Transcript: Thanks Allan, this is David Brower with Your 20 Minute Podcast. Our special guest today from Dallas, Texas is Sidney Clevenger. Now he’s a tech nerd at heart, and we’ll talk about that. He has spent over 12 years, almost 13 years now in marketing. He’s touched over a thousand websites, 150 funnels, over 250 Facebook ads, and he loves changing people’s lives and helping them achieve the goals they did not know that that were possible. So let’s talk about what you’re doing and how you got started.
Sidney Clevenger: Oh, thanks man. I got started, it’s funny. It seems so long ago, but I’ve been in marketing for 12, 13 years. Been doing it really since college, I’ve always played around and tinkered with it. Definitely really didn’t know what I was doing. Just love the fact of trying to make things look a certain way online really was what college was about. And then I wanted to get into sports, and so I ended up taking an internship in my senior year of college in sports and the athletic department and the sports information, athletic communication office of all things because I wanted to be around tech. So I got to work on some pretty big athletic websites for some schools, and that really just fired me up. I ended up then going to work down in south Florida in Miami, Florida at a college doing the exact same thing, and although I love sports and stuff like that, I love tech more than I love sports, So I ended up starting doing the whole WordPress site thing when I lived in Florida, and it was great.
I didn’t know how to market it all. It was all off referral, and this was before Wix and all those other sites were available.
David Brower: Sure, sure.
Sidney Clevenger: And so, it was great, because I was able to make a good living. I was single and my mid-20s and living on a beach in south Florida in a little box with a microwave and a mini fridge and a bed. That’s pretty much all I had.
David Brower: That’s all you need at that age on the beach, yeah. Sign me up.
Sidney Clevenger: Yeah, exactly. I look back, I was carefree and it was fun, and then I ended up moving back home because as fun as Miami is as a place to vacation, it’s not really a place to live.
David Brower: Agreed.
Sidney Clevenger: I would go days without hearing English. That’s a true story. Worked at an advertising agency in Louisville for a little while, kind of stopped working with small businesses, and I got to kind of start working with bigger businesses. I got a chance to work with like Humana and Passport Healthcare, and we got to do a little bit of things like Papa John’s and stuff like that.
David Brower: Nice.
Sidney Clevenger: And these were, getting to see it from a big agency’s perspective is really where I got to learn my systems and processes that I currently use now because I didn’t really have any before.
David Brower: Sure.
Sidney Clevenger: And then, yeah, life would be pretty hard about two years ago. In fact, I got suicidal, I had a gun in my mouth, December 24, 2016 at my parents’ house, asked for a sign and got one, got an email to not give up that night and didn’t give up and decided the next day on Christmas that I was gonna move to Dallas with anything I had to make it work. In April of 2017, I moved here and I’m [inaudible 00:03:32] about $3,200 to my name, and just got obsessive when it came to sales funnels, got obsessive when it came to digital. I knew all these people out there we’re doing it. There’s no reason that I couldn’t, and I listened to Eric Thomas and Tony Robbins and Les Brown and all these things and just got a little bit of momentum last year, and its just kind of carried through this year to now we’ve worked with over on the digital marketing side and sales funnel side and all that fun stuff.
We’ve worked with a little bit over 400 people now in a couple of years, and it’s just gotten to be so much fun. I have so much fun with what I do. The best part is I get to help a lot of people.
David Brower: That’s exciting. I want to go back … If I got the words right, God pulled the gun out of your mouth.
Sidney Clevenger: Yeah. Actually, I will never forget. It’s a hard place when you go back, so I don’t talk about it a lot, but I’ll never forget the taste of gunpowder and the smell of gunpowder. I’ll never forget that. And it was the stupidest thing in the world for me to even get to that point, but I allowed myself to spiral and I really didn’t have any. Everybody that was in my life before that had been abandoning me, and it was my fault, I let this build up for too long, it was completely my fault and I wasn’t ready to take responsibility for it. And so I just put that gun in my mouth.
David Brower: Well, mine was November 5th, 2013.
Sidney Clevenger: We can relate there.
David Brower: It’s nice to be a beyond that and in this great place that we’re both enjoying right now and helping people do what they do.
Sidney Clevenger: The world’s an amazing place.
David Brower: The world’s an amazing place. That’s right, my friend. That is absolutely right.
Sidney Clevenger: Really is, and it’s just getting better.
David Brower: Oh my gosh, absolutely right. So you’ve been helping a lot of people, you’re working with 400 clients right now?
Sidney Clevenger: We’ve worked with 400. We’re not working, we don’t [crosstalk 00:05:18] at the same time, no.
David Brower: Oh, okay. Okay.
Sidney Clevenger: We work usually around 50 to 60 at a time.
