Good morning marketers and welcome to the if you market podcast brought to you by Mountaintop data. We are the only podcast that markets the shift out of it. I’m sky Cassidy. And today we’ll be talking with paul Ace of Amplify C calm about customer service automation. That is not what we’ll be talking about. I botched that changed on my physical print out but not on the computer screen. Okay. And today we’ll be talking with paul, Ace of Amplify C calm about conversational commerce or conversation automation. Paul is a drummer and a singer and also a conversational commerce expert and the ceo of amplify sitcom where they helped seven figure high ticket course creators generate an extra 6 to 7 figures and new revenues using conversational commerce paul. Thanks for joining us on the show today. 

Paul Ace

00:01:12 – 00:01:16

Great to be here Sky and look forward to giving some value to your audience. 

Sky

00:01:16 – 00:01:27

So quick clarification on the intro there. Um High ticket course creators, Can you explain to the audience what what that is? Yeah. Yes. 

Paul Ace

00:01:27 – 00:01:55

So that’s typically someone who has got a program of course with maybe an element of group coaching or in person that’s typically $5,000 or above. Um and from $5,000. Really up to about $50,000. Um and somewhere like in the process of building like $100,000 programs as well. So they may have other programs underneath. But that’s really like the core where we, where we work. 

Sky

00:01:55 – 00:02:07

Excellent. Excellent. Okay. It was something I wasn’t very familiar. I assumed that’s what it was. I was making a jump there but wanted to make sure the audience got some clarification on, on that as well. You are in England, is that right? 

Paul Ace

00:02:07 – 00:02:13

I am, yes. Not so sunny this time of year, but but it’s it’s still great. 

Sky

00:02:13 – 00:02:43

Some of your terms may be unfamiliar with us. So I’ll jump in and ask you to explain something where you’re like, come on, everybody knows what a sticky wicket is. Why do I need to explain that? Okay, so let’s let’s get along here to straight into the topic, um, conversation, automation and conversational commerce. It’s what you guys specialize in as a company. Um, can you give a general overview to the listeners, what what that what that means? 

Paul Ace

00:02:43 – 00:03:33

Yes. So, so conversational commerce is, is really where marketing his head in right now, because if you look back to the early two thousand’s right, deacon was just coming on and people were like, oh, what is it? What is this electronic commerce thing that’s going on and people were just scared to put the credit card details in. Now. Now going forward since the pandemic and everything else, people’s demands have gone up significantly right? Everyone wants personalized service. And one instant answers. So what we look at is how do we create more trust connection, report through the whole buyer journey right from the first point first point where they first come in and maybe see your website for the first time or your sales funnel all the way through to the sales process and how do we bridge that gap between 

Paul Ace

00:03:33 – 00:04:07

a combination of using conversational language right? Where you would normally use that in conversation rather than feeling like a robot. And then we also have that human takeover where then we’ve got this basically we can do 80% human like customer experience and then a 20% human experience. So it means you get to have that personal stories with every person that comes through and at the same time you get to automate the grunt work that you want to automate at the front end. So you can give that more personalized service to everyone who comes in. 

Sky

00:04:07 – 00:04:49

It seems like this is a like um, e commerce is matured to the point basically where initially a new product comes in and say it’s the automobile and people are like, this is so cool. I wanted, I’m gonna jump through all these hoops to do it and I don’t mind. And then as the product matures, people are like, I actually expect the same. I don’t need to be doing all the work and jumping through the hoops. Now I kind of expect to have a good customer experience because there’s competition. It isn’t just, there’s one person making this amazing thing that you can get. So it seems that initially people coming to e commerce like look what I can do on the web now, Amazing and they’ll jump through the hoops. 

Sky

00:04:49 – 00:05:10

But now have we gotten to a point where it’s basically saying, let’s get back to where we were before the internet and you actually had a human interaction for the whole funnel and you’re saying now we need to take your fully automated funnel that gives a bad experience and automated in a better way to give a more, a better experience. 

Paul Ace

00:05:10 – 00:05:41

Exactly. So that’s, that’s certainly one piece of the jigsaw and the other pieces understanding what language patterns are your customers using, right? So imagine, imagine you were ringing up to complain about something and you are ringing up, let’s say your broadband provider and you’re like, hey, it’s not working. I’m so frustrated right now. And they say, yeah, sky, I really appreciate that. I know you’re angry and you’re like, no, I’m not angry. I just said I’m frustrated why you’re not listening to me. 

Sky

00:05:41 – 00:05:48

Actually, what they say is, um, due to overwhelming, um, um, 

Paul Ace

00:05:48 – 00:05:49

overwhelmed right 

Sky

00:05:49 – 00:06:21

now. So, uh, you’re gonna be on weight for a long time, please sit and then three hours later if you’re still there, just disconnect you and make you call back and go through that hole. So there there, I understand what you’re saying, bad example and that the, the cable companies here in the US have basically set up a known situation where they’re like, don’t call us because it’s going to be a waste of your time and your worst experience you’ve ever had in your life. They’ve trained us just to not bother, but I understand what you’re saying. 

