TCC Podcast #262: Filling Your Lead Pipeline with Jacob Suckow

On the 262nd episode of The Copywriter Club podcast, we’re joined by Jacob Suckow. Jacob is a Funnel and Launch Strategist who helps his clients sell their products on autopilot. From filling up your lead pipeline to creating products and services that sell, this episode is filled with useful advice you can implement into your business. Here’s what we talk about: How Jacob went from working with the Seattle Seahawks to working in cookie dough sales. The method Jacob used to grow cookie dough sales from 25k to 4 million in a matter of a few years. How a pivot landed him working with companies like McDonald's and Disney. The moment he realized he needed to be his own boss. Creating a pipeline to keep clients rolling in. Why building your network is your greatest funnel resource. Switching roles from freelancer to strategist. What’s the difference? How Jacob reverse-engineered how to make 100k a year without working 80 hours a week. Why letting go of clients will benefit your business and help it grow. The kind of clients that make for high-income months. Is there a mindset trick behind making six figures? How to fill your pipeline with ‘ready to go’ clients. What 15-minute connections can do for you and your business. The steps to building a solid network. Why you should build an audience even if you have nothing to sell. The key to being loud in your industry. How to create offers that people want to buy. What’s the method to the madness? Where do offers go wrong and how can they be fixed? The upside to being able to create your own offers. Tune into the episode by hitting the play button below or check out the transcript. The people and stuff we mentioned on the show: Kira’s website Rob’s website The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground Jacob’s website Kickass Copywriting by Jacob Carlton Skip the Line by James Altucher   Full Transcript: Kira:  When you're still learning the ins and outs of your business, the last thing you want to worry about is where your next lead is coming from. We'd prefer a lengthy line, kind of like the line outside the Apple store when Apple released the new iPhone 13. That's the kind of line we want, filled with dream clients just waiting to work with you. Our guests for the 262nd episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast gives us the lowdown on lead generation so we can create a demand for our copywriting services and hopefully never stress over finding clients again. Our guest, Think Tank member Jacob Suckow, is a copywriter and launch strategist who skyrocketed his business within months by creating a full pipeline of leads. But before we jump in, I'd like to introduce my co-host for today's episode, TCCIRL speaker, "two-peat" speaker at TCCIRL and then a podcast guest from way back, Episode 13, long time ago, conversion copywriter, funnel optimizer and growth ecosystem designer, Sam Woods. Thanks for being here, Sam. Sam:  Thanks for having me, Kira. It's good to be speaking with you. Kira:  Yeah, I'm excited to co-host this with you. Before we jump in, though, can you just share a quick update of what you've been up to over the last few months in your business? Sam:  Yeah. It's a mixed bag of things. Over the past year or so, taking a step back and only worked on a handful of more in-depth projects. I think either you're a copywriter and you do a lot of smaller projects or you do a few big projects or maybe you have a mix. But for me, it's been only a few handful of deeper projects with various companies. It's still with copywriting, still optimizing different ways that they're acquiring customers and been working on some barge campaigns. So it's been nice. It's been a nice break from the smaller type projects, nice to set those aside and deep dive into a few things. I think I prefer the mix. It's nice to go back and forth. Kira:  Yeah. When you say bigger projects, do you mean in terms of not only deliverables, but length of time you're working with clients or are you working with them for six months to a year in this capacity? Sam:  Yeah, pretty much. Bigger scope in terms of what the project is, the pieces involved and also, the length of time for however long you work with them. For me, with the projects, a few projects that I worked on, they're probably 10 to 12 months long projects, I would think, about on average what they've been like. It's been nice. Kira:  Okay, cool. Sam:  Okay. Well, before we jump into Jacob's interview, Kira, let's hear a word from our sponsor. Kira:  It's me again, I am a sponsor. Actually, our Think Tank Mastermind is our official podcast sponsor. The Think Tank is our private mastermind of copywriters and other marketers who want to take massive action inside their businesses. Whether that's taking on bigger clients or creating new offers within their own businesses, our Think Tankers have