#204: Bryan Harris — How to grow your audience through partnerships (even if you have a small audience yourself)

Bryan Harris [00:00:00]:
Can I actually tell you right now the deepest, darkest thing that I'm experiencing in work or in life and you to be okay with that? If you can do that, you actually have trust.

Jay Clouse [00:00:26]:
Hello, my friend. Welcome back to another episode of Creator Science. This week, I am rejoined by friend of the podcast, Brian Harris. Now, if you don't know Brian, he's the founder and CEO of Growth Tools. That's a coaching program that guarantees to help you grow your business. And I don't say that lightly because they actually guarantee that they will help you land 10 partnerships in 90 days. Brian was a guest back on episode number 121 where we talked about this guarantee and his unique revenue model. It was really popular.

Jay Clouse [00:00:57]:
So I'll link in the show notes for you to listen to after this episode. I've worked with Brian's team in the past through Growth University, and I've also been on the receiving end now of their partnerships machine. This episode is actually the result of his team making a really good partnership proposal. It's very meta, but they actually proposed the idea of doing a follow-up episode to talk about his team's process for landing partnerships. And here you go. Proof is in the pudding. I said yes, and I respond to very few podcast pitches. So that is what this episode is all about.

Jay Clouse [00:01:28]:
Brian and I get into the weeds of of how to grow through partnerships and collaborations even if you have a small audience. This is the number one growth strategy that Brian helps his clients with and it is truly effective. In typical Brian fashion, this is a highly tactical, dense, and even surprising at times interview. He's a man who truly practices what he preaches, and this episode does not disappoint. I'd love to hear what you think about this episode. I love when people tag me on Instagram or Twitter or wherever and show me where they're listening to the show. It's so exciting and I try to reshare all of those posts. So take a photo, take a screenshot, whatever, tag me at jklaus and let me know.

Jay Clouse [00:02:06]:
But now, let's talk with Brian. Alright. Brian Harris back on the show. Your first interview on the show gets referred to time and time again as kind of a frame breaking idea for folks to think about monetization strategies and models. So I'm excited to talk today about partnerships because I think that'll similarly have an impact on people. Before we talk about the how to get partnerships, though, I kinda wanna spend a little bit of time talking about why to get partnerships because you've explored all kinds of different ways to help your clients and your customers grow. And it seems like partnerships has been a cornerstone for you for several years now. So I'd like to hear how you landed on that as like a go to strategy.

Bryan Harris [00:02:54]:
Yeah. I honestly didn't really want it to be. I feel like in the last year, it's gone from, like, the thing we've primarily talked about to, like, okay. I think I get it now, like, personally. So in the first episode, we'll talk about the sum pricing model, which is my favorite way to price any high ticket offer, but especially coaching or training. So it's, you know, pay a one time fee, a setup fee, plus a monthly recurring fee. What we're gonna talk about today is way more answering the question that comes before that, which is how do I get new clients to hire me at all, much less get particular about the pricing model that I'll charge them. So over the years, we've just passed the 11 year mark, I've tried so many things, and I don't really care.

Bryan Harris [00:03:37]:
I don't care if we sell coaching. I don't really care if we run ads. Like, I don't really, at the end of the day, really I just want the thing that is, like, really hard to screw up because I'm not a master executor. I think people have this perception of me, sometimes people that have followed for a while, like, oh, he's really good. Well, actually, I'm terrible at all those things. Like, the thing that's gonna work is the thing that's really hard to screw up. Well, this is the case with any product, especially coaching. Anything that takes a high level of trust, which coaching does, agency work does, like, as the price point goes up, the trust factor to buy has to go up as well.

Bryan Harris [00:04:11]:
Like, if you're paying $9 for a thing, doesn't really matter. Netflix, $19. If you don't like it, you turn it off the next month. But if you pay a $100, a $1,000, $10,000, or more, like, you have to trust that person. Dave Ramsey has this quote that I've heard for years, which is, like, I don't teach fine like, the thing I sell is trust at the end of the day. And I think that's the that's, like, the underlying mechanism needed to make a purchase, especially as the price point goes up. So there's 3 things, and I'll get to the point of answering the question, Matt. This is a little bit of me coaching myself and verbally processing.

Bryan Harris [00:04:40]:
So there's 3 things needed in order to buy that I've just noticed over the years and different people say this in different ways, but you need eyeballs, hearts, and then you can get wallets. So first, people have to know you exist. You could have some way where random people on the Internet don't know of you, and then tomorrow, they know about you. So that's eyes. The second thing you have to have is trust. You gotta have their heart. If they don't trust you, they are not giving you dollars. And then you could have a simple mechanism to get them to actually give you money.

Bryan Harris [00:05:06]:
That's a launch or a webinar, just a, hey, this is what I do. Do you want to hire me thing? And all that to say, of all the different sales and marketing channels I've tried over the years, blogs, and videos, and podcasts, and webinars, and launches, and SEO, and all the things, The one thing I keep coming back to over and over and over and over again that makes it really hard to screw up is partnerships. Getting somebody like, for instance, right now, this is a version of that. You have an established audience. Most of them don't know that I exist. When I come here and talk for 30 minutes to an hour, a lot of them know I exist now. And, hopefully, at some point along the way in this interview, I grab the hearts of a few people, and they're like, oh, man. That Brian guy.

Bryan Harris [00:05:48]:
Like, I kinda like like him. Like, I like he resonate with the way he's talking or the things he's saying or whatever. And then at the right time, whether it's now or later, like, I'll make a call to action of some sort, and I'm like, hey. If you're interested in hiring me, go to growth levels.com and schedule the call and let's talk and see if it makes good sense to do. And a few people will hear this right now and do that. So I've just found with partnerships, it's the simplest way to get people to know you exist, to connect with you, to get a heart connection, and then to make a simple call to action in order to get them to buy. Frame that with the polar opposite, which is running ads. Ads are great.

Bryan Harris [00:06:19]:
We've run them for years. It is really hard to get a random person to see you on Facebook, click a link, and then pay you a lot of money, and when they do, because we you can get that to work, It takes effort, but you can do that. When you do, the heart connection level is really low. Like you can get a random person to see an ad tomorrow, click the ad, schedule the call with you, and pay you $10,000 in the next week. Like, you can do that, and that works. You can make the math of that work really, really well, but it is really hard to coach or agency that human into like really good results consistently over time because like there's no connection at all. And if the thing you trade in is trust and you need that if you're doing any kind of high end work at all. And, honestly, you need it for the low end stuff as well.

Bryan Harris [00:07:02]:
People are just more willing to throw away money if it's not a lot of money. Like, it's really hard to build trust there. And partnerships does that. Doing list swaps, doing collaborations does that really well because the trust is transferred from the partner from you to me for a lot of people in this interview right now or any other thing that we could do. If we do a workshop together or do a lead magnet swap or whatever the thing is, trust is easily transferred. And one of simplest examples to think about this, as most people know, is Robert Kiyosaki or doctor Phil. Like, both of those dudes were totally unknown to basically every human on the planet. They go on Oprah's show years ago, and Oprah has a ton of trust, because he's done a live daily show for decades on end.

Bryan Harris [00:07:42]:
So when doctor Phil comes on, no one knows this dude exists. At the end of that, he now has one of the most longest running daytime TV shows in human history, and he got a start by going on Oprah. Or Robert Kiyosaki has a book called Rich Dad Poor Dad that a lot of people know. That book was published before he goes on Oprah. After Oprah, he attributes all of his success, over 5,000,000 copies sold to going on Oprah one time and the trust being transferred from Oprah and her audience to Guy. And now, everybody knows the name, and he has a $100,000,000 business and all this stuff, all because the trust transfer right there. So that's why we keep coming back over and over because it just works really well and it's really hard to screw up. And yeah.

Bryan Harris [00:08:22]:
So, that's kind of the the long answer to the short question.