Paul Ace

00:06:21 – 00:06:46

Yes. So let’s, let’s take that now and apply that to a sales funnel. Right? And I say sales process. So one of the first things that we do when we go into a business is we go and survey the list. So we’ll survey the buyers and we’ll survey the non buyers and then we’ll find out what their goals are, what their desires are. What’s the pain, What’s been stopping them from getting to where they want to go? And then we’ll use the customer’s language patterns in the headlines. 

Sky

00:06:46 – 00:06:55

Say buyers and buyers. Are you talking about general target audience list or people who came into the funnel and didn’t buy versus ones that did. 

Paul Ace

00:06:55 – 00:07:38

Yes. So you’ve got different levels of it, right? So some, some people will have a lower ticket products, so they might be selling something for $47 and then they get people into a book call and then they sold something for $5,000 or $10,000. Other people will go straight to a $10,000 product straight from a book call now in those situations. So what, what we’ll look at is let’s go and segment out the survey based on if if they have not bought anything, but maybe they’ve abandoned cart then let’s survey those people, Why didn’t they buy? So the first question that we always do is we send an email out in the first one in the abandoned cart sequence. What went wrong? Did something go wrong or did something break? Just let me know, I’ll get it fixed ASAP. 

Paul Ace

00:07:38 – 00:08:22

Such a conversation or message. Right? Rather than that. Hey, let me tell you what the reasons why you should have bought this thing and then people are like, oh great, another sales pitch. So then what we do, we start to get this feedback loop and then we can use those feedback loops to fix the holes in the funnel. So instead of trying to guess, Then we actually just take the customer’s language. We take the customer’s feedback and then we use that to fix it. So that’s where that conversational commerce parts coming in. So for example with the headlines, then you go, let’s look through the survey results. Okay, we pulled out 10 top keywords here, right? These are what the desires were. These, what the pains were. Now let’s go and do and I learned this from mint cr oh 

Paul Ace

00:08:22 – 00:09:09

um they do something called a color block test. Okay so what happened, did you go on to go onto Facebook, you start, you run 20 different ads and use a traffic objective So that basically like it’s really cheap clicks. But you get to test data very quickly. So you’ll take the survey results. You’ll take like 10 different desires, 10 different pains, put those into headlines. Put just a, let’s say just a red background, plain red background and black text on it or white text and that’s, that’s it, that’s all the images, right? And then what you do, you put that in a traffic headline test. So then you go and test those 20 headlines, see which one gets the highest click through rate and the lowest cost per click and then use that on your landing page. 

Paul Ace

00:09:09 – 00:09:14

So you take the guesswork out of actually doing the testing, 

Sky

00:09:14 – 00:09:41

that’s marketing testing. But you need a high volume of traffic for that. So you’re looking, I imagine that a low cost per click type product and a low value product. Um, but getting the testing, So it seems like you’re saying the first step of the process is to gather information feedback from the actual interacting people to figure out why they did and didn’t, you’re optimizing the customer journey kind of. 

Paul Ace

00:09:41 – 00:10:24

Exactly. So what we’re looking for is it’s kind of like looking for that, that part of gold, right? We’re looking for the most profitable path in the customer journey. So one thing we find a lot of businesses they’ve, they’ve currently got no way of tracking their lifetime customer value. So we say, what’s your lifetime value. Like, well if I took all the cells that I’ve got, you know and and divided by the number of people who bought, then I could probably work out what it is overall, but that’s it. They’re not tracking it per funnel, they’re not tracking it, touch point in the journey. So what we look at is then based off doing things like those headline tests, then we go great, they’re the winners. 

Paul Ace

00:10:24 – 00:10:41

So then we go onto the funnel and then we look at, we’ll go right with this headline against his headline and then we’ll look at the lifetime customer value between formulae and Funnel be instead of just looking at okay, which one got a higher opt in rate because that doesn’t matter really. 

Sky

00:10:41 – 00:11:00

Right? So you’re saying instead of knowing your lifetime customer value for the whole company, like, hey, are we making money or not? Like what we need to know for each individual path, what’s working best? Just like with testing the background color and the, the headline and stuff, what’s working best so we can focus that, shift everything to that type of type of, and, 

Paul Ace

00:11:00 – 00:11:35

and then we get, and then we go back to this feedback loop. So for example, we just build out a a new new landing page process for a client and we were like, hey, we want to get this conversion rates up. So what we did, it was like, okay, who’s that? We’ve got the target audience and some of those target audience were actually on the staff as well as right. So they worked in their community and so on and so forth. So what we did is it was like, okay, I’m gonna give you a link to that page, you give me a loom video of all the things that you notice as a user on there. So we got basically probably about seven different 