been able to take massive leaps within months of joining. If you want to find out more about this mastermind experience, go to copywriterthinktank.com. Sam:  All right. Well, let's dive into this episode and find out how Jacob started his journey. Jacob:  So, it's a long journey and I'll try and shorten it so we don't lose anybody here. But it all started with a desire to be a chiropractor, actually. About seven years ago, at this point, I think it's what I was going to school for. Was a degenerate for two years, even though that's not a major. But after diving in really hardcore into the medical profession and wanting to own my own business, that's what I thought I wanted to do, got hooked up with a great doc, got an internship at the Seahawks. It was really cool stuff and worked at it for about eight months and found out I absolutely hated it. At that point, I had been working with a close friend of mine for a little while who was actually starting an edible cookie dough company. Yeah. And he asked me, he said, "I don't really have a job title, but I'd love to have you on full-time to do something and sales and marketing. Do you want to do it?" and I said yes and hopped in and took on all of the awful, ugly jobs alongside building out our econ channel, as well as breaking into wholesale, did some really big scale, B2B sales and things along those lines for about two years. It was a ton of fun. We grew from doing like 25K to a couple of million a year in like four years and my daughter was born and traveling all the time for different conferences, different meetings. It was way too much. And so, next pivot is an HR SaaS company out of Chicago and they're doing really great things in something similar. Apparently, I can't say no to a indiscreet job offer because there are deals that they wanted to make a pivot in who they were selling to and how they were doing it and they needed somebody to take on handling the messaging, as well as starting to build out a small team to do the actual outbound sales. I said, yes. We saw a lot of success there. Brought on some big clients like Boeing, McDonald's, Disney, closed like 400-500,000 in that first couple of months and it was a ton of fun. And then about eight months into that, I realized that I'd started to hate that too. I turned it inward and said, "Well, Jacob, maybe the problem is you. Maybe you're just not employable." Now, I got a little bit of a laugh out of it, but I was starting to get a little bit restless. I was getting on edge and angry and just not who I really wanted to be for myself and for my family. So I decided to really look back and think introspectively and say, "Okay, if I wanted to do something on my own, what skills do I have right now where I could freelance, I could consult, I could start to build out some products on my own?" The thing that I've always loved is sales, is marketing, is creating messaging. The thousands of people can understand and enjoy and see much, to get some help no matter what the product is. I read Gary Halbert's book, The Boron Letters, and that was my first foray. And I said, "Okay, cool. I'm 100% on board with this thing." I'd been familiar with copywriting from before we used to, it was funny enough, we used to go to trade shows and we'd collect a bunch of emails and a bunch of different contact names like everybody else does. Except after the show, everyone who was on our list would get some very John Carlton-esque semi-aggressive, a little bit pushy, very funny, a little bit raunchy type newsletter sent over like two weeks. We actually did pretty good with it. We'd have ice cream shops, pizza parlors, any other kind of small restaurant you could think of ordering from us left and right, just from this quick automated email campaign. Leaning into that, it was really cool to see those numbers start to come up as well as anything with our econ. I thought that I could pull it off. I leaned in for the last three or four months that I was at my job and matched my salary and then I decided to leave full time last November and I've been doing it since then. I had a great first month that was insanely unsustainable and since then, ran into copy hackers and have found your guys' community, copy chiefs too. Since then, it's just been a focus on marketing strategy, funnels and copywriting and not turning back. Rob:  Jacob. I've got lots of questions about all of that first, what's your favorite flavor of edible cookie dough? Jacob:  Yeah, no question. It's something that we called Monster. It was chocolate chip, oatmeal, peanut butter and coconut and it's the best cookie I've ever had in my damn life. I will fight anyone who thinks otherwise. It's amazing. If you haven't had anything like that, you can make it yourself. You can go find out and buy it, but it's a problem. Rob:  All right, I'm going to have to track some of that down. And then you referred to the email campaign,