279 What A Hostage Negotiator Taught Me About Selling

Jim Cockrum has been doing this for 24 years, and he still texted three coaching students personally this week just to check in.

That detail tells you a lot about how Jim runs his business. He's the founder of Proven Amazon Course, host of Silent Sales Machine Radio, and the author of a book that's been read by over a million people. His funnel starts at $7 and goes to $7,000, he's coached more than 7,000 students, and his Facebook community has 80,000 members. But the thing that struck me most in this conversation wasn't the scale. It was how much of his success comes down to a philosophy most people resist: give everything away for free.

We talked through his entire funnel, from how he spends $50–$90 to acquire a $7 customer and recoups it within 30–90 days, to why he says there's nothing behind his paywall except time and relationship. He told me about a real estate client who fired him for suggesting free, then called back months later when the paid version flopped. And he shared the Death Wish Coffee story, where a single email blast outperformed a Super Bowl commercial in sales.

We also got into email list hygiene, why he maintains 40% open rates by scrubbing non-clickers, and why he thinks getting people onto a screen is the most underrated move in any funnel.

Jim is sharp, generous with what he knows, and genuinely fun to talk to. I think you'll enjoy this one.

Check out Jim's work:
🌐 https://www.silentjim.com/
📸 https://www.instagram.com/jimcockrum/?hl=en
▶️ https://www.youtube.com/c/silentjimdotcom

Transcript

Give More Away For Free

SPEAKER_02 0:00

When you're nervous, you're giving away too much for free, you're not giving away enough for free yet. That's how you move people through the funnel the most aggressive. He was a former negotiator for very intense, life-threatening, hostage negotiation situations. And one of the things he's that triggered something in me started testing it, it worked remarkably well. When there's a hostage situation, there's a magic two-word phrase. If you could just get the hostage sticker to say this magic two-word phrase, you knew no one was gonna die today.

SPEAKER_03 0:27

Hello

Jim Cochrane’s Amazon Origin Story

SPEAKER_03 0:28

and welcome to the Art Selling Online Courses. We are here to get winning strategies for acts and top performers in the online course industry. My name's John Antwerp and today's guest is Jim Cochrane. Now Jim is the founder of Proven Amazon course and my silent team and the author of Tilent Tell Tip. So back in the 90s, Jim was a Microsoft software reseller during Microsoft biggest years, and then in 2002 he got fired. But he had already been quietly building on my businesses since 1999. He'd flipped his first pair of Jordans on eBay, he'd used that to learn how to sell there and then figure out how the internet really worked before moving on to selling on Amazon. So instead of looking for another job, he wrote down what he'd learned and that became the Silent Sales Machine. That book's now been read by over a million people. Jim's updated it 11 times over the last 20 years to keep it kind. He launched a podcast, Silent Sales Machine Radio. It gets downloaded about 115,000 times a month, has a total of over 7 million downloads and has 4.9 out of 5 stars. He started coaching other people back in 2003, and his team has now coached more than 7,000 Amazon sellers. He runs one of the biggest communities in the whole space, the My Silent Team Facebook group with over 80,000 members from around the world, plus a live event called the Proven Conference. Jim, welcome to the show, man. Dude, you did your homework, man.

SPEAKER_02 1:39

You asked me for a bio and I didn't send you one, but you just went out and failed it. Hey, what's your fee to like do that for me every time? I love it. I love it. Good job, man.

SPEAKER_03 1:50

Great to meet you, John. It's a pleasure to be here. You too, dude. So talk us through who is it that you're helping? Is it people just getting started on Amazon? Is it people who are already successful to make more money? Like, who's the target audience?

SPEAKER_02 2:00

I mean,

The Low Risk Amazon Opportunity

SPEAKER_02 2:01

I'll try to rein in my excitement here and not go too long with my answer, but really we think we've found the what we call around here the low, low, high business opportunity in e-commerce. Low, low, high. What's that mean? Lowest cost, lowest risk, shortest learning curve, highest odds of sustained profitability over a significant period of time into the future. Like what's that perfect business? Blue ocean, it's expanding, and it's just not that hard to get in. It's work, as we all know, any business is. We're not a magic push this button make money organization. But so this is really for anyone who's ready to tap into what I believe is one of the greatest paradigm shifts in business opportunities in world history. And that's basically helping Amazon fill the shelves with 1.5 billion products. It takes us 32 years to look at all of them. They've got hundreds of warehouses. Most of those warehouses are sitting empty at any given time for even the most popular items that are being sold. And customers are willing to pay for convenience and speed. They're willing to pay a premium for that. Instead of getting in their car to go to Walmart and pay 20 bucks for an item that they know is $20, they'll pay $40 for it if they can have it on their porch in half an hour. That's opportunity, man. Arbitrage, unlike anything I've ever seen in my 24 years of e-commerce. That's what we teach. So who's it for? Anyone who's ready to make some money online with a virtuous business. That's my shortest possible answer.

SPEAKER_03 3:22

And give people some kind of idea of the size of the business, like number of students, revenue if you're happy to share it.