David Brower: Oh, that makes sense. When you start working with a business, how does that work? Do you find them, they find you, is referrals a huge part of your life?
Sidney Clevenger: I built a lot of my name and my stuff through a lot of organic up to this year. We’re really doing a big ramp, which I’m sure we’ll talk about here in a minute, a big ramp up.
David Brower: Sure.
Sidney Clevenger: We’re 2019, I’m really going to start doing some paid stuff. Kind of what I’ve gotten famous, I don’t say famous because I’m just a simple country boy, but where people have found me or know me from is through my organic strategies, which I can share a couple of those tips with you the show. But once I started cultivating a following and I started putting out posts that people were seeing, one of the things that I do is I get friend requests every day, and a lot of people I get friend requests are people that I don’t know. Now obviously, not all of them are people that are obviously fake accounts or who knows what they are.
David Brower: Sure. Sure.
Sidney Clevenger: People that are, who knows what they’re doing.
David Brower: That’s right. That’s right.
Sidney Clevenger: But some are legit. And so, what I would do is I started, I learned some sales stuff through some of the coaches that I’ve had, and I learned kind of a great opening line, and what I would do is when people would, I would look at every single person that reached out to me in any fashion as a lead.
David Brower: Sure.
Sidney Clevenger: That’s how I started looking at it. So what I did was, is I had a formula. I would go and I do this, I do this now three times a week. I will go through my friends, they’re not my friends, but people that are requesting to be friends. So right now, I have 5,000 friends, I can’t add any more.
David Brower: Right.
Sidney Clevenger: But people will still request it. So ‘ll go in and I’ll see these people, and what I do is I click on their profile, I take a quick glance, literally five seconds of who they are, what they do, where they’re from. If there’s someone that have mutual friends of mine, that typically means they’re reaching out to me because they’re interested in being in my sphere of some kind.
David Brower: Sure.
Sidney Clevenger: They want to connect with me.
David Brower: Sure.
Sidney Clevenger: So, what I do is, is I’ll send them a DM direct from me. This is not a bot, this is not an assistant. This is directly from me, and I would suggest that you do this too. So what I would do, and this is the script that I use, and I’m just going to say John Doe is the person.
David Brower: Sure.
Sidney Clevenger: Hey John Doe, thanks so much for the ad. Um, I really appreciate you reaching out to me on Facebook today, or reaching out to me on Facebook to be my friend. What enticed you to reach out to me, question mark, and I let it go.
David Brower: Good.
Sidney Clevenger: There’s a couple of things that happened there. It’s super simple. I’m not writing my long story about reaching out to me. I’m not sending them a link they need to click on. I’m not asking for anything. I’m taking control of the conversation, and I’m allowing them to talk about themselves with an open ended question. One thing I’ve learned, and if you can’t tell you, I love to talk, people love to talk about themselves.
David Brower: Absolutely.
Sidney Clevenger: And that’s something I’ve learned for years.
David Brower: Absolutely.
Sidney Clevenger: And if you give them the opportunity, they are going to answer so many questions that you don’t have to dig for that a lot of times, we’re going to talk their way into whatever it is they’re looking for or reaching out to, and a lot of the times, that’s been working with you. I follow a pretty easy way that I sell which is I stack things, and what I mean by stacking is I give value, I give value, I give value, I give value, and I literally get them to a point to where the only answer they can say is, “I need your help.” My closing line is always the same. Is this something you would like my help with?
David Brower: Nice.
Sidney Clevenger: Always. When I say that and I do my stacking right. So I go in and I solve their problem, I ask them the right questions, and I make sure to let them know that I can solve their problem with this specific thing that I have. This is what I can do, this is how it’s going to solve your problem. No one to this date has ever said they don’t want my help. Now some might have said that they can’t afford it, and that’s my fault because I probably should’ve never been on the phone with someone who couldn’t afford it. But some would say, “Yes, absolutely, I want your help,” because I’ve done that the right way.
David Brower: Right.
Sidney Clevenger: And that’s really how I do it. You can easily do that through text messaging, through a Facebook message. I communicate a lot on Facebook Message, I close on Facebook Message every week, and it’s just following the same stuff. Texts, I know it that to some people, texts can be looked at as not personal, and I understand that. Being from the south, I completely understand that.
David Brower: Sure.
Sidney Clevenger: But the thing is you have to meet your potential clients where they are.
David Brower: That’s right. That’s right.
Sidney Clevenger: And if where they are is communicating through texts, then you have to be able to communicate through texts to be able to influence them in a way to be able to help them. What is it that, was it Zig Ziglar that said you want to make $100,000,000, help 100 million people first, and I guess that’s how I feel.
David Brower: Yeah, yeah.
Sidney Clevenger: That’s kind of where the DNA is.
