Capture, Cultivate, Convert

MIKE:

I see a timer going on. It looks good. Hey everybody, welcome. If you’re here with us live, fantastic. We always take a little bit of time to get the stragglers into the room together. So, feel free. I always like to set the tempo a little bit. Let us know where you’re from, where are you joining us from. I’ve got some familiar faces in here in the waiting room already. I’m seeing some folks I know. Thanks, Jeff, for starting off the chat, man. Where you from?

Hey, Kylie. Yeah. Little bit of time. We always set the tempo here a little bit. I recognize some of you all. Yeah. Texas. More. Yes. Awesome. Pastor Samio, good to hear from you. Glad you’re joined today, sir. There’s my friends at Knackards Edwardsville. I have not been back to a little bit. I am a Saluki though. Si’s there, but I think they’re the Cougars in that side. Get them going. Thanks so much for the participation, y’all. Just getting us started here today. I know it’s a lot to do like the live webinar type thing. But I’m always so grateful for the folks that are able to jump on in the moment with us and help ask some of the questions and start to participate with us. Of course, we will do a recording and we will send it out to all of the rest of the folks that were not able to join with us live. But this part is always so valuable to me. We’ll wait for maybe just one other minute here to get us going. I still got some locations in and we’re really spanning the whole US right now.

Hey, everything’s sounding good on your end. Yeah. Audio visual. It feels like there’s a lag on my screen a little bit, but I think that’s all right. I’m moving slow today.

And awesome. You might have just seen a chat from our marketing officer, Pat. He is in there helping us out. If you have some impromptu questions that we don’t cover today for some reason, then he’s right there to be able to help fill in any suggestions. And because it is also recorded as well, we’ll be able to send out maybe any individualized type things for you. There’s my guy over at 144 Academy. Good to see you, Ira. Team, what do you think? Should we jump into this? We got a lot of content and information. Excited to get into it with you all here today. If you can tell, the vibes are high. The energy is super high. I had an opportunity as we were thinking about like who to partner with, who to bring on to the webinar because you all might have seen my face and mustache before. And it’s okay if I’m brand new to you. I will introduce myself here in just a second, but I am so glad to eventually tee up and introduce our co-presenter here today, Hannah. Her and I have been working together on some very exciting projects using some of our knowledge about martial arts and trends in the industry to take advantage of it. So, absolutely, without further ado, let’s go ahead and remind everyone because I think I just had a question. Absolutely. If you got to jump off, if leads start knocking down your door, if there’s a fire at the dojo, whatever is going on, there will be a recording sent out to you all to keep up with the friends that we talk about here today because it’s going to get pretty dense with information. And I always like to do a little agenda setting. They always say the key to an effective webinar is tell them what you’re going to tell them and then tell them and then tell them what you told them. And I’m talking with a room full of martial arts instructors that know exactly how often you have to do that to even like reinforce one technique for folks. So simple agenda here today. Obviously we want to qualify ourselves. Who are we and why are we here talking to you about collecting leads and ways to do it and how to manage those leads. So, we’ll do some introductions and then I’m going to turn it over to start with Hannah who is our digital marketing manager here at Kicksite to help talk about at least four different channels that you can kind of investigate for lead generation. I will put on my fanciest Harvard regalia and talk with you about a fancy study from the Harvard Business Review that share some insights with us, even contemporarily, about how you should follow up with those leads. I’ll talk a little bit about some Kicksite tools. A lot of you are Kicksite users, not everyone. So, I don’t want it to totally be the Kicksite show here today, but if you’re struggling with some of the things that we talk about here today in your program, it’s an awesome opportunity for us to show maybe some ways that life could be a little bit easier. And then if we’re doing our job right, we’re going to leave a little bit of time open at the end for just like raw Q&A. And remember, you can still ask questions in the meantime here today as long as they’re kind of on the slide or topic that we’re at. And our friend Pat is going to do their best to give you an awesome answer. Let’s get started with a little bit of introductions. Who am I? I am looking a little different than this original headshot that Kicksite has. My name is Mike. If I have not had the pleasure to meet you all, I have had the opportunity to meet many of you. Some absolute legacy customers with us here today. Master Knackard, thank you so much already for even volunteering that — it means a lot to us. I’ve spent 10 years now in sales and that is from business to business, business to consumer, enterprise sales, the last seven of which I’ve been exclusively focused just on fitness and martial arts. And I’ll be candid with you all, I resisted a career in sales for a pretty long time. Thought my calling was something else. And it’s mostly probably because a lot of the same things that you all might think about the idea of selling your gym. It feels sometimes disingenuous and it feels like you’re pressuring people to get them to do something that they wouldn’t have done. These were all the pejorative things that I had in my head about a career in sales. And I have to tell you now, this company in particular, Kicksite, has changed my opinion so much because what I get to do now is to almost be a consultant with the folks that I’m in touch with about trends in the industry and how to go to market and tools and optimizations and it never ends up feeling like I’m convincing someone to do something that they didn’t want to do. It feels like guiding them along the process. That’s what effective sales folks are. That’s what you all will do with your businesses. So, I’ve made sales processes and I lead a team now of three business development representatives here at Kicksite. That’ll come up a little bit later in the presentation. I’ve had some top producing awards and numbers, but I’m also in your dojos. I spent time in my youth training in Taekwondo. I’m an active natural bodybuilding competitor. And for some reason, in all of my extra free time, I decided to try to learn jiu-jitsu as well. It has been incredibly humbling, but I’m so grateful for it because it brings me closer than ever to you all. It’s a little bit about my experience in sales and the position that we’re coming from here today. I will come back around to talk with you all in a little bit. But first, we got to know who is telling you how to bring leads in to your gyms. And it cues this up perfectly for our digital marketing manager, Hannah.

