The Zero Ad Spend System: How We Swiped 24,976 Of Our Competitors Leads And Made $46k in 31 Days, Without Spending A Penny On Ads.
Posted by Andrew Mark on 13th June 2024
This approach isn't the perfect fit for all coaches, online sellers and agency owners.
In fact, if you're doing more than $50k a month consistently, there's more scalable ways to drive revenue by spending money.
But, if you're just starting out, or you're stuck banging your head against the wall struggling to break past the 10, 20 or $30k mark, the Zero Spend Sales method can help you do that in the next month or 2.
It's the exact strategy that saved my bacon when I was really up against it, and allowed me to generate 24,976 leads for just $115 and brought in $46k in revenue in just 31 days.
Now, it's at the level where it consistently brings in $100k months, as the pipeline has built up over time.
That's on about $500 a month of software & subscription costs, so it's pretty much all profit.
The best part is, I own all the traffic, so I can't be shut down by Facebook if or when they get their knickers in a twist.
What is the Zero Ad Spend Sales System?
If you're a creator, coach or service provider (e.g. Agency), you need 2 things...Leads & Sales.
A predictable, consistent method that lines people up ready to buy what you have to sell.
When you're just starting out, or you're struggling to break the $50k a month barrier, you haven't got a proven system that works.
You might have an offer, or an idea for an offer, but if you're at this stage, you're struggling with 1 of 2 things.
Either traffic, or sales.
Even the world's best salesperson is going to struggle if they don't have enough leads.
And if someone has loads of traffic, but not making any sales...The problem is the offer.
The Zero Spend Sales method is a system that solves both those problems, by consistently brings in new leads every day from multiple outbound traffic sources, and automatically filtering them based on quality.
So you can focus on the very best sales opportunities......While using automated systems to turn up the temperature on those warm leads and getting them ready to buy from you in future.
Solves 2 Problems At Once.
When you're under the $10k a month mark, it's best to assume both your traffic and sales suck.
Or putting it politely, they're not at the levels you want them to be at.
So we need to validate your offer. Make sure the market actually wants it.
Now you could spend another 6 months trying to figure everything out on your own...Manually.
Or you could put a system in place that gets people into your ecosystem...Takes them from ice cold click, to smoking hot prospect using a bunch of super-slick automations.
So that all you've gotta do each week is write 3 emails to the warm leads......and either take sales calls with your hot prospects, or delegate to your sales team and watch them grin from ear to ear as calls turn into customers faster than they've seen before.
So...How Do We Do This?
ONE: Build a list of targeted prospects.
TWO: Send them messages.
THREE: Move those prospects from your leads list into your sales process by offering them something massively valuable but completely different from anything else they've seen or heard of before using a "Killer Offer".
If you do this the right way, you'll have a predictable stream of targeted, interested leads flowing into your business for you to then convert into a customer.
This works for anyone selling something over $1k as a high ticket offer (ideally $3k+), or $300/m - $1k as a subscription...and it's so much easier selling someone something when they know, like and trust you, vs just clicked on your ad 15 seconds ago.
Here's some of the results our Zero Spend Sales Members have seen...
Step 1: Build A List Of Leads
First...what's a lead?
We consider a lead to be an email address of someone that's opted into your list.
We don't need to know their Mother's, Brother's, child's middle name or how many tattoo's their Sister's ex-boyfriend had.
We need an email address, that we can send emails to and hit their inbox.
That's your absolute minimum level of what a cold lead is...Someone that opt's-in to your list.
How do we get these people to opt-in?We find them, we contact them and we give them an offer they can't refuse..."A Killer Offer".
There's many places you can collect data from, you can buy lists, you can scrape data, you can send messages "in-platform".The one we like to start with is... Linkedin.
Specifically Sales Navigator.
We use Linkedin for 2 reasons.
1. We can message them in-platform.
2. We can scrape their email and email them.
Which gives us 2 cracks at them...Then we use a Linkedin automation tool to connect with them, message them and get them into our ecosystem.
Plus we use a cold email tool to contact them from that angle too.The software to do all that comes to around $350 in your first month.
Once you're properly up and running those costs will jump to around $500 a month, but you won't care because you won't be giving the equivalent of your left kidney to Facebook each month in advertising spend.
Clients sending 1k emails a day...and selling something that costs $6.5k (which is middle of the road pricing), this is what the numbers look like.
That's $32,500 in sales, which is a pretty average week.
Remember the cost to run this system at scale, is around $500/month.
Emails Sent: 7231
Conversations: 41
Closed Deals: 5
Revenue: $32,500
Even if this client closes like the class nerd at the school prom, and only converts 1/20 opportunities, that's still 2 sales a week.
As it is, their close rates sitting at 12.5%, which is half of what I want it to be at.
Still, that's $32,500 in revenue in a week for $500 cost in a month.
