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TRANSCRIPT:

*this transcript was mostly generated by AI, please excuse any mistakes

Amanda: Welcome everybody. Amanda Holmes here, CEO of Chi Home to the Ultimate Sales Machine. Today I wanna share with you, this last year has been one of the most memorable years of my life thus far to date, and I know it’s only the beginning and I thought it important to share the nine biggest lessons I learned this year from more than doubling ourselves.

We’ve had, uh, some record breaking things that have happened and I’ve gained so many great nugget. That I wanted to share them with you, so let’s dive deep into them. 

Here is your daily dose of the Ultimate Sales machine coming to you from the new edition. Visit ultimate sales machine.com to get your copy or multiple copies. Hi, I’m your host, Amanda Holmes, CEO of Chet Homes International. What you’re about to learn has assisted a quarter of a million businesses to generate billions of dollars working faster, better, smarter.

Amanda: Number one, truth is more powerful than any marketing or sales tactic. I saw this with dear dad. I don’t know if you saw this that I put out, but, um, instead of writing my forward for the book, dear Reader, Julie Eason suggested that I write Dear Dad, And I was resistant. I didn’t wanna write that letter.

Uh, then I was resistant to putting it in the book. Then I was resistant to leading my entire marketing of my book with dear Dad. Then I was resistant to creating the, the video with my own family as a montage instead of just a black screen. So I was resistant every step of the way with dear dad because it was the honest truth is the honest truth about.

And my relationship with my father, and yet that was resoundingly, I mean, a game changer for us. It went soft viral. The video did, it got 36 times what our normal videos get. Um, it very often, the most common, um, feedback I got was either that they cried watching it or they’d watched it four or five different times, which to have somebody watch a video more than once or even get through a video.

Is hard in today’s world, right? So that was such a powerful realization for me. Truth is more powerful than any marketing or sales tactic.

Number two, vulnerability is power. So I, as vulnerable as it was, I was terrified.

And yet everybody, the feedback that I’ve gotten is that it was endearing and refreshing because more than ever it is. To be vulnerable. So that was my second biggest lesson from this year. Three. Own your customer data. Now, for the last 15 years, we have had a book on Amazon that is sold through our publisher Penguin.

So I haven’t had access to my own customer data. I send it to, I send everybody to Amazon Penguin captures that information and never gives it to me. So it’s only when someone reads the book, they go to the. Or they come back to my website and they opt in and they say, Hey, I’d like to talk to you. So I have missed out on so much business cuz I didn’t have the control of my own data.

This last time around I told Penguin I want to create my own checkout page and I want, uh, I wanna own my data. And they said, you can’t do it. He said, no, I’d like to presale my. So I need to capture all of that information because if I hit a bestseller, the only way to do that is you know, gaining the traction and increasing your presales and then going out all at once.

So all of those deals add up so you can hit a bestseller list and they went, you can’t do it. It’s not possible. For months they told me this, and it wasn’t until three months before, two months before we, we went live, that I was able to figure out because of the team for sale included Tyler. That, um, it, it wouldn’t have been done without them.

So owning my own customer data allowed me to be able to, I invested a ton in my book launch, and yet I more than broke even before the books had even shipped. Why? Because I owned my customer data. Our average, if we had sent people to buy the book on Amazon, their average checkout cart would’ve been around 17, 18.

Because they came to my page, our average checkout value was $64 60. Nearly three times more than three times as much as if we had sent them to Amazon, and now they’re in my system. Right now you’re getting my regular emails. Now you’re getting the offers that I have. So the lifetime value of that is immense.

Own your customer data. Number three number. Trade shows. What are the most potent forms of, of marketing? I know for some of you, you’re like, of course, but there’s also a whole generation of people that don’t think so much about physical events because they’ve spent so much time online, especially with what we went through with Covid.

Right. Uh, I found that the book tour that I did, uh, it was a complete game changer. One of our biggest ROIs came from, uh, the speaking tour that I did, and specifically, The key to trade shows, I followed exactly what my father said in chapter seven of Ultimate Sales Machine. Number one, you have to get noticed and I was trying to find a way to get noticed in the crowds.

And so I told my team, oh, go find, can you find a backpack that we can design so that when we’re walking around the backpacks will say the ultimate sales machine? And when I was looking at them, I just thought, that’s really not gonna GA grab people’s attention. What can we do to truly grab their a. So I went onto Google and I typed in human billboard and up popped this, it’s called Backpack.

Billboard. It was a backpack with a four foot billboard on my back, and it glowed this thing. I wore it, okay. I know people said you could just hire someone to do that, but why would I do that? It was like Christmas [00:06:00] morning. Every day I wore that because I’d walk through a trade. People would be staring at me from a hundred yards away.

I mean, everybody’s pointing. They’re taking pictures, everyone’s laughing. I am the social buzz that everybody was talking about. The most common compliment I got was people would come up to me and say, you are the most brilliant marketer in this entire event. People are talking about marketing here.