Jay Clouse [00:08:24]:
I like this frame of eyeballs, hearts, wallets. I spend a lot of time talking about the difference between discovery and relationship building, which is kind of like the bridge between eyeballs and hearts. And it seems like today, people are so good at the eyeballs part of this, and they really over index on it. They're like, I am so good at short form vertical video. I'm getting so many views, so many impressions, so many engagements, and they're not winning hearts at all. So at the risk of taking a slight diversion, when you look at the landscape today, which has changed a lot since you started creating content years ago, and you see the way people are just reaching a ton of people, what's your reaction to

Bryan Harris [00:09:08]:
that? Multiple things. 1, who cares? It's the first place my mind goes. Like, I met somebody the other day that gets a 1000000000 views a month. And I'm like, awesome. To me, that sounds terrible. Some people love that. Like, they want the fame and all that stuff. But but also, there's gigantic dangers just in that level of distribution.

Bryan Harris [00:09:29]:
For you personally as a human, that will take you to some very bad places if you are not a robust human with a robust brain space. Like, you would jack yourself up completely. So, I hope that many people never see that, and the ones that do have great spiritual and mindset coaching wherever you go. Like, I hope you have that. Otherwise, you are jacked up for life. From a business perspective, I don't really care. Like, I don't want, personally, to be a person anyone knows. Like, I'm good.

Bryan Harris [00:10:02]:
Like, walking in Walmart and somebody knowing me sounds like the worst thing I could possibly dream of. Walking into a conference and 10 people be like, oh, it's Brian. I'm like, that sounds terrible. I want no one to know my face. Which is funny. I heard recently James Clear has decided to not do, like, video interviews anymore for this reason, because he's so big now that, like, I don't wanna go on Good Morning America or do some video podcast. I'll do voice only, because I want to be able to walk down the street and people not know me. So that's a sad answer to the question.

Bryan Harris [00:10:30]:
It doesn't matter if you're not making heart connection. And one of the best examples of this I've seen in, like, this decently mainstream in Internet marketing space is Amy Porterfield. She builds Heart Connection unlike almost anyone I've ever seen. Just go listen to her podcast. Well, go skim through 2 episodes of her podcast, and you will feel connected to that woman after 2 episodes. And the key is, and at least in my evaluation opinion, is she is transparent and vulnerable in uncomfortable ways for her. Like, just go listen. She'll just share everything.

Bryan Harris [00:10:59]:
Not super polished, although she's a very polished person, but she does it in a way that's like, man, it lowers your guard immediately, and this goes to, like, Patrick Galiciano teaches this concept, but it's the humans are humans. He says, like, layer 1. This is in his book, 5 Dysfunctions of a Team. The foundation of any team is trust. And a lot of people, they're like, oh, well I trust my coworker, but he defines trust as your ability to be able to share the thing you suck at, and the thing you're actually hurting the team with, and the rest of the team to be able to hold space with that and support you in it. It's not

Jay Clouse [00:11:31]:
Mhmm.

Bryan Harris [00:11:31]:
I trust you not to murder my kids if you were to keep them over the weekend. Because like most humans actually pass that test. But it is like can I actually tell you right now the deepest, darkest thing that I'm experiencing in work or in life, and you to be okay with that? If you can do that, you actually have trust. Can I tell you, last month, for us at Growth Tools, was the single hardest month in business in 11 years That we lost a $100,000? That 2 people quit. That it was like hard. Like, really hard. Can I say that? No, that's true, by the way. And, like, one, that's kinda scary.

Bryan Harris [00:12:10]:
That kinda sucks to say. I could share more details, but, boy, that seems super scary. Like, can I say that out loud? Because like, that's just real. That's true. Can you do that? Because we think if you just put on this veneer, everything's great and up until the right, which is just We all know that's stupid and not accurate and and fake. Like that's that's really fake. But if you share that, if you can share that and hold space for other people to share that, man, that builds trust and gets hearts. I hate even I hate even saying win hearts.

Bryan Harris [00:12:37]:
It sounds like some tactic. It's just like be a human and be real. If you can do that, like, you can win hearts literally anywhere in any conversation with any human whether it's 101 or 1 to 10000 or 1 to a 1000000, like, who cares? Like, there's something deeply connecting, guard lowering, and just trust is built. Like, people buy from people they trust and when it's all rainbows and unicorns all the time, they think they wanna trust that. But, the people you connect with are the people you are real with, the people you do life with. And that's what I've found to be just true. So Amy does that fantastically well. Go listen to her podcast, go listen to a few of them, and you'll see that in real time.

Bryan Harris [00:13:10]:
Like, I I look up to that. That's impressive. Especially because she's been around a long time and her stuff is really good and she's really successful, but like she still struggles. I still struggle. Alex Ramozi struggles. Whoever you look up to, They have bad days and bad months and crap is hard. So the more you just say that out loud and whatever your context is, like we went to this marriage counselor and he's like, yeah, man. In the last month, me and my wife have disconnected 3 times.

Bryan Harris [00:13:33]:
That violates, like, every rule of marriage counseling, by the way, because the number one rule they teach is don't self disclose, which is totally stupid, by the way, because, like, it just isn't like it just isn't effective. Like, when I heard that, I'm like, oh, man, tell me more about that. When I heard that one of my business mentors had to take out a payroll loan, like, 2 years ago to not default on payroll, I was like, can you tell me more stories like that? Because, like, now I feel like you're a human I can connect with because before Yeah. I just don't want that to idolize you because everything seemed perfect. So you can do that in any context, in any business. So a 1000000000 views, a 1000000 views, like I was just reading back over this morning Kevin Kelly's A 1000 True Fans essay, which is fantastic. You don't even need that many humans, by the way, to know you exist, to meet whatever your financial goals are. You just don't need that many.

Bryan Harris [00:14:18]:
You get a 1,000 people paying you a $100 a month, you're making whatever that is, a $100,000 a month. You have a $1,000,000 business. Fantastic. Like, you don't need more than that. You don't need a 1,000,000,000. You don't need any of that. You didn't need a simple problem you solve. Be open and transparent.

Bryan Harris [00:14:31]:
Use partnerships, by the way, because that just does it really easily. Use whatever you wanna use. I don't care. Partnerships are the simplest, And you'll have whatever monetary goal you need. Like, you don't need the fame thing. You just don't need it at all. But if you optimize for eyeballs, you do. Because you're just going off pure volume.

Bryan Harris [00:14:45]:
Optimized for hearts, you need a lot fewer of them and it's way easier. And it, like, builds community and a relationship by default, by the accidental side effect.

Jay Clouse [00:14:53]:
I promise we're gonna get back to partnerships here in a second. But this is really interesting to me because what you just said, you know, if you're optimizing for eyeballs, you have to go for volume. Because it almost feels like if you're optimizing for eyeballs, you can't do that pure true vulnerability thing. Because I don't think that would actually perform broadly. I don't know that people have the patience to hold that space for someone that they don't already have some sort of relationship to. Because the question I was gonna ask you is, let's say if someone comes to you, comes to Growth Tools, and they're reaching a 1000000 accounts on Instagram per month, but they're not monetizing at all. How would you triage that and say, here's what we're gonna do to help you build trust. I feel like these strategies are almost opposed to go, like, the the broad view route versus the deeper human trust route.

Bryan Harris [00:15:41]:
Well, if what I'm saying is true, they work together. If we have a deficit as a society overarching as, like, nobody actually tells the truth ever, none of us are actually real, none of us actually confess what's actually going on, We just, like, kinda halfway lie all the time or push that down, literally depress the things down, and that causes, you know, the biggest mental health crisis in human history.

Jay Clouse [00:16:05]:
A lot of omission. It's like, I'll tell you part of it. I'll tell you the good parts. And then the other stuff, we're just gonna leave that alone for now.