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HANNAH:

Yeah, thank you, Mike. Hi everyone. Like Mike said, my name is Hannah and I am the digital advertising specialist here at Kicksite. So, if you’re already currently a marketing service client, you may already recognize me, but I specialize in paid advertising and I have a proven track record of just building that brand visibility and driving engagement to businesses just like yours. So, I work with martial arts school owners every single day. I’m helping them strategize their marketing. I’m creating seasonal promotions tailored to their school, and I have helped generate hundreds of leads across multiple Kicksite campaigns. So to get started today, let’s just talk about four effective ways to generate leads. So my arrow here is not working. Do you mean to go? Let me know. Maybe. Yes, for some reason it’s not working on my end. Thank you so much.

So we can see on the right side of your screen, I’d love to know how are you guys currently marketing your business? Are you already using social platforms or running paid ads?

Perfect. And then if you want to use the arrow again, Mike, for some reason it’s not correlated. Thank you so much. Okay. So, there are many effective ways to generate leads, but today I’m going to focus on how you can leverage your community and local businesses through a strong referral program, how you can invest in paid advertising as well as just build that consistent content for organic growth. Starting off with community — one of the most powerful strategies for growing your martial arts school is going to be forming those community partnerships and cross promotion. So you don’t have to grow alone. By teaming up with local businesses, schools, or organizations, you can get in front of new audiences that are already trusted. So some great examples of partnerships can include fitness studios, after school programs, and even your local police department. Hosting something like a back to school bully prevention workshop or community self-defense night in partnership with the community can give your school credibility and show parents that your program is focused on safety and service. So, when running these promotions, I highly recommend utilizing Facebook events. Creating the event on your Facebook page and then adding a partner — which is the organization that you’re teaming up with — as a co-host. What this does is it can make the event appear on both pages, which means your school instantly gains that exposure to their followers, too. It’s basically like free advertising because the Facebook algorithm actually favors co-hosted events. So, more people in your community will also see it in their feeds. And if you have those long-term relationships as well, placing each other’s links on your websites can help boost that SEO as well. Bringing partners can bring valuable programming and community without taking on that extra work and your school gets introduced to a whole new audience in a trusted way. So if you’re looking for organizations that you want to team up with, you can check out community Facebook groups or even utilize your chamber of commerce as well.

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MIKE:

Yeah, that one I always think is good. Scott, that’s such a good question as well. We’ll provide a little bit more of the how-type things as well. We would totally take you sideways on the presentation if we started to show the actual stuff. But it’s a good example — if your community, like that police department Hannah mentioned, also has a Facebook page, we’re putting them both together. That visibility thing is I think so great for just the marketing. You’re right. I think the algorithm does kind of benefit you if they already have maybe a more established page than you do as well. It’s a good one. We’ll get to that question. Ready to go after the community stuff? You want to start going inside the school a little? Referrals.

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HANNAH:

Yeah. So, another big growth tool that you can use is, like Mike said, referral programs. So, word of mouth is already one of the biggest ways that martial arts is bringing on new students. But when you put a structured referral system in place, you can turn that natural sharing into something that’s consistent and also repeatable. So, people love talking about the things that they value. If you give your students and parents an easy reason to spread the word, they will. The key is just making it simple, fun, but also rewarding. So, for example, you could have a “bring a buddy” week where every student can invite a friend to try a class for free. And then if their buddy signs up, you can reward that student with a freebie, a gift card, or maybe a credit on their membership. You can also layer in a tiered system to keep it exciting. So, maybe one referral earns a t-shirt, two referrals can get a $50 membership credit, and then three referrals can score a free month of training. The other piece of this is also visibility. It’s not just enough to mention your referral once and then hope that people remember. You need to talk about it often in your class announcements, maybe put it out in your emails, on your social media, and even placing a flyer on your front desk. So, the more people that are reminded, the more they’re likely to take action. To take it even a step further, you can create landing pages with referral codes. That way the student advocates get their own unique code, which can make it fun for them and easy for you to track, and it’s just a great way to reward both your current students and the new ones that they bring in. So, referral programs can turn your students into your best marketers. When you keep them visible and rewarding, they can become one of your strongest growth channels as well.

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MIKE:

To have the existing members evangelize the gym — and so many of them are potentially already doing that. They’re buying the t-shirts, they’re wearing the gear, and putting their brand out there. This now puts a little deeper connection with those folks. And Hannah, if I’m not mistaken, I think there are studies that also kind of suggest that there is a correlation between the source of that person — like once they come in, if they’re a referral — I’m fairly confident those referrals actually have a higher than average retention rate. When someone comes in with a buddy, they are likely to stay at your academy longer. This is why we know families are so valuable in martial arts. They’re not just high value because they spend more and your family memberships are big, but the family that kicks together sticks together. We oftentimes see those folks lasting longer at the academies. This is such a good idea. And I like the way you structured it as well. It’s a referral for both the person who evangelized the gym, but then also for the new person coming in. Both people get the benefit.

