Book Full Title: $100M Leads: How to Get Strangers To Want To Buy Your Stuff.

Book page on Goodreads: $100M Leads: How to Get Strangers To Want To Buy Your Stuff.

Book in A Paragraph

The book is about getting engaged leads. It covers the core four advertising methods: warm outreach, post free content, cold outreach, and run paid ads. It also covers the four lead getters: customer referrals, word of mouth, agencies, and affiliates. The book is written by Alex Hormozi who is a serial entrepreneur and has founded and scaled three companies to $120M+ in cumulative sales across four different industries without taking on outside capital.

My Notes

Here are my notes from each chapter of the books.

How I Got Here

My offer was simple. I’ll fill your gym in 30 days for free. You pay nothing. I pay for everything. I sell new members and keep the first 6 weeks of membership fees as payment. You get everything else. If I don’t fill your gym, I don’t make money. You spend nothing either way. It was an easy offer to sell.

The Problem This Book Solves

You’re not getting as many leads as you want because you’re not advertising enough. Period.

In a nutshell: I will show you how to get strangers to want to buy your stuff.

Leads Alone Aren’t Enough

A lead is a person you can contact. That’s all. If you bought a list of emails, those are leads. If you get contact information from a website or database, those are leads. The numbers in your phone are leads. People on the street are leads. If you can contact them, they are leads.

Leads alone aren’t enough. We want engaged leads: people who show interest in the stuff you sell. If someone gives their contact information on a website, that is an engaged lead.

Engaged leads are the true output of advertising.

Engage Your Leads: Offers and Lead Magnets

Often, a business promises to give its product or service in exchange for money. This is a core offer.

Sometimes, though, people want to know more about your offer before they buy. This is common for businesses that sell more expensive stuff. If that’s you, then you’ll often get more leads to engage by advertising with a lead magnet first. A lead magnet is a complete solution to a narrow problem. It’s typically a lower-cost or free offer to see who is interested in your stuff. And, once solved, it reveals another problem solved by your core offer. This is important because leads interested in lower-cost or free offers now are more likely to buy a related higher-cost offer later. Think of it like salty pretzels at a bar. If somebody eats the pretzels, they’ll get thirsty and order a drink. The salty pretzels solve the narrow problem of hunger. They also reveal a thirst problem solved by a drink, which they can get, in exchange for money.

Your lead magnet should be valuable enough on its own that you could charge for it.

A person who pays with their time now is more likely to pay with their money later.

Types of lead magnets

1) Reveal Their Problem. Think “diagnosis.” If your audience has a problem they don’t know about, your lead magnet would make them aware of it. These lead magnets work great when they reveal problems that get worse the longer you wait. Example: You run a speed test that shows their website loads at 30 % below the speed it should. You draw a clear line between where they should be and how much money they lose by being below standards.

2) Samples And Trials. You give full but brief access to your core offer. You can limit the number of uses, time they have access, or both. This works great when your core offer is a recurring solution to a recurring problem.

3) One Step Of A Multi-Step Process. You can give them one step in a multi-step process that solves a bigger problem.

Leads have to notice your lead magnet before they can consume it. Like it or not, this means how we present it matters more than anything. For example, improving the headline, name, and display of your lead magnet can 2x, 3x, or 10x your engagement.

Here’s what you do next-you test. The three things you’ll want to test are the headline, the image(s), and the subheadline, in that order.

People buy stuff based on how much value they think they’ll get after they buy it. And the easiest way to get them to think they’ll get tons of value after they buy is … drum roll please … to provide them with value before they buy.

Once the leads consume the lead magnet, some of them will be ready to buy or learn more about your offer. This is the time to give a Call To Action (CTA).

Good CTAs have two things: 1) what to do and 2) reasons to do it right now.