Bryan Harris [00:16:12]:
And if it's true, we all, like, want that because we're all experienced and yet no one's saying it, then saying it out loud would be effective because people would resonate with that. So I would challenge that they're opposed to each other. Now, how you do that, like all the marketing content production stuff, I think it's been good because we've we've found really cool ways as humans to talk about things that resonate with people. So don't just talk about the wins. Talk about the hard parts as well. Like in a sales letter for instance, you know, paint the picture of what success looks like and then share a handful of mistakes that people typically make on that. Just like be real about your mistakes. Like, hey, one mistake we made on the way to founding partnerships was, you know, losing $2,000,000 on ads along the way.

Bryan Harris [00:16:50]:
It isn't that ads are bad, ads will work, but like if you aren't willing to light 50 grand on fire and throw it down the toilet, do not start. That's a bad idea, and let me show you my bank account of where we did that with a bunch of zeros on the end. So like if you don't have the stomach for that, don't do it. So that's just being real. You know, number 2 might be talking about leadership. Like leadership is way harder than a sales funnel. Leadership is way harder than marketing by a mile. Building a good solid leadership team that can run the company so it isn't just me with every decision, 10 times harder than any marketing thing, a product thing I've ever done.

Bryan Harris [00:17:22]:
And let me give you how I had to hire 4 different directors of marketing and all of them quit because I sucked as a leader in that role until I found the 5th one and I realized, hey, the common theme here isn't these people. The common theme is me. So here are the 3 things I changed. Now it works. Now I'm literally coaching right now 3 different people through hiring directors of marketing and I just straight up tell them that. I was like, hey, here's the 4 mistakes I made. Don't do that crap because that's bad. Like if you're good at marketing and hire a marketer, that'll be the hardest role you ever hire.

Bryan Harris [00:17:48]:
So like you can weave this stuff in elegantly to increase your credibility because like hey man, like I I fell into those pits. I got the t shirts and the scars, and I can walk you through them viscerally because I've lived them and those things suck, so just don't do that. So, you know, think about the blog post. Like, we lost $2,000,000 over the last year on ads, learned the one sales channel that worked. I don't know. That's a crappy headline I just made up on the fly like, okay, that's interesting.

Jay Clouse [00:18:15]:
That's not bad.

Bryan Harris [00:18:15]:
I think

Jay Clouse [00:18:16]:
it's pretty good.

Bryan Harris [00:18:16]:
Yeah. You could talk about the losses in probably ways that are interesting or like decreased credibility or you could talk about them in a way that, one, resonates with people because they're like, oh, dang, he's real and builds desire for the thing that actually worked for you, which is what you wanna hand them anyway. So I think that's just like copywriting marketing 101 kinda stuff, But if all you share is the wins, you will never have the connection that you could have if you share the losses as well. It's impossible because people can't connect with a human that is perfect.

Jay Clouse [00:18:43]:
It starts feeling more like an account than a person, and I think that's a downward spiral when people are engaging with an account rather than what they see to be a person.

Bryan Harris [00:18:52]:
I have this situation with a client right now. Like, they're very well known. A lot of all the followers everywhere, and, like, they're just not real ever. They're just not. Like, it's a bunch of Enneagram threes. So they're like, everything's well polished and perfect and buttoned up and all the good things. It's like, hey, man. Can we tell the losses as well? Share that stuff too.

Bryan Harris [00:19:09]:
Weave it into, like, the hero's journey. Like there's a reason that Luke was in a bad place. That's why he went and saw Yoda. Literally story arc is built on the hero who has a problem who meets a guide. So tell the problem. Don't just tell the hero part of things. Amy actually has a line I heard the other day, secondhand, but it was share the scars not the scabs, which I like a lot.

Jay Clouse [00:19:31]:
Like,

Bryan Harris [00:19:31]:
in the middle of the pit, you don't have to be talking about it. That's okay. Like, you can let the thing heal a little bit and then tell the story because also there's a practical reality of like you're getting attacked. Like you it is hard to share the scab real time and that can actually make it worse. So there's like a healthy level of healing for any trial period you go through anyway that you need to escape before you're even good enough to even tell the story because you don't even see the story if it's still unfolding. So that's a good way to like you don't have to like real time process all your crap out loud with everybody. Go see your therapist and have your community for that. But at the end of it, share the story, man.

Bryan Harris [00:20:02]:
Let that crap work. That blog post will be the most successful blog post you ever published, or Instagram story, or whatever you publish on. It's all the same thing. Like share it. Share the loss. And share it not just as a woe is me, my life sucks story. Share it as like, show the growth from it. Show what happened because there's always a what happened.

Bryan Harris [00:20:19]:
There's always growth. There's always wins from it. Like for me, I've learned how to hire marketing leaders now. After 5 years of totally screwing it up, now, I've hired good marketing leaders, and we have a good marketing leader, and really it's just I learned how to lead a position I was good at, and I've been able to walk clients through it as well. And literally had a hour long conversation Friday with a client who's in the middle of hiring. I was like, hey. Here's just the 4 things I did to totally sabotage this. And if you aren't careful, you will do the exact same thing because you have a lot of the predisposed things that I did in that because you are really good at what you do, and like if you don't leave this person alone and micromanage them, they will leave and you'll just be on the same cycle I was and that'll stall the whole company out, which it did for us as well.

Bryan Harris [00:20:58]:
So, the growth is in the hard times anyway.

Jay Clouse [00:21:01]:
After a quick break, I talked to Brian about how to go from concept to action in leveraging a partnership to get in front of someone else's audience. So don't go anywhere. We'll be right back. And now back to my conversation with Brian Harris. I agree with you that doing a partnership, not only is that a way to get in front of a new audience, the eyeballs, but you are benefiting from the implicit trust that that person is passing on to you. So talk to me about how I put this into action. If I'm hearing this and I'm saying, you know what? I wanna reach more people and I wanna do it efficiently where I'm generating trust as well. Where should I begin?

Bryan Harris [00:21:37]:
One of the simplest forms of borrowing someone else's audience versus having to build your own, which is the easiest way to think about this, is just do a list swap. So, find someone else that has an established audience and give them content, and they'll promote that content. So, one of the easiest ways, we literally do 2 of these every week and coach our clients to do the same thing. We do a resource swap. So you can think about it as in I reach out to Jay and I'm like, hey, Jay. I got this really cool 5 step guide to making great YouTube videos. This worked for us. And it has this cool little tactic underneath it.

Bryan Harris [00:22:09]:
I would love for you to promote it to your audience, and they will get good value and they'll have more trust with you as a result of recommending someone they liked and I'll do the same thing for you. In fact, I found this interview you did or this resource on your site and I'd love to promote it to my audience as well. Literally, you promote their resource, they promote your resource. Both of us get eyeballs, both of us get hearts transferred as a result of it, and both of us get clients and revenue out of it. So that's the very first thing we do every week to grow our audience and to get hearts and to get clients is just swap a resource with someone else. There's a handful of other ones as well that are more complicated, like going on podcasts or doing workshops and such, but a lead magnet swap or a resource swap where you simply take a resource that's really good for your audience and tell them about it. And another creator that you meet does the same thing for you, is one of the simplest ways to get clients. Like, last week, we did a resource swap with Justin Moore, who's a sponsorship guy.

Jay Clouse [00:22:59]:
Oh, yeah. Justin Moore is one of my best friends.

Bryan Harris [00:23:01]:
Oh, cool. Awesome. Yeah. So we do a resource swap with them and we get, I don't remember the number, something like a 150 new people, new eyeballs, 150 people subscribed for the workshop. Six people went to the workshop and were like, oh, that's interesting. This was immediate results. They booked a call. I was like, hey, I'd love to hear more about y'all coaching me because I liked what you were saying.

Bryan Harris [00:23:21]:
I said, great. One person within 7 days hired us. Paid us, I don't know, 5 to $10,000 to coach them. Cool. Very simple. We didn't run ads. We didn't do a ton of content. I simply showed up, taught them how to use partnerships.