David Brower: I’m a firm believer that if you focus on the right people for the right reasons, the money will follow.
Sidney Clevenger: Always.
David Brower: Always. Alright.
Sidney Clevenger: If I help somebody win, money always follows.
David Brower: Always follows.
Sidney Clevenger: Money is a byproduct.
David Brower: Yeah. That’s right.
Sidney Clevenger: I don’t do this for the money. If I did this for the money, I would have fell through the cracks a long time ago.
David Brower: Long time ago. So how can we get that eBook you’re talking about?
Sidney Clevenger: I’m actually going to be done with it here in about two days.
David Brower: Okay.
Sidney Clevenger: I can send you a copy over. It’s actually getting designed right now by my graphic designer. I do have an Evernote, but what I’ll do, if it’s okay with you, David, I’ll send you over a copy, and then you can blast it out to all your audience.
David Brower: You got it.
Sidney Clevenger: And they can have it for 100 percent free. So I’ll share this with them and then of course, I’ll give them the content as well. They can have it forever. I should be able to have that to you, Wednesday, Thursday, probably by Saturday if I can just email it to you, and I’ll see what I can do.
David Brower: Okay sure, that’d be great. Yeah. Well, let’s talk about your launch. What’s coming up in January?
Sidney Clevenger: Awesome. So over the past couple of years, pretty much me at first was by myself. Now it’s me and a team. We’ve been a digital marketing arm, we’ve really done a lot of sales funnels, we’ve done a lot of lead generation type stuff. We’ve dabbled a little bit in websites and stuff like that and in mobile apps, but we’re formalizing everything now, tying everything together. We’re going to be offering a full array of digital marketing products and we’re going to be offering different types of campaigns. A lot of people, the sales funnel thing, everybody is promoting it as the magic bullet, and it’s really not. It’s a piece of the puzzle, but it’s not the magic bullet.
David Brower: Right.
Sidney Clevenger: And I want to make sure that I put the right information out to people, so they understand that it’s not an ATM machine. You don’t just pay a couple thousand dollars to have a sales funnel builder, in some cases which is really upsetting 10, $20,000.
David Brower: Right, right.
Sidney Clevenger: You build it to certain things, you need to make sure that you have a goal in mind for whatever you’re doing with your marketing. What is your goal, what is your target you’re going to hit, and what actions are you going to take to hit that target? So you have reasonable expectations. And then you also need to know what your sales process is in any marketing, but there’s a lot of marketing that’s built to either shrink or take over a sales process, so you need to make sure that you know exactly what your goals are in your sales process so you can attack in the right way in your sales process to make sure that you convert as many people as possible, and a lot of people just don’t do that. They just put a sales funnel up, they throw it out there.
David Brower: They don’t know what the y don’t know. They see the silver bullet and they go, “Oh crap, here’s the easy money.” And they dump all this money and they wake up 28 days later going, “Uh oh. Uh oh.”
Sidney Clevenger: What happened? Where’s My ATM?
David Brower: Right? Right? Right? So they’re not only spending a lot of money, they’re doing it for the wrong reasons.
Sidney Clevenger: Exactly.
David Brower: And what you’re talking about is helping people to do it for the right reasons. And then the money becomes the benefit.
Sidney Clevenger: Absolutely, and another thing that we’re coming out with that I really wanted to do, a lot of people have reached out to me over the last year. I don’t personally coach, it’s not that I don’t want to, it’s just I’m really stretched thin. I don’t say stretched thin, I just got a lot of stuff going on right now, I just don’t have time. I want to, but I don’t have time.
David Brower: Yeah. Yeah.
Sidney Clevenger: And if I do that, I want to make sure that if they pay me, say two or three grand to do it, I’m giving them 20 or $30,000 worth of value. That’s just how I am.
David Brower: Yeah.
Sidney Clevenger: And so, I don’t do that, but what I’ve decided to do is a product that I’m launching in January, and I can send you over this when it’s done as well, David, is something we’re calling the Better Leads Box. And what we’re doing is we’re going to be putting together a complete, kind of like marketing in a box for real estate agents mark, mortgage loan officers, the construction, other people that have specific niches that have reached out to me that typically do very well with us.
Sidney Clevenger: And we’re going to put this out there and is literally going to be hours and hours and hours of me personally, along with some mortgage brokers that are very high up in the field that are also coaches as well as, I have someone that I work with who does NLP coaching as well, which is neural linguistic programming.
David Brower: Yup.
