214: Create an Irresistible VSL with Jackson Calame

10
Jun

Jackson Calame, the Founder of First Class Business, helping visionary entrepreneurs build businesses by bridging their gaps in marketing, sales, and fulfillment. We explore Jackson’s journey founding First Class Business, driven by his vision to integrate marketing, sales, and fulfillment. He shares frameworks for boosting engagement and conversion, highlighting the significance of fostering championship teams with defined career paths.

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Create an Irresistible VSL with Jackson Calame

Good day, dear listeners, Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and my guest today is Jackson Calame, the Founder of First Class Business, which is helping visionary entrepreneurs build extraordinary legacies by bridging their gaps in marketing, sales, and fulfillment. Jackson, welcome to the show.

Happy to be here, Steve.

It’s great to have you. Listen, I’m really wondering how you came up with this idea to build a consulting firm around these ideas of marketing, sales, and fulfillment. I’ve not seen this combination anywhere. How did that come about?

Oh, my gosh. Getting my butt kicked in business for 14 years and watching other business owners do the same, That’s really where it came about, seeing that there’s so few companies out there that are successful, and there’s also even fewer companies that have created harmony across the different departments and divisions. Well, what can you expect if you have a fractured company? You’re gonna get fractured results. So I saw that there needs to be more transparency, there needs to be better delegation. Thank you, E-Myth. Thank you, Strategy OS. Lots of programs have taught me what I needed to know to pull these formulas together and realize, business is not as simple as people want to make it sound.

Yeah, it is not simple, and even if it’s simple, it’s not easy.

That’s right.

Yeah, so, but it seems simple, it’s still not easy. Execution is the thing. Okay, so you start this business and what I’m very excited about is you are into creating frameworks, you’ve got a bunch of frameworks that you’re teaching your clients on your website even and one of them which I’m very curious about which is a really trending topic, video sales letters. A lot of people are recognizing the trend that people are not reading sales letters, they want to watch it and there’s YouTube and you can have your video sales letter featured there. And how do you create a video sales letter and what is your framework for creating a great video sales letter?

I love it. Well, this comes from R&D, a huge rip off and duplicate processes, right? I mean, research and development. I used to work at Video Power Marketing and Jake Larson is known as the YouTube ad expert of the world. We were running campaigns with a minimum budget of $10,000 per month on YouTube ads, and this was back in 2014. YouTube wasn’t a huge platform at the time. Everybody’s gravitating towards Facebook ads, Google ads, and even traditional advertising still. So, the fact that our clients had that type of a budget, the Vivense, the NordicTrack, John Lee Dumas Entrepreneurs on Fire. These are brands that have made it, have done amazing things. So here we go, teaching them about this process of creating irresistibility in their videos that was so attractive, it would drive people to click and buy through the process. We’re talking NordicTrack spending $15,000 on their advertising and driving more than $430,000 in sales for direct click-through attribution, not to mention all the phone calls. All the people who said “Hey, honey, shouldn’t we check this out?” And they pull it up on a computer. I’m not talking about tracking any of that. I call it the VSL revolution. You see it every day on Google now and on YouTube and on Facebook.

People talking to the camera, explaining why they're valuable, and trying to inspire people to move forward and convert. Share on X

How do you do it though? What are the recipe ingredients that make you actually irresistible versus a talking head that doesn’t know which direction to go in?

Okay, so give it to me. What is it? How do you do it?

We’re going to give it to you. We’re also going to give you guys the framework so you can take your time, look at it, and write these subjects out. We’re going to make it as easy sounding as possible. It’s going to be hard work. It is simple. There’s five key areas. Number one, grab attention. You might start your video off much like a movie where it’s like, whoa, what just happened? You want to do a pattern interrupt, typically in the beginning.