Let’s say you make $10,000 of profit on your core offer. And it costs you $1000 in advertising to get someone on a call for it. If you close one out of three people, it costs you $3000 in advertising to get a customer. Imagine you advertise a free lead magnet instead of your core offer. Your lead magnet costs you $25 to deliver, and because it’s free to them, more will engage. The extra engagement means it only costs $75 in advertising to get someone on a call. All in, it’s $100 per call. Now, let’s say one out of ten folks who get the lead magnet buys your core offer. This means your new cost to acquire a customer is $1000 ($100 x 10 people). We just cut our cost to get a customer by 3x.

The Core Four Advertising Methods:

#1 Warm Outreach

When I make an offer from scratch, I refer to the value equation. If you’re wondering ‘what’s the value equation?’-it was the core concept of my first book $100M Offers.

The goal is to maximize the first two and minimize the second two. So all you have to do now is show someone: You have exactly what they want They’re guaranteed to get it Insanely fast Without lifting a finger or giving up anything they love.

So let’s do just that with a real-life offer:…

By the way, do you know anybody who is (describe their struggles) looking to (dream outcome) in (time delay)? I’m taking on five case studies for free, because that’s all I can handle. I just want to get some testimonials for my service / product. I help them (dream outcome) without (effort and sacrifice). It works. I even guarantee people get (dream outcome) or I work with them until they do. I just had a girl named XXX work with me (dream outcome) even though she (describe the same struggle your contact has). I also had another guy who (dream outcome) and it was his first time. I’d just like more testimonials to show it works across different scenarios. Does anyone you like come to mind? (Pause if on the phone) … and if they say no … Haha, well … does anyone you hate come to mind? (ha) This helps break any awkwardness.

There’s an important feature here. We’re not asking them to buy anything. We’re asking if they know anyone. And of the people who say yes, most say they are interested.

#2 Post Free Content Part I

Building an audience is the most valuable thing I’ve ever done.

Leila bought me four calls with a big influencer who had the type of audience I wanted to build. She paid $120,000. On my first call, he told me to post regularly on every platform. So, that’s what I did. Twelve months later, my audience grew by more than 200,000 people. On my second call, he noted the progress. But I wanted more. He said, “Bro, anyone telling you there’s some secret is trying to sell you something. We just put out as much as we possibly can. Pull up your Instagram and pull up my Instagram… Look. You’ve posted once today. I posted three times. Pull up your LinkedIn … Look. You posted once this week. I posted five times today.” Simple. Not easy. Over the next six months I put out ten times the content. And over the next six months, I added 1.2M people to my audience.

Free content makes all other advertising more effective. If you reach out to someone and they can’t find content related to your services, they’re less likely to buy. On the other hand, if they find lots of valuable content, they are more likely to buy.

#2 Post Free Content Part II

Switch from “How to” to “How I.” From “This is the best way” to “These are my favorite ways” etc. (especially when starting out).

Narrow the focus of your content. If you have a small local business, you probably shouldn’t make general business content. Not at first, at least. Why? The audience will listen to people with better track records than you. But you can narrow your topics to what you do and the place you do it. Example: plumbing in a certain town. If you do that, you can become king of that puddle. Over time, you can expand your plumbing puddle to the general local business pond. Then the lake of brick & mortar chains and so forth.

First, we start with warm outreach. We reach out to every person we have permission to contact. Second, we post publicly about the successes and lessons we have from our first clients. We post testimonials. We provide value. Then occasionally ask. We commit to doing both of these activities every day.

#3 Cold Outreach

Cold outreach has one key difference from warm outreach: trust. Strangers don’t trust you.

Cold outreach is a numbers game. The more people you reach out to the more engaged leads you get. Once we figure out how much outreach it takes to engage a lead, then we only have one thing to do … more.

There are three different ways I get my targeted lead lists. First, I use software to scrape a list of names. Second, I pay brokers to assemble me a list of targeted leads. And if neither of those work, I manually scrape a list of names myself. Find your scraping tool by searching “outbound leads scraping tool” or “database lead scraping.”

There are two important factors I emphasize to get strangers to engage: personalization and big fast value. This is important because they don’t know us and they don’t trust us. We’ve gotta overcome both issues in a matter of seconds.

