213: Lead Nurturing Masterclass with Dustin Bogle

07
Jun

Dustin Bogle, the CEO of Gym Reinforcements, a company that helps gym owners hire, recruit, and train high-level virtual assistants so that gyms can create the impact they were destined to make. We explore how Dustin’s system supports gym and business owners, focusing on strategic lead nurturing with platforms like GoHighLevel, while also offering advice on recruiting skilled virtual assistants in the Philippines and optimizing online ads for engagement.

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Lead Nurturing Masterclass with Dustin Bogle

Good day, dear listeners, Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast and my guest today is Dustin Bogle, the CEO of Gym Reinforcements, a company that helps gym owners hire, recruit, and train high-level virtual assistants so that gyms can create the impact they were destined to make in the first place. Dustin, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here, Steve, and hope I can add as much value as possible to the audience, man, so let’s do it.

Well, hope is not a strategy. I think we’ve got some good plans here, and we’re just going to follow them.

I agree.

So let’s start with how you got into this business, because, kind of no pun intended, but it boggles my mind that someone would get into business to help their competitors. How did you come up with this idea of helping other gym owners and what was that idea?

Yeah, so quick little back story. I’ve been in fitness 20 years and I’ve been a gym owner for 12 years and across that time, I went to a lot of events and I started really networking with a lot of gym owners. We’d get on calls, we’d swap stories and the number one issue that I heard many of them say was around this lead generation problem. That I can’t get enough leads, I can’t get enough buyers, and this is a major pain point. And I knew because I was in the trenches with them. And so, yeah, to your point, could I just keep focusing on my gyms and not really helping them? But I don’t know, almost that thought process was foreign to me. So I’m a pretty optimistic team, like I guess you could call it kumbaya type of guy, like we’ll all be friends, everything will be all right. And then it’s only once you get into the battle with people, you find out they had a different way that they wanted to do things, or they didn’t think it would go this way. And then, you know, the rubber meets the road. And so, it was one of those things that like, I just got into fitness because I enjoy helping people. I never, you know, yes, I want to make money. I want to provide for my family, but like I just thoroughly get joy from helping people, whether I’ll get something from it or not. So I’d take calls with a lot of owners and just give advice, and that’s it, so we’re done. It’s like, yeah, just no ulterior motive, just want to help you out. And so, obviously, at some point, we gotta charge because we have bills to pay. And so the reason for wanting to help other gym owners is because that was my knack. I was always good at marketing. After many years of doing the coaching on the floor, I started to fall out of love with it, and I really just wanted to learn more and more about business. And so I started to just see that marketing and sales is what drives every business, not just mine, every business. Like that is the lifeblood that, you know, keeps the machine going. And so I was like, okay, I’m good at that. It’s very important. I can charge a fair amount of money. Like all the boxes are checked. I’m going to go all in on that.

That’s great. So, you basically elevated yourself from just running your gym or even more so from helping people with their fitness and figuring out what kind of exercises and diets work for them and got into helping other business owners. And one of the areas that you highlighted was really this idea of the follow-up and how important that is and why it falls through the cracks. So can you talk a little bit about why that is important, why follow-up is important, and then maybe share with our listeners about your fortune follow-up system that you created along the way?

Yeah, it’s funny, Steve, because a lot of people, when they trace back their life, they see it’s like one problem leads to the next. So like, no, problems don’t go away. They’re almost like weeds. You rip one up and two more pop up, right? And so, it’s like, you say with fitness, what workout should I do? Then you figure that out and you’re like, well, what nutrition should go with that? And then how much sleep and recovery should I get? And what about supplements? And so, it leads you on this life journey. Share on X

And then in business it is the same thing. So like problem number one was lead gen. And then what happens when I flood the gym with leads and they’re not getting sales? Well, the next problem logically is lead nurture. And so, that’s why I paired those two together, because we start where most agencies stop. They just get you leads and then they call it a day. And they don’t really follow the experience after that. They kind of let the owner carry the weight. So first, I created a system that I taught to owners. Then I built it into our service where it was part of what we do for owners. So in any kind of problem, you have those two options. I can solve it myself or I can hire some experts to come in and fix it, whether it’s changing your oil in your car or fixing something around the house to problems in your business. And so, when it came to the lead nurture, I saw that there were really just four places that the person, if they spent their time and energy got the biggest return. I could probably come up with a hundred ways to lead nurture, but these were the four predominant ones that led to the most money being collected. And it was essentially built into a system I call the fortune follow-up system, because we’ve all heard that, right? The fortunes and the follow-up. Share on X

So, what are these steps? What are these four steps or these four elements that make up this fortune follow-up system?