SPEAKER_02 3:27

Yeah, let me give you some round numbers. You shared, you know, a good number of them, you know, coaching 7,000 big ticket students over the past, you know, 20 years or so. Um any given week, we pick up a handful of new students. We've got group training, which is a mid-range price point. We've got higher end, uh, which is you know about twice that, several thousand dollars. A great team of coaches comprised of people who have succeeded with our content, which I think makes us somewhat unique. We've never used a coach unless they were a very successful student of our core content and training, which is a great insight that you know that's the way to do the program right. Don't hire Philippine VAs to do your coaching for you when people pay you. Put successful students in those roles and let their excitement filter down. So uh numbers-wise, you know, it just in round figures, it's a multiple seven-figure per year business with a with a good team. It's not without its challenges. It's a leadership. You are the you are the ceiling of your business, your skills, your virtues, your discipline, uh, your commitment. You're the ceiling. No one's going to outperform you. So you've got to truly believe in and love the stuff you're doing. Uh, but this, but the sky's really the limit. And in this niche, there's there's a few million people who sell on Amazon already. We're trying to teach them how to do it the right way if they're struggling. And then there's a lot of we love stay-home moms and single dads, trying to make ends meet, retired couples. We've got teenagers, we've got students all over the world who didn't realize that they could have a US-based Amazon selling business. From one case, one of our coaches lives in Slovakia. They don't have Amazon there. But he's got a multiple seven-figure business because of our training, and he's doing great. He's crushing it. Um so that's that to its forward. That's a generality of the numbers. You know, I'm not going to get into real specifics, but I mean, we're we're doing thousands of dollars of sales of digital products every day.

SPEAKER_03 5:20

And what's the kind of talk me through like that that product ladder in a little bit more detail? So you've got the book, you've got the course, you've got coaching, you've got like what's the kind of price points of these different things you've got, or if I missed any others.

Building A Funnel With Free Value

SPEAKER_03 5:35

Oh, there's the event as well.

SPEAKER_02 5:36

Yeah, let's let's draw a funnel. And I would put the event kind of outside the funnel. Those are like little halo effect opportunities that pop up. Kind of like if your podcast does well, go grab a few sponsors. It's like a halo effect of having built an audience. But the funnel itself, if someone comes to us and says, uh, they find us on Facebook or Instagram or I'm starting to toy around on TikTok and you know, they find us somewhere, or maybe one of our paid ads, that's a either free or a $7 experience. That's come check out our podcast. Where by the way, we're about to pass 1800 episodes. The vast majority of our episodes are interviews with our successful students. If you want a great podcast, interview people who have listened to you and succeeded. I mean, like, there's your show. Just talk to them. That's your marketing, it's a great show. People love stories. It's like killing it. All right. So that's what our show is. Um, they find us that way or any number of ways. Our Facebook group that you mentioned in the intro. They're exposed to great insights, free content, free, free, free. Gary Vaynerchuk wrote a book, what, about 15 years ago called Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook. I don't know if you've remember it or heard of it. But my theory is just keep jabbing. Just keep jab. Like free, free, free, free. Look at what happened to Alex Harmozy. He played the free game longer than anyone. His motto for a long time was I don't charge anybody anything for any ever for anything. I just all free, free, free, free, free, free, free, free, free. And then when you had something to sell, right, he just crushed it. Give away free. That don't be a you know, one of my early mentors told me, whatever your big secret is that you're hoping people will pay you for, just give it away free.

unknown 7:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 7:13

No, no, no, no. The number of people, this is a short story, okay? I applied this to a client. I think, I think your listeners will love this story. So there's a real estate agent here in Greenwood, which is the city I live in, which is a city you're familiar with. Crazy. You're in London, I'm here in Little Old Greenwood, south of Indianapolis, and you've been here before. Who knew? But he's a real estate agent here. And this is about 12 years ago. He started crushing it with Google Paid Ads. He was doing pretty well. And I was kind of coaching him early days of Google Paid Ads, more like probably 15, 17 years ago. And um, we designed a system that, like, hey, we're gonna sell this to other real estate agents, right? So I worked with him for a year. We dialed it all in, how to run the whole program. And when it came time to us to start marketing it, he wanted to sell it for $5,000. I wanted to give it away free. He fired me. He's like, thanks for helping me to this point. I'd been paid, I was happy, like, all right, man, I hope it goes great for you. He sold one or two in the past in the next three or four months, called me back. It's like, what's your idea with free? And I said, give it away, dude. Just give it away and then say, we will help you implement it. It exploded. I'm talking hundreds and hundreds of clients saying, Okay, we've got this, it's amazing, it's everything we need, but will you please do this with us or do this for us, please? We'll pay you. That became his business model. Crushed, crushed. So when you're nervous, you're giving away too much for free. You're not giving away enough for free yet. Because the game is as you move down the funnel, and you asked me about my funnel, I remember where we were in my story. So we're we go to like a $39 a month offer. That's the proven Amazon course. Cancel anytime. Most people stick around for six, eight months. In the meantime, they're exposed to our ideas, our content, step-by-step trainings on the different strategies we teach, and they're in contact with us. We're earning their trust. Some of it's starting to work. They start saying, hey, this is kind of cool. Can anyone do this with me or for me? That's when you oftentimes very organically, they step into either our group training programs or possibly our one-on-one, which is the bottom of our funnel. So you've got $7, $39, $500-ish dollars, different options, um, boot camps and things, $3,500 offer. Bottom of the funnel is a $7,000 offer approximately. Um, and then the Halo effect, the other things floating around, the event. For example, I mentioned our annual event, which you know, uh, we've done it 14 times with the longest running annual Amazon seller conference in the world. It's coming up August 2020. Yeah, we've been doing it longer than Amazon. That's my bragging point. It's like, yeah, Amazon's there, they're the new guys on the block when it comes to having a conference for sellers. We were doing it about six years before they even thought about it. Um, but yeah, it's uh it the proven conference, if anyone's interested, um, is the is the website there. But they've got the so we got the conference. I mentioned podcast sponsorships, um, people sponsor our Facebook group, right? Those kind of like those are the halo effect opportunities that aren't really part of our funnel and and landing prospects. But then that leads to other opportunities as well. Your what does this now make possible? Anytime you have a win, anytime you have someone move forward with you in their trust or the move make or paying you, you want to deliver on those services with excellence, obviously. But what does that now make possible? Where's the momentum? I often say that I think our job as content creators and and funnel builders and serving people with information, you are the chief momentum officer. You've got to notice not what gets me excited and fired up, what gets the people I'm serving excited and fired up, and what does their um excitement make possible next? What are they asking for? Keep giving and then keep asking. Give, give, give, ask, ask, ask. Follow the momentum.

