329: The Power of Conversational Commerce – with Paul Ace

Meet Paul

Paul is popularizing the concept C-com, the science of conversion, conversation, and automation. He founded Amplify C-Com, which helps grow businesses past seven figures through 80% human-like and 20% human experience. Amplify combines human psychology and automation to create more profits in their customers’ pockets.

How do you apply the 80-20 rule to automation?

So we find a lot of the time that people try and automate either 100% or not a bit. So they will go, “Let’s automate everything, you know, I want to make everything evergreen so I can sit on a beach and drink pina coladas and not have to do anything.” But when you do that you lose that human touch, and especially post-pandemic, people are looking so much more for that personal customer experience that I’ve been able to speak to a human, but in a way doesn’t take up a lot of their time and they can do it in their own time so there’s that instant gratification. What we look at is, how would you normally speak if you’re having a conversation? So if you would just send in an email to me one on one, Lori, what kinds of things would you say? If you were sending an SMS or a text to someone, how would you usually phrase that? So we write that in the same way as we normally would and then we automate that. So then we automate the start of the conversation and then hand it over to the 20% of human-like experience to guide the people through a more personalized service.

What are embedded commands and why are they so important in marketing?

Embedded commands are all about, starting to plant the seed, so to speak with whatever kind of conversation you’ve gotten into. Lori, if I was to speak to you, right now, you may be thinking, as I started to say this, you may be thinking of a pink elephant in the corner of the room. Now, as you probably try harder and harder not to think about that pink elephant in the corner of the room, then that image is probably getting more vivid and vivid in your mind. You probably see that pink elephant right now we’ve got roller skates on as well, can you see that? Well, don’t think about that. Whatever you do, Lori, don’t think about that. You can’t think about it, right?! We start starting to use some of these embedded commands in the way that we write copy. So if you want to guide someone towards a certain direction, then you use some of those language patterns throughout the copy. So for example, if you want to bring up an objection that someone’s having, and to be able to handle that objection, rather than like, brisk over it and try and hide it, say you might be thinking right now this or maybe you’re thinking this and then you go “Great, now we can crush that objection.” So you bring the objection up and then crush it. You may already start seeing yourself achieving that goal. I don’t know what it is for you, it might be you want a new car, you might want to move houses, you might just want to spend more time with the family and see yourself go into Disneyland. But whatever that is for you, then you probably know what that is in your mind right now. So you can see if we break down that sentence, for example, you create the future pace in the mind and then adding things like “right now” at the end of it, you’re starting to see that in your mind right now. So it’s like these hypnotic language patterns that are being used that guide people towards the sale, but you can also do it in a conversational way. For example, another way is not so much of an embedded command, but another language pattern that we use a lot is ask for a no instead of a yes. So I learned this from Chris Voss. Chris Voss is an FBI hostage negotiator and he wrote a book called Never Split The Difference and one of the things he wrote in there was about asking for no. Most people, like if I said, “Hey Lori, would you like to have me on your podcast?” And then you kind of like, they’ll say yes, or say no. But if I say, “Hey, Laurie, would you be totally against having me on your podcast?” Then what are you gonna say then? It takes the pressure off when you ask for a no instead of a Yes. Would it be crazy to entertain the idea? Would it be unreasonable to consider? No, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to consider. So we use that, “Would you be against?” For example, let’s say you want to book a sales call. So you might send an SMS message and say something like, “Would you be against speaking with one of our application specialists?” “No, I wouldn’t be against that.” “Can you check if this link works?” Then they click the button, and then they go to the next stage, “Yeah, that works.” “Great, can you see that on the page?” Then you notice what you do if you’re on a sales call, you’d run the same kind of thing from the conversational perspective and you’ll notice we’re always creating these micro-commitments through the whole process. It’s a different psychology behind the language patterns that you use to reduce the ask that you’re looking for.

Let’s dive into that a little bit from the power of conversational commerce to sell really high ticket items.

