The Traffic Hackers


Join Brent Stone and Glen in an enlightening episode of "The Traffic Hackers" as they delve into the critical role of delivering genuine value and fostering a stellar reputation for long-term business success. This episode, part two of a pivotal discussion on lead generation, unpacks the detrimental effects of selling based on illusionary value and the essential strategies for establishing and maintaining a business ethos rooted in authenticity and customer satisfaction.
Highlights Include:


  • The Pitfalls of Fake Value: Explore the common traps businesses fall into by promising more than they can deliver and the negative impact this has on their reputation and bottom line.
  • Understanding True Value: Brent and Glen discuss the importance of knowing the real worth of your products or services and how to price them not just for profit, but for genuine customer benefit.
  • The Lazy and Selfish Mindset: Uncover how a focus on quick profits and scalability challenges leads some business owners to compromise on value, and why this approach is ultimately self-defeating.
  • Building a Reputation on Real Value: Learn why starting with "unbelievable value" and leveraging testimonials is a powerful strategy for new businesses aiming to establish credibility and trust.
  • Employee Mindset vs. Business Owner Mindset: The episode concludes with a thought-provoking comparison of short-term versus long-term thinking in business management and growth.


Brent and Glen use their experiences, both the triumphs and trials, to offer actionable advice and reflections on ensuring your business not only survives but thrives by adhering to ethical practices and delivering on promises. Whether you're a seasoned entrepreneur or just starting out, this episode provides invaluable insights into the importance of building a business that genuinely serves its customers and stands the test of time.



Creators & Guests

Host
Glen Martin
Struggling with month-to-month finances, I reached a breaking point in 2013 and contacted a mentor who changed my life. His guidance shifted my mindset from an employee to an entrepreneur, leading me to create various business ventures in e-commerce, digital marketing, and coaching. Nine years later, my wife is a full-time homemaker, and we've been blessed with success. I'm passionate about helping others escape financial struggles and take control of their lives, aiming for impact, influence, and income. Let's connect to start your journey of growth and change lives together!
Producer
Brent Stone
Overcoming early turmoil, I've transformed challenges into resilience and success. My journey includes: Escaping legal trouble in my teens. Achieving national recognition in network marketing at 19. Transitioning from managing a multi-million-dollar dental facility to co-owning a Dental Service Organization in my early 20s. Launching a lead generation firm/software development company and starting the “Traffic Hackers” podcast. Undergoing a spiritual journey and creating the “Changed Podcast” with my wife. Today, I'm an entrepreneur, owner, connector, and author, inspired by my encounters with Jesus. I founded Funnel Force and developed leadtether, an innovative lead generation software. I focus on helping professionals streamline their business processes. Expertise: Advertising/Marketing Strategy, Scaling Systems, Dental Industry, Software Development, Podcast Hosting, Strategic Business Consulting. Looking for: Collaborations, partnerships, opportunities to expand my podcasts, and speaking engagements. Join me for a transformative journey in entrepreneurship. Let’s make an impact together.

What is The Traffic Hackers?

Welcome to "The Traffic Hackers" podcast, your go-to resource for mastering the art of lead generation and demand generation. Each episode is packed with insights and strategies to help companies and entrepreneurs skyrocket their business growth. We delve deep into the secrets of increasing sales and revenue, transforming the way you attract and nurture leads.

Join us as we explore innovative methods to increase lead sources and reveal the tools and tactics for automating your lead generation process. Whether you're a seasoned business owner or just starting out, "The Traffic Hackers" is your guide to putting revenue growth on autopilot. Tune in to unlock the potential of hot leads and learn how to turn clicks into customers, driving your business forward in today's competitive market.

Subscribe now and embark on a journey to elevate your business with "The Traffic Hackers" – where every listener gets equipped to conquer the digital landscape and achieve sustainable growth.

#LeadGeneration #DemandGeneration #BusinessGrowth #IncreaseSales #IncreaseRevenue

Brent Stone (00:00.574)
Hey, welcome back to the traffic hackers. We are Brent and Glenn and we are going to have some fun today. This is part two and a very important lead generation discussion around basically just delivering real value and having a good reputation. And it's, it's one of the, it's one of the fastest ways you can like kill your business if you, if you don't practice these things, um, we just to catch you up on the episode, if you didn't listen to the last episode.

Well, first off, I'm sorry, Glenn, how are you doing today? So excited. I'm going to get right into this.

Glen (00:35.651)
Hey, what's up guys? I am doing awesome. Great to be back and super excited to continue this conversation about real value. We're going to have a lot of fun today. Thanks for watching.