You’re actually doing it, which was really cool. And even in my last event that I went to, uh, I got shut down because I was generating too much of a buzz and too many sales that, uh, it aggravated. This stack. So with that said, getting noticed is critical and then converting leads. So you have to make sure that you’re actually converting leads.

So what I did is I took just one chapter of my book instead of giving up books that would’ve cost me, you know, quite a lot of money for per book, but just one chapter was only 20 pages, so it was much cheaper and I could hand that. You know, would you like to double your sales? Here’s 20 pages on how to do that.

People would lean [00:07:00] into that rather than me pushing a book on them. So that was critical. And then I had a QR code on my billboard to say, okay, to get, uh, to get more information, do this. So people were coming up and whether I was talking to somebody or not, they were doing the QR code to put their name in email in.

So getting noticed, generating that lead right, so that you can get the appointment and get the. Okay. Um, 

five, quality over quantity. This is a huge theme for us because when I created the Dream 100 Bootcamp, that was a critical piece as well. So my father taught about Dream 100 and the more over the years that I have watched and listened to people implementing the Dream 100, the more I found a common trend.

The very often for a business, it’s not about a. People get stuck on this number, that it’s about a hundred. By definition, it’s, there’s always a smaller number of better buyers than there are all buyers. That means marketing and selling to them is [00:08:00] cheaper than marketing and selling to all buyers to get to hit the best seller list.

That helped me double my sales this year and got me 19 keynotes that I’m feverishly trying to actually, um, fulfill on . Uh, all of that was done by focusing. Five. Ah, okay. Five. Okay. Less than 12. Less than 12. Dream relationships. Less than 12. We actually, so, uh, David Asar now called it his Target 20, and I asked him if I could actually car call it the Target 12 and run with that, because it doesn’t always have to be Dream 100.

For me it was a Target 12. What’s the next one? Um, I’m just looking at my notes. Oh, quality over quantity too. So of the book sales that I made, 79.23% of my revenue came from just 3% of the people that bought my book. [00:09:00] 3% would purchase a hundred books, 400 books, a thousand books. That is very fascinating.

Okay. Uh, number six, social proof is. Holy cow, right? We live in a world where we have been trained as consumers to go on Amazon, look at reviews, look at the customers that say, what about the product, and decide to buy. We go on Google, we look at the reviews and the ratings, right? So we are conditioned to do this.

How are we doing that in our business to duplicate what Amazon has already created for the buying experience. . So all through all of my travels, anytime someone would say something that was complimentary of me, my father, the legacy, the book, anything we do, I would say, hold on, hold on, hold on. Can I capture what you’re about to say?

Or can I capture what you just said? Will you repeat it? And I would just bring up a phone and record right then and there. Or if I had a videographer, sometimes I had videographers that would capture [00:10:00] those moments live. Then those became podcasts. They became, um, Uh, YouTube videos. They became blog posts.

They became, uh, social media posts. They became my ads. I had one guy that came up to me and he was like, the ultimate sales machine, changed my life. And we said, stop. Don’t say anything more. Can I film what you’re about to say? And he said, absolutely. And he said, with all his heart and soul that he went from, I didn’t even think I could run a business to now I’m eight figures.

But when he. He was so passionate about it. He actually cri, he got me crying. I don’t know if he cried. I think he just teared up and then I cried, and then we took that video and we made that an ad on Facebook. And I got feedback. It was the guy that came up to me and he said, I saw that video on Facebook.

I had already bought your book twice. I bought it a third time after watching that testimonial of that guy crying, that was just too good, Amanda, right? So how are we repurposing and capturing those testimonials? Just doing it [00:11:00] live right off the cuff, it doesn’t take much. Capturing it in the moment is critical.

Uh, let. We live in a short attention Spann society. Right? Three second, the goldfish rule. Our, our average attention is that of a goldfish today, three seconds. So you should have micro content everywhere. That’s how we’re consuming our information today is in small bite size pieces. So for me, I had a podcast, I started at 30 minutes of podcast.

I went down to 15 minutes of podcast and I ended at Five Minute Podcast. So I was doing daily podcasts for five minutes each. I read a quote, I talk about the quote I finish. We doubled our downloads. Um, we have increased ar organic traffic to books, sold it. Uh, it gave us more quantity to post on a regular basis and frequency on social media.

So we’d have a minute. So we’d take the five minute and we’d chunk it down to a [00:12:00] minute clip that we’d then put on social media. So it’d be rep. That was a game changer. It, you don’t have to say a to a ton, it’s just being hyper-focused on one thing and speaking it resoundingly clear and simplified. Cuz there’s so much information online today that people just want simplification.

They want clarity. That’s what they want to hear and they want an bite size pieces with more frequency. I’m FOMO is a real thing number. So, uh, I sold out our book stock twice before we went live with the book. So the first time, in the first five days, we sold about 80% of the amount of books that we had, and I still had two more months before we went live.