Facebook Ads And CAC Reality

SPEAKER_03 10:55

And then what is it uh in terms of kind of the top of the funnel, what's getting people in in the first place? Are they just discovering the podcast and the Facebook group organically? Are you running ads for this? Like how are people finding you? Interestingly, we just started doing ads a couple years ago.

SPEAKER_02 11:10

It was all organic up until that point. But we noticed just organic is getting noisier and harder to break through. And it's harder to get affiliates excited to promote other people's stuff. When Amazon first came out with their affiliate program 20 plus years ago, everyone's like, wait, I can get paid just to recommend a book. Never mind that it's you're gonna get paid a dime. Just the concept itself was like, whoa, I can get paid to sell other people's stuff. And everyone, it kind of caught fire and people got excited. So you have these raving advocates out there talking about your stuff better than you ever could. But what everyone started to realize is hold on a second. I think a lot of the affiliates started to realize I'm just helping someone else build their business. And they can kind of cut me out anytime. The number of times I've been the number one affiliate for some tool or software or something, and here's the checks coming in, and then suddenly boom, zero. Oh, we've changed all of our links, we've changed our terms, we've changed like what? I want to build my own business. So the whole Halo effect of other people talking about you and getting paid to do so, affiliate marketing, it's just it's gotten harder to get people to do that. So the that's all organic, right? The organic, just from my experience, it's gotten harder to do organic. Not that it's impossible. If you're good and going viral and creating good content, yes. But at this point, about 70% of our new clients coming in the door, they've got a CAC attached to them, customer acquisition cost, and we're trying to keep that as low as we can so we can you know dig out of the hole we dug, getting them in the door as soon as we can, right? So we're keeping an eye and monitoring those things just in the past couple of years. So I'm a newbie to paid ads. Our momentums continue. Reconcile the two if we get an issue there.

SPEAKER_03 12:52

So with ads, what are you uh doing? You f Facebook, Google, where are you spending your money?

SPEAKER_02 12:58

Primarily Facebook. Yeah. Which is where our Facebook group is, which is one of the best credibility builders we have, is it's the largest, most active Facebook group for Amazon resellers in the world, uh group of any kind, to my knowledge. So having people kind of expose experience that early on, kind of proof of concept that like, okay, look at all these people. They're posting we got 2,500 success stories in our Facebook group. It's like you don't have to listen to me, just walk into the room and look around, right? Uh and and you're in a room full of energized, successful people experiencing our content and the energy. Um, and that, you know, again, chief momentum officer, keeping that excitement up. If someone has something good to say, you capture that moment, you share it, you throw it out there. Um, you got to be the chief encourager of that community. And that's a powerful asset to have is a community of people who know, like, and trust you that you can toss the newbies into. You know, it's kind of like if you go to a new church uh and the first experience is like, man, I really like these people. They're really nice. Like these are my kind of people. Before you even meet the pastor or hear about the programs, you're like, I like the vibe here, right? It's not the pastor trying to convince you or anything. It's these are my people. You I I try to create that experience um by just highlighting and exposing people to in a very genuine way who's already here and what they're up to.

SPEAKER_03 14:13

So is that where you send people to from the ads to the Facebook group, or is there another step in between?

SPEAKER_02 14:18

Um it's one of the first things we encourage people to do is start checking out our podcast and get into our Facebook group. And then we've got content that we've charged fifteen hundred dollars for that you get for seven bucks. It's it's everything. Like yeah, I get a lot of resistance from my team to this day when I'm like, all right, what are we keeping behind the paywall? I'm like, nothing except our time. Everything else is on the other side of the paywall. If you dig around enough, I've had people come up to me at our events and say, Jim, I feel really bad. I wanted to meet you and thank you, but I feel really bad. I'm like, what's going on? He's like, I've been in your community seven years. I've never paid you a penny, and I've built an incredible business just doing what you guys teach for free. I'm like, that's a great testimonial, man. And if you don't need us, that's awesome. We're here to create success stories. Your energy and that story that I'm gonna tell a hundred times and I've told it a hundred times is going to be all the fuel that some people need to say, okay, I trust these guys. I'm just gonna go ahead, rather than learning it on my own, over. And I asked him, how long did it take you to figure it out? It's like, about a year and a half. I'm like, would you have been willing to pay a couple thousand dollars to figure it out in a couple months instead? He's like, Oh, yeah. I'm like, okay, well, that's part of the story too, then, right? Like, yeah, the free stuff is great, but do you want some hand holding and speed up the process? Do you want to go further faster? Do you see the value of a coach? Do you value your time over being able to say, I haven't paid a penny for my education in e-commerce? Okay, you know, die on that hill. But how about you work with someone who knows what they're doing? So that's our approach is we're gonna give it all away free. It's all out there. There's nothing held back. There's no secret sauce that you're gonna get once you hop over the paywall. But what you are gonna get is someone who's been there, done that, that you can trust and interact with. That's what's on the other side of the paywall, is is a person, an experience, yeah, part, a friendship, right?