Yeah, I’ll definitely give them to the listeners, so this is a good time for note-taking. But most people are running paid ads. Every now and then I come across a business and they’re not running any ads, they operate just off of referrals and they’re doing fine. That’s great. It’s almost foreign to me, because even if you are getting just referrals, why not pour paid ads and get even more, but maybe they can’t sustain that growth. But I like to start there. You’re getting paid ads. I recommend taking people through a system I call the five by two follow-up system, and so that means in the first five days they opt in, you reach out to them twice a day. So that’s ten contacts, and so my favorite is to text them and to call them every day in that first five days. And the reason being is that is when they are at their peak of pain and they’re ready to buy your solution, it’s just breaking through the noise. Cuz today’s phones, people, I joke, I say they’re ringing, dinging, zinging, and pinging. And so essentially, there’s notifications from social media, there’s text, there’s emails, there’s phone calls. And so it’s a very noisy device for most people’s life.

So you gotta break through, which means doing more reach outs. Share on X

And also being creative, but essentially that is like industry specific. You gotta decide what is the actual wording. I’m not gonna sit here and write it for you, but just know the system is what makes it work, that you’re reaching out twice a day for five days. That’s my recommendation with your new leads. The second system in there is called the database dynamite. So sadly, I see so many business owners have a database of leads, thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, and it’s just collecting cobwebs. They have not reached out to them in months, sometimes years, and they just don’t know what would be the system for that. So, the easy one that I share is to send a text or email blast to 10% of your database. Sometimes if someone’s over 10,000, I even reduce it to 5%. But most business owners on this call probably are below 10,000 leads. So it’d be a 10% text blast a day. So if somebody had 5,000 leads, they’re gonna text 500 of them on Monday, and then they’re gonna do another 500 on Tuesday, just work their way through the list. The way the cadence works out is you get through your whole list in two weeks. So when you repeat it, you’re gonna go through it every two months. But what that requires you as the person who’s designing the scripts or your sales rep is think of new creative ways to reach out to them. You don’t want to write it the same way, like, hey, I’m just following up. Hey, I’m just circling back. I just want to check in. People get really annoyed by that, and you’re going to get, like, I call it wrongful unsubscribes. Like, they probably would have never unsubscribed, but because you kind of did it in a really boring way, they’re just doing it because it’s annoying. But if you say, hey, I got this lead magnet. Do you want this? Or, hey, are you able to hop on a phone call? Is today or tomorrow better? And just different reasons to talk to people. But obviously, they’re all leading to the same outcome, which is I wanna get on a call with you and I wanna sell you our program. That’s the database dynamite. And I mean, I’ve seen people explode their sales just by working their database. The third in the fortune follow-up system is the LTV champion. And so essentially, that’s what all businesses are fighting for, this championship, is who can have the longest lifetime customer value and who can increase their LTV to the highest amount.

And that's the winning combos, like getting the most out of somebody and making them stay a long time. Share on X