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HANNAH:

Yep. Absolutely. But now we go into the scary stuff, the digital world. So, word of mouth, referrals, and community partnerships are all super powerful, but sometimes you need an extra boost to consistently get in front of those new prospects, and that’s where paid ads can come in. Platforms like Google Ads and social ads — which can be on Facebook and Instagram — are both designed to put your school in front of the exact audience that you’re trying to reach. So, with Google Ads, you can target custom keywords so your school shows up above competitors in those search results. This is a great way to supplement that website traffic, increase that visibility, and capture those high intent leads. So, for example, if someone in your area searches “kids martial arts near me,” your school can appear right at the top of those results. That’s high intent traffic targeting families who are ready to sign up now. But on the other hand, social ads can help plant that seed. So these campaigns can show up in a parent’s feed and get them thinking about martial arts before they even hit Google. They’re perfect for seasonal pushes like back to school, Black Friday, or those New Year’s resolutions. And you can use visuals to highlight specific demographics like showcasing women’s classes if you’re trying to get into that demographic, or targeting parents who want to get their kids started in a new program. Carousel ads are a great way to showcase multiple photos or highlights from your classes and promotions. These are multiple photos within your social ads that give users more chance to engage with your ad since the carousel will automatically scroll through different images in their feed, giving them multiple chances to see that. And then video ads are another powerful option within social. They can grab that attention quickly and allow you to highlight the energy of your classes, the benefits of the training, and just the overall atmosphere of your school in a way that static images might not. So both approaches have unique strengths. While Google captures the people that are actively searching, social ads grab attention with eye-catching visuals and keep your programs top of mind. And when you combine the two, you’re covering both of those bases — being visible when people are looking and sparking interest with families who may not even have considered martial arts yet. So now, the key to making this work is organization. When you’re running both of these ads, you want those leads to funnel into a central system so that nothing slips through the cracks. With Kicksite, leads from both Google and Meta ads will flow directly into your account and trigger an instant notification. This will just make follow-up easier and way more effective. And if you’re not sure where to even begin with either of these services, Kicksite offers services to help supplement your visibility and keep that traffic coming in.

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MIKE:

It’s one of the things that I love about the way that we’ve structured all our marketing services together, Hannah, is like it is still so personal, what you and your colleague Justin do when we’re helping people set up — because we acknowledge, right, we work with people on all different ranges of technology experience. We have the folks that are asking us how to turn on the computer and how do I restart and stuff like that. There’s no shade. But we also have the absolute power users who could arguably develop a program like Kicksite themselves. That is a huge range of folks to work with. The fact that they still do such a personal touch, they meet people where they’re at and they start with their level of knowledge on either a Google ad or a social media ad — I think that is how, frankly, you’ve earned a black belt so quick in this digital marketing space. It’s awesome to know the differences of each channel. One of the things that you educated me on super early in terms of paid ads — because I was kind of flying blind on these a little bit, guys, not knowing maybe the full power of them. I see them a lot as a consumer of martial arts info. But one of the things Hannah kind of helped me realize is the trends about how ads have evolved over time. Like if we were talking about running digital ads maybe even three to five years ago, I think the common norm in the industry was just that ads were just there to boost website traffic. It was like a one-to-one correlation, right? I would run and spend all this money on an ad and when I click on it, most of the time I’m just getting shuttled to the homepage of their website, which is not a bad thing — I know you’ve seen numbers there. Increased website traffic is good. Some of you have amazing, beautiful websites. But there is also this more contemporary trend that’s happening in ads because people buy fast these days if they’re interested and maybe they’ve already got the brand awareness. One of the things that Hannah has really been spearheading here is that now when someone clicks on an ad run through Kicksite, we want them to land on something tailored for the ad that caught their interest. So, if you’re running an ad about a kids martial arts program, I don’t just want to go to the homepage of the website where maybe I’m seeing something about adult classes or a special offer for bully prevention. I want to go to a targeted funnel page that just shows parents what they need to know about starting their kid in a martial arts program. This kind of net fishing versus spear fishing approach is so modern and it’s something I’ve seen Hannah do for our clients that really increases conversions so much more. If you can speak to it —

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HANNAH:

Yeah. And especially having just a more digestible landing page where people are clicking for that specific offer — it gives them a way more comprehensive breakdown, but it also gives them chances to go to the main website too for more information. But it’s just kind of more funneling those leads, giving them a more efficient way to submit their information.

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MIKE:

For sure. Absolutely. And I guess there’s one more digital component as well. Those are paid ads, but I think you’ve got one more.

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HANNAH:

Yeah. So, I mean, we just covered great tools for driving in new leads, but that’s just the first step. The truth is that most families don’t sign up the very first time they hear about your school. They need time to build trust and just feel confident that your program is going to be the right fit. And that’s where content marketing comes in. So, every piece of content that you put out is a chance to answer questions that future members already have in their heads. Things like testimonials or videos that highlight different programs or posts that explain the benefits of your memberships can all help address the concerns that parents and prospects are already thinking about. So, consistency is key here. Having up-to-date content across your platforms shows that your school is active and engaged. A good rhythm is posting a blog once a month on your website and then also posting weekly on Facebook and Instagram organically. This not only builds that credibility, but it also helps boost your online visibility. And the best part is that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. The content that you create for social can often be repurposed into that blog that you’re putting on your website, which can help your website pick up keywords and improve your SEO performance. Now, once someone shows interest in your school, that’s when lead nurturing is really important. If you just let that lead sit, the chances are they’ll forget about you or sign up for a different program. But if you’re following up with calls, texts, and emails, while also providing valuable content to them along the way, you’ll stay top of mind until they’re ready to make that purchasing decision. So, really, content marketing gets people interested, and lead nurturing helps keep them engaged until they’re ready to commit. When you have a system that does both, you’ll notice that more of your leads will start showing up for those trial classes and then turning into those long-term members.