Bryan Harris [00:23:34]:
A couple people wanted to, one person hired us. And we do that every week. We do 2 lead magnet swaps a week and 1 workshop a week, and that's our marketing plan. That's it. And it works really easily. As a result of that, your audience grows. Like your email list grows and you can send emails to them and whatnot to nurture that relationship and grow connection, and then occasionally ask them to do whatever the conversion mechanism is for you. So, via example, that's how it works.

Bryan Harris [00:23:55]:
You find a partner that you would want to do a list swap with, you make a resource that they would want to swap, and then you both promote it to the audience. And your audience grows, you get heart connection, and you get clients as a result of that. And just do that every week. If you do one swap a week, you can, like like, if you have a high ticket coaching offer like we do, that's in the 5 to 10,000 other range. If you do one resource swap a week, you can get a client a week from that and that's it. You don't have to do anything else. You simply show up and share your stuff.

Jay Clouse [00:24:20]:
There are two elements of this that I wanna drill down on. 1 is what needs to be true for this person to say yes, And the other is, what is the approach to maximize the likelihood that they will say yes?

Bryan Harris [00:24:35]:
Yeah. They have to want one of 3 things or multiple of these three things. They have to want to grow their audience, they have to want to grow their revenue, or they have to want to share a good resource. One of those three things. Because all of those things will happen when they do it. So, if they have a desire for 1 or more of those to grow their audience, to get more revenue, or to share good resources, content with their audience, then they're almost always easy yeses. So, you don't have to have a bigger list than them. You could have no list in some situations.

Bryan Harris [00:25:08]:
But, if they have one of those three things, then they're good to go.

Jay Clouse [00:25:10]:
If they wanna grow their audience, but they aren't so sure that you do have much of an audience yourself, how do you get them to say yes?

Bryan Harris [00:25:18]:
So the win for the partner you're swapping with can be audience growth, can be revenue growth, and for sure always is a good resource to share with a list. So the great thing is about any audience you would ever go to, they all need good content. All of them. In fact, if you have a newsletter or a podcast or YouTube channel or whatever, like, one of the number one things you think about is, like, what's next week's thing? And it I want it to be better than last week's thing. I want it to be good, and I need something there. That's why interview based shows are very popular because they're kind of an easy route to that. Like, you don't have to create brand new concepts. You can bring people in, and you can interview them about their thing, and your audience connects with that a lot.

Bryan Harris [00:25:54]:
And sometimes you have hits, and sometimes they're okay. So if you're doing a list swap with someone where you're sharing resources, it's this exact same content. That person has a newsletter, and they need content for it. So if you have a great piece of content like, imagine I come to DJ and I'm like, hey, we have a $3,000 course that we sell all the time. Couple big launches a year on Evergreen. It's 3 grand and it's about how to do this list swap thing, but I just want to give it to your audience for free. I've I've never done it before, but I'd love to do it. There'd be a high chance of you saying yes to that.

Bryan Harris [00:26:26]:
Yeah. That's like an easy yes. So that's taken to the max, but the same concept exists. I could say, hey, Jay, we have And this is true. My number one takeaway from 11 years of doing marketing, tactical takeaway, tactical, like, thing I've learned and discovered and do and it works, is something called the 3 by 5 ritual. And it's this little spreadsheet, and you input data, and you look at the first thread, and you fix it. And like, if you do that for any marketing channel, the marketing channel works, whether it's ads or bar none of the people's audiences or SEO or whatever. Like, we've applied it across a ton of businesses, high end, low end clients, everything in between.

Bryan Harris [00:27:00]:
It works exceptionally well. I would love to give your audience that sheet and a little 10 minute loom video kinda going over like a little mini course for that. That would be the thing I'd wanna swap. Likely, you'd be like, I'd be interested in that. That'd be really good. So the key is having a good resource, Just something that's helpful. And that

Jay Clouse [00:27:17]:
that doesn't have to

Bryan Harris [00:27:17]:
be crazy, by the way. It can be a simple 2 page checklist because a lot of times those perform better. Something crunchy, something applicable that their audience can actually use. If you have that, you need nothing else. A lot of times Jay, people think in doing collaborations like this, that the problem will be getting a yes. And we've done, between all of our clients and ourself, we do about a 1000 partnership collaborations a month. Getting yeses is never the problem. Like, we average between a 30 50% yes rate for every client.

Bryan Harris [00:27:48]:
Like, yeses are like not an issue. The issue becomes like in just executing them, like once you start getting them. Like the number one problem we have to mitigate for is on the sell side, getting them over the, will anybody ever say yes? And that's literally just not a problem. As soon as you get in, you're like, I have too many yeses. It is processing those once you get them. Streamlining internal systems to where when you get a lead magnet swap every week or 2 lead magnet swaps every week, it's just easy to actually do. That's where we actually tactically spend almost all of our time, is in work flowing that. It's not in actually getting people to agree.

Bryan Harris [00:28:20]:
And these could be people You could have a list of 200 people and do list swaps of people of 10,000. And there's two reasons for that. You have a really good resource for them, and you aren't a weirdo on the internet. Like, you have connected with that person and you just have a good resource that serves them well. Like, people will say yes all day long for that. It's when one of those two things are out of balance. Either you come across like a weirdo or your thing is just not helpful at all to them. If you have those two things, you will get yeses all day long.

Bryan Harris [00:28:49]:
If you also have an audience of size, your yes rate will go up. So, the 30% range yeses is for people without an audience or super small audiences doing collaborations with people bigger. The 50% yes rate is people with an audience that also have a good resource. And that's just like people you outreach to, till they say yes and actually do it. So, they're looking for content. They're They're looking for interviews. They're looking for news of our content. They're looking for YouTube content.

Bryan Harris [00:29:12]:
You just be that content.

Jay Clouse [00:29:13]:
The here for me is I always assumed that these partnerships needed to be on the level because the trade would be I promote you, you promote me. But what you're suggesting is actually if you create something really high quality that this person would wanna share anyway and it fills their need of creating high quality content, you don't have to, on the back end, make the pitch necessarily of, and I'll promote you to my audience also. Because in the beginning, you might not even have that much to offer there anyway. It can be just about the content and having something that high quality.

Bryan Harris [00:29:45]:
Yeah. And people usually drastically underestimate their audience impact. Like, we've done collaborations with people. You know, our list is, like, 250,000 or so people. We've done collaborations and routinely do with people 5000, 1000, because those lists, a lot of times, are way better prime. Like, their open rates and click rates and interactions are just through the roof. So we could get 2 or 3 customers, which is, you know, 15 to $30,000 for us from a collaboration with a list of a 1,000. We have a list of 250,000.

Bryan Harris [00:30:13]:
So those people rarely will come to us, but we'll go to them and be like, hey, we'd love to promote you. And sometimes we'll bundle 2 or 3 of those together in a promotion, like, so we'll say, hey, we got 3 resources this week. Check them out. They're really good. And they'll get audience growth and revenue growth off that, and we'll for sure, because those lists usually perform really well. So people in that seat don't see that. They just look up and see, man, they're just way too big. It's like, man, you you underestimate the level of needle moving that you can do for those people.

Bryan Harris [00:30:40]:
Like For us, if we're just sending content out, we're making $0 in our email. But if we can send content out to promote you, and as an effect of that, we get 5 or 10 more clients, like, that's a huge revenue booster for us. Like, we want that. And big audience owners need to realize that as well. It's like some of the best collaborations you can do are not with people your size or bigger. It's sometimes people smaller than you because they'll do way more and you can serve them and help them and get their upstart and also, like, they will move the needle. But if you don't have any of that, if you have 0 audience at all, you can still share resources with a list bigger than you and grow. That that's literally my origin story.

