Episode #115 – Gaurav Duggal on How To Land Recurring-Revenue High Paying Clients

It’s John McIntyre here, the auto responder guy. I’m here with Gaurav Dougal. Now, Gaurav came from a private face book group actually with … He’s got to a grip on the next level mastermind and this … function of interesting people and they’re doing a lot of stuff that you wouldn’t really find. We had to find people elsewhere. So, it’s a Gretel community that … put together, but where Gaurav came to my attention was he just put a post up one day, I was browsing through just looking for different things … to learn and he mentioned that he’s been fairly quiet in the group, but he’s been learning from … Brandies, Stock Brown and these guys and he just landed to really high profile clients for large upfront fee and then a recurring fee as well, plus shares in the operation and I thought that was such a cool story and you know that you would probably not a bit about how this actually goes down when someone does this. So, I asked Gaurav to come on a podcast and talk a bit about his story and how these sort of deals coming together and what his business looks like and some tips and strategies that he has for making it work. So, Gaurav! Good to have you on the show man.

Gaurav Duggal: Hey! Thanks for having me John.

John McIntyre: So, before we get into the nitty-gritty how to stuff, can you give the listeners a bit of a background on who you are and what’s the business like? What are you doing?

Gaurav Duggal: Yeah well, I got started in I guess you call the online marketing space, you know we call the … space. We want to call it a long, long time ago actually one of the old guys in the industry. It started in 2001. It doesn’t do something about somewhere in that range just a offer one of them cheesy Craigslist’s ads that hey! Do you want to make money at home and I was like Oh! That’s sounds interesting; I’m just getting outta high school here, so I can do this. That’s what I can get started and went through some of the hard knocks but you know try to figure out where some of the real information actually came from and then eventually once you learned the ropes started in agency officially in 2004, part time I was going to the University to service local clients with something I learnt at that time, I mean Ad words barely getting started, SEO was really easy to do, so, kind of got started there. You know finish my education in… when full-time built up the agency to what it is now, which is we provide all the usual services, your SEO, SEMP design kind of whatever is necessary for the client to get to the next step, but we’re moving more and more towards kind of a full marketing alignment and automation which some people will call a marketing funnels. You can call them sales funnels. The idea being you know is not just enough for you have just the website out there, just to have some cart in out there. It’s what are you doing to drive the correct person to the correct piece of content at the correct time. So, the right person, right content, at the right time and a right follow up, so having an actual method to convert them. That’s what we do now; it is I mean for … sales funnels or marketing funnels.

John McIntyre: Okay, so alright cool and is that the transition that you moving to some moving away from you know some SEO and SEM during the funnel stuff.

Gaurav Duggal: It’s not so much you’re moving away from that, its stopping doing the SEO, SEM as a piecemeal and offering it more in terms of, okay! Let’s look at the funnel as a whole and see if SEO fits then. I mean yeah, it might fit in, but we’re not going to do it until we know that your funnels convert. So, you have some beginning place to really you know make that traffic work. So, that’s kind of we’ve added the funnel as the overarching peace.

John McIntyre: Yeah, Okay, okay. It’s really cool because I’ve had people saying telling me to do this for a long time with the funnel stuff, because I get started three years ago as a copywriter and I guess hustle my way up with some freelance class while living in… stage with the time and is time when on people looking at me can I just offering … offer a package of 10 emails and now what’s happened in the last probably 6 to 12 months is it moves toward slight, you know it’s fully moved away from that large degree into much similar stuff to watch your audience going in and looking at the business as a whole. What do they need with a holistic perspective through set to say would they need to email, need some SEO, something like that going, what do they need is a business. You know what’s the overall strategy that I need right now to close more business and you know.. put that together for them.

Gaurav Duggal: That’s exactly what it is. It’s you know mean its so competitive out there right now, where if you don’t have something to tie it all together, you going to leave holes. You going to have people falling out at your secrets will.. whatever you want to call it and why would you want to take that risk, if you’re spending the most talk to clients. It’s you going to spend an effort whether it’s time or money to break somebody into your funnel and to your sales process. Then you better spend the maximum time possible making sure they don’t leave. They take the action that you want them to take. Otherwise, it’s really inefficient.