A) They Don’t Know Us → Personalize (Act Like You Know Them). This comes in handy for personal subject lines on emails, the first few messages in chat, or the first few sentences someone hears.

B) They Don’t Trust Us → Big Fast Value. We’re not trying to tickle their interest, we’re trying to blow their minds in under thirty seconds. It needs to be BIG FAST VALUE. If it’s not, or it’s mediocre, you’ll blend in with the ocean of people trying to get their attention. Give away something for free people would normally pay for and they will want it. Note: I didn’t say, “so good they should pay for it,” I said, “stuff they actually pay for.”

Pro Tip: 50% Email Response Rate Bump I took our cold outreach template and re-wrote it below a third grade reading level. The results: 50% more leads responded. I recommend running all scripts and messages through a free reading level app online. I won’t recommend one because they go out of business all the time, but I promise you can find one. Make your messages easier to understand and more people will respond.

#4 Run Paid Ads Part I: Making An Ad

With warm and cold outreach we have to do more stuff to reach more people. To reach more people with free content, we depend on the platform or audience sharing it if they feel like it. Paid ads are different. The reach is guaranteed. But getting your money back isn’t. So it’s a game of efficiency rather than reach.

This chapter reveals how I create more efficient paid ads by finding needles in the haystack. I start with the entire world as my audience (haystack) then narrow down to get a higher percentage of engaged leads (needles). First, I pick a platform that contains my ideal audience. Second, I use whatever targeting methods that exist within the platform to find them. Third, I craft my ad in a way that repels anyone else. Finally, I tell whoever’s left standing to take the next step. People overcomplicate it. But that’s it.

Once we advertise profitably in a small puddle of an audience, we expand to a pond, then a lake, then an ocean. And as the audience gets bigger it does have more of the wrong people, but it has more of the right ones too.

…instead of spending $1000 to make $10,000 with $9000 in profit, you spend $100,000 to make $300,000 with $200,000 in profit. Your ratio goes down, but you make more money.

Modern advertising platforms have two ways to target. You can use them separately or combine them:

1) Target a lookalike audience. Modern platforms can show your ad to an audience that is similar to, and much bigger than, a list you provide.

2) Target with factors of your choosing. Targeting options include: age, income, gender, interests, time, location, etc.

What should the ad say? → Call Out + Value + Call to Action (CTA)

Call Out: People noticing your ad is the most important part of the ad … by a lot. My advertising became 20x more effective when I focused the majority of my effort on the first five seconds. We need the audience’s eyes and ears just long enough for them to realize “this is for me, I’ll keep paying attention.”

People want to work with people who look, talk, and act in ways familiar to them. So if you serve a broad customer base use more ethnicities, ages, genders, personalities etc. in your ads. If you serve a narrow customer base (ex: medical devices for seniors), then use people who look like them.

Dream Outcome: A good ad will show and tell the maximum benefit the prospect can achieve using the thing you sell.

Opposite-Nightmare: A good ad will also show them the worst possible hassles, pain, etc. of going without your solution.

Lower perceived risk by minimizing or explaining away past failures, emphasizing the success of people like them, giving assurances by authority, guarantees, and how what you have to offer will at least give them a better chance of success than what they currently do, etc.

A good ad will also show them how slow their current trajectory is.

A good ad will show and tell how much faster they will get the thing they want.

A good ad will also show them the amount of work and skill they’ll need to get the result without your solution.

A good ad tells and shows how you can avoid the stuff you hate doing, do more of the stuff you love doing.

Make your landing pages match your ads. People click an ad because you promised them some benefit. So carry that same look and language over to your landing page.

In Robert Cialdini’s seminal work, Influence, he shows that people like to think of themselves as consistent. So, if you remind them of the action they just took (CTA), and show how taking the next action aligns with it, you’ll get more people to take the second action (Contact Info). For example, “Now that you just did A, you need to do B to get the most of A.” Or “Doing A makes you a ‘doing A’ kind of person. Doing A kind of people, do B.”