One of the ways to do this is address your audience right away. Share on X

If you’re in real estate, boom, you just hit your audience and they go, wow, okay, I’m in real estate or I’m not. You segmented, right? Or are you looking to sell your home right now? That’s another pattern interrupt. Of course, it sounds infomercially. So, you’re gonna get some people, the direct conversions to move forward, but if you can start, by the way, with branding, something that people can feel rather than just hearing your voice, that’s also helpful for the attention grabbing. Option number two or part number two, presenting the problem or the opportunity. If you can combine those two ingredients, awesome. When you call out the problem, hey, are you looking to get the maximum value out of your home? That’s a problem and an opportunity. They’re looking for it, nobody wants to look for anything. You’ve already presented exactly what they probably want, super helpful. Item number three, credibility. When you look at most of Tony Robbins’ promotional videos, one thing you’ll see in almost all of his videos, there’s hundreds of people in those videos. He doesn’t have to say, I’m Tony Robbins, I’m the best coach in the world. All those people who are present in his videos, you see him on stage in front of them, every single clip that you see like that points to his credibility. Do you have credibility in your market? You probably do, you don’t know how to showcase that. There’s lots of ways to showcase credibility and authority. Step number four, give value. I’m a big believer, Steve.

The more we give, the more we get. Share on X

I’m not talking about pretending to teach. I see people who say, hey, I’m gonna get to that in a minute, in five minutes we’ll come back to that topic and we’ll talk about these tax things, and next thing you know, this guru is talking for an hour and a half. They’ve never shared one tangible thing about that reality, that carrot, that’s going to ruin your reputation.

They talk about the problems all the time and there’s no value coming out and they just keep talking and you’re waiting for the shoe to drop, but it never does.

That’s right. And so I’m talking about giving wholeheartedly your value, being willing to give it all, put it all in line. There’s 8 billion people who might buy from you. They’re more likely to buy from you if you give abundantly because even if you open the fire hydrant, they’re still going to need water again tomorrow and the next day in the next day. So, you become the source of excellent information, excellent ideas, excellent production, ideally.

So, give value, help people move forward Share on X

and step number five, they call it the call to action. CTAs, call to action, the simplest form of a call to action, the purest in my opinion, it’s just an invitation. Invite people to move forward. Especially if these VSLs, I will say, if you go back 10 years, if you had one flagship video, you were good to go. You were the company who had a video when nobody else had a video. Nowadays, everybody has a video. And so, what do you do? Like, how do you stand out? One, again, it’s still important to get all these ingredients in, but you need a video at the intrigue stage of marketing distribution. You need a video at the attract stage. You need a video at the inspiration stage of marketing, at the invitation, at the offer, at the valuation. You’re gonna need lots of, you’re not gonna need it, but if you wanna scale, I highly recommend paying attention to the reality that your customers do not want to engage with you. They don’t want to call you on the phone. They don’t want to go to your free consultation, your free sales pitch. They want to evaluate.

The best way to help them evaluate is to reach them through audio, through visual, and help them see, feel, know who you are. Share on X

That’s a big idea. That’s right. So they want to have, it’s kind of an asynchronous sales pitch. They want to see your sales pitch, but on their own time and without you being there.

Yes.

So that they are not pushed. They feel completely relaxed, not being put on the spot to make a decision or be manipulated by the salesperson. And that’s a great way to think about these videos. It’s basically an asynchronous sales pitch.

Yep. It is the new interview process in a modern world. And it already existed, but it was amplified by the digital reality that COVID shut the world down and two things happened. Most people started to move to look at their decisions online because they had to, but two, we masked up, right? We put something over our mouth so we couldn’t really talk. People put sunglasses on so you couldn’t see their eyes and they put headphones in and headphones became an even bigger deal. They literally shut all physical realities out physically in their lives. And getting people to trend back towards hugs and high fives and handshakes and talking again, it’s an uphill battle. You’re welcome to try to force that. But if you combine the reality that, yes, as human beings, we want to belong and connect again. But first, we want to evaluate online how sincere somebody is.

Yeah, I love it. And I just realized that we launched a new website very recently and my videos were not put on it, which I had on the previous website. We have testimonials and other stuff, but this is a big piece that we shouldn’t have missed. So I just made a note that you have to put them back up. Yeah.

Go you, Steve. We’re always moving, right? Always learning.