So essentially, it starts with you doing some data mining and figuring out what is my current LTV? What is the average lifetime that someone stays and what is their average value? And first, you can’t know how to beat it until you know what you’re currently at. So I would really urge everyone who’s listening to this to go find out your current LTV and that way you know that and now you know what to beat. But essentially the goal is to get it so that 30% of your customers are in your highest tier program. Again, a lot of people don’t have a tier two, they only offer a tier one service, which is fine, you need to focus and have less offers. But once you feel like you’re in a stable amount of customers, you should unlock a tier two, which again, think of my situation. What’s the next problem they encounter? So, I started tier one marketing, tier two marketing and sales rep, right? And so, it’s like, that is what we did. So even in my fitness experience, boot camp, $150 a month, pretty affordable for the average person. They say I need the next level, we gave them small group personal training, and that’s more double the price, it’s $300 a month. So, when you got like 30% of your customers are near tier two, you are an LTV champion, you’re doing a great job. The fourth and final part of this follow-up system, and by the way, how does that apply? I didn’t mention this. It’s following up with your members to spend more money. Like you can do follow up externally, that’s more of an internal follow up. A lot of people will just sell them and then they’ll be happy. And they’re like, I don’t want to bother them, they already bought my service. But listen to them, what are their problems they’re encountering now that they’re in your service and create a paid path to get them there, with more done for your resources. But the fourth and final one, it’s called the comeback campaign. And so, this leg is essentially reaching out to all your past customers. So this is different than your database. Your database would be leads who never bought from you. They opted in and they never made it to client or customer status. The comeback campaign is people who have been doing business with you in the past. They were on a reoccurring membership. They were a client and then they canceled. So, it’s coming up with creative ways to get them to come back. And the beauty is they can skip, if you have like a trial offer, they can skip that and go right back into membership. And so, you gotta think of ways to get them back in. So in fitness, I’ll use this as an example, we had a 90s theme workout. We had 90s music and everyone’s dressing up like the 90s.

We decorated the gym and we said, we want you to be there. Share on X

Even though you’re not a customer anymore, you were, but we wanna pack the house and we want you to come in and enjoy this workout on the house. And my team went around and said, man, it was so good seeing you here. Did you enjoy the workout? What do you say, you wanna get your membership going again? Why not? You know, like today was a blast. And so, just a very casual conversation. Each location got half of the people to get their membership activated again, that came back for this free class. So, you know, you would get ten people in five. All it took was putting some time and intentionality behind a cool comeback reason. And that’s it, you just need a reason to converse with people that’s not straight to an offer. Like that was like a bridge, right? Like we’re just gonna hang out and then I’m gonna make an offer. So invite them to a webinar, invite them to a Zoom, right? Like invite them to get something first and then make them an offer to come back. So, that’s the four layers of the fortune follow-up system kind of broken down in detail.

That’s fantastic. So even though we had the pre-interview, I’m still taking notes because you’ve got so many good nuggets. Excellent. This is really a great system. I can’t believe that if someone just adopts this as you describe it, even without hiring you, I can’t imagine that they will not get more customers and actually get a lot of value out of it. So one area that really intrigued me, which you talked about, was that you are using outsourced people, virtual assistants, that you actually help train them for people, and then they can even close sales of gym memberships, which is surprising because the conventional thing is that in the Philippines, you’ve got great customer service people, but sales is not necessarily their strong suits, and you are actually identifying salespeople there. So what is your process? How do you find sales talent there and what does it take to hire these people?