I went back to the publisher and I said, this is how many books we’ve sold. I’m afraid we’re gonna sell out before the end of these two months. Can you increase the amount of books that you’re printing? And they said, whoa, whoa, whoa. Stop selling.[00:13:00] 

They said, not gonna happen. I’m gonna continue to sell books. I think you should just increase your print run. And, uh, they said You have 24 hours to sell out this print run. We don’t, this is the deadline. We have to know now if you need more books printed. So I went out on social media and I said, Hey guys, I need to know in the next 24 hours if you’re going to buy a bulk order.

And we, and we doubled the amount of books that we. In that 24 hours from a group that was on my social media. It’s strange. So on my email database, I have a hundred times what I have on social. So on social, I have 5,000 followers here, 6,000 followers there. Not like a crazy amount, right? But from 5,000, 4,000, 6,000 followers, we were able to.

A ton of units for books. Then I did it again right before we, we went live for the book. I said 48 hours left. I need to know [00:14:00] order books now so we can hit the best level list. And my goal was what everybody told me it would take to hit the best seller list. So I said, we have 900 books left. You know, we have 500 books left.

And we moved more units in that last 48 hours than the prior two months combined. 48. FOMO is a real thing. If you’re not using scarcity in your promotions, absolutely should find a way to use scarcity because people buy in scarcity. 

And then number nine, this is a critical one and it’s probably controversial, but following, how do I say this?

So everybody that puts out a book says it, it’s all about the bestseller list. You have to hit the bestseller list. And there’s lots of programs today where you can. To hit a bestseller list, right? You purchase the books or someone purchases the books for you. And, um, we had decided with our, with my team that we weren’t going to invest in [00:15:00] buying to get to the top of the list.

Uh, like we were going to just do the work. To be hyper focused on who is actually our client and get in front of them, in their face, in their space, in their, sorry, in their face, in their place, in their space, right? Like my father always said in their face and their place, in their space, so that we became omnipresent to them and they would have to purchase or they would have to inquire.

So doing that, I let go of needing to have like people that buy followers, people that buy bestseller, people that buy these. , it’s, it’s a shallow way and you actually don’t get the revenue you need. So I let go of having to get those bestseller lists because I focused on, I wanna own my customer data because I know I can increase my lifetime value.

I became, um, I paid for the whole book launch before the books even shipped. That’s, I mean, usually [00:16:00] you release a book, it takes months before people start reading it. Then they decide to work with you. Maybe over time before they had even gotten the books, we had more than broken even on the investment, so, so what I’m trying to say is don’t let the outside world believe that you have to hit some kind of ego goal.

Let’s just focus on what really matters, which is, you know, revenue, profitability, and. This is, this isn’t coming from a, I need to beat my chest and be the best and have these titles. This is coming from a place of I want to serve when I give great value money forms, when I am in this place of giving and serving.

I mean, we more than doubled sell. And it wasn’t, the focus wasn’t number, number number. Hit it, hit it, hit it. It was value. Serve, uh, results for the clientele. All of this is to say that [00:17:00] I’m just so grateful for all of you that listen to what we do, that read our emails, that watch our videos, that actually take these steps and implement them into your business.

The joy of this job that I get to do is seeing your. It’s about your success. If you don’t succeed, I don’t succeed. My success is determined on your success. So that’s why I try with all my might to be as honest and transparent and, um, uh, giving you the tools that you need to grow. And that is my summary of the nine biggest lessons learned from this last year, that more than double.

I look forward to seeing what we created over the next 12 months. And, uh, if you could write in the comments what was your biggest takeaway from all of [00:18:00] these? Uh, I’d love to know what landed for you the most. It’s great to give, get that feedback so then I can help educate even more. If there was something that you’re interested in and you wanna know more questions, go ahead and ask in the comments and I’ll make sure that, uh, we’ve applied.

I reply my team. So go ahead. Go ahead and comment. What was your biggest lesson from the nine? Let me read them off again. Number one, truth speaks louder than any marketing or sales tactic. Number two, vulnerability is power. Number three, own your customer data. Number four, trade shows are one of the most potent form of marketing you wanna get noticed.

Collect leads, follow up to close the deal. Number five, quality over quantity. Sometimes you don’t need a whole Dream 100. You could just need a Target 12. Number six, social proof is king, right? Amazon has taught [00:19:00] us this to buy based on customers feedback. How are you replicating that in your business?

Number seven, we live in a short attention society, so you should have micro content that speaks to the goldfish. Uh, the goldfish roll three seconds. Number eight, FOMO is real. If you are not creating scarcity, you are missing an opportunity to potentially double yourselves. And number nine, following the ego trip of getting likes, uh, getting name recognition will only get you so far when you, when you lead with value and service.

And focus on the true numbers that matter, like sales and profitability. That’s when the results that truly matter to your business happen. Those are my nine biggest [00:20:00] lessons that helped me more than double sauce. Thank you so much. It’s been such a great pleasure. Give me a comment. What was your biggest takeaway and what was your favorite of the nine?

Make sure to get your copy or copies at the ultimate sales machine.com. There’s a lot of special bonuses that you can’t get going to Amazon, so make sure you check it [email protected].