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MIKE:

And I’ve got to ask as well — I mean, you are so experienced in leading from the front when it comes to thinking about marketing at Kicksite. We know the lives of martial arts owners, right? These folks are wearing so many different hats. They are head instructor, head financer, head janitor, head salesperson, marketing director — most of them doing it all. Some are doing it with another full-time job. So, I respect your opinion and your expertise so much. If you had to say — and I have a bias a little bit — but if you had to pick one of those four tactics for someone going head first into just one specifically, is there one that you’ve tended to find the most valuable?

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HANNAH:

Yeah, I would say content marketing is the most valuable. You can always have paid advertising, but that’s supplementing what you’re already doing essentially. Content marketing — posting on both Facebook and Instagram where people are doing their research about your school after they’ve seen your website — having those up-to-date blogs is really important and it just means that your business is active. If you go to an organization and you don’t see they’ve been active in years on their social media, they haven’t posted anything new on their website, it kind of questions their credibility a little bit. So, I would definitely say content marketing in my opinion is one of the most important.

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MIKE:

I think so too. I think you’re right. I think it’s one of the first things I do — to be candid with you all about the process. If someone submits a demo request into Kicksite, I always go into internet sleuth mode. I start researching everything I can. I want to see the existing school’s website and I want to see their social media activity. It helps me not just learn quite a bit about who I’m potentially about to talk to, but it shows me maybe some of their struggles — they’re not posting regularly, they’re not showing things of value out to the community as well. But I always — maybe sometimes my bias comes through as well. Those community events are tough because oftentimes you’re not the organizer, right? Like you’re participating in someone else’s event. I’ve seen so many of you do parades down the city streets, carrying your banner, having a booth — those are tough because they’re never ones you get to decide. But I have to tell you something as well. I think that so much of what we do in martial arts academies is personal and intimate, and that potentially being the genesis of how you get in contact with your members has always been very strong for me. I mean, there’s a reason that we’ll always do the content marketing and lead from that. But we sponsor events and travel across the country and you kind of earn your opportunity to establish a brand in those moments as well. People know me now — I’m like the yellow shoe guy at the events or something. You build up that reputation. But the ability to get to shake hands right then and talk to a family or talk to the young participant or the person who’s getting to join — there’s something about that that I think also has to just change the lead qualification so much. It’s just a lot to organize and you’re only one person. So it’s hard to be at the school and at the event at the same time. I think that’s probably why Hannah puts content marketing so high — because if I’m not mistaken, she’s even got a way of pre-scheduling out lots of posts, right? So if you’re up early in the morning with a strong cup of coffee and you’re just whizzing through a bunch of posts, those don’t always have to go out in the moment. A schedule can win there. And there are tons of free services that also do that for you. Anything else before I try to talk about what to do with all these leads you bring in?

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HANNAH:

I mean, I think that sums it up really well. Yeah, content marketing is key in building that credibility. But like I said earlier, all these other ways are really great options as well and tools to help grow that business. If you have the opportunity to designate someone else on your team for different aspects of this, that’s great. But I know a lot of you are kind of a one-man show, too.

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MIKE:

Oh, it’s time for another poll. I’m personally curious about how the leads are going with folks. So, as I hop here — oh, I thought we had one, didn’t we? Yes, it’s right after. Yeah, I’ll come back to the last slide, but I wanted to start here. I’m curious how many leads folks have been getting this year compared to last because we’ve got some interesting outliers, some things that have happened. We’ve got this post-COVID kind of activity when a lot of us weren’t able to open.