SPEAKER_03 16:02

One of the things you mentioned there was about that you have to kind of dig yourself out of that hole of what you paid to get someone as a client. Can you share any of those numbers, like how much it uh it costs you to get someone onto your email list or whatever, and then how long it takes you to get back to break even or positive?

SPEAKER_02 16:16

The goal right now is to get them uh if they buy a $7 program, we're willing to spend $90 to get them to buy a $7 program. And the rest of our funnel then picks up the Slack over the course of ideally 30 days, but sometimes it's 60 or 60 to 90 days, and we're kind of playing with it. We're still playing with all those numbers. We're still playing. But it's one of the best ways to spend a marketing dollar, man, is to land a $7 client and they're exposed to what it is we're up to. And some of those people refund out, some of those people fizzle out, but one out of every 10 or so has a light bulb moment and says, Wow, I love you guys. This is awesome. I'm going deeper. And they do, and they buy stuff and they see the value of it. Um, yeah, that's it, that's our general numbers. $7 first purchase typically costs us $90, between $50 and $90. $90 is kind of on the high end to uh to get that person's attention and get them to buy. Um, and then somewhere between 30 and 90 days, depending on you know what levers we're pulling, because we're always exploring new audiences and getting aggressive, and then you know, we dial it up, dial it back. Uh, we haven't found that like, hey, just put a dollar in here and it turns into three dollars every day. You know, it it's kind of always shifting with Facebook, um, which is something we're figuring out and probably offering as a service because we've learned a lot. Yeah. Nice.

SPEAKER_03 17:35

What's

Upsells That Don’t Feel Sleazy

SPEAKER_03 17:36

the um do you have upsells after that seven dollar offer, like on the confirmation page or immediately? Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 17:44

Absolutely. Yes, you're crazy not to. You're crazy not to have one-time offers, upsells, all of that. Everyone's like, oh, we hate those, we hate those. Well, just like the pop-ups for email that still work, by the way. Yeah, um, everyone hates them, but they work. So yeah, of course, of course we do. It's not a high pressure thing. We try to dial back the you gotta do this today, or else we we want to be have a very genuine relationship with people where they stick around for a long period of time and really like us. But we do say, hey, while you're here, here's an offer. You can do this later, but here's the benefit of doing it now, and here's an incentive to do it now, right? To pressure you, but like get just kind of you gently offer those things. Uh and if you believe in what you're doing and you know that it can help the right people, people are grateful to see that. Like, oh, you you could actually help me do this. I don't have to do it myself. I can actually have someone walk me through this. That's worth the price tag for me to do that. Sure. Right. So we're just we're just kind of saying, hey, here's you know, before you order your sandwich, just look at the rest of the menu real quick. You good? Okay, well, here's the sandwich. That's all you want. But you know, do you want fries with that? We've got great shakes. You know, you want to look at the rest of the menu real quick. That's not an intrusion, that's just disclosure, right? So, yeah, there's upsells, but it's done in a way of like, um, you can always do this later. We don't like to strong arm people.

SPEAKER_03 19:00

Nice. If anyone's interested and want to learn more about upsells, I got a um upsells sales page template that I've made before for podcast listeners, which you can get that out too. Data yeah, data driven marketing.co slash upsell. And I'll see if I can find any um podcast episodes that we did on the topic as well, because uh I know Yosip and I have talked through upsells quite a few times, and I don't talk about it that much on the podcast. It's I think for a lot of people it's a little bit more of an advanced technique than they're currently doing, like order bumps and upsells is not not where everyone's uh kind of starting from. But uh let me see if I can find uh here we go. Episode 183. Uh this simple strategy made $200,000 in 12 months, copy this, and that Joseph and I talked through about a case study around around upsells. So what what is your uh your upsell at that point? Is it that $39 a month membership?

SPEAKER_02 19:57

Yes, or it's an experience. Okay. What we've discovered, there's actually a good book.

The “That’s Right” Trust Moment

SPEAKER_02 20:04

I don't remember the guy's name that wrote the book, but you can find it. Uh, what was the title? Never split the difference. Never split the difference.

SPEAKER_03 20:12

Yeah, yeah. Have you read it by any chance? Uh I listened to a podcast from him about it and I bought it. I did not read it.