John McIntyre: Yeah, absolutely, absolute! So, before getting into, I mean do you have before it or like how they sort of happen. Can you talk a bit about; I didn’t wanna mention the figures in the deals, because I wasn’t sure whether you wanted to talk about that.

Gaurav Duggal: That’s alright. I can go through couple that I mentioned.

John McIntyre: Okay, tell me what about the deals that you’ve been doing? You know what people are paying up from what they’re doing during recurring?

Gaurav Duggal: It kind of depends on obviously the complexity of the funnel and you know the type of product that we’re promoting, but I mean typically to just setup a decent sales. So, that means setting up your capture mechanism, what you’re giving you in the front the so-called lead magnet. You know what the next thing be given away and the email sequencing and all that kind of stuff. Just the initial setup usually runs between 10-40 thousand dollars somewhere in that range. Again yeah this depends on the complexity of it and then you know from there it is always maintenance and the maintenance is not so much, not just hosting or something. It’s actually going in, optimize the conversions, optimizing the email paths. You know we have a 108 step process that we kind of call together some of our … some stuff we would learned from .. from dice and kind of cobble together on system. That’s going to be an ongoing and that usually we started about 1500 a month and it can go up from there and that’s pure funnel usually, 1502 about three thousand dollars a month plus beyond that a depending on what we’re charging or for compiling anything on the recurring we like to have a share in the growth of the business right. This is something I learned from Ryan Lobac and it really works well because by sharing the growth I mean it keeps us on as well, right because if a business is doing six figures and revenue today and we can take them from 6 to 7 and we get a you know five to ten percent share in that growth, so you know from a hundred thousand to a million, that’s 900K growth, we can get 10 percent about, we’re pretty happy doing that because the business grows they’re happy to pay us. We’re still getting our monthly anyway and we grow along with the business. So, you don’t need as many clients as well and you’re really, you got skin on the … without point.

John McIntyre: So, tell me about like if you’re doing, I mean 10K to 40 K to setup a funnels of big … What do you get at 10k and what’s the difference between 40K?

Gaurav Duggal: A 10K funnel, the main difference is the kind of the amount of follow-up is .. also, so almost the amount of emails that we’ve got for the follow-ups because of the amount of advertising that we’re targeting ads that we’ve got to put in because in typical funnel is indeed usually going to be more than it… we’re talking about one funnel maybe one or two targets right and then there could be multiple targets that you know cost a little bit more data. Say one funnel with two targets and about 5 to 7 follow-up emails is going to be about that 10K range, but a similar funnel would seven or eight pages and the 40 to 80 email follow-up sequences going to get to that higher range because now we’re having to manage a hell able lot more and to help a lot more and you know there’s a lot more variables to manage with that kind of targeting. So, that’s the major difference between the two. We don’t do it.  You know a lot of companies is okay you know, this is a dentist so dentist average customer value so much, so I can charge this much. We don’t do it that way. It’s a pretty standard fee where we make up the difference is in the growth share.

John McIntyre: Interesting, interesting okay! That’s another interesting question of you know like I finally yes, so the way like pricing is the price is more custom deal because the guys at the companies should have been working with this, everyone’s very different, so it’s hard to give at the same solution to everyone. I find anyway like a package it has the same thing that’s for the company, because often find that each company has a big list, the other one doesn’t have a list but they’ve got some good traffic. One of them doesn’t have either of them. 1 of them already has an engage list that they mailing and so I found but so what you’re saying is you’re using, you’ve got packages that you offer and the price just depends on how much effort you have to put into it not so much what the potential attorneys for the client.

Gaurav Duggal: Yeah essentially yeah, we don’t usually go much below the 10k unless there’s an incredible, we feel really good up side and maybe the businesses and not the cash invest but we know okay we put the extra effort and we might we’ve done on occasion where we’ve done the funnel for 5 but we’ve taken a much higher share of return, share the business until the initial 5k depressions made up, so we might take 25 percent.

John McIntyre: To take it, is it equity or is a share in the profits?

Gaurav Duggal: It depends on the business. It can be either it. It can be either be equity or sharing the profits. It would both. It just depends on how the business operates. In some cases like with the 40k deal that I mention on the … forum that was more shares because we know that the company is going international. So, it is very tiny market of Western … they’re doing well. They’re gonna go to international markets. They’re gonna explode. So, I’d rather have shares publishers the company as it grows.