Brent Stone (00:44.414)
It's gonna it's gonna be fun because if we're really going to deliver value on our own and we got to give you some tangible ways that you can actually like look at this in your business and think about your business. Sometimes reflecting on content like this you know this episode the last episode helps people with getting their business to the next level. And so one of the things we talked about is like real value. So many people today are selling things based off of like fake value. And you made it. You made.

a reference to, you know, selling something for $50,000 when it's really only valued, you know, like you're only delivering like maybe $3,000 worth of value versus, or you could sell something for $50,000 and deliver $100,000 worth of value. Obviously, the second is where you want to be. And so that's where I think a lot of people miss the mark. Would, I mean, obviously you agree you made the example but

Glen (01:42.24)
Oh, 100%. I mean, we have paid not quite $50,000, but we've paid for services just for ourselves that were thousands of dollars that I don't think we're even hundreds of dollars worth of deliverability at the end of the day. And, and, you know, that was when we were obviously starting funnel force and looking at our, you know, over our overall company.

And it was a really good lesson for us really soon in the beginning of our company. It's like, wow, you know what? There's some real, there's some real terrible offers out here and it takes a lot of vetting. And I mean, dude, I think that's why business owners are so frustrated sometimes when people don't take them serious. You know, you've got Brent over here and you're, you know, the most ethical person in the history of the world and your value is actually real value. And then you've got, you know, Darrell and his values, just complete garbage. And

Darrell is better at sales and now you can't figure out why no one takes you seriously. And you know Darrell's over here shy-stirring people and you're just like, what is going on? That's why we're having this conversation because you got to be able to stick that out and your business reputation will stand the test of time, even if it takes you longer to get started.

Brent Stone (03:02.25)
Yeah, it's so true. I mean, here's the thing. If you got a good reputation, then you can have long-term business. Most people, like post-COVID era, it's like they see Instagram and hundreds of people being like, you can start a business online and you should. And you should, but before you do it, you really need to understand why you're doing it. If your number one goal is just to make money, you're not gonna stay in business long. You have to find something that you believe in first.

Like what are you doing that you can believe in and understand first? And then, yeah, you should need to have a goal of making a lot of money, sure. Because if you make a lot of money and you reinvest into your company and it's scalable and you can deliver not only a service to a couple of people, you can deliver a service that impacts the world if you're successful. But that, unfortunately, we've run into people, they don't have that thought process. And so anyway, so today, here's what I wanna talk about today, is

why businesses don't do this. So I'm just gonna call it out right away. And before I do, Glenn, I don't know if you wanna weigh in here on your opinion on why businesses don't do this. I've got a couple of notes written down, but basically I have strong opinions on this, but I would love to get your feedback on this. Do you have any feedback on why you believe businesses don't do this?

Glen (04:28.52)
I think they think it takes too much time and the ultimate, the ultimate reason I believe is they're lazy and they care only about themselves. They're lazy and they're selfish. And that's my two overarching reasons. So dive into yours because I could obviously unpack those a little bit more.

Brent Stone (04:35.126)
Yeah.

Brent Stone (04:45.474)
So, well, here's the thing. I think you're exactly right, especially post 2020. I mean, I don't know what happened, but it just seems like work ethic. Like we have a business, like another business, like outside of what Glenn and I have, I say we, my wife and I, and trying to get people to show up to interviews for like real jobs, like it's wild.

Glen (04:50.333)
Yes.

Brent Stone (05:11.594)
And especially for the positions that we're offering when we know we're paying two, three, four, five bucks more an hour more in most cases than what other people in the same industry in our geographical area are paying is wild. Anyway, so yeah, that's just my side. So yes, I agree 110% with what you just said. Now here's some of the notes that I wrote down here and I'm going to go through this quickly so we can have some opposite thought process here on how to actually build.

value and reputation and whatnot. So why businesses don't wanna put in the time to do this? Because money, it's adding overhead to their business. So when you automatically get shystered, first thing you gotta understand is that business owner wants to make a profit and they should wanna make a profit. That's okay that they wanna make a profit, but they should also deliver value at least equal to plus, you know.

Glen (06:09.247)
Yes.

Brent Stone (06:09.33)
some margin of 20, 30% more than what you paid. So you actually get benefit from you investing your operating capital into that service. But the person selling you the stuff, they've gotta make money, but if they're gouging you and they can't deliver on the value, that's where the problem is. That's the problem. So.