SPEAKER_02 20:19

Which I should have done, but if you're a Jordan Peterson fan, one of the best interviews he ever did was with the author of that book. Go back and do it. It's like one of his first. There we go. He was uh he was a former um negotiator for very intense, life-threatening hostage negotiation situations. And one of the things he said in that book triggered something in me, started testing it. It works remarkably well. And I'm gonna I'm gonna make sure everyone understands the point as briefly as possible. One of the things he said in that book, when there's a hostage situation, you might remember this from hearing him talk, is there's a magic two-word phrase that if you could just get the hostage taker to say this magic two-word phrase, he knew no one was gonna die today. Do you happen to remember that? Or did you hear what he said? No, I remember no, I don't know. It took the intensity out of the situation, like, okay, we understand each other, we're heading in a good direction here. That magic two-word phrase was that's right. That's right. As in, okay, I feel understood now. Someone's listening to me. The hostage taker feels like, okay, someone gets me. The quicker you can get your prospect to have, and our version of that is, okay, these people are speaking my language and I can do this. That's what we're going for. It's like that aha moment. Like, okay, I feel understood now. I can do this. I see the possibility. I see how this could work. I see, you know, because they cut, they're skeptic up to that point and they're not sure if they're gonna ask for a refund or not, and then something flips and they say, Okay, this makes sense. I could do this. I see, I've seen the like moment, right? The best way to do that is an interactive, like what you and I are doing right now. Right. If we tried to replicate the first 25 minutes or so of our conversation today over email and have the same relationship established, it would have taken a Weeks and weeks and weeks, we may have never even gotten there. But now you see a face, even on the screen. Not quite as good as in person, but it's as good as we can get. And you've got that person, a real person there, their excitement, their vibe, their energy. Females all know this. Us guys are kind of thick headed sometimes, but the vast majority of communication is nonverbal. 80% of communication is nonverbal. And we think we're going to, you know, use this device and text people and build a relationship. No, you're not. Get them on a screen as soon as you possibly can. Get your prospects on the screen. Get them on Zoom, whether it's free or it's a small price, whatever it takes, small group, big group, doesn't matter. Get them on a screen. Get them thinking, okay, I believe this guy, I like this guy. I think I could do this. Right? So that's how you move people through the funnel the most aggressively. It's not pounding them with email, pounding them with text, reminders, impersonal. It's get them on a screen, man. If you're having conversations, you're winning. If you're not, you're losing. It's that simple, especially early on in your funnel. So the next thing we like to sell to people is, hey, join a small group of other new students. One of our top coaches is going to walk you through the first few steps of this process. We're going to turn those mountains that you feel like you're facing into little molehills that you can skip past at very low cost. Let's do it together. And those groups, they form relationships, which is one of the stickiest things that you can do for your community, is let people form organic relationships with themselves. It's very rewarding for me to go to our annual event and walk up to a group of people that are talking, standing there, and I'm like, hey guys, good to meet you. And I'm kind of interrupting. They're like friends that talk once a week because they're been on Zoom for the past four years as a mastermind. They formed because they joined our community at the same time and jumped into one of our boot camps. I'm almost interrupting the flow. Like they don't need me. They met because of what we've built. They use our tools and resources, but they're not looking to me. They're relying on each other. There's relationships that have been built. How's that happen? You get people on screens, you get them talking. That's how you move people through your funnel with info products, in my opinion. I haven't seen anything that beats

Coaching Programmes That Actually Last

SPEAKER_02 24:03

it.

SPEAKER_03 24:03

And then kind of going down to that next level, talk us through like that coaching program. You mentioned that one of the things that works is getting your successful students to be the coaches on that. Can you kind of talk us through that whole process a little more?

SPEAKER_02 24:16

Yes. And I'm excited to point out that I'm starting to offer the service, and you and I talked beforehand of helping content creators, low-ticket course creators, people who are on recurring billing of any kind for content training, education, helping them build a coaching program the right way. Because I've I've been doing this 24 years, and I'll talk through that specifically, some of the things that we do. But it's rare that someone lasts more than a year or so after launching their own coaching program. It's just rare. I've seen my competitors come and go. I've seen a lot of people pop out of our community try to replicate what we're doing and they fail. And I see what they're doing wrong, and it winds down very quickly as a result. And there's a handful of very predictable things that can go wrong. But in general, you have to keep it relationship-based. You just have to over-deliver and underpromise at every step. When you start taking, you know, anything that has any price that has a comma in it, you know, people start giving you four figures for something. You better be ready to interact, to hop on the screen, have someone who's there to save the sale if they get a little antsy. It takes a lot of in it takes a lot of interaction. There's advantages for group training versus individual and vice versa. We've done both. We've experimented with both. But as a general rule, the one of my favorite ways to pitch individual or group training to prospects is to say it's a matter of how much margin you have in your life. Like if I was talking to you right now, John is a prospect for a coaching program. It's like, okay, got a couple of questions to see if you're a good fit. Because if you're not, I'm not going to sell it to you. Even if you try to throw a lot of cash at me, I won't sell it to you. You've got to have the margin in your life. And here's what I mean by that relational margin. Does your spouse think you're crazy? Is she threatening to divorce you if you spend another penny on e-commerce? You're not a good fit right now. You need to win her over. We need to take our time. Don't jump in with both feet right now. That's a bad idea. Bring your spouse with you. Do you have time margin? That means have you got at least 10 to 15 hours a week that you can commit to this? If not, if you're working four jobs just to keep the lights on, you do not want to put all this on a credit card and think it's going to save your life. It's not. You have to have the time to put into it. Do you have the financial margin, right? You go down. Do you have the health margin? Very few people think of this one, but it's a big one. There's people out there who only have 10 or 20 healthy hours a week and they've got some kind of ailment and they just can't. Like you're going to have to have your brain on. You're going to have to be doing work. You're going to have to be doing the stuff that we're teaching you. It's not just a matter of having the time, but are you healthy enough? Do you have the health margin right now? Has a doctor just given you eight months to live and you're scrambling? This isn't what's going to dig you out of that. There's people out there in these scenarios and you want to be shoot straight with them. So I like to explore those areas of margin. And once we have checked the boxes, relationship, financial, time, health, they've got margin. They've got some excess space in their life. Okay, do you want to go further faster, yes or no? That's the only left question I have left. If you want to go further faster, there's nothing faster than having a good coach who's been there, done that, and is doing it currently. That's the fastest way to get from point A to point B. You've told me what your goal is. Do you want to get there faster or slower? Do you want to be like our free student that took a year and a half to make sure this stuff works? Or do you want to be like a student who has someone there holding his hand, keeping them accountable, pushing them, coaching them? That'll take you a couple months in that case. Go a lot further, a lot faster. That's my basic pitch. That's the offer. It's very relational. There's no two coaching relationships with students that look alike in our organization because you're working with someone, you're building a relationship, you end up becoming friends. We've had coaches and students build businesses together off to the side and go have fun with it. That's great. So it's very much about the relationship, and that part's emphasized. Hopefully that answers your question. I mean, I I could probably talk for two hours on that point, on my philosophy of what goes into making a good coaching program on the back end of a low-ticket course offer. I've been doing it for 20 years, man. Like I need to write that book. I see people doing it wrong. One of the things I see people doing wrong constantly is trying to set it and forget it. There's no setting and forgetting it. These are real people. And you better, you know, today, today, I texted three people who are in our coaching program. One of them's been in it two years. And I was just looking at some metrics that identify this is someone we might want to reach out to based on how long they've been in our program, when their most recent point of contact with us was, right? And just kind of, I've got a metric I use. It's like if they've been in with us a long time and they're still touching base with us, they're still checked in. I'm not going to check out on them. I'm going to encourage them to reach out, touch base. That's a relationship that's just begging. You know, it's like a, you know, to use a church analogy, it's like a pastor who's got a fairly large church. Wouldn't it be interesting to know the people who've been there the longest, who are the most bought in, that you haven't touched base with in a while? Those are probably the people you want to touch base with, right? Same thing with a group coaching or a or a large individual coaching. Reach out to those people, build relationships. They're your greatest advocates, your greatest success stories, greatest podcast guests, right? Um so little things like that, I've had time to perfect these systems. And I'm getting very passionate about helping others build these systems for their offers too. You and I talked previously. Reach out to me, track me down. If you're looking for someone to coach you through how to build a coaching program the right way, a big ticket, man, let's go. If you're ready to go further, faster, I'm your coach, right? Um, I love that. I just love it because it's a beautiful business model. It's a great way to make a living, genuinely pouring into others and caring. But the whole set it and forget it is the biggest mistake I see people make. Oh, I just got to hire a couple good coaches, build the right funnel, push some buttons, they take care of it. No, no one's gonna care more than you do.