Paul Ace

00:11:35 – 00:11:51

of the perfect avatar going through that page and saying this is what I noticed, this is what I noticed and we just refined and refined and refined and then straight out the gate in the first month went from 1.2% conversion rate to 2.2, so pretty much almost double cycles. So a 

Sky

00:11:51 – 00:12:39

couple of things, a couple of questions come up, let’s I’ll throw them both out there and then answering whatever you want. But one how do you get people to actually do that for it? Like you’re getting your customers or people who didn’t even buy to to do that for? You can be very difficult sometimes. And then the second question, it seems like what your what you’re talking about is again the step back to pre e commerce of saying these people are going to have an account manager in a sense. Now it may be a lot of automation, that’s the account manager, they’re having an experience as if they had an actual account manager and everything was a person to person uh conversation. But with those account managers it can be 

Sky

00:12:39 – 00:13:09

extremely difficult to get them to gather the information you’re talking about because they’re not interested in that they’re interested in doing the sale, moving through the pipeline, stuff like that. So to get a bunch of account managers together, collect this information from them and be able to apply it to optimize stuff. Um I guess, I’d say it seems kind of like the best of both worlds where you’re giving the account manager style experience, but you can actually collect all the data that you would be hurting cats to do with an account manager. 

Paul Ace

00:13:09 – 00:13:11

I don’t know how the 

Sky

00:13:11 – 00:13:29

question you answered it. Yes. So I guess it’s a question but so that seems great. I love this hybrid um capability. Now, because of the data collection capabilities. Um back to the uh the first question though, which was more of an actual question. 

Paul Ace

00:13:29 – 00:13:55

So, so how do you how do you do that? How do you actually get non biased to go and give you that feedback? Well, here’s the thing, number one, it depends on the audience. Right? So we will test different messaging in terms of to get people to fill in that that survey at the front. So this could be sent maybe 30 days after they’ve opted in. It could be sent two days after they’ve opted in Right? Or five days. So you go and test again. Everything is a test. 

Paul Ace

00:13:55 – 00:14:29

We don’t we go with ideas of what we’ve seen that’s worked, but also at the same time, every audience is different. So, and then the other thing is, what are the language patterns that use now? Sometimes you get it bang on. Some people are like, hey, I want to support you and they want to be part of the community, right? So everyone’s got different drivers depending on the niche. So some people like to prove people wrong. So then you might use a slightly more aggressive tactic with, for example, I think it was Ryan Levesque created the why do you Hate me survey? 

Paul Ace

00:14:29 – 00:14:47

Right. So, so it’s like we, but we use that on a client recently. Um, then we’ve got quite a lot of feedback saying, hey, that’s not the kind of language you want to use. So we’re like, okay, great, let’s let’s switch that around. So now we’re all very much kind of, hey, we really appreciate your feedback and, and all those kind of things. So 

Sky

00:14:47 – 00:15:05

you basically ask them and you ask them in different ways until you find out. Now, do you ever have to go in and manually extract this? Like pursue them in a non automated way with with an account manager because the, either the volume is too small of people to try to get the feedback from that, that kind of thing? Yes. So, 

Paul Ace

00:15:05 – 00:15:49

so a couple of things that the first thing is we also incentivize non buyers. So we’ll say, hey, we’ll put you into a prize draw to win this thing, right? It could be one of the products. It could be an ipad, it could be whatever you want because it doesn’t matter quite as much what the prize is with that because you’re not, you’re not bringing people into the survey to salam something in the same way that, you know, when people do giveaways for lead generation, that doesn’t work well with an ipad because you’re attracting the wrong crowd. However, if you’re using maybe an ipad or a tablet or something to incentivize people to fill in a survey, then they’re like, oh great, I’ll do that. So it’s just like people have to wail in the mind is the pain of doing this 

Paul Ace

00:15:49 – 00:15:52

greater or less than the pain of not doing this 

Sky

00:15:52 – 00:15:53

Or is 

Paul Ace

00:15:53 – 00:16:34

the benefit of doing this greater or less than the pain? The benefit of not doing it. So when you, when you look at, okay, how do I create that balance for some people? It might just be okay. I’m happy to fill it in for some people that are like, yeah, but what am I going to get out of it? Mm hmm. Okay, so once you understand the psychology behind the audience and you can do that. Now, the next part in terms of collecting the manual data, here’s where we, we look at that process. Right? So one of our first things is first principle is everything is tracked. So every single stage of a pipeline, Every single funnel step, every single opt in test, everything is tracked with a tag, 

Paul Ace

00:16:34 – 00:17:00

like tagged coded dated and everything. So that means that we can start to see like what language patterns are using through the whole journey. So there is an element of manual where I can say to example, I can say to the sales manager, hey, what what are you seeing that the objections that are coming up and then they can say this and this and this and I go, great, let me look at the server results and compare that and see if it’s the same thing. 