Yeah, I think it all just comes down to just like way of thinking, mindset. And so let’s pretend we flipped it. Let’s say you lived in Japan or somewhere in Asia and you were going to come to the US and you can’t find any good people, but you’re paying minimum wage, right? You’re paying $10, $12 an hour, whatever that state allows. And then let’s pretend that this Japanese business owner goes up to an American business owner and says, man, I can’t find any good people. I’m paying $10 an hour, but they just keep dropping the ball. I can’t find any high level talent. What’s going on? You’d say, well, dummy, it’s the amount you’re paying. If you go to 60 grand a year, 100 grand a year, 200 grand a year, you will find amazing people and they will completely revolutionize your business. I say the same thing to recruit in the Philippines. Most people only go there with the mindset, I’m gonna hire the lowest cost people. Basically, their version of fast food workers. I’m gonna hire someone for four, five, $6 an hour. So I challenge the listeners, why not post something for 12, 15, $20 an hour in the Philippines and see the remarkable talent you get. I would say it’s the equivalent of whatever number you put in, it’s the equivalent of triple in the US. So if you put in a $10 employee, you’re gonna probably see $30 comparison employees here in the US. So, it’s a savings on wages. And I also say you gotta get in while the going’s hot because America is growing the Philippines to being an emerging economy, right? We know all the third world countries, they don’t have running water, it’s terrible. And then we know the top countries that have the highest economies. Well, in the middle is emerging economies, and that’s where the Philippines is right now. People are building homes, people are buying cars. It is growing because so much American money is going to those people and growing it, which is great for them. And just so you guys know, the average, their country’s minimum wage is $8 a day, US. So when you come in, you say $8 an hour, they’re jumping for joy. They hit the lottery, and they’re highly skilled and qualified. They’re highly educated, many of them went to college. Great English speaking, it’s taught in the schools, so you kind of don’t even have to take time to do that. And they’re very tech savvy, because almost nobody works in the Philippines locally. They all work remotely, so it’s like cultural. You gotta learn how to use a computer and all the softwares that exist. So when you tap into that jump start, you might not even run that in the US. If you got somebody who was a generation behind, they’re like, you’re gonna have to show me how to do this Zoom thing. I’ve never done it. And now there’s all this catch up, and they’re more expensive. So you’re like, why am I wasting this? So I would say it’s the frame of thinking of what the person’s posting compensation. And then also challenge your thinking about higher level roles. Like don’t think it’s just for entry level workers, just like it’s not here in the US. Like, hey, can I get an executive assistant over there? Could I find a C-suite person? Can I find a CMO? Like, absolutely. And there’s some really amazing people who work with massive companies. We had someone on our team that was an EA within Facebook. And so it’s like they were just one Management level below Zuckerberg and so it’s like holy cow. Can you imagine the processes and SOPs? They got exposed to that we now get to absorb into our business and that’s exactly what they brought. They started challenging us. Why do you guys do things like this? And that’s what us as business owners, sometimes we try to figure out how to grow and I would challenge you go find someone else. That’s got all of it in their brain and bring them in and just let get out of the way and let them make your business better and that’s what you would find in the Philippines for pennies on the dollar.

Yeah, I think Steve Jobs said something like you don’t hire good people to tell them what to do but you hire good people so that they can tell you how to do things and what to do. There you go. It sounds like you’re doing that. I also experienced that I’ve got some colleagues who are in the Philippines and they’re really savvy, tech savvy. They use AI tools. They are using all the state of the art technologies and they really are driven and they want to get things done and they’re excited about a good mission. They want to be part of it and they do a good job. I was not surprised about that, or at least I am no longer surprised about that. But what I’m still surprised about is the sales talent that you can find because sales is also cultural. You know, in America, we are very direct. We go for the clothes. It’s okay. It’s much more accepted. And they take the rejection, that’s okay. Rejection is okay. Whereas in some cultures, like in the Philippines, rejection is very embarrassing. It’s not okay. So how do you get around this problem?

Yeah, it does take quite a bit of filtering. I think in December, my team told me when we went through 500 applicants and we invited three or four people to join our team. So, there is definitely still a lot of groundwork on our end, but that’s what we’re saving our customers from having to do. Like our gym owners don’t have to go and go through hundreds of interviews to find an awesome person. We’ll do that for them. But yeah, where that really shows up the most, like it does depend, Steve, if it’s a voice role or a non-voice role. So if it’s voice, we screen for, do they sound too ethnic, do they got too thick of an accent? Like they’re gonna get hung up on left and right. We’re just not gonna invite them to join our team as a phone sales rep. But where they would never need to talk to someone is if it’s a non-voice role, it’s an appointment setter, they’re just texting and emailing. And they have wonderful grammar, like welcome to the team, we’ll find you a role as a setter. You just can’t be a closer. A closer, we want someone that is not a newbie because we don’t have time to train newbies, they have to have previous sales experience. So how do we find them? We poach them from AT&T and Travelocity and all these other companies that have an amazing sales experience and training. And then we just say, hey, are you kind of sick of being lost in the corporate world, not being seen. Would you like more higher up potential that you are not seeing in your current company, come on over and work with us. So it’s really important in our ads that we put senior sales rep, experienced sales rep. And that way we don’t have to do a lot of digging through people. But even then, still, we find that sometimes they could call themselves a sales rep, but they were totally just an inbound order taker. So, they work for Apple, there’s no sales needed. Like, it’s just get the credit card and run the card for the iPad or the new, you know, headset. Like, you’re not selling. Selling, you know, is really where you’re doing outbound and you have to convince the person to buy. And so, that’s what we have to delineate, is like, who is an inbound sales rep and who is an outbound? Outbound are the better ones. They’re hungrier and they know how to turn a cold lead into a sale where inbound is basically picking up the phone accepting orders.