Sidney Clevenger: So, we’re going to have a section in there for sales language from there and mindset and how to talk a certain way to influence people the right way through tonality. We’re going to have, how to build a certain campaigns. We’re literally going to walk you through step by step. We have a full customer service to be able to answer all the questions, and it’s literally going to be done for you. We’re going to have sales funnels in there that you can download directly and use. We’re going to have prewritten, pre-done. You just got to download and implement and put your custom stuff in there, your custom name and business name and all that. We’re going to have everything done for you, and we’re going to be launching that January 1. We’re putting the final pieces together right now for the launch, and that’s the big one that we have coming out. I’m really excited about that product. I think that’s gonna help.
David Brower: Yeah, it’s huge, man, it’s huge.
Sidney Clevenger: And then of course, we’re still helping clients, we’re still doing client work as well over here, but now we’re doing it where we’re now officially building mobile apps for people. I found a great technology where I can build mobile apps where they can basically take away your business cards forever. Any time someone logs into your app, you get a push notification and you’re able to respond to them through text, email and phone call directly from the app.
David Brower: Wow.
Sidney Clevenger: I’ve set it up to where, or we’ve set it up, or I’ve worked with the technology to be able to set that up to where when somebody gets into your app, I can also dump them directly into your CRM automatically through automation. And we set it up to where it can be, or it’s been set up because it’s not my technology, I don’t own the API.
David Brower: Right.
Sidney Clevenger: But it’s been set up to where, through some of the stuff that we went over the last couple of years, to where it can be cobranded as well, so it’s a really good option for brokers, real estate brokers who have teams or people who have sales staff to be able to allow their sales staff to have a cobranded app absolutely free. And anytime someone goes to their app, they get notified just like they would in a CRM. They only see what they do. They don’t see what the entire company does.
David Brower: Right.
Sidney Clevenger: So, it really gives them their own private app. So you can have 30 … All my people have my cobranded app, but I see everything. They just see what they do, and it’s just not paying for business cards worth it because the starting for that, which includes everything that I just said, it’s $700.
David Brower: Hello. So you’re going to have all this stuff launched in January.
Sidney Clevenger: Yup.
David Brower: After the launch has happened, how do people find out about that? How do they reach out to you?
Sidney Clevenger: The best way right now to reach out to me is through my app that I was talking about, and you can text the word FUNNEL to 36260, so you can go to Fritz Advertising Agency and you will be able to find that. Um, I also have a group that a lot of people love. We have a little bit over a thousand people in the group now. It’s called Lead Generation Secrets for Sales Closers. It’s a Facebook group, you can join that group absolutely free. I go in there and go live in that group once a day and give a free lead generation tip. And then of course, my book will be out in the middle of January. It’s called From Parents’ house To Penthouse, and it’s about my story over the past two years of eating spaghetti and ramen noodles for months at a time, working my tail end off just to make ends meet, all of a sudden picking up some momentum and being able to influence and help hundreds of people.
David Brower: What an exciting time for you, man, and all the people that you have already touched and the thousands of people that you’re going to touch once all of this stuff is launched. So you can text FUNNEL to 36260, and you can check out his Better Leads podcast, everything will launch in January. Congratulations, man. I’m really excited to follow you in about six weeks and see if you’re still breathing.
Sidney Clevenger: Awesome. Hey man. I’m a big believer, and Les Brown says this. I’m a big believer in being the best that you can be, and I’m a big believer in your maker, I put you out here with specific gifts, that might be baking cakes, that might be doing hair, that might be doing something.
David Brower: Yup. Yup.
Sidney Clevenger: But he gave you that specific gift to influence the world. You need to find it and you need to influence the world with it. You know, My favorite quote of all time, and I’ll end with this, “The meaning of life is to find your gift, but the purpose of life is to give it away, and I’m trying to do everything I can to give away my gifts to as many people as I can every day, and I hope that your audience does that as well.
David Brower: Absolutely right. Certainly, man. Hey, Sidney Clevenger, thank you so much. Really enjoyed it, and I’m writing down that last quote.
Sidney Clevenger: Oh yeah, the meanings of gifts.
David Brower: I got goosebumps on that one.
Sidney Clevenger: Oh man, I saw that about three years ago right before my pappy died, and it just related his life so much and I have not lost that. The meaning of life is to find your gift, but the purpose of life is to give it away. It’s such a good quote that no one, it’s anonymously done. No one’s even taking credit for it.
David Brower: Continued success and looking forward to following your journey, so be well.
Sidney Clevenger: Thank you David, me too. I look forward to following you, man, thank you so much.
David Brower: And Merry Christmas.
Sidney Clevenger: Merry Christmas.
Allan Blackwell: Today’s podcast has been sponsored by davidbrowervo.com. Over 500 clients in 85 countries trust us with their brand, and you should too. Listen to Your 20 Minute Podcast With David Brower the go. Downloads are available on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, iTunes, iHeart Radio, Spotify, or any podcast app, and on our website at davidbrowervo.com/your20minutepodcast. Until next time, thank you for listening.