Sky

00:17:00 – 00:17:35

Okay, so that seems important because maybe the survey results are skewed because the type of people who tend to especially in certain so getting that, I like that going to the sales people and kind of looking to confirm or or maybe have to skew the results based on their feedback. But again, you can’t get this automated feedback from sales people, it’s pulling teeth. So having um having the automation, having that just allows you to get all this data, um you don’t have to collect it from. Salespeople seems very convenient. 

Paul Ace

00:17:35 – 00:18:12

And you also have like, so a lot of it is built through text messaging and email automation where we have documents of the of the conversations that have gone on, right? So at that point we can we can look at some of that data and analyze some of that as well to see what language patterns are being used if you want to go even deeper with that. And it’s the same thing then you’ve got things like hot jar where you can look at the visitor recordings and see what are the usability experiences. So everything from that first touch point where someone first comes into your world all the way to the back end sale, it’s about optimizing every single part right to find the most profitable path. 

Sky

00:18:12 – 00:18:45

So we’re we’re we’re talking about conversation automation is kind of the general large topic, but really what it comes down to is by conversation, you’re talking about the funnel and the the the customer journey. And considering that a conversation versus hoops they have to jump through or or something like that. And would would it be accurate to say this is all about basically refining that customer journey to to make it a better, more successful experience? 

Paul Ace

00:18:45 – 00:19:33

What? 100%. Because if you look at the so there’s different points right in the in the customer journey where you can you can create increases. So it could be average order value on your front end office. So you know, you can spend more to acquire a front end customer. It could be your front end roo I it could be the back end sales, closing rate or here’s a great one. It could be if you’re providing a great customer experience, it could be the amount of referrals that are feeding the system at the start. So the better the buying experience you create than the more people are going to refer to you afterwards. So I’ll give you, I’ll give you an example of where we really took a combination of, we call it the trifecta of psychology, technology and data ecology. 

Paul Ace

00:19:33 – 00:20:10

So we looked at the data, so the first part of the data ology part, so we looked at the data and we found when people got to day four of a challenge, they say the average the lifetime customer value went up significantly. So we know if they consume day four it’s like, oh wow, if they consume day for great, they’re gonna buy, they’re gonna buy the back end offer. So then we was like well how can we get more people to consume day 4? Well we need to create some accountability. So this is where we created this combination of human like and human experience. So we wrote in a conversational way 

Paul Ace

00:20:10 – 00:20:46

automation to essentially remind people each day to go through the challenge and commit to do the things. So an email and a text message and then what we did, we created something called a breakthrough body process, right? So that breakthrough body would be a real person That would be able to answer their questions through the whole buying journey. So we start to build some report on day zero right straight away as soon as I get introduced to him, find out a little bit about and what are the goals actually have back and forth and build the report. Then all the automation every morning were automated. So they didn’t have to worry about those being late and we could control the data 

Paul Ace

00:20:46 – 00:20:56

And then any extra questions that people had, then they can naturally guard him through. So then the lifetime value within 30 days doubled because again, I love this 

Sky

00:20:56 – 00:21:43

hybrid of of human and automation Kind of work working long, like, like that, that’s fantastic. It occurs like we have a topic for this episode, but it seems like there’s 10 different names. We could have given it having to do with customer journey, having to do with with with so many, so many different things. Um The automation aspect seems almost like, hey, we’re not talking about pure automation here, We’re talking about this, this hybrid system, there are of course still humans involved in here uh in the process. I want to take a really quick break, but when we come back we’ve got paul is here with us all the way from England and uh when, when we come back, we’ll be talking a little bit more about conversation automation um about customer journey 

Sky

00:21:43 – 00:22:04

improvements, whatever label you wanna you wanna put on it, you’re listening to the market podcast and we’ll be right back 

Sky

00:22:04 – 00:22:42

321. Welcome back to the if you market podcast. We’ve got paul ace here with us, we’re talking about conversation, automation about customer journey flows about improving that whole process of the funnel. From the first touch with marketing all the way down through into the sales process. Uh paul, before we get back into that, I’d like to get into you a bit paul, Ace, first of all, what a what a name, the last name. Um I want to marry you just so I can take your last name. 

Paul Ace

00:22:42 – 00:22:42

Can you 

Sky

00:22:42 – 00:22:49

tell us a little bit about where you came from your journey to being ceo of amplify seek on there? 

Paul Ace

00:22:49 – 00:23:29

Sure, yeah, so I’ll give you the short version. Okay, So I went from selling sausage rolls When I was 18 to what I actually worked at Subway than I was selling sausage rolls, dana became a wedding singer. Then I was selling bridesmaidsdresses. Then I was like, huh, pretty good at this digital marketing thing. And then then I ended up starting a digital marketing agency called the Messenger. But guy when messenger bots were the first came out and then from there, I remember my, my now mentor said to me at the time, he was like, if you stick with that, you’re going to be out of business in two years. 