To be clear, we aren’t selling anything. We are asking if they’re interested in the stuff we sell. And if they’re interested, they’ll give us a way to tell them more about it. And when they do, they become engaged leads.

#4 Run Paid Ads Part II: Money Stuff

Imagine I spend $100 on ten ads—$1,000 in total. Nine of them lose all $100. Then, one of them makes $500 back for the $100 I spent. I’m still down $500. Many people stop here because they see a $500 dollar loss. But not us. We see a winner. So now we buckle up and 100x down. We spend $10,000 on the winning ad and make $50,000 back.

I measure paid ad efficiency by comparing the lifetime gross profit of a customer (LTGP) with the cost to acquire a customer (CAC). I express this ratio as LTGP to CAC. Lifetime gross profit is all the money a customer ever spends on your stuff minus all the money it takes to deliver it.

We speak with hundreds of entrepreneurs every month. They often think they have crappy ads (high CAC) when, in reality, they have a crappy business model (Low LTGP). The cost to acquire customers, between competitors in the same industry, is much closer than you’d think. The difference between the winners and the losers is how much they make off each customer.

Example

You spent $30 in ads and only got $10 back. Ten bucks trickles in, one month at a time, until you finally break even … two. months. later. That’s tough! Make no mistake, you should 100 % make that trade. But, now we have a cash flow problem. Here’s the way I fix it-I immediately sell them more stuff.

If I cover the cost to get and fulfill a customer in the first thirty days I can pay off my card, then do it again. It’s how I’ve scaled every company I’ve started for the past seven years past $1M / mo in the first twelve months-without outside funding.

Ad content ideas: Your Best Free Content Can Make The Best Paid Ads. If you can get your customers to create testimonials or reviews using your product, post them. If they perform well as free content, they often make killer ads too.

Core Four On Steroids: More Better New

First, you reach out to people who know you. Then, you start making free content. Then you start reaching out to people who don’t know you. Then you start running paid ads. This is how you do the core four to get engaged leads.

Here’s how I get better: I test one thing per week per platform.

First, you do way more of the advertising that works until it “breaks.” Then, the next drop off point becomes obvious. Then you keep that level of advertising up while you go back, fix the constraint, and make it better.

Only once you’ve exhausted more–better do the real returns come from doing new. First, go with new ad placements on a platform you know. Second, go with placements you know on a new platform. Then, once you get the hang of that new platform, use new placements on it. Once you exhaust that, you can add a new core four activity on top of what you currently do. That gives you my simple, real-world way,

As far as what to do when? Whenever I build a business I think about it this way – after I do warm outreach to get my pool of customers going – if I have more time than money, I move to posting content. If I have more money than time, I go with cold outreach or running ads. But remember, you only need to do one to get engaged leads. So, just pick one. Then, max it out. Do more. Do better. Do new.

#1 Customer Referrals—Word of Mouth

Pro Tip: Make The Success Activities The Conditions of Your Guarantee DO NOT DO THIS IF YOU HATE MONEY AND HELPING PEOPLE: As soon as you start getting customers results, note what they did. Then, start guaranteeing new customers those results. But do it on the condition they do what the best customers did. The guarantee sells more people. The conditions get them better results. You win. They win.

Asking for referrals only works when you treat it like an offer. The referrals come when you show the value the customer gets when they refer their friends. Dropbox gave free storage to customers and free storage to the friends they referred.

Example: Pay your average cost to acquire a customer (CAC) to the referrer or the friend or both.

I had a new salesman come into one of my portfolio companies and shatter all the sales records for an upcoming event. We didn’t know what was going on. So I hopped on the phone with him-how are you selling more tickets than everyone else? He shrugged and said, “I’m doing the same thing as everyone else. I just make sure I ask them who else they’d want to have come with them. Then ask them to introduce me.” Half his sales were referrals. So simple, and yet no one does it.