But I was so curious to see the trends here. It started off with like an early lead on less, but it actually looks like the more submissions we get, folks are suggesting more leads. And it’s good — about the same in there too. So many factors contribute to this, right? There’s all the political stuff going on and people’s economics that they’re worried about and social media continues to be a buzz. I also frankly think that there’s more competition than ever. There are more martial arts schools popping up left and right than we’ve ever seen before. And that’s only if we consider a fellow martial arts school as competition. Oftentimes, what you all know better than I do is that it’s not really the school up the street — it’s oftentimes other things like team sports or school academics or other things like that that just make it really hard to participate in a full-time martial arts curriculum. So I’m actually really inspired by this. I love to hear that most folks here are experiencing more leads than last year. I expect this hopefully to continue to grow, but it’s oftentimes a question about how we deal with those leads. So, as I mentioned, I was going to talk about Harvard a little bit here today. The trends that I’m about to share with you all come from a study published in the Harvard Business Review. The specific dynamics of the study reviewed over 100,000 leads collected by data aggregators and lead acquisition services. They followed those leads for an entire year — 365 days — and they watched around 2,100 different businesses on how they dealt with those leads. So, it wasn’t just 100,000 leads toward one company. It was spread around a lot of different services. And these were insurance and financial services and fitness and education. So it really does vary across all different areas. There will be some trends here that are unique to what we do inside of martial arts. But my whole job the second half of the presentation — once we have found something to latch on to to get more leads into the academy’s system or CRM or whatever it is — is to teach you the best practices to help respond to those folks. One of the first things that came about from the study is this kind of six-number sequence that we’ll take through. The first one was just like deficiencies in following up with leads. We’ll talk about response times, days, how many times, and what your competition frankly is not doing. So, let’s start off with the one that’s most fresh in my mind from this study. 100,000 leads, 2,100 companies, all different industries. One of the very first things — and this is an incredibly depressing statistic — is that over 30% of those leads were straight up never contacted at all. That doesn’t just mean they never had an opportunity to qualify the lead or get someone on the phone or respond to an email. I mean, straight up, they never even made an attempt to get in contact with that individual. There are so many things that go on about why this could happen. In fact, these same researchers did another study because they wanted to amplify it by scale a little bit more. So, instead of just the 100,000, they did another concurrent study — 1.25 to 5 million leads by 40 different companies, some of which were B-to-C, some of which were B2B. And what they ended up finding very quickly is that if you could respond in the first hour, you’re seven times more likely to qualify the lead. Even then, in that study, they found the same rate — larger test sample, still 30% of the leads are never contacted. So they’re asking people, “What is it about this lead that you just decided not to reach out?” You know what one of the simplest things was that was volunteered back? They judged the email address for the lead and never reached out. I admit we are sometimes ripe to judge a book by its cover and an email address can sometimes say a lot about you and sometimes say absolutely nothing about you. Like, do I still somewhere out in the ether of the internet have like skaterboy2008@hotmail.com? I might. Please don’t email me there. But I know that sometimes if I receive a lead like that — from an AOL.com or SBCGlobal or whatever — it already kind of prejudices you a little bit about who is on the other end of that phone. Here’s one of the points I want to make about that: a lot of new devices lately, like your fancy new iPhone, have features specifically to try to protect people’s email addresses. When I buy something online anymore, I use a feature that Apple provides — and I know it’s available on Android as well — it’s called Hide My Email, and it quickly generates a very bogus-looking email address just so I don’t have to give away my personal one. And what it does is it forwards that response onto my personal email. So I get to decide if I want to respond. And outside of that, if I don’t, those leads just end up going to spam or those follow-ups get ignored. If you were just looking at me submitting a lead on many of your websites and I used that Hide My Email feature, they are going to look absolutely bogus to you. The main point I want to reiterate on this is to throw caution to the wind a little bit. When you see that contact information come through, try as best as you possibly can not to make an assumption about the quality of the lead without still making an attempt. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been wrong. This is incredibly valuable for you. No judging a book by its cover anymore — the name and the contact information is always worthwhile to at least send an attempt. After that, we want to talk about response times. I highlighted this a little bit in that second study, but this is a very tough thing for a lot of you to achieve — responding to that inquiry in the first five minutes of them submitting their info. It’s going to sound astronomical coming off my tongue, but you have a 400% increase in likelihood to get in contact with and qualify that lead if you can do it nearly instantly. The reason for that — and this is proven, you all. Many of you have submitted a demo request over to Kicksite and you know I instantly have an opportunity to call you and oftentimes what is the number one response? People aren’t freaked out that I’m calling that fast. Almost always they’ll respond back, “Wow, that was fast.” And I am subtly — without having to say a single word or launch into my sales pitch — communicating with you the type of person that I am and the type of brand that we are, which is responsive and human and responsible with your information. If you can do that alone, if you learn nothing else from today’s presentation, if that becomes your new mantra — speed to lead, first five minutes, I have to try to contact this person — you are already beating the school up the street. There’s no doubt about it. I know that is easier said than done because we’re potentially working full-time and we’re training on the mats. So, we’ll talk about some of the ways to make that a little bit more efficient, but it just continues to diminish after even the first five minutes. This is a good point as well — many of these leads come in at like 10 p.m. or late at night. And this is oddly enough when people are shopping, and we know the life we got ourselves into in martial arts — it is nights and weekends almost always. So I respect this. Absolutely. We’ll talk about some of the ways that we’re going to leverage automations to get back to those folks. It doesn’t always have to be a call. It just has to be a contact within the first five minutes to increase the likelihood that we can have a future conversation at a reasonable hour of the day. This is a great question, but the next one is when to follow up. So, I get a lead — like my friend Scott here said — at 10:00 p.m. on Saturday night. And now I’ve maybe got a response that goes out to them. I’ve got to know when the best time is to try to reach back out to that person. I think this is contrary to popular belief. Most of the time we will frontload our meetings. We try to get energy going at the very beginning of the week and we try to contact people on Monday and Tuesday. And I actually see Monday disproportionately a lot. As someone who is actively leading a team of three business development representatives here at Kicksite, if there’s one lesson I hope they’ve learned from me — please, for the love of my weekend, stop booking people to talk with me on Monday. Because anecdotally, I have to tell you all, the no-show rate for folks on those Monday meetings is like 3 to 1. It’s not even close. There is an entire weekend — 72 hours of potential distractions — that will get in the way of you and that person’s appointment. So, in actuality, if you want to have higher than average contact rates for when to follow up and when to do your dedicated call blitzes and try to get in contact with folks, it’s the middle of the week. It’s the boring days. Wednesday and Thursdays will always end up being better. That’s exactly right, Scott. The lead might have still come in on Saturday night at 10 p.m. Instant response back confirming, “We’ve received your info. It matters to us and we’re going to give you a call back from this number.” So, they’re potentially expecting it now. We also know that if someone fills out an online lead they might be shopping now, so they might also be looking at other academies. This is the first way for you to establish that you’re going to reach back at a time that’s reasonable for them. And there’s one other common misnomer here. I know people are in good moods on Friday. I like to do demos on Friday. I like to call people on Friday. It always feels good, but it is still outshined by the middle of the week contact rates. Wednesdays and Thursdays should be the days that you are scheduling the bulk of your outreach campaigns. That is not just for when you might be scheduling your emails, but when you’re sitting down to take 30 minutes to call through a list of leads — do it on those days. Compare your results. Let us know what you think. I think you’re going to get in contact with more folks. But then it’s a question of when. So, I know the days, but there are 24 hours in my day — I need to know when to reach back out to those folks. I think it’s only fair to say: if they submitted a lead to you at 10 p.m., you don’t have to call them back at 10 p.m. on Wednesday just to see what that feels like. Don’t do that. That’s bad advice. You’re not going to have very good contact rates. In actuality, if you want to get a hold of them — particularly for our martial arts industry, and this one is caveated a little bit with a focus on martial arts — 4 to 5:00 p.m. in your time zone. Almost 165% increase in first-attempt calls answered. We know why. You don’t have to think very much about your own personal lives to know why. This is oftentimes when people will start winding down at work a little bit. And we know a lot of parents now are having to think about what they can do because the kids are off school usually at 3:00 p.m. And now we’re into routine mode — running errands, shuttling people, traffic. So that to me is the ideal time. Now I’ve broken from this every now and then as well. I do like to try to start the day strong too. I think there could also be significant evidence to suggest that if you’re calling now — I never go before 8 a.m. as a personal rule, and again time zone specific because I work with folks all across the world — we’re in 32 different countries — but I’ll never try to contact someone before 8 a.m. That 8 to 10 window has been successful for me, and if not, then it’s the evenings when people are into their routine. Is an email response as effective? You could probably answer your own question there. Absolutely not. This is a personal sport. We know that your ability to carry the efficacy of your academy — how awesome it is — is always going to be better communicated through the phone. However, I would say that it is still a prime way to prime the pump. An email response that is highly visual and shows off your stuff is always better than nothing. So it cascades like this — phone at the top of the hierarchy, email and text after that — always better than simply waiting for the lead to try to re-engage with you. I’ve got one other thing to share with you because this is important. How many times do you all follow up with a lead? There are so many different perspectives on this. I’ve worked with academies now for five-plus years at Kicksite and I hear so much. I’m curious to see on the poll how many times you all might gut-check and try to reach out to a lead.