That’s awesome. So when you say that there is a video for every stage, are these the same stages that you described in the video sales letter? So, the grab attention, present the problem/solution, credibility, create the credibility, give value, and invite call to action. Do you mean having a video for each on your website, or that’s a different sequence that you referenced there?

Great questions. Excellent question. Those five components I recommend having in every single video that you produce. If I’m a weight loss coach or I help people with their health, most health coaches aren’t weight loss coaches. They learned to niche down. This niche component can be valuable, but if I want somebody to download my free asset, they’re being asked to download the free asset by a thousand other coaches today, and tomorrow and the next day.

The best way to influence them to take that small and simple step is a quick video that honors these three principles. Share on X

Now that I’ve downloaded the free asset, and I’m going to move into the pipeline further, if you’ve got a book that you sell or you’ve got a one-on-one core program or a one-to-many program, you’re wanting to create transparency about what’s going to unfold every step of the way. And so you don’t need a video. You know, there’s plenty of great resources out there. As A Man Thinketh. That book continues to thrive to this day, even though James Allen has been dead since 1845, I believe. How? Well, it has to do with a lot of the richness of his value and the irresistible nature of how pure that book is. And at the same time, if I want to drive more people to get that book, I just did it, didn’t I? I just used a video sales letter to sell his book or Strategy OS. The goal is, really the topic is, how badly do we want to help our audience understand we are here for them.

Okay. All right. So this topic about the videos is a different idea. You said that one video has to attract, the other one inspire. I thought there was another framework behind that.

There is. There is, absolutely. So this is called the Power Marketing Funnel. I’ll use my visuals this way. The marketing funnel, if you look up on Google, the marketing funnel, you’re going to see awareness, interest, consideration, intent, evaluation, and purchase. The problem with that funnel is all of those steps are the consumer state of mind. It doesn’t tell you how to influence it. It tells you what needs to happen, but you don’t know what to do. So we’ve created what we call the power marketing funnel. And with the power marketing funnel, it helps you know that, okay, sure. Steve, I could skip right to the point. You just say, Jack, just be blunt with me. And I come up to you and I go, Steve, will you marry me? Like, what? What just happened? I’m shoving an invitation down your throat, an offer down your throat, for the rest of your life, that’s what’s happening in sales and in LinkedIn. People are saying, okay, I got these great case studies, just come and buy from me, let’s cut right to the point. And it creates toxic relationships. Relationships where people will commit immediately, but the people who are quick to commit are also just as quick to cancel. There’s no loyalty built in the process because there’s no healthy relationship established. My challenge to business owners is, if you really want to have long-term relationships and more of them, and people who actually send you referrals, not because of an affiliate cut, not because they were bribed to do so, but because they actually love the process, then we need to respect stranger danger, survival instincts. And if we approach people by intriguing them, then after intriguing them, attracting them, and then inspiring them, once they’re attracted, they open up. Now they’re like, man, I really like this Steve guy, he’s got it. Wow, look at the background he has, there’s Strategy OS. And then you decide to inspire me by maybe talking about how we relate. Now I’m much more likely to receive an invitation and say, yeah, I’ll go on your podcast. Yeah, I’ll go to your event. I really like you. You’re fun to talk to. And now I can move into the business components of invitation and making an offer, then supporting people.

And this can all happen in a video. So the time lag between these steps, there’s no maturation process or that can be accelerated so that you can fit everything into a video or is it a sequence of video. So what are we talking about? The marketing funnel, is this a long nurture campaign we’re talking about? Is it about the buyer’s journey and how you tap into the emotions and how do you kind of walk them along the process, creating the context? A little bit confused here.