Bryan Harris [00:31:13]:
I got my start from an accidental partnership where Noah Kagan asked me to share how I had grown my list to 100 people. So my list was literally a 100 email subscribers. His list was 50,000 subscribers. And he said, hey, you recently grew your list to a 100. Can you just share what you did? I'm like, yes, I would love to. So I wrote a guide, He publishes it to his list and I get a 1,000 subscribers and we actually tracked it over the 1st couple years after that guest post thing I did. And it got over a $100,000 in revenue from the subscribers that joined the list and the products that I launched after that. From one of them where I had basically none, and he had a gigantic list and was super well known.

Bryan Harris [00:31:52]:
So like, that's like where I started, and since then I've done a lot of similar ones, and as the list has grown, I've been able partner with other people and help other people out. So you don't need much at all. And anyone can round up a 100 subscribers in a week. Just go ask literally every human you know, every social media account you got, your grandma, your aunt, and everybody else, and just ask them to join your list. Anybody can get a list of a 100 together in no time. And if you can do that, you can do what I did, which is partner with somebody like Noah that's 500 times bigger than you.

Jay Clouse [00:32:17]:
This may sound like an obvious question, but I'm curious to hear your answer anyway.

Bryan Harris [00:32:20]:
Yep.

Jay Clouse [00:32:21]:
How do I find potential partners? Where do you go looking to find people, especially when they're on the smaller end or the newer end, and they're not just, like, glaringly obvious names that you see all over the place? How do you find new partners?

Bryan Harris [00:32:33]:
So two things. Atgrowthtools.com/j, I'll have, like, I think it's, like, a 4 page cheat sheet and it's a bunch of prompts and different things to search. So Just go to growthtools.com/j and I'll have like our full this is what we give to clients. It's our partner research tool for clients. So we'll just give it to you so you can go check it out. So there's a handful of prompts. First off, there's 2 big categories of people that I'm I'm gonna spend 30 minutes brainstorming with a guided prompt, and you'll have a list of over a 100 people you could partner with. So, the first two big categories are people you're familiar with, people you're not familiar with.

Bryan Harris [00:33:02]:
Start with the people you're kinda familiar with. So, research group number 1. Who do you kinda know a little bit? Either you know them personally or you've followed them for a long time. And I'm looking for one main category of people. People that are related to the problem I solve, but not competitive. Meaning they're not solving it for the exact same person, exact same problem. Now, a marriage counselor could partner with another marriage counselor because a lot of marriage counselors specialize. So a lot of marriage counselors do pre marriage counseling.

Bryan Harris [00:33:28]:
Some marriage counselors specialize like in empty nest stage people. Some people specialize in early stage marriage stuff. They might not publicize that, but that's kind of their specialties. So if I am a early stage, you know, premarital counselor, I can partner with other people that focus way further down the line. Some people are like trauma responsive, like if there's been cheating or infidelity or whatever, they focus there. So, I'm looking for not competitive, but related. Who am I familiar with? Who do I follow? What books do I read? What podcasts do I listen to? What services do I subscribe to right now? It's like for us, we literally go down our p and l. Like, alright, we host WP Engine, we use WordPress, we host our shopping cart with Kartra, or I don't actually know who we host it with.

Bryan Harris [00:34:05]:
Whatever. SamCart, whatever. Here's a big list of people that we literally pay money to right now. Are any of them related but not competitive? Oh, okay. So like for us, it'd be like, well, SamCart is. Like they sell a different solution to similar audience, so we could reach out to them. So who am I familiar with already? That could be friends with similar email lists or blogs or whatever. Like, who do I kind of know a little bit? That's gonna be group number 1.

Bryan Harris [00:34:27]:
Group number 2, people I'm not familiar with at all. And you can only go so far with the people you're familiar with. Like, you're gonna run out of those, you know, maybe 10, 20, 30 people at max there. So people I'm not familiar with, I'm gonna be looking for the things that actually cause the problem that I solve. Like, what are the root problems that cause for us, the problem we solve is getting clients for coaches. So what causes not having clients for coaches? It could be any number of things. It could be not clear thinking, like mental health category of things. It could be like stretched finances to your creativity as a hat.

Bryan Harris [00:34:59]:
It could be just tactical marketing stuff. That's the majority of people we focus on. So then, I might just literally Google top blogs for marketing problems 2024. Because any blog, any YouTube, any Instagram account, almost all of those are gonna have lists underpinning them. Whether that's the thing they focus on or not. Like, if you have a YouTube channel, you're probably gonna have an email list underneath it. You have a big Instagram account, probably have an email list underneath it. Any place of size.

Bryan Harris [00:35:25]:
So I'm gonna search for that and just make a list of sites. So if I search like top entrepreneur problems 2024, there will be a group of 5 or 6 different list posts that just summarize a ton of these blogs. I'm just gonna I'm actually gonna go to the very bottom of those posts. I'm gonna look at number 40 through 20. Make a list of those. Go to their sites. Just check and make sure they have an email list and then reach out to them. And that just works really well.

Bryan Harris [00:35:46]:
So the second thing you need though, you need to be able to discover who they are. They need to be able to say things to them so they say yes to you. So how you outreach to them is super important because you'll find people to partner with. You just need to be able to get them to actually say yes to you. So we use a particular approach to doing that. Anchor, when, ask is kind of the framework. I'll put that in that slash jlink as well so people can just go see, and we could talk about that if we wanna get depth on it. Like, how do you write things to them? Email typically.

Jay Clouse [00:36:11]:
Yeah.

Bryan Harris [00:36:11]:
So that the blog you found or the email list owner, the big YouTuber actually replies and says yes. And there's a particular strategy to that. It's actually kinda like what we were talking about earlier. People think the problem is yes, but really is like executing once you're in there. Similar thing here. People think the problem is finding people. There's tons of people out there. But the real problem is how do you get them to say yes.

Jay Clouse [00:36:29]:
I'm gonna tap into that framework here in a second, but I first wanted to double click on this example used of Samcart. This is something that I learned when I went through Growth University years ago, and I did my dream 100 list. You encouraged us to think about not just individuals, but brands, software tools even. And I think today that might not be the most obvious thing that people think about but it's probably an easier pitch because people running these software tools, content is probably priority 2 or 3, but they still want to have high quality content. So can you talk a little bit about that and how that's changed or evolved over the years?

Bryan Harris [00:37:07]:
Another sneaky one is people that think of themselves really as creators. So they make content first, like, on social media platforms because they paid more attention to the e list is easier to get to. Versus like bloggers actually tend to actually prioritize their email list where it should be, very high. The people that focus on social tend to prioritize the social above the email list and that's actually backwards way of doing it if you actually wanna run a business. The category here is people that have lists and care about them, but focus on it second or third level. And SaaS companies are fantastic because most of the people on their list are past or current customers. So they're they're actually paying money to these people. Now, something like SamCart's actually a hybrid because Brian's like a really good Internet marketer that does a lot of content.

Bryan Harris [00:37:48]:
So they kinda have a little bit of both things going on. But a company like WP Engine, they might have a GoDaddy or, you know, people of that size or that type that are just secondarily doing content marketing and everything. Usually just have better businesses, but their email list is easier to get access to. So, yeah. Looking down, like, googling top software for coaches might be a search crew that would yield us new partnership types. Like, actually, we're doing a workshop with a company next week. I don't know their name, but they're a financing company that specializes in agency and coach offerings. So if you sell a high ticket offer, one of the main tactical things you can do if people don't wanna pay in full or you don't wanna do payment plans is offer financing.

Bryan Harris [00:38:22]:
So So we do that. Like hey, you can do 3 pay or 4 pay or 12 pay or whatever you wanna do. So we use that and that's helped sales a good bit. So we had somebody outreach to us to wanna do the collaboration. We're like, oh, cool. And it's a financing company. That particular partnership didn't work out, but we're it opened our eyes to the, oh, crap. We've never thought about partnering with financing companies.

Bryan Harris [00:38:39]:
So we found 1. They said, yes. We're doing a workshop next week. And I'm pumped because they have, like, 10,000 active customers. It's the people they're inviting. I'm like, and they're coaches. I'm like, this is like I mean, I haven't done it yet, so get back to me, but like, this sounds fantastic. This might be the best partnership we've ever had.