When it comes to selling high ticket items, we look at each stage of the customer journey. So when you look at each stage, you go, “Well, where are people dropping off.” So a lot of the time people go, I’m not making enough sales. That’s a symptom, not a cause. So you have to work backward and break down each stage of the process. So we’ll use technology and automation to look at each stage of the pipeline. So we know every time someone pops into a certain stage, for example, let’s say they opted in, or they started a challenge, or they watched a webinar or they submit a deposit. So we can see how many people are getting to each stage of the journey, and then work out what we need to do to get more people to that stage. Where are most people dropping off and what level of conversation do we need to have at that point? Can we automate all that? Or do we need to actually add a human element to that as well? So at the start of the journey, quite often, you’ll automate more of it. But as you get higher and higher up the price point you might get the owner or a higher level person in the team more involved when it comes to let’s say, submitting a 10,000 or $25,000 program. Let’s say you’ve got a lot of people stuck on the pay to deposit, but they haven’t paid the full amount. So what’s happening at that point? What’s happening in the buyer’s mind? Maybe they’re having buyer’s remorse, maybe they need to get funding together. We don’t know without asking. So then you could have, for example, we will have some owners, they’ll go and record a personal video message to those people who get to that stage, but don’t get to the next stage. So it might take them 30 seconds of video, let’s say 10 videos a day which takes five minutes. If that closes one more sale, that five minutes has made them $10,000. So that then becomes a really good return on investment. Looking at each stage of the customer journey, and then understanding how you can add conversation at every point to guide people to the next step of the journey. It’s like Martin Luther King said, “You don’t need to see the whole staircase, you just need to take the first step,” and we kind of rephrase that a little bit is “You don’t need to see the whole staircase, you just need to take someone to the next step.”

Can you share with our listeners one of your most favorite or successful networking experiences that you’ve had?

So I always say this kind of catalysts that happen over time, right? So one of the things that we used to do was just doing Facebook Messenger, when there wasn’t loads of compliance around it. So at that point, I’d get people on a Facebook Live Show and I build them a bot for free on Facebook Live. So we do that kind of thing where we go cool, what kind of thing you’re looking for, and we build it live. And they go oh wow, you’re building a bot great, you can take that away and use it in your business. Now what that led to is because we give so much value, people started introducing this to other people. So we had for example, oh John Lee Dumas on the podcast, and then ended up we did some work for him beforehand before the podcast so we’ll talk about the results. We improved his webinar rate quite significantly and because we improved that then he introduced me to Pete Vargas and Ray Higdon. Then we just started to level up. So I always say is if you want to go and get paid by level eight, then go and work for level nines for free or level 10s for free. It improves your authority, credibility, and at the same time, it opens up your network to get even wider. So I always looked as well for any deals that would make with some of these high leverage people is how can we leverage that and then introduce it to other people at the same time.

How do you stay in front of these people that you’ve created these relationships with?

So the last couple of years have obviously been a little bit different in terms of going to events. But what’s interesting is, for example, I had someone message me today and she said, “Hey, we spoke last year.” Bear in mind, I haven’t physically spoken to her in over a year, and before when I did speak with her we spoke for about five minutes. She said, “I’m looking to do this, is this the kind of thing that you do?” So staying at the top of people’s minds, how do we do that? Well, I post on social media, like six times a week. I can’t remember the person who I got this from but we do a connect authority. So we will make a small offer like a lead magnet and we’ll ask who wants it and everyone will want to get it. So then we get to have back and forth conversations with those and then the other ones, it might be like a personal story about me. It could be a case study so when people see case study after case after case study of “Hey, look at all these six-figure seven-figure results that we’re getting for people,” then you naturally stay on top of mind and it’s not so much with social media. Sometimes everyone’s like, “Oh my god, no one’s engaging with my post.” If you want to work with seven and eight-figure entrepreneurs, most of those won’t engage with your posts, but they’re always watching. Always keep an eye on things. If you are at that seven-figure level, or even at a six-figure level, how many times you actually go, “Oh, I like that. I like that.” No, you just scan every so often and just go, “Oh, that’s interesting, I’ll make a note to myself about that,” rather than engaging with everything. 

What advice would you offer the business professionals really looking to grow their network?

So I’d say do what do I did, and find how you can give as much value as possible to the people that you really want to work with. Identify your dream clients, and give as much value to those people as possible, and then you will work either with them or someone very close to them based on that. So you’ll find a lot of the high-level people, if you go up to them and say, “Hey, I’m really good at doing this thing, am I okay to do this for you for free?” I spoke to someone else who does the same similar thing with LinkedIn profiles. So he went to a lot of the bigger players in the industry and said, “Hey, would you mind if I create your LinkedIn profile based on what I know about you? I’ve been following you for a long time. If you think it’s great, you can use it. If not, that’s fine.” They’re like, “Yeah, sure do,” and then afterward, they’re like, “What can I do for you?” Then you’ve got testimonials from all these big players and suddenly, that becomes an authority overnight.

Do you have any final words of advice for our listeners with regards to growing and supporting your network?

Remember, every single person that comes into your world ash a human beating heart. They’re not an automation, they’re not a lead, they’re a person. When you start to remember that, and start having those back and forth conversations with your customers or potential customers, and you start to find out what the pains are, their desires are in a lot more detail. It makes your marketing better, it reduces your cost to acquire a customer and increases your reputation in the marketplace. So have more conversations with more people and you’ll make more money, have more impact on the world and be better for it.

 

Connect with Paul

 

Amplify To 7 Figures Podcast: https://amplifyto7figures.com/home 

Website: https://lp.amplifyccom.com/ 

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