Paul Ace

00:23:29 – 00:23:50

And I was like, okay, so then we, we rebranded to amplify sitcom and then we realized how it’s more than just messenger bots. And then it ended up, to be honest, we do very little of that stuff now. So now we do yeah sms emails and the conversation and the automation. So that’s um and then just to dive in and go backwards a little bit right, That’s the short version. 

Sky

00:23:50 – 00:24:09

So it seems like you you were selling stuff selling stuff, found out that whether it was a sausage roll or a wedding dress, you were like, I know how to figure out how to sell things. Maybe I should be focusing on that skill rather than the sausage rolls or or any other thing I could be selling. 

Paul Ace

00:24:09 – 00:24:40

Yeah, I mean when so I was I was 20 years old. I’m running a bakery of 20 staff and that was that was heavy. I did pretty well there we want the best shop in the area for like 11 months in a row and you know when you think everything is going well in the top of the world. So that then at that point they said Okay, we want you to go open this new store, so go to open this new store, it’s a smaller team and stuff, but it was a brand new store and I was going to be running it from scratch. And at that point 

Paul Ace

00:24:40 – 00:25:01

then I realized that I had it easy where I was before right? Because it was a lot different kind of pace and I realized my heart wasn’t in it anymore. Um and I remember one day I was basically pretty much having a panic attack on the, on the floor in the changing room just going, I can’t do this anymore. And this was like, I was about 21, 

Sky

00:25:01 – 00:25:04

Really? What you meant was, I don’t want to do this anymore. Yeah, 

Paul Ace

00:25:04 – 00:25:05

Yeah, 

Sky

00:25:05 – 00:25:08

Yeah. You just didn’t, you didn’t want to Yeah, 

Paul Ace

00:25:08 – 00:25:29

exactly. It’s just that it was the stress of it. I was also like on the verge of being addicted to caffeine, you know, I drink like three Lucas later today at a pro plus just to keep myself going because then I do that and then I go to band practice in the evening and work and do that till like midnight and then get up again at like five am to go back to work and you just can’t do it. So you 

Sky

00:25:29 – 00:25:45

had a band you were doing as a hobby on the side, would you say? Thinking I got to get away from these sausage rolls, come a rock star. Now you transitioned from that into saying into wedding singing? 

Paul Ace

00:25:45 – 00:26:24

Yeah, so, so I was a drummer since I was 11 years old, so I’d always always kind of been in music and then I got, I got to like say 2023 I’ve been learning to sing for the last couple of years, I couldn’t sing when I was when I was a kid or anything out to go and learn how to sing and and got taught, So at that point I was like, right, I need to make the leap. So I pretty much took a 50% pay court To go to go and be a wedding singer at the time. And I did that for four years. I started off in the whole pubs and clubs and someone said to me, Hey you’ll never make more than £130 a night. And I ended up the last gig that I did, I charged £2,000 for that day. 

Paul Ace

00:26:24 – 00:27:11

So, so I was like I proved you wrong. Which, but in the process of being the wedding singer, I wanted to learn how to generate more leads. So you know, online marketing. I know there’s a lot of people have been there for years for me, it was like, wow, this is this new world And, and, and Facebook was still even emerging like what, 6, 7 years ago? So start start learning and we create this thing called a dream and a secret box, create this dream in a secrets box and it became essentially becomes a a self liquidating office. So we charge £12 for it. We make £12 back. So we got a customer for free, That was great. We sold like 250 of them. We built a group of 3000 brides in a group and then we said, what do you want? 

Paul Ace

00:27:11 – 00:27:19

Um and they said, bridesmaids dresses at a reasonable price. So we polled our audience conversational commerce polled our audience and they said, what do you want? And we give it to him, 

Sky

00:27:19 – 00:27:51

right? He said, wait, I’m doing the wedding singing, but this gives me this audience and now I can find out what’s a more profitable thing that isn’t, you don’t have to go and do it every time I used to be a photographer and I did a lot of weddings and I got away from that um and into a photo sharing website, startup and all kinds of stuff like that because I looked at it and said I have to be here doing this or I can get a team maybe. And it’s just the maintenance and every, it’s you’re limited on your growth. Kind of was like 

Paul Ace

00:27:51 – 00:27:53

you said, you wouldn’t be making so 

Sky

00:27:53 – 00:27:57

much tonight max and that’s all you can do and it takes you to do it. 

Paul Ace

00:27:57 – 00:28:14

That was the thing with me. Right? So when I was like, can I sell this business? And it wasn’t worth anything at all. It was worth, was the £2,000 worth of my speakers. So basically I worked five years at a business and it paid for a new bathroom, that was it. 

Sky

00:28:14 – 00:28:18

The business was you, that’s what you have in that type of industry, 

Paul Ace

00:28:18 – 00:28:27

especially a bit like it’s one thing being a photographer, right, where you can go and potentially get a team in as a singer. I can’t go, All right, I’m just going to get my friend into standing for me for the night. 