That’s absolutely right. So there are all these people, I mean, on some of these platforms, there are millions of people literally on it. So you put a post up and you’ve got 200 applicants within 48 hours. It’s pretty crazy. So, let’s talk about some of the technologies that go into your fortune follow-up system. So, what other latest technologies to help you texting with messaging and making these campaigns like the 10% a day campaign? What kind of technologies do you use for that?

I have not found a better tool than GoHighLevel. I think it’s got everything that you need built in. You can do drips. What I didn’t like a lot about other texting platforms is basically you got to go in and manually select the leads that will get the text, or you just gotta blast the whole list. What GoHighLevel allows to do is a drip. So, I can select my whole list, but I can say only text 100 of them per hour, and that way it’ll just automatically spread it out over two weeks. I don’t have to manually do that. So that’s been a game changer. And then you can build funnels, you can build forms. So, to me it’s an all-in-one, and it was built, in my opinion, by somebody with a marketing and sales brain, versus a lot of CRMs, they’re built more with the operational brain. They’re worried about keeping things organized, or task management, or team communication, which is great, but I like a CRM that’s got good marketing and sales tools built into it. So, that’s the main one we use, and then in terms of ads, it’s definitely gonna be Facebook ads, we’re dabbling in TikTok ads. And then if for whatever reason the customer’s really resistant against GoHighLevel, they got their own CRM. There is a bridging tool called Zapier, where you can take information from your ads and zap it into their CRM. And so that works great. But honestly, man, like we like to keep our software stack pretty lean. We make a Slack channel for every customer, they get their own dedicated Slack channel, they got their direct, their digital marketer in there. If they do have a sales rep, they’re in there too. So, both services can talk to one another and the owner has eyes on it. And that’s one of the things people like about us is that their marketing and their sales is under one roof. Otherwise, they gotta hire a marketing agency and hire their own rep or they might even hire a sales agency. And they’re now being pinged between the two. So you kinda get both and then we GoHighLevel so we can build out your whole automation on the back end as well. But that’s it.

We feel like, you know, try to keep the software stack pretty lean. Share on X

That is great. So essentially, you take care of finding the people, training them, both marketing and sales, and you provide the technology. So it’s kind of a plug and play system for gym owners?

Yep, exactly.

That is great. So, before we go to the end and ask you how people can contact you, who would like to learn more, I’d really like to ask about you. What are your plans? So, what is it that you’re working on right now that most excites you going forward?

Yes, I think there’s a couple things. Number one, we’re just dabbling into being more broad and just working with service-based industries in general. So, we have a basketball, a kids basketball camp, we have a dog grooming, landscaping, and then even a climbing kind of gym, like a rock climbing. So it’s like we’re getting outside of just your normal fitness gym and we’re starting to work with other service, so we can kind of test our skills as like, hey, does this fortune follow-up system apply to the dog groomer, the landscaper? And so far, it does. Like people are people, it’s just changing the offer and really identifying the main pain point the business solves, like with fitness, it’s a given, people want to lose unwanted pounds.