Bryan Harris [00:38:55]:
Now, what we do then is circle that whole industry of like, okay, make a list of every financing company for coaches or agencies or courses or anything related to that. Know, there's about a 100 out there we found pretty quick. There's a top list of, like, 5 to 10, but there's a bunch of other smaller ones as well. So now we're going out to all of those and trying to do partnerships as well. And anybody connected with them, look at the testimonials on their website for every one of those 100 financing companies. Who are those people? And reach out to all of those people as well because they might look at them and see, but to make sure, but all of them are likely clients as well. One other sneaky one, by the way, Jay, that I love doing is interview based podcast. So, for example, we come and do an interview here.

Bryan Harris [00:39:33]:
Now go make a list of every person Jay's ever interviewed. Usually, like, 80% of them would be great partners for us as well. They might not have a podcast, but they got something we could do with them. Yeah. We did this early on with Andrew Warner. He was one of the first people that ever interviewed me. And he's interviewed. He's like one of the OG business interview people.

Bryan Harris [00:39:50]:
So he has thousands of interviews on the record. So we just become a member and then start systematically reaching out to most of those people because most of them have businesses that would make sense in some way for us. So you can do the same thing. Like, we had a client one time that was a dentist, and he's like, alright. How does this apply? I'm like, great. Let's find all the dentists online. The great thing with these weird industries like that, they're very rarely pursued with any level of intention. So the weirder your world is, the easier it is to do all of this stuff.

Bryan Harris [00:40:17]:
The hardest market to do this stuff in is online marketing stuff because everyone knows all the tactics. But you get outside of that at all, whether it's dentistry or one guy made board games was his thing. It's like, man, there are podcasts. There are YouTubes. There are email lists. The internet is way bigger than we imagine. There are tons of those people out there and they never get approached for anything. So their yes rate's like a 100%.

Bryan Harris [00:40:38]:
Because, like, this is the only human that's ever asked them to do a thing before.

Jay Clouse [00:40:41]:
I know. Sometimes, I fantasize about starting, like, a totally weird niche thing because everything that we now know, like, would be so much easier in a space where it's not being done all the time.

Bryan Harris [00:40:53]:
That's why Pat is crushing it with his Pokemon stuff.

Jay Clouse [00:40:55]:
Oh, man. I know.

Bryan Harris [00:40:56]:
He hosted a hot conference last year and had, like, 5,000 people at a Pokemon conference. I'm like, Pat, what on earth? Cause he's taken all the stuff that he's learned from 15 years and just applying it to this weirdo industry that no one's ever done that stuff. And it works fantastically well. And he's like the number one Pokemon expert in the world all of a sudden. Like, Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income doesn't even care about it. It's like all Pokemon stuff and it's great. Yeah. So the weirder your world, the better.

Bryan Harris [00:41:23]:
But it works here too. Like, I mean, we do it and it works great, but it's more competitive. That's okay. It just makes you better.

Jay Clouse [00:41:28]:
After one last break, Brian gives us his proven formula for making the ask when reaching out to potential new partners. We'll be right back. And now the conclusion of my conversation with Brian Harris. Talk to me about the actual message that you send. You you mentioned like this 3 part email framework. Can you give me the high level on that?

Bryan Harris [00:41:47]:
Totally. So I'll include the template and a couple examples. So one of the ways we train our team because our team does the outreach for us and then we use that to teach our clients. One of the best way just for teaching in general is good pitch, bad pitch is what we call it. So it's like, hey. And we usually do it from pitches people send us because we talk about people pitches and we're, you know, we've been around a minute, so people reach out to us all the time about crap. So we literally I'll take a pitch. I try to do this once a week.

Bryan Harris [00:42:08]:
A picture I get personally in my email. I'm like, this is terrible. It literally violates, like, every rule of that we teach, and it's effective. And then I'll rewrite it. It's like, alright. This is what I would have said yes to. And then we'll train the concept, but then the best way to learn this is just looking at here's a bad pitch, here's a good pitch, here's a bad pitch, here's a good pitch, and you'll see these dynamics in action. So we'll just put a couple examples so people can actually learn it.

Bryan Harris [00:42:27]:
I'll talk through it so they get the concept and then you can just see it to actually, like, get your brain working in the right direction. So, the number one mistake that people make when reaching out about literally anything, whether it's cold outreach for high ticket sales, they just go direct or collaborations for sure, is they just talk about their self way too much. Like, nobody cares about you, for real. Like, I just don't care. I mean, at the end of the day, I love you, I mean it, but I bet I really don't. Like, I'm like, I've got too many things going on. So, the framework is anchor, win, ask. First, anchor yourself to prove you're not a weirdo on the internet.

Bryan Harris [00:42:59]:
Step 1. Step 2, show the partner the win. What's the win for them? Step 3, ask for the thing that you want. So, anchor, win, ask. I'll kinda see if I can make up a helpful example here on the fly. So imagine I'm a random dude on the Internet, I'm listening to this interview right now, and I'm like, okay, Brian just said he'll do collaborations with a list way small and he has a big list. Yes, that's true. So a sharp person listening to this right now would have wrote me down on the Dream 100 and be like, I'm gonna reach out to Brian as long as our things are relevant.

Bryan Harris [00:43:28]:
You're not in, you know, teaching people how to knit, and I'm over here teaching people marketing stuff. So as long as we're semi related, you should probably reach out to me. So I just open broadcast. Please reach out to me. I wanna do a collaboration. Now, if you send me a bad pitch, I'm literally gonna ignore it and not listen to you unless you follow-up a ton, then I might. But if you do this, I will answer you because this is really hard not to answer. First, prove you're not a weirdo.

Bryan Harris [00:43:47]:
There's a bunch of tactics there you can do to do that. One of the easiest ways though is to listen to what somebody teaches and do it and report back. This is what I did with Noah. Now, I did all of this unintentionally. It was just kinda, I don't know, seemed like the right thing to do at the time. Now, I understood what was going on and why it worked. Because I bought a course from Noah in 2012. As I was doing the course, I just kinda shared my progress in the Facebook group they had.

Bryan Harris [00:44:09]:
So no one saw that progress. So the way you can do this in email, you can listen to this interview right now. You don't have to do anything crazy. You can go, hey, Brian. I listened to this interview. I love the the list swap thing. So I made a dream 50, and you were on it. Here's a snapshot of my dream 50.

Bryan Harris [00:44:23]:
So listen to what someone says, do it, and show them that you did it. That's one of the strongest anchors you can have. There's a bunch of other ones as well. That's one of the easiest, and it's easy to do. Because cause you can just listen to what they say, go try out the thing, do a small version of it, and show them. So if you write me an email and say, hey, Brian, I listened to your interview with Jay, really liked the idea of doing list swaps. I love it compared to ads and all the other crap, and like connects with hearts, and I get how that makes sales easier. Thank you so much.

Bryan Harris [00:44:46]:
In fact, I didn't just listen. I went and did something. I made my dream 50. You were number 2 on the list, but I also found these 3 people you potentially could partner with as well. Here's 3 people you might not have thought about. Okay. Like, I'm I'm reading more of whatever that email is no matter who you are. It doesn't matter your list.

Bryan Harris [00:45:00]:
I don't even know your name yet, But you've anchored yourself to prove you aren't a weirdo. Easiest way to do that, show you did something. Show something like that. Reference something they've said and show how you did it. Second thing you need to do is tell me what the win is for me. So, hey Brian, listened to the interview. Went and did it. Made sense to me.

Bryan Harris [00:45:16]:
Made it a dream 50. Found one person for me. Here's 3 people for you. Okay. I would love to do a list swap with you. The win for you would be fill in the blank. The win for you, Brian, would be you have a hole in your content where you've never talked about, let's say, legal. Let's say this is a lawyer or something that wants to specialize in this space.