Sky

00:28:27 – 00:28:32

You have to become like an agent and then have bands that you book and then it’s like, 

Paul Ace

00:28:32 – 00:28:37

and I tried that and it just didn’t didn’t didn’t suit me. You know, it’s it’s a legitimate 

Sky

00:28:37 – 00:28:59

hell. Um you’re still dealing with all these one off things everywhere. So you figured out the marketing side and they served and you’re like, let me sell them other stuff where I don’t have to perform this every time. So, but drummer wedding singer real quick. I know this is off topic. Were you when you were doing wedding singing? Were you the drummer or were you just singing? 

Paul Ace

00:28:59 – 00:29:28

So I was I was just just singing at that point. So I figured out as a drummer, I would have to be absolutely exceptional to make a living being the drummer. So I’d have to be like at the top of my game, right? Doing it pro and doing big stadiums and stuff like that as a singer. I could be good enough and then still go and make a good living out of it. And the reason I was good enough, it wasn’t so much because I was an amazing singer. Like I was a decent singer, especially when it came to like baritone and swing and stuff like that. 

Paul Ace

00:29:28 – 00:29:43

However, what I took to make it better was the performance side of it. So I studied the performance side and went, okay, how do I create? Um are we always remember the quote? It’s not what people said, it’s not what people did, it’s how you made them feel 

Sky

00:29:43 – 00:29:49

right, right? And so you went like dan band with it and you said, hey, I’m gonna, I’m gonna make this a show, I’m gonna have some 

Paul Ace

00:29:49 – 00:29:51

stage, the people 

Sky

00:29:51 – 00:29:56

with no stage presence, they can have an amazing voice and you’re like, I’m not having fun. 

Paul Ace

00:29:56 – 00:30:28

So, so for example, like at the end of the night, what I would do is I get everyone from the wedding party and the old pitch used to be something like something like this, right? I want everyone to get in a circle, If you’re not in the circle, get in the circle right now, if you see someone not in the circle, you’re going to drag them, you’re gonna put them in the circle right now because everyone’s going to get in the circle for this final dance, we’re all gonna be together, you’re in the circle, you’re in the circle, you’re in the circle, right, Here we go, we are going to be rocking the role and everybody, are you ready for this? And it’s are you ready for this, are you ready for this? So we just got everyone going and then all they remember from the whole night was that one moment 

Paul Ace

00:30:28 – 00:30:32

and they go, oh, it was an amazing night, it’s like you could have been sitting down all night and it didn’t matter. 

Sky

00:30:32 – 00:30:35

You could ship the bed early but just leave them with that strong, 

Paul Ace

00:30:35 – 00:31:16

just leave them with a beautiful, that’s why you go to a restaurant, you always finish on dessert, like you don’t finish with the starter. Um so I, I went, went through that the bridesmaid’s dress business was going well. It was growing. I was like, wow, we made six, we made six figures in like six months and I was like getting really excited by that and then I didn’t calculate my return policy properly. So we had a 90 day return policy and I was calculating it based on that month’s sales but we were growing. So we thought we had a 12 15% return rate. But it turned out we had like a 30% return rate which is standard in apparel 

Sky

00:31:16 – 00:31:22

as you grew the logistics scale. But you were, we were 

Paul Ace

00:31:22 – 00:31:24

a month to month cash flow. 

Sky

00:31:24 – 00:31:25

So What 

Paul Ace

00:31:25 – 00:31:57

happened is we got, we got up to like, I think it’s about 16, a month. Right around that we had £25,000 or dollars. I can’t quite remember which is a bit of a blur, but about $25,000 come back in two months. So what would happen is every morning postman will turn off right as you guys calling the mailman and he turned up with his little van and get the parcel back out It scan it. And every time I heard it beep it was just like beep 300 pans 

Sky

00:31:57 – 00:31:59

ptsd when every time you hear a beep now 

Paul Ace

00:31:59 – 00:32:03

I literally like I said I called it postman a phobia 

Sky

00:32:03 – 00:32:04

because 

Paul Ace

00:32:04 – 00:32:21

like for about six months even after the business finished, every time I heard that beep it gave me a weird weird feeling inside me because I created that association that trigger. So at that point that’s why I’m so obsessed with numbers and data because I was like hey that’s never gonna happen to me again. 

Sky

00:32:21 – 00:32:48

Yeah. Yeah interesting. Okay so now let’s let’s jump straight to the amplify C. Com um You start this business to focus on this, testing this. It seems like you’ve had success and in each of your areas with this kind of a thing. Finding the customer, finding their way through. Um What is it that got you to start this business? What what was the why? 