Um, and I'm not saying that you don't give them adequate time to fulfill that value because maybe I've seen people that have a really good offer in a sense to where they'll charge a whole lot upfront and they'll work with you until they basically deliver back like twice what you paid or something like that. Like I've seen guarantees like that. You know what? If people hold to that, that I think that that's a good offer. Because if they're not only wanting you to get the money that you invested out of it, but times two, then, then they've, they've given you something. Now if

If it's like five years down the road, that's not really good offer because of inflation. And if they can't return that capital back to you sooner for you to redeploy that capital into something else, that's, that's not good, but that that's a whole nother, that's a whole nother discussion. So here's the other thing. Um, businesses, it takes away typically, unless they're like in software, which is a whole nother conversation, but it takes away from their ability to have high volume of, um, output.

So if people are selling like consultative services and they're charging, you know, $500 an hour, well, it's not like they have 30 hours in a day and nine days in a week. So they have to be able to like deliver what they sell. If they've got to be on site, well, they can't be in two businesses at the exact same time. So there's limitations there. Now you sell software and...

Glen (07:31.494)
Yes.

Brent Stone (07:59.402)
you can keep increasing the value of your software with, you know, updates and, uh, live help and tech support and different things. Like there's different things you can do to increase value there. But I mean, if people are going and just buying your software, I mean, that's. You could sell a million subscriptions today. Um, and then, and then what you should do is you take that profit and reinvest it into things that are going to raise the value. So you elevate your customer experience and you have this upward cycle.

because then they get happy and they go tell other people and then you have two million people buy subscriptions the next month. And that's just that's just in my mind, that's just common sense. Do you have any feedback on that? Glenn, do you have any feedback for people on you know, what other reasons why business or if you want to unpack the reasons why you gave initially?

Glen (08:37.594)
Mm-hmm.

Glen (08:45.944)
Yeah. Well, you know, I'm going to go with like online businesses and, and I think where a lot of people get this whole value stack, this whole value ladder. It initially came, I believe Russell Brunson really made it popular of like the value ladder and, and the reason I say people are lazy and they're selfish is they didn't take time to understand why the value that he places on something.

was 10 times what he charged and it was due to actually what he was going to deliver was actually worth 10 times what they were getting. And instead of them really taking each thing and saying, well, if you charge $97, how was that worth, you know, 970 or 9,700? What's the difference? You know, how, why would have you originally priced it at that? And studying it, see, this is the lazy aspect. People look at it and they're like, well, if you could charge that.

Oh, okay. Cool. I want to sell coffee cup. Oh man. Yeah. 10 bucks. Sure. Value of that coffee mug over your lifetime. $10,000. Cool. I'm just going to put that on there just because. And so it's this, it creates this fake value ladder where people just don't take time to think and they don't take time to study their specific market and say, all right, so if I want to charge this price, what's actually

in the market, what is, if I take market value and I do market research, what are actually people charging for this and what can I, and doing their studying and putting the work in and they show up and they know, like they know that they know that they know that what they're charging is way more value than what they're actually asking as a ticket price. See, that's a business owner that understands and someone's like, well, how did you

I've got this question on sales calls. So how did you build the value into that? It's a really good question to ask. I mean, that's a great question for a part. Yeah. And I was like, man, this is actually when I was closing for somebody else. When I got that first question, I was like, kind of caught me off guard because I didn't know, cause I was just being the closer. I didn't know why they put the value in. And I was like, well, here's why I believe. And I went down through it and I said, but I can ask.

Brent Stone (10:43.05)
Yeah, it is. And people should ask that. People should ask that.

Glen (11:06.48)
And I can get you an answer of why they put this there. Cause I, they knew I wasn't the business owner. I was just the front end guy. And it's a great question to ask because they're asking, you know, if you're doing X, Y, and Z, how do you know if your time is worth $10,000 over the next six months? How did you figure that by the way? Well, I just feel like I'm that valuable. Well, sure. You know, but, but that's where these questions come in. And so.

Brent Stone (11:16.459)
Yeah.

Brent Stone (11:26.273)
Right.

Glen (11:35.176)
The reason I mentioned this is I think that that's where people are a little bit lazy and a little bit selfish is they take something that is kind of all over the internet now based on someone's actual real life experiences and what they actually built in and they're just like, well, if he can do it, I've sure. I'll just do the same thing. Now you got to study your specific industry and actually have good answers. And it goes back to what we said in the last episode, put yourself in your prospect's shoes and ask yourself.

Brent Stone (11:52.844)
Yeah.

Glen (12:03.332)
If I am asking the question of where did I get this value? Do I have a great answer? Am I stumbling over myself saying, well, I mean, I'm important. You know, that's why no, where did you actually get this? And, and I know it's a little bit funny, but I think these are really, really big questions of why people don't do it and then why you should and how you can separate yourself so much from a lot of other people in that industry. So.

That's my thoughts.