We got the poll showing up. Hannah, see there we go. Yeah, it should now launch into the responses.

Being sensitive to our time here today — I never want to hold anyone hostage — but a little bit more info to bear with us. I had a feeling. This is not a bad thing. Don’t get us wrong. This is not a finger-wagging session telling people that what they’ve been doing to grow their academies is wrong. I already admire so many of you and the businesses that you build and the skills that you’re teaching people, but this is definitely the trend. Three strikes and you’re out. I see it all the time. Old school baseball mentality. If there is one other thing that I encourage you to try to break with throughout the rest of the presentation, it is to do more outreach. This sounds probably ridiculous to some of you that are tried and true on your three contact attempts, but you actually have a 70 to 90% likelihood to get in contact with that lead after the sixth contact attempt. Why don’t we do it? Because oftentimes we think we’re being rude or pushy or that if they wanted to be here they would have already responded. I couldn’t agree with Greg more here — they need the reminders. And here’s the thing. What I know about so many of you on the call right now and so many of you watching the recording is that you believe in your school. You know what you’re teaching them is valuable — from a self-defense standpoint, from a character development standpoint, from a fitness standpoint — it doesn’t matter. I know you believe in it. I know that you’re not out here just to sell someone something that you don’t think has any value. If you hold that commitment very strong in your head and in your heart every time that you reach out to folks, those negative self-talk voices that are telling you that reaching out for the fifth or sixth time is intrusive will disappear. If you know you’re reaching out to help because they said they were interested and you are the best academy to help them achieve their goals, that negative self-talk will diminish — and watch as your contact rates increase. It’s astounding. I will feel like I’m chasing sometimes when someone submitted a demo into Kicksite and I’m reaching out — calling, texting, emailing — potentially for the sixth, seventh, or eighth time. But what that also communicates about me and our brand is persistence and how much we care about our sport. This is subtle and it’s almost unconscious, but I promise you, the person that answers on the other side of the phone is not going to say, “How dare you continue to call me?” You know what they’re really likely to say? “Thank you for continuing to follow up. I’ve been so busy.” And then you’re already one foot in the door because you’re doing something that most people won’t. If you make that sixth or seventh or eighth call, you are edging out the competition. You are in the top 5% of academies and sales professionals who take themselves seriously enough to reach out. This is a good modifier question. I don’t believe in the three-no system. You might have seen this — it’s very common and trending. Door-to-door people will knock on your door and say, “Ma’am, I’m just here to sell you solar and you’re going to have to pay a bill one way or the other and I think we’re going to save you.” And then no — that’s the first one. “Oh, I can understand, but are you sure you wouldn’t want to schedule another appointment?” No is the second one. And then by the time you get to that third no, there’s some hostility going on. Your brand is tarnished at that point. Does not matter how much more you might be able to save the person on their bill or whatever. So, I don’t really wait until I get a no. I’m going to make those six to ten contact attempts. After that, I think it’s okay to back down a little bit and to maybe put them on just some residual nurturing campaign where I might try to call once a month on a blitz when I have a little bit of free time and I’m going to let email and text do a little bit more of the work at that point. But I mean this to you all right now — if you can differentiate yourselves from the rest of the sales profession and make those extra attempts, you’re doing something that others won’t and your likelihood of getting in contact with those folks will go through the roof. It’s studied, it’s proven, Harvard published it. But one of the things that we know we need to focus on a little bit more now is — okay, are there some systems to help out with some of this? Because we’ve acknowledged it already — we’re very busy as owners. We have a lot of things going on. Just to recap with you all: most of us are not even following up with 100% of our leads. We’re leaving 30% on the table, judging them by the email address they’re using. Responding in the first five minutes increases your likelihood to get in contact with them sevenfold. Middle of the week is the best time, and evenings are better than mornings — 4 to 5:00 p.m. Keep track of how many times you’re following up with folks and know that sometimes you’ve got to go the distance. Six to seven contact attempts. And if you continue to do that with consistency — which Hannah kind of labels on the slide — if you stay consistent, you’ll edge out the competition.