Paul Ace

00:32:48 – 00:33:32

Why? So what I actually did an exercise right um Which like I recommend anyone who’s at a pivot point in the in the business or the life like do this exercise and you put a line across the middle horizontal line and you say what do I hate, what do I love? And then you put a line vertical and at the top you put what am I freaking rockstar amazing at. And then what am I absolutely awful at at the bottom? Okay, and then what you did plot everything that you’ve ever done in any business on that graph, right? In any business in life in general, what are you amazing at? And then what I looked at is that skill set then became 

Paul Ace

00:33:32 – 00:33:58

like what amplify? See comet is and where did the amplify c. Com coming from? It was like, well the amplifier was a little bit of a homage right as well to the whole wedding singing um and it was also all about growth because we’re obsessed. And then the second part was like ah this is conversational commerce, right? So this is, this is like a new way of doing doing commerce online, is this conversational things. So it was a way 

Sky

00:33:58 – 00:34:02

of having the circle at the end of the party. Yeah, 

Paul Ace

00:34:02 – 00:34:27

yeah, exactly. It was just, it was just, it was just a natural thing of all these other things that have come together, where you look at those individually sausage rolls, singing subway bridesmaidsdresses, how does that link to where you are? But every step of the journey, I was actually doing the same thing and learning more about my craft without realizing it. So when people go how long you’ve been running the business and you’re like, oh you know, it’s, I think we’ve just gone over two years of full inception now. 

Sky

00:34:27 – 00:34:28

Right, 

Paul Ace

00:34:28 – 00:34:31

Well technically I’ve been learning this for the last 12 years? Yeah, 

Sky

00:34:31 – 00:35:04

it seems the way you approach stuff, you keep looking at the business and saying, okay, but what should I be doing? What’s, where’s the opportunity here? Where’s the opportunity here? And so you’re jumping from this to this um seeing the, the opportunity, like you said with that dividing stuff up and what you’re good at and what you could really be focusing on eventually, I guess you get into the bot um business for conversation and then you saw the opportunity that saying, oh, this is a short term kind of fat or step to the real thing, which is the whole, what you’re doing now. 

Paul Ace

00:35:04 – 00:35:48

Yeah, exactly. So I was like, oh maybe this works on SmS. So I started learning more about how people were using SmS in business and, and all those kind of things. And then we started closing $5000 deals over SmS like with no phone calls and was like, oh, this is pretty cool. And just doing the two question close, it was super, super simple. So when, when you start looking at those things and just like, it’s almost, you’ve got to have this insatiable curiosity um and this is, it’s like we’re playing with the toy box all the time and just going great. We got all these tools, white fitted this with this tool and what the other thing as well, like as you kind of touched on previously is um perry marshall, I think talks about this in 80 20 rule 

Paul Ace

00:35:48 – 00:36:29

Um and the 80 20 rule, 80% of the results come from 20% of the actions. So as any good ceo should do is look at everything that you’re doing in the business and going what’s breeding 80% of the results for 20% of the effort. And the big thing that we found was lifetime customer value testing. So some people do split testing. We take it a stage further and we get a lifetime customer value testing because it was like well if we look at the lead value of every single part of the bio journey, the more that we do that every time we do them we make more money and we make the clients more money. So that’s where we started to put more of attention and then like how’s everything else around that? 

Sky

00:36:29 – 00:37:13

That’s interesting. It’s something that we recommend here as a data company to our clients that they say lead attribution. There’s all these these these steps in analyzing where things come from to find the value. But we tell them look if you’re purchasing data to run campaigns, email campaigns, phone call campaign, whatever it is. There’s a handful of providers you can work with and really the ultimate test, you can get a sample, you can look at people’s information, they have a lot of the same contacts because it’s the same people out in the world they have information on but they should be looking at their deals and their most valuable deals and tracking those back to what was the data source. So if it’s google Adwords then it’s like, okay, this is attributed to google Adwords marketing, 

Sky

00:37:13 – 00:37:57

but if it’s attributed back to data and trying to decide what data company to use, they should really have multiple and then look at who’s actually resulting in deals because it doesn’t matter if they give you more data, if the data looks better on the service that they have Flashier stuff, it’s it’s really ultimately trackable to, oh, we sent 1000 emails from these people and 1000 from these and this one gave us more deals. This one gave us more revenue. That’s all that really matters with the uh, with, with, with the data source there. So you’re measuring all this stuff, looking to constantly optimize, provide a better user experience for the people. I mean, it just seems like an amalgamation of all of this stuff through uh, testing. 

Paul Ace

00:37:57 – 00:37:58

Yes. 

Sky

00:37:58 – 00:38:00

You’re just always testing this stuff. 