Bryan Harris [00:45:34]:
You never talk about, you know, the downsides to having guarantees without contracts and how that could, like, totally tank your business because you could get sued and people could just call back money from years ago. I would love to give you a 1 page contract cheat sheet you could give to your audience to talk about that. The win for you would be you would plug that content gap. That's the win. And notice there's no audience group there. You could add that in, but let's say you don't have an audience. And then the ask is really simple. Are you interested? Question mark.

Bryan Harris [00:46:01]:
That's the whole thing. So this whole email would be something like, let's say it back all the way through so people kinda thought of the logic. Anchor, previewer into weirdo, show me the win for me, and then ask for what you want. So hey, Brian. Listen to your interview with Jay. Awesome interview. Love the idea of list swaps. I've tried the other crap that doesn't work.

Bryan Harris [00:46:16]:
I'd love to connect via heart and make sales easier and the whole thing easier. That makes sense. So I made my dream 50. Here's a a link to the Google doc. Also, I found 3 partners for you while I was doing my research. I think it'd work. Here's their name and contact and why they'd be a good fit. I would love to do a lead magnet swap with you.

Bryan Harris [00:46:29]:
I'm a lawyer, and I specialize in online entrepreneurs, or I wanna get in that space. And one of the biggest risk in companies like yours is, you know, what I just described, This contract thing. You'd have a good contract. So, I have a template and a 3 page cheat sheet you could audit your current contract with to make sure it would actually stand to a lawsuit. I would love to have you to email that out to your list. Are you interested? That's the whole pitch. And if you did something like that, I would say yes and I'd promote you. And I'd ask you to promote a resource amount as well, if you had a list of any sort.

Bryan Harris [00:46:54]:
So anchor, prove you're on a weirdo, in whatever creative way you wanna do it. I gave you one example. Show the win for the partner, that could be the resource only or add list growth into it as well. 3rd, literally say the line. Say nothing other than this. Are you interested? Question mark, and then shut up and let them respond. That's it. If you do that, your yes rate will be between 30 50%.

Jay Clouse [00:47:14]:
I think this framework applies to, like, any type of cold ask for anything. It's super similar to the email that I sent for interview requests for this podcast. It's so surprising how low the bar is to prove you're not a weirdo or prove that this email was sent to me and me specifically and not, like, 50 other people. I I think that's an important bit of it too is contextualizing. I know who I'm talking to and I know I'm gonna show you that this was written specifically for you because I feel like people wanna feel special. And it's more like I'm gonna say yes if you made me feel special.

Bryan Harris [00:47:48]:
Yeah. Like, a personal letter handed to you, you read no matter the contents. A junk mail that comes in the mail that you can tell was trying to mimicking a personal letter, I throw it away in 3 seconds. So, like, if you just write out a letter to somebody, don't talk about yourself and talk about them, like people read it. And as long as your the reason for doing the thing you want is clear and makes sense to them, they're gonna do it. It's not too mysterious. Now, trying to do that regularly is a little bit of skill, a little bit of skill to refine, but I'll give you just follow that basic framework. You're a yes rate.

Bryan Harris [00:48:17]:
We'll go through the roof for honestly anything and you could apply this to, like you were saying, all kind of stuff.

Jay Clouse [00:48:21]:
I think people will hear this and they'll try it and they'll find success. And then months will pass and they'll realize, hey, I forgot to do that thing. I stopped doing it.

Bryan Harris [00:48:29]:
Yep.

Jay Clouse [00:48:29]:
What do you do to help your clients make this more routine?

Bryan Harris [00:48:33]:
Oh, well, yeah. Because that applies to any marketing channel ever. So the key thing we've discovered, if we go to super tactical marketing, no matter the sales channel that you commit to doing, you gotta have one. One can take you to $5,000,000 a year pretty much no matter the business. You just need 1. You need one product, one simple marketing channel, and you can get a very, very long ways with that. Every product, every marketing channel you add on to it decreases your chance of success by a lot because it's too complicated to do all that. So, the fundamental ritual we train all of our clients on is the daily 3 by 5 ritual.

Bryan Harris [00:49:08]:
So as applied to partnerships, 3 by 5 stands for 3 actions done 5 days a week. Action 1 is log your data. Action 2 is look at the data and compare its performance to what should have happened. And action 3 is to look at the first area that didn't perform well in that funnel and come up with 2 action items to do in the next 48 hours to fix it. If I started over from scratch and the whole business blew up when we started over, I would literally just do this. You could take any business, a marketing channel specifically, any marketing channel and make or perform with that. And list swaps and doing this stuff we've been talking about, the key action number 1 is your pitch count per day. And we start with 1 a day.

Bryan Harris [00:49:41]:
Just send 1 pitch out a day. That is the fundamental action you have to do to fill up the funnel. It's the equivalent of the ad spend in an ad funnel. You gotta get eyeballs before you get hearts. Like if you don't have eyeballs, you have no hearts to actually win. So you got like some minimal viable number of those. So we install just tactically for our clients and for ourselves because we do the same thing. I have 2 through our 5 meetings on my calendar every day to be in and to run and to train the people how to run them well.

Bryan Harris [00:50:05]:
So we have to admit to what we're doing. What is the key action to do? We have to look at the data to see how it's performing, and the first area is not performing well, we get to fix it. So example, in partnerships, it might be your yes rate. Maybe you've sent 50 pitches and got no yeses. That is extremely odd. You're almost for sure saying dumb stuff in your email. This is the space to go fix. So we would see it literally visually.

Bryan Harris [00:50:25]:
You would see pitch count on spec is green. Yes number, not on spec it's red. So we just zoom into that. Double click, open it up. What's in there? Let's look at the emails. Let's look at the people you're sending things to. Let's look at the things you're sending, and let's diagnose what's going on. There's only a couple things to fix and to go fix that thing.

Bryan Harris [00:50:41]:
And it that probably doesn't make the whole thing work, but it brings it down to the next area. It might be, hey, we were actually having this conversation last week. Last week, we had, like, 200,000 people be told about a partnership we were doing, but the number of people that actually got to our sales call booking page from that was like half of what it should have been, and there were 3 or 4 partnerships in there. So we just opened them up and looked like, okay, what was the email like? What was the call to action like? Where was that? And we found a couple spots that were kinda clunky. So we fixed that and it started working. So the key is just to do it every day and have a mechanism to make sure it's almost impossible to fail at it. So we will put a stick bet behind our clients. They have to agree to it.

Bryan Harris [00:51:19]:
Meaning, if you don't send your one pitch a day and do that consistently over time, and work your 3 by 5, then some negative event happens to you. I find one of the more motivating things, especially in seasons like we're in right now, is to make it some public political thing. Like, if you hate Trump, make it. You donate a $100 to Trump if you don't do your pitch count per day. If you hate Biden, great. Donate a $100 to Biden and publicly talk about it on social media. Have like a a thing that like pushes you. I got a buddy right now who's becoming a pilot, trying to become a commercial pilot, and he needs to get 50 hours a month of flying in.

Bryan Harris [00:51:49]:
In the 1st 3 months of the year, he missed his 50 mark. I was like, Wes, bro. You know what you need to do. Bring it down to the weekly level. You get to get 20 hours a week or 25, whatever. I guess 25 a week. And if you don't, you get to give a $1,000 to somebody. Somebody you don't like can talk about it publicly.

Bryan Harris [00:52:02]:
You can say, oh, boy. So like he I literally got up this morning to walk at 5 AM and he was already gone, which I'm I know he's flying right now. Like he's in the air flight because he needs to get 25 hours. And 25 hours is pretty hard to get in. That's a lot of freaking flying. So it just works. A stick bet is a great mechanism. If you get James Clear's book, Atomic Habits, good to read chapter 17.