And if they were bombing, it'd still be $13k revenue in a week from $500/m in cost.
Assuming every week looks like this, it's what???
104x ROI
As it is, they're sitting pretty at 260:1 ROI...Which is just nuts.
Now I'm not guaranteeing that you're going to get exactly these results, it does show you that even if you got half the worst case, it's still probably a damn site better than what you're doing right now.
Even a 3:1 or 5:1 return, would make this a no-brainer.
How to Target Your Ideal Prospects with Sales Navigator
There's 3 main things to consider when creating your list requirements.
1. Which country?
2. What size company?
3. Which niche?
You get to use their filters to target your ideal list of prospects, then you can automate all your messaging to them through Linkedin and Email.
The goal is to filter your leads list as much as possible, taking a list of millions down to thousands or tens of thousands, who you can then focus your attention on.
Step 2: Send, Send, Send.
You're going to send these leads direct messages offering them something of massive value (your Killer Offer), where they question why on Earth, you're giving it away. All in exchange for them opting in to receive it.
For Linkedin, we use Automation tools that crank out messages to your lead list as though you sent them individually. Costs $89-99/m.
Linkedin isn't the same since Microsoft bought it, you can't send 100's of messages a day anymore, don't send any more than 50 messages a day, 30 if your accounts new.
For email, we use a variety of email warming tools which cost $37-97/m.
We use our own email sending platform that lets us send unlimited cold emails for $99/m.
We clean our lists with Bulk Email Verifier which costs $75 for 100k emails. It gets cheaper if you buy more credits.
As far as sending goes, we don't send any more than 30 emails a day per email address, so we end up setting up a lot of email addresses daisy-chained together into a web of perfect automation where they cycle through from one to the next and keep under their daily sending limits.
All while looking like a real person sent the email, not a machine.
Once you crack this, it's like magic.
So, you've got your list, you're ready to start sending...What do you send them?
Here's a great example of what not to do:
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Hey Billy,
Bob here,
Please buy my stuff
LINK
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This isn't a spam fest. This isn't 1999 where you could send anyone an email without any legal repercussions.
This isn't the late 90s when you hit the inbox every time unless you sent them dodgy pictures.
Heck, this isn't even the 2010's when you could email people in a lot of different countries around the world without fear of GDPR or the California Privacy Act etc.
There's certain things your emails need to include.
You've got to comply with CAN-SPAM, include addresses, ways for people to opt-out/unsubscribe etc.
You've got to comply with other laws in other countries too, such as GDPR, so don't just spin up 30k emails a month without knowing what's legal and what's not. It can cost you $10k per infraction.
Now I've put the fear of God up you, it's actually pretty easy to comply, just don't email people when they say not to, and if you don't know whether it's legal to cold email in a specific country, don't do it.
As far as messaging people on platforms like Linkedin or Instagram etc, it's really easy to comply by spreading out your sending over a full day, not just pumping through 30 messages in a 15 minute window. There's also no real regulatory framework for in-platform messaging. They'll just give you a temporary ban if you're too trigger happy.
What you need is a hook. An offer.
Something that makes them stand up and say....YES! I Want that.
We call it a Killer Offer.
Something like this:
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Hey {FirstName}
I want to bring you 2 clients in the next 30 days as a minimum, while helping you to add 10-15 more over the next 90 days using LinkedIn + Messenger automation.
Want to see how it works? Check it out here: LINK
Have an awesome day,
Andrew
Founder
Sales Rocket
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It's the kind of message that creates curiosity, sells an outcome, and without having a guarantee, has one baked into the intro.
When you choose to work with us, we run multiple variations of every message we send, to find the highest performing combination to get as many people as possible signing up to your list.
When those people opt-in to get your freebie, we're moving them from a cold lead to a warm lead.
We're also then switching the tech in the background, because we aren't cold messaging them anymore, we're hitting their inbox from our main SMTP server rather than one of the many email inboxes that we use for cold email.
Tips & Tricks
First, get the right software.
We've tested them all and keep coming back to the same ones.
Bulk Email Checker - https://www.bulkemailchecker.com/
Linkedin Sales Navigator - https://business.linkedin.com/sales-solutions/sales-navigator
Sales Rocket (Yep that's us). Here's the link: https://getsalesrocket.com
Scrape & Send - https://scrapesend.com
Secondly, once someone's on your list. Nurture them. Teach them stuff. Give them a reason to stay.
And of course, get them booking a call or buying your offer directly (depending on what you sell).
Third. Either take this 30,000ft overview and try & figure it out on your own, or let us just do it all for you.
We DON'T run a coaching or consulting program. We don't teach theory and we don't faff about.
If you want us to just build all of this for you so you can sit back and watch the cash come in, here's the link you need:
automaticappointmentsystem.com/go
It's not free & it's does take a week or 2 to setup, but the best thing, is that it'll make you a shit-load more money than whatever you're doing right now.