John McIntyre: Okay, okay interesting and then so when you do I mean one thing: one question I’ve had and I know a lot of people have this as well as when you do say a recurring I say like a share in the profits over time and so the business economy does two hundred thousand dollars and you take million dollars. You increase the sales by 800,000 dollars. Let me take stake five-percent cut on the profits. So, let’s say a profit three hundred thousand dollars extra profit a year. How do you count let’s say how do you calculate that. Are you tracking the sales and then you send the invoice at the end of the month. How is that process happened?

Gaurav Duggal: It depends from company to company. Of course that’s the e-commerce space is extremely easy, because we can tag it, you know we tag everything with the other periods of report. Something that we’re using is tagging mechanism at the back and so we know since we started we know what their sales were, we know what their sales are now. We have the channel separated in the automation software. So, their physical sales are the physical sales, I mean whatever the sales that is doing that’s their prerogative, but anything that comes through our funnel, like the stuff that we’ve setup exclusively, that’s easy to track, right because we know they came through our funnel the way through our lead system and they closed online through the system. If it’s something that’s a little bit more difficult to track in the terms of physical sales, retail sales in the case upon the clients we have right now, in that case we said we do have to trust them at the end of the day. You know we got to say okay your sales were ex- ways what we started; you know they’ve increased by 400-500 percent. This is our share and so far people have been very fair about it and coming back and saying yeah okay you know but this is very you know generally people are pretty appreciated with people grown with business quite such a massive amount. They don’t mind and we’ve got, we have very tight contracts in place at the end of the day. They can’t really know no reason really been able to wriggle out a bit.

John McIntyre: Okay, okay alright cool! Another thing that an interesting part of you know my learning process and getting better during these set of deals is the actual sale state, because what I found is that knowing how many has is it down make the phones is fairly straight forward. Sit down on the piece of paper, you map it out, once you been through a few of these products and you understood up sales and some of the behavioral segmentation you can do with marketing automation software. It’s fairly straight for the actual setting it up once you get it, but the company’s when it comes to selling it, I found that the more you talk about the emails and the landing page software like the actual what do you actually do for them, I find the less like they are closing and if they do less liked probably pay.

Gaurav Duggal: Yeah, there is something that we found actually you know very much like you are saying when we initially try to I guess sales funnels, it was very technical. Right, it was very almost dry in a way. It’s like yeah! being soft automation blah, blah, blah and people to said, the eyes with the glaze over be like what is this and why the hell do I need it and then a lot of them would actually go take our information, go back to their guys and they’re guys be like yeah! I can do this. You know go hire these guys out there when now, you know they could really do it, but they thought they could. Now, we pretty much never talk about the tools that we use because that’s irrelevant. Businesses don’t give about really how you doing it? They wonder of the bottom line. What are you going to do for me? I going to increase your sales. How you going to do it? I am going to automate your marketing process and you know we give a lover analogy if we talk about companies like McDonald’s and their sales process, because that’s the… McDonald’s has one of the best sales funnels on the planet. You talk about examples that a business can relate to you and we have one of our pitches, do you want to be like McDonald’s and never like what the hell does that mean? Well! This is what McDonald’s says, do you want that process in your business? They have predictable growth or we call it an inevitable growth. It opens the doors a lot because people, like yeah of course I want that. Okay well we can do that for you know and that makes a huge difference because it’s less complicated and it’s very easy for somebody to visualize something that they’re familiar with.

John McIntyre: Yeah absolutely, I mean would not found like, because …I was writing emails right get on the phone with someone and when came time to make them an offer, I’ll give you 10 emails and it’s funny now knowing what I know now, you know things have changed but backed at all well I was not buying email, so you .. Emails and charge amount a dollars in email and that will be that and what you learn is basically what you… that people express you once you get the higher to businesses at a bigger. The owners don’t and you know they’re not you know just starting out and they don’t have like you know small six online businesses. If they have got like a serious business they fairly experienced. They don’t really care, especially if they are the founder or CEO. They are way too busy to learn about how it actually happens?

Gaurav Duggal: Yeah!