It’s great. There are multiple concepts that there’s two people involved in the equation, aren’t there, Steve? When we have a transaction, we have the person who has the entity and the brand, but then the unknown factor is this prospect over here. And much like a city map, we don’t choose whether that person is right next door to Starbucks or that person lives five miles away. So, if we oversimplify the reality and assume that all prospects are the same, then we end up confusing the process of the marketing creation. When we look at the customer journey map and the process of getting to Starbucks, you know, from point A to point B, it’s never linear. Sometimes you have to go to a turnaround before you can get there. Sometimes there’s one-way streets that exist. So we can’t oversimplify it. Every single prospect is unique, but what we have to do is say, okay, if my Starbucks is right here, did I build this Starbucks where there’s a demographic of people who are all right around here who are likely to buy from me. Well, the same exists in the digital world. If I go out and I try to sell my free e-book, and that’s all I talk about all the time, you might as well go to the Dollar Tree, buy a bunch of socks and get on a bus and sell those socks. You’re going to have a better conversion rate than if you’re out there pitching your free thing to people. I try to teach entrepreneurs, especially in the coaching space, focus on your high ticket offer.

Focus on what you're best at. Present that to people over and over. Share on X

You usually have higher profit margins on that too. Then you can start building out the rest of the pathways. Much like again, Starbucks focuses on their local core neighborhood as well as those who they already know in the area, already bought into their loyalty program. And then they continue to branch out from there and try to attract more and more customers. So you can’t really oversimplify it, but you need to be thinking about which group, which audience is the most important audience for me to drive right here and right now. That’s your call. Do you want the conversions or do you want the branding? YouTube wants the branding. That’s why they give their solution away for free. They’re still going after the 8 billion people who are out there. They operated a loss for many, many, many years and they’re not so worried about the profit margins. Otherwise, they’d start charging us all one dollar per day to use it.

Yeah. So so basically it is kind of a niching. You’re looking for niching strategies, start where you have the highest likelihood, the low hanging fruit prospects where they will trust you because you talk their language, because you’re focused on their industry, and maybe geographically close to you and then bring in the intrigue. So, you’ll stand out, pick their curiosity and then look attractive, be professional, and then inspire them. And I think there are multiple ideas here, but…

Well, there’s two different images, too, the audience will be able to have. I’m happy to provide those to you. Those images walk through the principles step by step so that it’s easy to see how they both combine. And naturally, if you’re trying to grab somebody’s attention, right, then in order to do that, you have to know, do I intrigue them? Do I attract them? Do I inspire them? Do I create an offer? And again, so both frameworks can go hand in hand, but it’s like elements of the periodic table. If you’re going to be a scientist and know how those elements come together to create different reactions, then, you know, you can’t just say, well, wait, what’s the one element, Jackson? There’s a lot of elements that come together.

Yeah, that’s critical. And also something else is critical that you talk a lot about on your website and in your materials, which is this championship team. You even named your company First Class Business. So what does it take to build a championship team in your business that can really take your company to the next level?

Excellent question. Number one, establishing a clear vision that people can belong to. People want to know that you are going in the same direction they want to go to in life. Part of that is also recognizing that for me, the destination is not the goal, the journey, enjoying the journey. Having a clear destination is part of it, but unless I want to create an environment where people are willing to be subordinate to me, you can control people and say, no, I’ll give you a job, but you’re gonna do this, this, and this. There’s a lot of companies out there that are like that. I want people to enjoy the journey with me. And how do I do that? I create a vision that’s also founded on certain values. My values for my company are love, patience, persistence, consistency, and reliability. So in order to create that championship culture, I put together what’s called a combine. Sports people are going to love that and say, oh, I know what that is. This is the NFL and the NBA opening up a complete tournament, basically, an opportunity for scouts, the owners, the GMs, the coaches to come and see these players perform. And they see how well do they do, how well do they run the 40, how much weight can they lift, how high can they jump, what about their physicals, we’ve got doctors here, everything.

The stronger your combine on the front end for your business and brand, the more likely you're going to, and the better aligned it is with what you want to be testing for, the more likely you're going to bring people into the environment that… Share on X

I’ll tell you the number one way I recognize a company that’s not scaling, and everybody can use this who’s watching, is a company that has no vision for careers. If you don’t have a page that says join our team or careers with an outline of what you’re looking for, it is obvious to me that that particular brand has a limited mindset in terms of growing their operations beyond themselves. Makes it very hard to attract rock stars to join the brand because you’re saying, well, we’re not recruiting. Why are you not recruiting? If you’re recruiting people who are powerful at driving revenues, then you’re going to have people who come in who aren’t a cost to your business.