Brent Stone (12:34.166)
Yeah. Well, in closing, here's, here's something else that it does too, which unfortunately a lot of the people in this online business space post 2020, they don't really think about this. What they, what they're doing is that if they just falsely and raise their value and, and they're selling a similar thing to people over here, what ends up happening is ever not everyone, but a lot of people start trying to fall, like keep up with the whole thing. It's just.

It's a bad cycle. How do people fix it? And here's the thing that I'll say, is if people wanna reverse engineer how much they're charging, how much value they're actually delivering to a small business based off of like their testers that they've done, like if they've got a beta group, how much value have you been able to produce in your beta test for a potential client?

And I think that would give people more of a realistic way on how they should price things. And then once they get to the point where they can sell that really, really well, then they start to realize, oh, well, this is selling all the time. I'm struggling to even just fulfill this. I need to price it higher so less people buy. So they just raise it a little bit just to basically slow down the volume.

Glen (13:40.96)
Mm-hmm.

Brent Stone (13:55.65)
So they raise the price a little bit, but then people keep on buying. Well, they're like, wow, okay, well then the market's higher for this service. And they've got the testimonials to back it up. So now they can actually keep raising it and raising it. And then that's when you see a, like a realistic cycle. Like if that person has the buy, like the purchasing still happening as they continue to raise that price, they have something there. But when you start off and you're just like, hey, we think it's worth this. Like you said, it's just,

Don't do that. So if you wanna generate a lot of leads, initially you gotta give people something that's like an unbelievable value. And unfortunately in the beginning, if you don't have testimonials and you don't have the beta group to base stuff off of, you're gonna have to go and figure out what's a realistic value. A lot of people get started offering stuff for free. I'm in a couple of different groups on Facebook for people in our industry, and there's people in there being like,

Glen (14:43.134)
Mm-hmm.

Brent Stone (14:55.998)
I'm going to basically help 10 people for free. And because I want your testimonials, real, real upfront. Hey, I don't have any, um, reportable experience. I've got experience, but I don't have anyone that's willing to give me their testimony yet. I would like to serve you for free and deliver a testimonial in return for testimonial from you. And, and there's people hitting them back. Yep. I'll do that. You know, and, and these people know they can invest their time to use this guy's service, but

Glen (15:17.225)
Yep.

Brent Stone (15:24.842)
at least that transaction's happening. And that's worth it to those people. I mean, you gotta be at a certain place in business to just take anybody just off the street trying to get started, which it's a beautiful thing. Like if you're a new business owner, this is probably a whole another episode, but if you're a new business owner and you're trying to come in and grow, using somebody like that is probably great. I don't know if, you know, I don't know if any business that, you know, is up and running and like high capacity, if they're gonna just.

Glen (15:28.448)
100 percent.

Brent Stone (15:53.718)
give someone the chance, hopefully they do, but that's something to consider. So the ecosystem, the entrepreneurial ecosystem is growing, if that makes sense. You know, you've got the people like in that scenario, they need other entrepreneurs that are also getting started that need those services, and so they can feed each other. And hopefully people can just get this ethical compass dialed into their brain so it's not just like the compass is spinning around, I can just do whatever I want.

Glen (16:11.089)
Mm-hmm.

Brent Stone (16:23.198)
Yeah, you can or you'll go out of business or you're going to have a terrible reputation and you're still going to go out of business. Anyway, so sorry about the rant, but we should probably wrap up this episode. Any, any closing thoughts?

Glen (16:37.264)
I mean, it just all comes back to, are you employee minded or are you business owner minded? Business owners always think long-term and so they're super excited to slow down and figure these things out. Employees think today. It's like, man, if I can just show up and work eight hours today and I do this for 40 hours, I get this much of a paycheck suite. I don't really care what happens. I got a paycheck. And

I mean, that's a different topic too, but that's why I think even small business owners, when they're just starting out, they're, they struggle because they're like, I cut my job. This has to work. And then they, they don't even intend, I think a lot of people have great intentions, but what happens is they needed the money so bad that they then couldn't even provide the service because they need more money right away and it creates a really, it's a, it's a bad cycle to be in.

And you got to, you got to understand what you're doing when you start a business. This is no longer a job. You might get paid a lot today, but you might not get paid again for like 60 days. Can you do that? You know, and, and I'm, I'm painting some, some pictures here, but a lot of business owners that have initially started out can definitely relate to that where. It can be amazing today and not amazing in the next three weeks. If you don't understand what you're trying to accomplish.

That's it. Appreciate you guys for. Hanging out with us, Brent. I'll let you wrap it up.

Brent Stone (18:06.062)
Sure, well, thank you, Traffic Hacker community for tuning in to us. Thank you for giving us your time. And we're excited about being able to go into new topics here in the next episode. But with that being said, we'll see y'all here very soon. Take care.