John McIntyre: They just want to know what you going to do like that the benefit of the result that you’re going to do for them. It’s interesting, because I was telling someone recently and he went through a pitch, he was basically you know they helping me improve and refine my own sales pitch for the stuff and the way he was going through like this is, what’s really funny is I’ve never really talk like this on the phone, but if ask me to write a sales page, this is exactly the sort of stuff sale. It will be pain, pain, pain, pain, pain, solution. More pain, pain, pain, pain, solution pain, it will like that’s all you do and then alter that on a sales page, but then I never thought to do it on a call, but then that’s what you’re doing these calls look with these analogies. What the analogies illustrate the pain that they are experiencing. Now cannot experience it, they don’t fix these problems.

Gaurav Duggal: Yeah, absolutely and lot of it is, I mean for us is really does come down to two things, I mean one is, oh! 3 things I guess, the analogy is one of them of course, but the other two is you know you ask a lot of questions and you ask a lot of prodding questions where you bring out the fact  are you can help them bring up the fact that they’re not doing enough, alright. We’ve gotten a valuation process that it’s not the initial meeting, but maybe the second meeting will actually go through a small little form that we’ve created. That just fifteen questions that they go through and integrates them automatically at the end and then they walk away knowing yeah I am missing 11 out of these fifteen things by just plug these 11 holes, it would make a massive difference in my business rate and they are answering it and coming to conclusion themselves, that this needs to be done and I guess the third overarching thing is kind of education rate, I mean it’s you know a lot of our stuff is know the way we actually acquire a clientele is a lot of educational base sessions, so we actually do a lot of group webinars, seminars and things like that where we will do a very similar processes, we would do one-on-one, but you know to a group setting what we actually walked them through the exact same analogy, the exact same process and will have them do it even as a crowd, you know ask these 5 or 7 questions by… hands and at the end of it people come running to the front because we are like okay we will need no more about this. You know because my God I had no idea that these questions even existed in the first place.

John McIntyre: Yeah, interesting okay, so then that was the next question then I have was how do you go about, is all different ways to go and find this sort of class is networking is going to events, just doing the seminar, but what’s the some logo and you know advertises what you advertise on LinkedIn and other places. So, what’s working for you right now in terms of finding clients that are interested in this stuff and have the money to invest forty thousand dollars in it?

Gaurav Duggal: Three things that work better than anything, in fact I mean we have been obviously have a bride in met with the top three, I would say number one would be speaking to networking groups that are pre-qualified, so this is not talking to let’s say you have gone a BNI which is fairly large networking organization, but even if you’re talking to a BNI  group, you want to be talking to the BNI group that is the most productive in the city because their BNI groups that are starting out is BNI groups that have been established for twenty years and are doing you know 10-15 million dollars a year within them. That’s the type of group you want to first pre-qualify the type of networking groups you want to talking to … the BNI’s, some of the higher organizations. These are the guys you know where you know the average income for the business owner there and you’ve got to make sure that the decision makers … you know you want to make sure there and you pre-qualify in that way, so we have had  made the mistake initially. I will speak to anybody. This is a real spoke able library. Spoke God knows where else and of course we got nobody from the public library because anybody can show up there. There are students there, some there are interested but you know student … funnel and they get it, but the more we change the strategy folks in the high and high network groups, the conversion rates just shot up because we’ve always have people coming at the end and this is the question about affordability isn’t there and the question of then being established isn’t there anymore, because you already got through those major hurdles. So, that’s kind of one thing, the other would be referrals that we built up I mean best kind of a measure of the fact that we’ve been around for so long but a lot of our business does actually come through a few referral partners that we’ve built up and these referral partners are in some cases applied, so we’ve had been really happy with our  work and we always pay back, so we pay back between 10 and 20 percent for the lifetime over referrals, so  if you refer us a client that wanted a funnel and then the next year the client wanted a SEO project or what design bubble blower, whatever backlight is tag team for life, so we’re giving our firm partners a way to build an income for themselves, while building us a business, so we do it that way, we partner with the agencies as well, we partner  with web firms and training companies and so that’s gonna passed away from you for us to generate clientele and I guess a third way would-be  equally important is the online funnel so we setup for ourselves because you know we’re doing funnel for other people we better have funnel for us, that actually work, right. So, we have our own funnels for intake, so a lot of them again education-based and very niche down, so we’re going after for example real estate investors, because again we know that’s the crowd that has money and you know we have a funnel that’s very specific to real estate investors, so if we are going after that we’re gonna go after that niche on LinkedIn and Face book and perhaps a few other platforms out there and you know we build an entire funnel that speaks to them, captures their lead, gives them the information, follows-up with them, just like any funnel will set up with somebody else. So, those kind of the three top things and they work very consistently.