Bryan Harris [00:52:20]:
It kinda expands on this concept quite a bit. And there's some school ways you can gamify this. Just get yourself to do the thing you no need to do. All that to say, daily 3 by 5 ritual is the key fundamental action. Whereby doing it, your marketing channel, no matter what it is, will work. And when it doesn't work, you'll know what's wrong so you can fix it. If you do that, everything else will take care of itself.

Jay Clouse [00:52:40]:
What's your follow-up process look like for these pitches?

Bryan Harris [00:52:43]:
Yeah. So at the 3 day mark, if they haven't responded, I hit reply to the email I sent and say, just following up. And then I hit send. And with that one mechanism, you'll get about a 50% response rate. And if 7 days later, I haven't responded, I'll say, hey, no problem at all. Can you tell me where I could have reached out better? There's a little bit variance on that. The actual template's a little more, but that's the basic concept. And you'll get about a 50% response rate to that as well.

Bryan Harris [00:53:12]:
Those are the 2 emails you need to send. There's other stuff you can do to squeeze a little bit more juice out, but that's fine. If you send the pitch a day, send the 3 day, just bumping this to the top of your inbox and send the 7 day. Hey, no worries at all. Totally get that it's not the good time. Can you tell me how I could ever reach out better? Almost all the time, your the response you'll get will be, hey, totally. Hey, I'm actually very interested. I got busy.

Bryan Harris [00:53:30]:
I would love to do it. And they're apologizing to you for not saying yes to your thing, which is a great frame to go into a partnership with. So those 2 email follow ups will increase your follow-up rate by a lot. By the way, 75% of the yeses come with those 2 emails. They don't come from the initial email. Interesting. Some of the top mistakes people make is not doing those 2 follow ups. So, you've got those 2 follow ups and your yes rate will get to that that high mark.

Jay Clouse [00:53:53]:
I like that there's only 2 follow ups. I have some threads in my inbox that are literally 10 emails deep of just following ups. I'm like, alright, you've burned this relationship forever.

Bryan Harris [00:54:03]:
And then what's annoying to me, Jay, is sometimes it works on me too. Sometimes I'm like Not alright. We'll do it. Sometimes it does. No. But but most of the time it goes to the, what I use hey as my email thing, and you can just hit them where you never see their email again in one click. And most of the time it goes there. But every now and then it works, and I'm like, dang it.

Bryan Harris [00:54:21]:
I even hate to, like, validate that you're doing this, but yeah.

Jay Clouse [00:54:24]:
You gotta hold the line. You gotta help me and I gotta hold the line.

Bryan Harris [00:54:26]:
I I was trying to remember. I I one recently one recently, I said yes. I'm like, alright, let's have a conversation. Like, I just respect the hustle at this point. Like, this is good. But that's if I can tell it isn't some automated soft like Mailshake or something that does the automated stuff.

Jay Clouse [00:54:39]:
Yeah. If

Bryan Harris [00:54:40]:
I can tell they're like actually digging and that's the thing. It all comes back to personal connection. Connection. It's like if I can tell because sometimes they'll reply like, hey, I listened to your podcast with Jay. I know I've sent you 17 messages, but I like that. I would love to talk. I'm like, okay, that's good. Let's talk.

Bryan Harris [00:54:51]:
You obviously want this really bad and that matters a lot.

Jay Clouse [00:54:54]:
Well, last question here, Brian. Is there anything else that you think is essential as part of this partnership's strategy that we haven't touched on?

Bryan Harris [00:55:04]:
Make sure that you're clear of what the win is for you. Like, what do you want and you don't have to think altruistically here. Like, I'm in a conversation with Jay. I just wanna have a conversation with Jay. Secondarily, I hope some of you come and find out about us and I hope some of you eventually hire us and we can help you. That's what I would like. So external goal is to give Jay a really good interview, something he really wants to promote and fills a hole with him and to connect with Jay as a human. Secondary goal, internal goal for me, selfish best interest is I hope we get some clients out of this at some point.

Bryan Harris [00:55:38]:
So if that's the case, I wanna optimize for Jay's goal number 1. What does Jay want? And do all the things I can do to make that happen. That might be mentioned it on social, sending an email about, referencing the interview. I want you to might be prepping ahead of time to give a really good interview, might be giving resources, all the things I hope I've done well here and hope I'll do for this interview. Optimize for partner number 1, but also do optimize for yourself. Eyeballs and hearts and wallets will not magically appear. If you just go do a 100 podcast interviews and optimize for yourself 0%, you will not win. If you go do a 100 lead magnet swaps and optimize for yourself none, you will not win.

Bryan Harris [00:56:15]:
Put the other person first, put yourself second, but do put yourself second. So that might look like, like in a podcast interview, one of my favorite ways to do that is just mention resources throughout and give them a link. Because when y'all go to the growth tools.com/link, you'll have the dream 50 cheat sheet, you'll have the pitch template. I'm gonna put the 3 by 5 example with a video overview so you see that. We didn't go depth on that, but, like, that that is actually the core number one thing in all the marketing I found out for a decade. It's I haven't found the right way to talk about it in short form though, so people might not know resonate. But anyway, I'll put those three things there because I want y'all to go join the list and learn more things about what we're doing. So that's one of the easiest ways to do it on a podcast.

Bryan Harris [00:56:49]:
It's just natural. Like, whatever you're talking about, just like give resources away to help them see it and do it. In a lead magnet swap, like make sure when the partner emails out your resource, it goes to a page where you either collect an email or they have a way to book a call with you, whatever your mechanism is. Just make sure it exists and make sure that whatever the partner does is serving you. So have that Don't shy away from that part of the conversation. Don't just serve them and ignore yourself. Like when the little air mask comes on at the airplane, they're like, put the mask on before you help your kid just so you don't die. So same thing here.

Bryan Harris [00:57:20]:
Make sure you serve them, but make sure you serve yourself. If you do the things we talked about today, you will get yeses, you will get partners to promote you, you gotta make sure the promotion actually leads to something though. So that is making sure you optimize the promotion to get the thing you actually need. There's a lot of tactical things underneath that, but then there's some basics so you can actually visualize it.

Jay Clouse [00:57:37]:
It. And that link was growth tools.com/j? Yep. And what I wanna call out for folks, if you haven't prepared this ahead of the interview, it's okay. It takes time to produce the interview. Growthtools.com/j as of this recording doesn't exist. But right now It's not exist

Bryan Harris [00:57:52]:
at all.

Jay Clouse [00:57:52]:
That you

Bryan Harris [00:57:53]:
see it. I literally So a little insight. When I have a podcast interview, I keep a notebook so I can write down the resources I mentioned because right after this podcast interview I'm gonna voice memo Cody, the guy on our team that sets all this up and say, hey, Jay's interview went great. Here's the three resources and the link. Because I I make it up real time. Now, a lot of people are super uncomfortable with that. I actually have tried for years to coach clients through that and most of them will never do it. I have found it to be the most effective for optimizing a podcast for actual our side of things.

Bryan Harris [00:58:19]:
But you can also just go into a podcast with a resource and mention it a couple times. That is the 80 20 for sure because this usually freaks people out. So I've actually just stopped talking about it because people just like, their brain, you know, short circuits. But that's what I do and it works really well.

Jay Clouse [00:58:41]:
If you enjoyed this episode, take a screenshot, take a photo, tag me at jklaus on whatever social platform you love most and let me know. I love seeing these messages and I do my best to reshare each and every one of them. If you look at the show notes for this episode, you'll find links for everything mentioned as well as a recommended episode to listen to next. And if you don't already subscribe to the Creator Science email newsletter, I highly recommend you take a moment to do so. Every Sunday, I write an essay that will help you improve as a creator and it takes less than 10 minutes to read. People have said it's a must read. We have more than 60,000 subscribers. I wish you were one of them.

Jay Clouse [00:59:17]:
And finally, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. I read all of those and they really helped you a lot to help the show grow. Thanks for listening, and I'll talk to you next week.