Every business has one main pain point that you solve. Share on X

And so, if you start listening to what your customers are saying on sales calls, why they bought from you, or why they review you, try to really identify that because that’s what you want to use in your marketing and in your sales process is keep hitting that pain point over and over again. And so essentially, that’s something I’m excited about. We’re just going deeper and to go high level. We’re hiring specialists to literally be like consultants and show us things we don’t know. And we want to just, in a perfect world, automate more and more of it further into the future. Go beyond the first month and even have possibly AI, if it can at least sound as human as possible, engage with customers right when they opt in. So, that’s something as well. And then finally, I’d say it’s TikTok ads. For whatever reason, more and more people are telling me that the leads they get on there seem to be more engaged. Like they actually reply to texts, they actually get on phone calls. It just feels like more real people that actually are interested in your stuff versus Facebook, the longer and longer we’re on there, we feel like there’s just a lot of window shopping. Like people just opt in to anything and everything. And so, what we’ve changed is putting in more friction. It’s too easy to just put name, phone number, and email. Facebook auto-populates it, so we ask more qualifying questions before they can opt in. And so, the same thing you would ask on a qualifying call, I would say build that into your ads so that they have to do a little bit more work, but then you’re getting better quality leads. That’s normal when there’s an aged platform, is that more and more people are on it, yay for marketing, but boo, people, it’s too easy to opt in now. Like there’s no effort, and so then you get a lot of leads and they can be a lot of low quality leads.

That is really interesting. So you actually don’t want to make it easier to opt in, you want to make it harder to opt in. So whoever opts in, they really mean business and it’s for you to engage.

And I should be specific, that’s on the lead form ads where it’s just literally a lead form that pops up on Facebook. On a traffic ad pointing to a landing page, I think it’s okay to still do a name, phone number, email. But it’s while they’re organically searching or scrolling on Facebook and they press your button and it just pops up into a lead form. Basically Facebook will auto-populate it with your info from your Facebook account. And so it’s basically, it’s two taps. It’s press learn more, press submit, and that took no effort. And so because it’s no effort, people opt into a lot of stuff, but then they have really no intention to follow through. So that’s the one where I would add more questions to improve your quality.

Yeah, okay, so even with the fortune follow-up system, you could have people who are not worth doing and running the system on them, I guess. 

Yeah.

Yeah, that’s interesting. So if people would like to learn more, maybe they own a gym and they want those leads and they want the sales and marketing taken care of, done for you, or they have a service-based business, maybe some kind of home service or, you know, say dog walking or anything that’s an easy home service business, which the same principles might apply. So where could they go to find out more and potentially to talk to you?

Yeah, I love it. And I would actually say my kind of like freebie, no pitch that will happen. I want to help the listener build their fortune follow-up system in more detail, because I gave the main frameworks, but like, let’s talk some color and add some texture. And I enjoy learning about other businesses because that then allows us to learn what are the pain points your customers have. And that just starts us to understand that industry. So maybe if we do want to add it to our Rolodex, we feel like it is an industry we can serve. I kind of get to learn that from you by learning about the industry. Like what are the pain points? Can I come up with ad copy for that? Would we be any good? And sometimes we’re not, you know, and that’s okay. But hey, if you wanna do it, it’d be freecallwithdustin.com would be the website. And so, I’ll help you build out your fortune follow-up system and then I’m pretty active on Facebook and Instagram. I post at least daily on there. So, just search my name, Dustin Bogle. And then last but not least, if you are a gym owner, it’s gonna be more applicable to you. My book, Reinforce Your Gym on Amazon, I think it’s like $10 for the paperback. And it’s just chock full of marketing and sales tips to help you grow your business. So yeah, that’d be the best places.

That is fantastic. You really take care of your listeners. You’ve got the book, you’ve got the call, so people can just pop on a free call with you?

Yeah, yeah, no string attached, not going to pitch you. It’s a give-give, right? I’m going to help you build out your support and follow-up system, and then you’re going to give me insights to your industry just because I like to learn about other industries outside of fitness.

That sounds great. I might myself take you up on this offer.

Let’s do it, man.

All right, well, excellent really good content So, if you have leads and you want to convert more of them, here is the perfect system: the fortune follow-up system. You basically make sure that you make the most bang for the buck out of your leads and then how do you nurture, how do you recycle your past leads with the database dynamite? I love it. Then LTV, how do you make sure that 30 percent, the top tier will get the higher level offer, keep the lifetime value high for your customers, and then the comeback campaign. Let’s go back to these old past customers and let’s revive them. The 50 percent, that is pretty amazing. So thanks, Dustin, for bringing all the value on the call. And for those who are listening, as you can see, every week, we get better and better entrepreneurs on the show and lots of goodies. So make sure you bring your pen and paper to every episode going forward. Thank you, Dustin.

Thank you. Appreciate you, guys

 

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