SPEAKER_03 29:53

You're the expert. If someone wants to get in touch with you, what's the best way?

SPEAKER_02 29:57

Yeah, well, it's uh silentgym.com, like it says here on the screen, my main website, you can send a message to support jimcochram at gmail.com. It's probably in the bio. My name's spelled out. It's most people spell it wrong. Just but just squish my name together at gmail. Feel free to reach out directly. Perfect. Happy to do it.

Multiple Income Streams For Sellers

SPEAKER_03 30:14

One of the things I bet people are thinking about with this is at least I well, I'm one of the things I'm wondering about is like if you're helping people to make a lot of money on Amazon, why are they wanting to also then work as a coach? Is it like a oh, this is a fun side gig? Is it they're not making as much money as they want to on Amazon? Is it being part of the community? Like what's the why do they say yes? Great question.

SPEAKER_02 30:35

The heart of you can see over my shoulder right here, the silent sales machine book. You referenced it in the intro, Silent Sales Machine. If you want it free, go to silentgym.com slash free one one. That's a free access to version 11. I'm not trying to sell my book, but one of the things I teach in there is multiple income streams. Build systems, build income streams. Don't build a job for yourself. Amazon sellers, same way. We've got a system here where as you step on the gas, you're stepping away. You're building something that other people can run. One of our clueless newbie students who became a success story and now became a business partner of mine, built a $3 million business selling on Amazon, great margins. He had two virtual assistants running the whole thing. He stepped back. He's a software genius. His previous work that he did was building software systems for a large company that he was owner of. He wanted to be home with his kids. He didn't want to work 70 hours a week at a company. He sold that company, built some software that we're now selling to the other students in our community to help them automate their business the way he automated his. So when you're building income streams, the point is not to make yourself busy. It's not like the clown at the circus that has 50 plates on poles and he's keeping them all spinning. No, it's like you're building self-spinning systems. You've got other people spinning the plates. No one cares who's spinning the plates as long as they keep spinning. So you're putting good people in place, you're putting good systems in place. So our students are taught early on, we're not teaching you how to put tape on boxes the rest of your life. We're building a profitable system that you can step back from, put other people in charge of, and then do other things, such as be a coach and help people through the process, create systems that serve this community, or launch other business models. And we teach a lot of other things besides this. This model just happens to be the lowest hanging fruit introduction into the community. But we've got people who go on to do all kinds of other interesting things. One of the wide open doors after you've had a degree of success on Amazon, for example, is help other brands that are struggling on Amazon figure out the landscape, get paid very well to do it, become a consultant, become an agency with a handful of clients, help other brands succeed where you've already succeeded, right? So those opportunities kind of spill organically into your lap as a part of our community. And we've seen some people do some incredible things. And as they rise in leadership and creativity, we to the degree they're interested, recruit that talent back in and pay them to teach us what it is that they're doing.