John McIntyre: Okay, okay what’s interesting there’s some people look at this sort of market and they think there is small that there’s always big players in there like the internet market the whole … in this market, so I never do that, I can’t compete with those guys but the more I mean sounds like you know this as well, but the more experience that I get with this is that this market is just, it’s so undercapitalized, they are under tapped in the sense is that if you can go to you know your local business being and the being I mean and find people this means that’s just people in Calgary.

Gaurav Duggal: Yeah!

John McIntyre: So, you’ve got people in every, this gonna be companies in every single city around the world that need the services and if you can explain without getting into the technical jogging just explains they got more customers, they want to maintain marketing process and no business can really turn that down.

Gaurav Duggal: No it’s so different that gonna be the message interestingly enough as we’ve tweaked this over the last couple years the message that I always get back, because I have been doing lot of speaking and stuff four or ten years, I mean the usual digital marketing products but once  we switched our talks to purely about marketing alignment and automation every time the feedback is wow I never knew this existed and this is the most interesting marketing talk and ever bit because it made sense but that’s something that we’ve always heard because nobody honestly nobody I’ve ever come across and we know all the major agencies at least and I mean I can ever speak about the burden be seek that’s gonna worry, you do most of our marketing, I barely ever come across an agency that talks upon proper marketing alignment or automation. They’re always the same thing. So, think about it this way.  Yeah there is a lot a big players that are doing funnels and stuff like that, but there’s also fifty times that number of small players doing SEO and PPC and all the usual stuff and where would you rather compete against a hundred big guys or 50,000 small guys. Way easier to compete against the 100 big guys. It’s the same bloody message and with the way you can target online with somebody’s platforms. You can reach the same person Ryan Dice kin for pennies. You know Dice may outspend you 10 to1, but you’re still reaching the same crowd, so you know your chances are just as good as close as somebody as Ryan.

John McIntyre: Right, right! You know another side this is that you’ve got like you know add some economy, a couple of weeks ago and he has some business. He had 11 or 12 products inside the business and two main funnels, two main interested people in the business that you want to put people through and he ended up going with another guy, but what was interesting is that it made me realize you know you’ve got business out there. There are already internet businesses, you know he already had a basic funnel setup and he monitor the automated … do a lot more advanced stuff and so you got people like that, but they probably gonna go for a figure   looking, they gonna find someone like Ryan Dias, because he has such a big presence in the internet marketing funnel industry. Then you’ve got every other like, that’s the internet marketing industry of people with businesses that are already been assigned eBooks and videos and training and like that, so that’s a tiny, tiny industry in the grand scheme in a world and then you’ve got like the BMWs and Mercedes and the huge corporations that they need all this stuff too and you’ve got everyone from billion-dollar corporations you know 100 million dollars or even 10 you know 5 you’ve got a five million dollar company. This quite on a how it must be thousands, tens of thousands of five million dollar companies around the world right now, that they have even no idea about the stuff.

Gaurav Duggal: Yeah they have absolutely no idea, when you talk to someone of these guys about it, I mean they haven’t even started in such a densely candy. You know sometimes you talk these guys are like, just no way, I mean they have been heard the stuff and they are still really actually get very excited and that’s something that doesn’t really happen very often. You talk about SEO and they’re like yeah! Forget about SEO and this is all bullshit. You talk about this stuff and they actually wanna listen because you’re talking about (a) I mean even you … about something like automation, you’re talking about taking time off their hands and freeing up you know their time and they can than more efficient, that’s something that any company can relate to, you know we’re going increase your live and we’re going to automate your marketing. That’s a really nice combination, where the SEO and like that just on it own, it’s very ephemeral. It’s like well at some point down the future you might rank high in the search engines and that’s good for you well I don’t get it. I acquire the hell what I want that, right.