Yeah, I like this idea of vision for careers. I agree with you that it’s really important because what’s in it for those people, obviously you want them to feel belonging to the vision, to your mission, or your why, but that may not be enough because the people, okay, they want to work for this company which has a great purpose, but they also want to become personally successful, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Correct.

That’s kind of helping them visualize what they can potentially become over time. I love that vision for careers. I’m going to steal that.

Please do. I’m honored. I hope more businesses get that, because I think one of the subconscious realities that most coaches and entrepreneurs or solopreneurs face is that their market doesn’t necessarily know why they don’t want to buy from them. But if coach John does not have a team and organization behind him and I invest $10,000 in him as a coach and he dies tomorrow, not to be too morbid, but there goes my $10,000. It’s gone. I’m not getting it back. It’s over. There’s no stability and no infrastructure for that business, you know, for that business to be able to fulfill the transaction. And so, I don’t mind the solopreneurs. Congratulations if you’re able to do it by yourself, but there’s still a lack of infrastructure, a lack of stability that the consumer wants.

Yeah, for sure. If either the consumer wants you to be dedicated to them or they want if they’re going to hire you as a contractor, then they want to make sure that you can deliver and you can give them all the benefits that they couldn’t get from an employee, which is stability, more diversity, more knowledge, more resources. All right.

The employee, you read the E-Myth. When employees is built based on a championship level team, they’re given procedures, resources, and templates to succeed. So, there is a structure that’s there and in place that you own as an entity that protects you so that if, again, Coach John’s working for you and he moves on, he goes to the competition, you’re not worried about it at all. In fact, you can celebrate him and be grateful for what he did, but now somebody else can take over that role because you’ve created an infrastructure where anybody can come in and fulfill those roles with the right training and support.

Yeah, I think Michael Gerber calls it the position contract. So essentially, document what they are doing. And it’s not so much the processes, but all the function, the function and all the outcomes that you expect from them. And if you document it well and maybe create the process, then someone can come and can take this over and allow this person to progress inside the organization or if they leave, that’s very useful. So Jackson, our time is coming to an end here, but before we leave, I’d like to ask you, so if the listeners would like to learn more about these frameworks, so we talked about different things here. We talked about the VSL framework, the video sales letter framework. We talked about your marketing, the power marketing funnel, you called it. We talked about championship teams. So if they would like to learn more about these concepts or maybe want the help of your championship team to come in and support them, where can they reach you and where can they learn more about you?

Awesome. Well, the best thing, audience, that you can do is I want to put you on stage. That’s what I want to do. I want to continue to give back to everybody that’s here. So Vision Pros Live is our podcast and we interview visionary entrepreneurs. So going to visionproslive.com, you’ll see that you can apply to be our guest and share your vision. In addition to that, there’s a little article on there that talks about why be a podcast guest. What’s the benefit? You can learn about that if you’ve never been on a podcast before. As you opt into those resources that we have, the cheat sheet, you’re actually going to see as soon as you opt into the cheat sheet that we give away the bio sheet for a dollar, we give away the VSL framework and the ability to support you on it for $7 instead of $97. We have all of these systems tied together to help people win. If anybody wants to ask me for any of those resources for free, because I really like Steve and I love what he’s up to, I’m happy to do that too. My goal is to help as many people succeed as possible. And what I know is gonna happen in return, those people are gonna wanna have long-term relationships. That’s really what this is all about, Steve.

Awesome, and where could these people find these resources that you just referenced? Do they go to the First Class Business website or where do they go?

If they go to firstclassbusiness.io, they’ll find an indirect path to that. If they go to visionproslive.com they’ll get a direct path to be able to go on my stage.

Fantastic. All right, well if you’re listening to Jackson Calame, founder of First Class Business, do visit his website, get his resources, reach out to him. He’s got great frameworks and he can help your business succeed. So that’s it for today. Thanks for listening and stay tuned. Follow us on YouTube and on LinkedIn, SPBG page on LinkedIn to learn more about our guests and see the short form videos of this and other discussions as well. Thanks for coming, Jackson, and thanks for listening.

 

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