SPEAKER_03 32:56

So it's a flywheel. Nice. How much

Email Metrics Deliverability And Clicks

SPEAKER_03 32:59

is email a part of your whole process? Is that like a major part of your funnel and how you're kind of moving people along? Huge, huge, huge, huge part of it.

SPEAKER_02 33:08

I can tell you that uh mass blast broadcast email is getting tricky, not because people don't open, read it, and respond, but because the big email providers really don't like broadcast. You're better off with the uh sequence, you know, drip campaigns, like because you did this, I'm gonna send you this, this, and this over the next few days. You know, those sequences, those are powerful. We do broadcast. I did a broadcast today about a new offer that we've got. So we do do them, but we keep an eye on our metrics with a fine-tooth comb. Uh and I can tell you we've got uh we use Infusion Soft, Keep, right? Um, have used them for a long time. There's better systems out there, whatever. Um, but they they do a good job with bulk email and email management. And my account manager there told me that of all he manages all the biggest accounts they have. He told me of all the accounts he has, no one has better email metrics than me. Which means we're getting we're getting their best email servers, we're getting their best delivery delivery rates. But we're we're very we're tedious about the details with our email. Meaning, if someone is opening our emails but never clicks, we send them an email that says, hey, we're gonna remove you because you're impacting our metrics. There's a link in this email. You need to click it to tell the email service providers that you're interested in engaged, not just opening. Because interested in engaged and opening is bad for us if you don't click a link every once in a while. We explain it to them. And if they don't click that link, we put them on the do not send list. Like, oh, that prospect's gone. Well, they weren't clicking anything. So we've we've shuffled them. So you if you do it that way, you can still send broadcast and still get deliverability. Our deliverability is 40%, or sorry, our open rates are 40%. Great. Yeah, it's it it's it's phenomenal. If it's sometimes more on Mass Blast emails with 40% open rate. Our click rate, we're always working on. You gotta get people to click. One of my if I had to give you one email tip, it would be early on when you start sending emails to people. One of the part of the sequence has to be, hey, click this link. You gotta click this link. Get people to click. Because as soon as they click, especially with Gmail, if you can get someone to open an email and then click something, Gmail's like, okay, these guys are legit. They give you a hall pass for the next few months. Your stuff's gonna go in the inbox. But if people are just opening and looking, they're not clicking, it's barely better than if they had not opened it at all. You want people clicking. That's the tip. Whatever you gotta do to get people to click, that's the tip. And then you've got to be willing to scrub people out because that'll impact your deliverability metrics no matter who you're using to do your bulk send, they've got all the big email service providers breathing down their neck. Saying, do not spam, do not spam. We will impact your entire database if you do. So keep an eye on those metrics or your or your list becomes pretty useless pretty quick. So, yeah, I'm a huge fan of email, but you got to be doing it the right way. And that's something else that I love helping people think through and coaching them through, doing that the right way. Um another thing we can help you with. Because we we've been doing email marketing for for 20 years. It's changed, it's changed a little, not as much as some people might suspect. It still is our most powerful way. Like, you want to make a couple thousand dollars today? Send an email. Make the right email. You got a big enough email list, make it the right offer, you know, run a sale, run a sale on something. 50% off next three days only, boom, here comes the orders. My son runs a landscaping business and he had a slow week here. He's got 700 clients now. I told him, collect email addresses. He told me this just a couple days ago. Like, I just dad, I just did what you said. I like sent out an email blast, said, Hey, 20% off the first five people. We have a slow week. We had a couple big jobs cancel. His calendar filled up for the next month. Right. Like one email blast, right? It works for a list of 700 people, it works for lists of tens of thousands.

SPEAKER_03 36:57

Yeah, it's something I um harp on about. If you're a regular podcast listener, then you would have heard me talk about this till the you know till I'm blue in the face. But like it sending out an ES promoting something every month will just change your life as a course creator. Like most course creators, um, I don't know if you know this, Jim, they they send out promotions for things probably two to three times a year when they launch a new course, Black Friday, and then maybe some other time. I'm just like, and what I say to people, what happens when you when you send out a promotion?

SPEAKER_02 37:28

Nothing.

SPEAKER_03 37:29

Or or what happened, what what bad happens, nothing, right? But you look at where's there's the spike in their revenue. It's like what happened there when there's that spike in the revenue? It's like, oh, I sent an email promotion. Okay. What if you sent another email promotion and everybody's worried about being salesy and spammy and too aggressive, and they never want to upset their list, but it's like, why did you get someone onto the list if it wasn't in order to get them to buy something? You know, don't you have great products that people should be getting that they get amazing value from? It's like you got to start doing promotions.

SPEAKER_02 37:59

I've I've got a story you're gonna like, John uh, about power of email.