There are ways to use programs like ours to try to help this lead generation. It can’t be all on you and your fingers and your phone every single time. You’ve got to leverage some help. And this is one area where we think we might break with some of the trends in the industry, because every day now I get a new question about AI and whether you should hire a concierge service and should someone else be calling your leads. Look, I can understand the attractiveness of some of those trends, but the one thing that I will always hold true to myself as someone who spends time working in and on your businesses is that there is no one that will ever carry the torch as strongly as you. You all probably know the lesson more than me. It is so hard to hire people that you trust and will buy into your brand as much as you do. When you find them, pay them as much as you possibly can, because they will do everything for you and you want to retain those employees. They are, I promise you, really hard to come by. But there are some automations — I don’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater on technology. I am after all at a tech company here. So, there are some ways to help. Inside of our software alone, the very first thing we’re going to do is speed. We are going to notify you as fast as we can about a lead submission — whether that is on your own website that you’ve connected your software to, whether that’s a website that we had the privilege of building for you, or whether that’s on some of the new ads that Hannah just launched into the internet for you. We turn on Quick Connect as a complimentary feature. We did not charge for this as we launched it so that we can instantly send an email and a text message to the account admin. Instantly from your phone, you say, “Hey, Mike, Hannah’s interested. Here’s her information.” And with one click, I could be dialing her in the first five minutes. Game on. We are potentially already talking. I’m doing something that most of the competition isn’t doing — instantly notifying you. And us footing the bill for that text message was important enough to do for our users. Got to be fast at the response. After that, we know that we can’t always do it ourselves. Most of you spend most of your time teaching on the mats and your time is arguably very, very valuable there. This is something that employees can do — the call blitzes and the reaching out and the appointment setting. I would always prefer for it to come from inside the house, someone that you trust and are employing, rather than someone you’re hiring and trusting to take it as seriously as you do. But if you do, inside of Kicksite, you even have the opportunity to not just have as many employees as you want — we’ve never been the type of company to charge you for employees. You can designate custom permissions and you can set tasks and appointment reminders for your staff. So, if you initially got the lead, contacted them, no response, I’m setting a task for my employee to try to call them on Wednesday or Thursday, 4 to 5:00 p.m. — the times that I know statistically are the most likely to get in contact with that person and set up a free trial or an appointment. This also allows you visibility into how much your staff is doing those tasks, right? You get to see their efficiency, and that can help you evaluate and do some performance improvement for your staff because they are learning just as much as you all are here today.

There is something new in the Kicksite software that I hope many of you have already seen. It’s fairly hot off the presses, but we built from the ground up a brand new kanban-style prospecting section that is as modern as it gets. And it works with some of the best and brightest digital marketing solutions that are out there contemporarily. This is every bit as strong as something like Go High Level. Your ability to make custom stages, to drag and drop, to look at them in a list view, to schedule specific times and ways — even moving someone from a lead to an appointment brings up the auto appointment scheduler. There was so much — I don’t want to say blood, sweat, and tears, but sometimes it feels like that — when it came to building this thing. So much insight from experts, not just from you all as academy owners, but also from experts like Hannah, to know what we need to visualize our leads better. It’s night and day. Rance, I couldn’t be more proud of the prospect section. But there’s a lot more that’s coming down the road with this as well because now that we’ve given you the ability to create custom stages, we will eventually build in the ability to have custom automations for those stages. A hot lead gets different communication than a warm lead, and a trial student gets different communication than post-trial. Those nuances can matter and make a difference. Any opportunity for you to tailor your communications, we will do. In fact, that even came up in some of the ways that we allow you to communicate with your members through Kicksite. So, we do already have marketing automations — or communications built within Kicksite. We call these our fancy term — message flows. They’re functionally a drip campaign, right? They allow you to create a whole sequence or cadence of emails and text messages to go out according to a period of time until usually one of two things happens: the person unsubscribes because they are tired of hearing from you and they’ve disqualified themselves, or they sign up or take an action — they move out of a lead or trial status into something else, in which case they would no longer continue to get those redundant messages. This capability already exists, but there’s also something on the horizon that we are very excited to launch for you all. We will build in two-way texting inside of Kicksite. We have already since 2007 been providing you all complimentary texting. We have footed the bill for every one of our customers’ outbound text messages. And this is incredibly expensive, but it is something that we felt indebted to do because we know how valuable texting can be for folks. It is notches above email, but lower than calls. So now we will allow you to do two-way texting from that private Twilio number inside of your Kicksite account to handle things like lead nurturing and true back-and-forth conversations that are all inside of the program. And we can’t wait to help launch this for you all. It was feedback and another instance of you asked and we listened. And it’s going to be an incredible feature. I’ve already got to see some of the mocks and testing. It’s coming, you all. All right, that’s a decent amount of talking from me about different ways to do sales. And I’ve kept you captive here for a little bit before we launch into a little bit of last Q&A with folks. Any questions, any comments on any of the sales process type stuff and my needy, nerdy, geeky ideas about how to follow up with folks?