John McIntyre: Right, I mean the other side is … is a world because we’re all you know pulling no more about the stuff tonight beside … population, like if you’ve been through any internet … you’ve been doing internet stuff even a year. You have to know more about internet marketing, then almost everyone on the planet, but to me means that you know you think  SEO, even funnels or setting up auto responder, like these don’t, it’s like what should we do, I but then if you explain this to someone who’s not familiar with it, like I have one guy in the funnel and … would talking about how, he mention a company that was doing this amazing thing and I still … was and he says what they were going as you could put a link in your email and if someone click that link they get automatically added to another list without having to sign up and that’s to me is like that’s the simplest thing, like  to me it seems like they’re really, really simple thing that’s just why wouldn’t you be doing that? I really thought of was absolutely amazing.

Gaurav Duggal: Yeah, it is its magic and in a way it is, I mean you couldn’t do this twenty years ago, I mean it was on manual right. You couldn’t do any other stuff and you know what are the easier ways to explain it to some of these more established companies, as you know like in funnels you know all this kind of something we talk about to bring it down to earth to allow these guys is older companies, it’s really not that different from any direct response marketing has been going on for 150 years, it really is the same process. The point is we’ve managed to take that process and turn it online which happens to be where your customers are hanging out. That’s all we’ve done. At the end of the day we’re doing something that’s tried, that also kinda helps a lot of companies like yeah okay. It is something that’s worked for a long time. You got just figured out how to make it work with where the audience is right now, I get it.

John McIntyre: Cool man, the last question I had is that what when … like companies that you go out, unit charge sale at least 10,000 Dollars a project and add on the recurring, what revenue company should be targeting?

Gaurav Duggal: We don’t usually have a revenue number, we usually have an idea, usually before us even going to a group for some of the weekend and get an idea, okay who’s there and who’s not there? What kinda revenues kinda important but it’s usually okay yeah we do look at, we don’t usually ask the question, we usually look at, okay what is the average customer value for this person because that gives you an idea of what they could potentially spend anyways in order to require customer so that’s one thing we look at internally but the other thing is not so much revenue but we find out the marketing budget at the end of the day because some companies with a hundred thousand dollar revenue might have a forty thousand dollar marketing budget because it’s a tiny company, whereas the company with a million dollar revenue might only have 10K to spend. We’ve actually come across that exact scenario slam mention it. It usually is not the revenue thing it’s usually: is this company poised for growth and can they afford it? You know, I don’t care what they are making? Obviously, I probably gotta make at least 150 K first even talk just because it’s really hard to justify that but you know some individuals you know you wonder that some companies starting up don’t have any revenue, but they’ve got a million dollars in funding, great. Let’s get started, right.

John McIntyre: Okay cool, that very cool. Thanks for coming on the show man and talking all this stuff. I really appreciate it.

Gaurav Duggal: No worries man.

John McIntyre: So, last but not least, can you if the listener would like to get in touch with you, either ask you questions maybe they even hi you for one of these funnels, what is the best place to do that?

Gaurav Duggal: Couple of ways, I mean you can either go to the website, it’s reachnexus.com or you can just shoot a quick email at infof@reachnexus.com which myself and the deckle founders have access to and we’re glad to chat, we don’t really be generally don’t charge for the initial 15-20 minute meeting because we just like to sit down and talk, we talk a lot. So, don’t mind figuring out and you know just kind of seeing where you’re at and just seeing if we can help and if we can great! If not you know so we’ll point you in the right direction regardless. You know we try to give value regardless whether you’re working with us and we are putting together after being inspired a lot by what that can dice, doing we are putting together an educational platform  similar to what the … is doing if somebody … listeners used to it but very much focused towards the small to medium business. So, they can actually do all this on their own or have the processes in house, where they can cadre of the marketing guy or gal and they can implement everything that they need to do to get to the point where they’re making revenue enough to be able to hire us at the end of the day.

John McIntyre: Nice!

Gaurav Duggal: So, that’ll be coming up soon enough as well, so shoot us an email. Go to the site, check us out and now you know we’re always glad to help.

John McIntyre: Perfect! All of the links to the site and email address showing on the micmethod.com. Gaurav! Thanks for coming on the show man.

Gaurav Duggal: Thanks John!