have a video testimonial and that's a problem because that person that is looking at your website has this stack of money and in order to give you that stack of money they gotta get over this feeling of risk that they have and so what better piece of content for them to observe or sacrifice their time to watch than somebody who just went through that same process that they're considering going through themselves. Because video doesn't lie. And video really shows that body language, which communicates even more than the words that are coming out of your mouth. But whenever you ask somebody for a video testimonial, this can be very difficult. And I recommend giving yourself a video testimonial and not publishing it, but just seeing how easy it is. Or doing a video testimonial for a restaurant the next time you go out Whip open your phone and say this Now that the thing that hard What do you say whenever you ask somebody for a review Their shoulder kind of creep up into their ear holes, and they're like, what do I say, right? So I've got this great little three-step video testimonial formula that I'll share with you. It helps anyone to give a great one-minute testimonial. Two pieces of bread with meat in the middle, okay? and I tell this is exactly how I tell my video subjects. I'm going to do this tonight actually. I'm going to video a presentation and then capture some of the guests after the presentation. This is what I'm going to say. The first piece of bread is the who, what, and the where. Who you are, where you are, and what you just witnessed. Then the meat you don't even have to think about because that's your experience. That should just come straight from the heart. What you thought going into it and what you got coming out of it. The last piece of bread is the CTA, is the call to action. What are you going to do next? Or what do you think the people watching should do next? And that's it. And sometimes it's just 30 seconds. Other times it's a minute, but it's a really authentic way to get the message across without, you know, rambling on. And I've found it, it's worked for me for the last 10 years. So hopefully your viewers can use it in their business. Well, even if they can't, I am, I wrote it down. I think that's a great, And I'm a big, I'm a believer of frameworks, right? Like, Hey, the, the recipes are out there. The process is there. There's microwave directions now for just about everything. You just have to follow the actual directions. And the problem is most people aren't following the directions. They're not trusting the process. They want to reinvent the wheel, which isn't necessary because there's smart people that have done these things so many times they know what works and what doesn't. And one question I always, always, always run into is how much should I be spending on my marketing? So what's your framework around that? What's like kind of your process of deciding like, hey, this is how much we're going to spend on marketing and here's where we're going to spend it. Yeah, surprisingly run into so many people that haven't answered this question for themselves. and they're just counting on word of mouth and the Yellow Pages approach. But I think any business in America is happy to set aside 10% if they can get back 90%. And it's a great place to start because Coke spends more than 50%. and uh you know i guess the local glass repair or shoe repair person you know probably spends nothing because they've just been around for 50 years and and i think it's a great measure am i winning or am i losing at that 10 at least it's something and it lets me get started with you know there's a bunch of these marketing tools out there that cost like 35 bucks a month and if you can find one that helps you, it's not a bad investment. I love that. I think it all comes back to every situation is a little bit unique, so that's why it's good to know someone that you can reach out to and have those kinds of conversations with. Honestly, we could probably sit here and nerd out on this for several hours because I know you love sales and marketing as much as I do, but I want to be respectful of your time. how do we come find you follow you check out more of your your content and your materials great yeah i have a 48 quick fix like i mentioned earlier we promise to repair any two technical problems on your wordpress website in 24 hours or less guaranteed or we'll give you all your money back and nice and you can find us uh wpsprints.com um talking about video you probably didn't expect that my main business was WordPress repair, but I kept running into WordPress development friction. If I have these low-cost video ads and you hire me to deploy them for you, I've got to interface with your website and work with your website developer. Well, because the AI, because the cost of WordPress repair has come way down, WordPress developers got a pretty tight grip on that. And so they didn't give me as a marketing person, a very easy experience. So I shifted, went with my partner. You probably see him behind me. He's got a highly skilled, low cost labor team in New Delhi. And we just passed the savings on to our customers. And that's the whole beauty of, of being able to really help people. And so if you guys enjoyed the show, you got some value out of it. Make sure you follow Anthony, make sure you share this episode on social media. Maybe you know somebody who sucks or isn't doing any video at all. Send this to them. You don't have to tell them that they suck about video or that they suck because they're not doing video, but this episode made me think of you. Send it their way. Then stop by, leave us a review, check out the other episodes. Everything's over at CallTheDamnLeads.com. If you have a story that you want to share on the show, go to call the damn leads.com forward slash podcast, send us your deets. We'll schedule you in and we'll get to hear all the amazing stuff that you're bringing to the sales community, just like my friend Anthony. So thank you again for your time, man. We really appreciate it. Thanks, Ruby. Appreciate having me on. You guys know what to do next. Go pick up the phones, call the damn leads. We'll see you next time. See you grind at speed, so breathe in deep. Then call the damn least. Call the damn least.