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HANNAH:

I will just say, kind of in relation to what you’re talking about with our new prospect section uplift — I will say with all my marketing clients, it has just been a game changer being able to organize your leads from hot to warm and customizing your stages, not just for a lead, but for when they came in for a trial or they converted into a student — and having a source of exactly where they came from, whether that was a website or social media. It’s just been super huge. And even adding notes into your prospects as well as to what your conversations were like is easy for us to see too how those leads are working for you. So, I will say I’ve gotten a lot of feedback from that and it’s been amazing for a lot of our clients.

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MIKE:

It’s deserved. It happened with a lot of your expertise as well, getting to see other systems and what people are using. We even had some folks in the chat talk about using Go High Level and I hope you give us an apples-to-apples comparison — check that prospect section back in Kicksite and just see, because eventually that is one of the north stars that we’re using to help continue to develop the program. I always like to leave a little bit of time for questions. We zoomed through some of that part here today and you could tell no doubt the amount of caffeine and adrenaline and seriousness that Hannah and I have when it comes to talking about some of this stuff. We take it really seriously. I’m happy to share these. I hope some of them were new for you all. Maybe not any big proprietary secrets or anything, but as we’re thinking about maybe any last questions that come through — I did want to start just at this moment by thanking you all for attending live and participating in the chat or asking us questions or watching the recording. If you’re watching from home right now, thank you for lasting this long. It’s been super nice to humble ourselves and sit back in the chair of an academy owner and think about all the things you all have to go through. So, absolutely, as a reminder, we’ll send out a recording of the whole presentation here today. And I wanted to say thanks to Hannah as well for coming in here today and doing the presentation. She’s the first person that I thought of to be able to help work with. I have spent a lot of time working with her now knowing that there are some trends in digital marketing that I think that we’re a little ahead of the curve on. There are some stagnant ways to market your academy that are still going on academy to academy. All I do is spend my time working with new schools or working with folks that are switching from one program to Kicksite. And she’s really been instrumental in helping us think in a really modern way about how to market gyms. There are generational things to think about — if we are of a particular age and generation, who are we really marketing toward and does that change the form of the content? I think absolutely. Hannah has been instrumental in helping me take my millennial glasses off for a second and sometimes looking at how other generations — younger or older — would view this type of ad. And then one of the other things that I just credit you for so much is that we know there probably isn’t full gender parity in our martial arts academies. It is the future of our sport — whether it is karate, taekwondo and some of the traditional martial arts, or whether it’s jiu-jitsu and wrestling. There is a market shift happening and knowing early on from experts like Hannah how to effectively market toward women — in a way that isn’t the same stagnant techniques we’ve seen all the time, like one free self-defense seminar playing on constant fear tactics — this is not the end-all-be-all answer for digital marketing toward women. And I’ve already seen some amazing stuff she’s doing to help enlighten different folks about that. So, I really do — Amina, thank you so much for joining us here today, Hannah, and sharing some of those tactics and techniques for us.

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HANNAH:

Yeah, for sure. Thanks for having me. Any last questions?

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MIKE:

It looks like as we do a last-minute review here, we’re getting a lot of thank-yous. We’re getting some folks dropping off. Of course, the video’s going out to folks. There is a good question here — the effective flow of stages. We come pre-prescribed in Kicksite. We give you I think three, but we’ve always thought about it that way — just lead, appointment, trial — it’s very linear. I would definitely add at least one to that no matter what: post-trial. Most people will tell me if I have someone come in for a trial, I’m 99.9% likely to sign them up. Like some people are very, very proud of their close rates. You should be — it’s fantastic. It really is a testament to you if that number is true. I think it’s valuable to at least have one of those post-trial categories as well, because if they don’t sign up on the spot, they are still as hot a lead as they’re ever going to be. I also think it might be valuable — Hannah, let me pick your brain — instead of just “lead,” sometimes I see folks who create another column like “qualified lead.” So that might be: now I got in contact with them, I talked with them, and I moved them to a slightly elevated status. Is that something you’ve seen or you might use or recommend?

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HANNAH:

Yeah, I would — I’ve seen people who, with a few responses or at least having a conversation, who are actually interested in the program, move them to “qualified.” Maybe they had conversations with them and they’re out of budget or it’s not what they’re looking for — those would stay in cold. So yeah, “qualified” is definitely something I’ve seen pretty frequently.

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MIKE:

Yeah, there are a whole host — we could host a whole webinar just on dealing with objections, the things that you all end up hearing: not the right time, too expensive, some of those different details. We could lead a whole other kind of seminar just on that fact. But that might be one of the most important questions here. That’s what I would kind of build in my Kicksite account when I eventually open up a gym. It would probably be like lead, qualified, appointment, trial, post-trial. Not too many — we’re not getting too granular because then you obscure your view. But that might be the motto. Some of the other questions about integrations and some of those — absolutely, always happy to help out with. Remember, if you haven’t had contact with anyone at Kicksite here recently, we always do human support — reach out to support@kicksite.net. We can help guide you through. We’re proud to have made it an area where you don’t get charged extra to have the software talking to your website and vice versa. Thank you all so much for the time here today. You’ve given us a diligent hour. You have stayed really, really active in the chat. I’ve learned a little bit from you all as much as I hope you have learned from us. Thank you to Hannah. Thanks for your participation. See you all for the next one.

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HANNAH:

Thank you guys. Bye everybody.