Unlockable Referral Bonuses: Create bonuses for people who 1) refer and 2) leave a testimonial. A few examples: Unlock VIP bonuses, courses, tokens, status, training, merchandise, service levels, premium support, additional hours of service, etc.

#3 Agencies

Agencies can play a valuable role in business growth. But not the way they want you to. I don’t want anyone else falling into the same trap.

If I want to learn new ways to do content, outreach, or paid ads, then I hire agencies offering new ways to do them. They’ve already made the big mistakes.

Here’s how I use agencies now. Rather than believe the lie that “I’ll never have to learn this stuff because they can do it,” I start every agency relationship with a purpose and a deadline to fulfill it. I open by saying: “I want to do what you do in my business, but I don’t know how. I’d like to work with you for 6 months so I can learn how you do it. Plus, I’ll pay extra for you to break down why you make the decisions you do and the steps you take to make them. Then, after I get a good idea of how it all works, I’ll start training my team on it. And once they can do it well enough, I’d like to change to a lower cost consulting arrangement. This way, you can still help us if we run into problems. Are you opposed to this?” In my experience, most agencies are not opposed to this.

I’ve used this method again and again. I hire one “good enough” agency to learn the ropes of a new platform. Then, I hire a more elite agency to learn how to maximize it – and I cannot recommend this strategy enough.

#4 Affiliates and Partners

An affiliate is a lead-getter. They are an independent business that tells their audience to buy your stuff. Affiliates seem like referrals on the outside, but are much different under the hood. First, they have their own businesses and do their own advertising. Second, they agree to offer your stuff to their engaged leads in exchange for money, free stuff, or both.

Scenario # 1: You sell ten customers per month worth $10,000 each. Your business caps at $100,000 per month. In twelve months you’ve made 1.2 million.

Scenario # 2: For the same effort, you sell ten affiliates per month. Each month, those affiliates bring you one of those $10,000 customers. Now, every single month you add an extra $100,000 in revenue. In twelve months you’ve made 7.8 million. And it grows every month thereafter.

The ideal affiliate has a business with a warm audience full of people like your customers.

We make the affiliate-offer and advertise it the same way we would any other offer. We call out our audience, show our value elements, and then call them to action.

Call outs for potential affiliates often include:

  • The affiliate business owners themselves-ATTENTION SPA OWNERS
  • The affiliate’s customers-Do you work with busy professionals who spend all day in meetings?

we don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Most affiliate money making offers show value like this: Make more money from your current customers and get more leads than your current offer (dream outcome) … with a high chance of working since your customers already want the product (perceived likelihood of achievement)… without needing to build, deliver, or provide customer support for the product yourself (effort and sacrifice)… so you can start selling it tomorrow (time delay).

The whisper-tease-shout method: During the whisper phase of my book launch: I posted content, reached out to friends, emailed my list, and told potential affiliates about major updates to the book. I showed what draft I was on. I took pictures behind the scenes of me printing out drafts. I showed the many versions of the frameworks I drew. I shared videos of myself editing the book early in the morning and late at night, etc … all of it made people who want leads get curious and pay attention. Tease: Think “Elements Of Value.” It’s time to start satisfying all the curiosity you created during the whisper phase. Reveal your product, make the date of the launch public, and start showing the elements of value. Shout: Think “Call to Action.” Give specific actions for the audience to take when the product launches. Now you start pounding the audience with bonuses, scarcity, urgency, and guarantees around being “the first ones.” You shout to get as many people exposed to your offer as you can.

Section IV Conclusion: Get Lead Getters

Once you find something that works for you – stick to what you pick. Those are the best words of encouragement I can offer. The longer you play the game, the better you will get, and the more success you will have. Just don’t quit or switch methods after seeing a few losses. It’s normal to lose in the beginning. In fact, I expect to crack a new lead source in three to six months (and this isn’t my first rodeo). So if your expectations are faster than that, do you think your expectations are reasonable?

Advertising in Real Life: Open To Goal

Waking up early, getting right to work, and working 8 hours straight has been my highest ROI “habit stack.”