Paul Ace

00:38:00 – 00:38:47

Testing Yeah. All the time. And the key thing about that is like I said, tagging at every stage of the journey. So I said to someone the other day, there was, they were interviewing me about like some of the split tests and stuff that we’ve done now, he said like how do you typically test? It was like, well, something that we’re working on at the moment is this multi variant testing. And I was like, what we’ll do, for example, four versions of an opt in page and then we’ll do four versions of the DSL page that they go to. So then you’ve essentially got Before, you know, you’ve got 24 different tests. And he said, How do you? Mm hmm. Mhm. I’m losing 

Sky

00:38:47 – 00:38:47

your 

Paul Ace

00:38:47 – 00:38:53

one. I was like, well, that’s okay, 

Sky

00:38:53 – 00:38:54

I lost 

Paul Ace

00:38:54 – 00:38:55

1. And you’ve got 24 

Sky

00:38:55 – 00:39:10

versions and then we kinda um we’ve got a couple of minutes later and this will be edited out, let’s kill the video. Um because that can take up bandwidth so we can make sure you get good audio at the end here. 

Sky

00:39:10 – 00:39:22

Good stuff. All right. Um so pick it up where you’re saying you’ve got four and four gives you 20 Some odd, something like that. 

Paul Ace

00:39:22 – 00:39:50

Yes. So, so we’ve got four variables and then three versions of that and then four variants of the next stage in the funnel. So we’ve got like four different variants. And then what we do is because we tag every stage of the cut by a journey. Then we can actually see while which thing at each stage Actually got the conversion. And then we can see the highest lifetime customer value. So, it means we can test 10 times as quick as most people are doing a B testing. So that’s 

Sky

00:39:50 – 00:39:59

not really about testing of this combination works with this, but just about testing more things at once. So it doesn’t take as long to gather all the feedback? 

Paul Ace

00:39:59 – 00:40:11

Yes. So then we apply the 80 20 rule. Right? So yes, occasionally we’ll be off But 80%, probably 90% of the time we’re going to be right. 

Sky

00:40:11 – 00:40:11

Right. 

Paul Ace

00:40:11 – 00:40:22

So because because we can see the tags at every stage, we can see well, what journey did people go through to make the purchase and then just track it backwards and then all we do is then 

Sky

00:40:22 – 00:40:47

isolate that. That’s a great point because you’re testing things doesn’t mean you get it right all the time. Sometimes you still get it wrong, you just get it right way more often than if you aren’t testing stuff. Um sometimes people think that when you put out a solution like this, you say, oh, and then everything just works every time. No, it doesn’t. Oh, it’s not 100% perfect. It’s just much better. 

Paul Ace

00:40:47 – 00:40:50

100%. 

Sky

00:40:50 – 00:41:22

It’s not 100% perfect. Just 100% better of a solution for this. Okay, can you give us one thing, we’re almost out of time here. One thing, if people are looking for kind of this conversation automation type of a thing, what’s what’s one thing they should be doing if they were to go change one thing other than uh, you know, call amplify uh c calm and hire you guys to do it. What’s one thing they could do themselves in their funnel to to improve the results. 

Paul Ace

00:41:22 – 00:41:49

Yes. What’s the first thing that I would do is if you’ve got a facebook group or a community, go and look through the language pack and that those people are using in your community. If you’ve got a list, survey the list. If you haven’t got a list, go and partner up with someone else who you can go and survey their list together who’s in the same niche and collect those responses together. So like find out what your customers language patterns are and use them. 

Sky

00:41:49 – 00:42:24

Excellent. Excellent. Alright. Um let’s see. I want to let people know before we end here where they can find you. Obviously you can go find police on linkedin and amplify c. Com. That’s amplify C C O M dot com. Uh we’ll have some links in the show notes here for some resources you guys have as well. Um you have a seven figure audit, will have a link to that on there. Anything I haven’t mentioned here. You want to let people know where they can contact you or about your company. 

Paul Ace

00:42:24 – 00:42:55

Yes. Yes. So you can go ahead to amplify c com dot com. And also we’ve got our own podcast which is called the amplify to seven figures podcast where we interview seven figures plus entrepreneurs who talk about mindset and results and team building and like basically what it takes to run a seven figure plus business. Um, so you can check that out and amplify to seven figures cast um and check that out on Itunes and all the other stuff 

Sky

00:42:55 – 00:43:18

awesome. We’ll put a link in the show notes for that for that as well. So just check the show notes that if you market dot com if you want to to get all those links and and see where you can you can find paul Ace um Ceo here of amplify C. Com. Any any info on what the C. Com, Y. Y. C. Com. 

Paul Ace

00:43:18 – 00:43:20

1. C. Comes for the conversational commerce, 

Sky

00:43:20 – 00:43:52

conversational commerce. Excellent. Okay I thought we went over the amplifier. I got a reason for that but the C. E commerce still was stumping me. Um Okay Paula a ceo of amplify C calm again. Find more information. If you market dot com links to all of his stuff and uh thanks in advance for giving us a rating on Itunes or wherever you listen and thank you for listening to the market podcast and on behalf of the market team and paul Ace amplify c. Com 

Sky

00:43:52 – 00:43:59

I guess I’m going to say thank you for listening again. Thank you for listening to the market podcast where we believe if you market the ship out of it 

Paul Ace

00:43:59 – 00:44:00

with conversation 

Sky

00:44:00 – 00:44:05

automation, they will come