Super Bowl Traffic Versus Email Profit

SPEAKER_02 38:03

Now it's a few years back, but nothing has changed. This story could be a week old and it would it would work exactly the same. So one of my students uh has a coffee that's become very popular. He started off as basically living in his mom's garage and he had a dream to build a coffee brand. We helped him out. One of my most successful students, he built Death Wish Coffee. I don't know if you've ever heard of it or not. It's huge in the United States. It's in every it's in 35,000, 40,000 grocery stores at this point in the world. Nice. Huge. But our community got behind him. He was in a contest, a social media contest, where the person who got the most votes won a commercial on the Super Bowl. Sounds crazy. Yeah, right. He won this thing to make a long story short. Hundreds of people entered as finalists. I mean, thousands entered, hundreds of finalists, dozen people in the final final got big exposure. He was the final winner, one winner, Super Bowl commercial to this day. You can go look up Death Wish Coffee Super Bowl commercial. Awesome commercial. It cost like, I think it was 20 million bucks or something to produce this thing free. It didn't cost him a penny. Okay. But in getting ready for that, we're having a strategy session. He's like, Jim, they're gonna put DeathWishCoffee.com on the Super Bowl. What do we do here? I said, you got to be ready to fill orders. You got to be ready to take a waiting list because you're probably gonna sell out, obviously. Don't scramble there. That's not where the money is. Get the email addresses. Get the email addresses any way you can because you're gonna hit a wave. Talk to talk to Shopify, make sure they put they put him on the Kanye plan. There's only like three or four people who've ever been on the Kanye plan. He was on it for like two weeks. So, like, it's not gonna crash, right? Right, guys? He's like, nope, you're good. They took Shopify took care of him. He gathered email addresses. The point of the story is as cool as that story is, you can go see that full story at pickmicbrown.com. P-I-C-K Mikebrown.com. That's his name. And that's the website I set up for him as a gift when I heard that he was in the final couple hundred. I'm like, let's just win this thing, man. So we just sent people to pick Mike Brown. He told his story. Now you see the rest of the story, you can see the commercial. It's a great, it's a great story if we stopped right there. But the point is email, right? So he gathers all these email addresses. He texts me excitedly, like six or seven months later. He said, you know, the best sales day we've ever had, obviously, the best 24, 48 hours we ever had is when the Super Bowl commercial ran. Swamped. Until I sent out an email promo a couple of days ago. It was like almost twice as many orders came in. He did more with an email blast than what he did with Super Bowl commercial exposure, which is the most expensive advertising space you can get in the United States. Third quarter Super Bowl commercial. Go ask AI what that costs. What did it cost him to send an email blast? Nothing. His I mean, whatever his monthly rate is to manage his email list, you know, a couple hundred bucks, whatever, right? So that's the power of email. Do not discount email. It's just so powerful. And it and and they've they've discovered all kinds of other stuff. If you become a fan of Deathwish, they're kind of the Harley Davidson of coffee, right? They got people getting tattoos and you know, putting their logo on the back of their car, and like, you know, and Mike's just clean cut, you know, skinny white dude. He doesn't even drink much coffee. But you know, he's he's marketed, you know, when his fans meet him, they're disappointed typically. They weren't a big Harley-looking dude, you know, Deathwish, Viking, you know, that's that's not who he is at all. Uh so his brand is is pretty funny to follow. Um, but you can kind of see what they're doing. Get on their mailing list and see. They're not just selling coffee, they're selling mugs and fan gear, and they're engaging and telling stories and um providing content that their audience wants. People want to hear from you. If they don't, they'll unsubscribe. Yeah, an email list goes stale. If someone hasn't received an email from you in about, I would say six weeks, they're just about gone. Two months, your odds of getting spam complaints rockets. You've got to have a reason to email people at least once every couple weeks, in my opinion, or you're they're gonna go stale.

SPEAKER_03 42:03

Yeah, I'd say that's fair. If you guys want to hear uh an episode about email marketing and the system that we recommend, it's episode 180, is a really good one. I sat down with Dominic from my team and we answered the most common email marketing questions from our group coaching clients, and so you can kind of learn all about that episode 108.

SPEAKER_02 42:22

I'll go check that out too. 180. I'm gonna check that out. There's always always more to learn, man. I've been doing it a long time, but every time, there's always more to learn. So thank you for that. For me, for my sake. I know that's for the listeners, but I'll go check it out

Resources Links And Final Plugs

SPEAKER_02 42:33

too.

SPEAKER_03 42:33

Jim, this has been absolutely awesome. Um, I love what you're doing. It's absolutely fantastic. If people wanted to go check out your site or your podcast, whatever, could you do a quick plug-in of like all the different website addresses?

SPEAKER_02 42:44

Yeah, just silentjim.com, just like it's on the screen here if you're watching this. If you listen, it's Jim J I M. That's my name, silentjim.com, uh, after the silent sales machine book. You know, if you want a free copy of that, you want to listen to me yammer for about eight hours about uh everything I've learned in 20 years of the only income I've earned is e-commerce. Since Microsoft since I was let go from my Microsoft position, that's been it. 24 years. E-commerce, jumping in with both feet, learning lessons along the way, surrounding myself with good people, serving clients. Do a little research on AI or Google if you want about my reputation. And if you like what you see, man, jump in. Go grab the book, silentgym.com/slash free one one is how you get the silent sales machine book for free. And um, you can hear me talking about that, or check out our podcast a little bit. And if anyone wants to reach out about launching their own coaching program, thank you for permission, John, to mention that today. I'd love to work with them and have a conversation with them. If you've got a bit of an audience, you've got a bit of momentum around an info product, and you're saying, I want to build a coaching program around this, man, it's a great decision. I can help you crush it. Let's go. Reach out to me. My team and I would love to work with you. I love working with leaders who just need to find another way to monetize what it is they're doing and providing value to their audience. So I think I'll leave it at that, man. John, it's been a pleasure. Thanks for inviting me today.

SPEAKER_03 44:01

Yeah, thanks, Jim. I really, really appreciate it. Um, as always, guys, if you uh want to learn more, uh you want to check out any of the other podcast episodes on those topics, then go check the links that I'd mentioned. Um, and then we've got resources on the email marketing as well at data drivenmarketing.co slash resources. Thanks again, guys, for listening, and we'll see you next time.