SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
EP 101: 7 Kids and $500k In Revenue With Wes Schaeffer
02 Nov 2015
Chapter 1: What is the main focus of The Top podcast?
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per top. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark.
And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Coming up tomorrow, you will hear from Christo Paul. He was a pro surfer, and now he does over 2 million in just under 12 months with this product. Okay, Top Tribe, good morning. I hope everyone's having a great morning. You're starting your jogs, you're drinking your coffee, and settle down because you're going to love our guest today.
His name is Wes Schaefer, and he is ruthlessly pragmatic, and he's an entrepreneur who believes that marketing is just selling in print. He has owned The Sales Whisperer since 2006, is the author of two books, and has over 160 episodes live of his own podcast at thesalespodcast.com. Wes, are you ready to take us to the top? Let's do it, baby. All right, brother, let's do this.
So we had some fun in Santa Barbara, didn't we? We did. It was good. That was our first time meeting in person, I believe.
Yeah, but you promised not to mention any of that. You said that, well, what happened in Santa Barbara stays in Santa Barbara.
All right, man, we'll keep it that way. So first thing, I can't wait for the Top Tribe to listen to this. Guys, you want to listen to this because Wes has such a unique experience. He's like a lot of you guys. He doesn't know, he doesn't work directly with developers.
but he works with tools like Infusionsoft and great entrepreneurs, and he helps them get more customers and makes a lot of money doing it. So you want to stay tuned for this. So Wes, tell me about October so far. What's the number one thing you're selling?
My main income producer has been for many years, either making Infusionsoft sales, right? So getting the kickstart fee, getting residual income, because every time I sell that, I get a commission for the life of the customer. And then ancillary services. So they may need additional help. They may need blocks of hours. They may need website support.
So I've got a good team that I can bring in either either on my team or a team of consultants that I've kind of vetted, you know, I know who's good, and I can sub it out and get a referral fee or a commission from them for the work that I refer out.
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Chapter 2: How much revenue is Wes Schaeffer generating this month?
And then the monthly goes to Infusionsoft. But we set all that up. So when you order, we take care of the rest. And, you know, within five, ten minutes, you have logins to my training portal. You have logins to your Infusionsoft account.
Chapter 3: What services does Wes Schaeffer offer through Infusionsoft?
And then there's some wizards to kind of walk you through the fundamentals, the rudimentary stuff. And then within days, you know, you're on your first one-on-one call with us.
That's great. Okay, so let's look at these monthlies. You have $200, $300, and $379 a month. What percentage of that do you keep versus what you pay to Infusionsoft?
Uh, so they, and their partner program, they have tiers, right? So you can earn anywhere from 5% recurring up to 30%. So I'm in the platinum plus, which is a 30% recurring. So on a $300 application, you know, I'll make 90 bucks a month.
Okay. Got it. And how did you get to the platinum? Do you have to sell a certain volume of soft plants? Yeah. How many? That's a hundred a year. Okay, 100 a year. So just out of curiosity, how much total monthly recurring revenue have you signed up for Infusionsoft over your whole life history?
Oh, my gosh. I mean, I have over 400 people. Well, you know, there's churn. Some people quit. So I've probably helped sign up 500, 600 people.
Okay, 600 at a minimum of 200 bucks a month, right?
At a minimum, yeah.
Yeah, so that's $120,000 of monthly recurring revenue, assuming no churn.
Well, yeah, but there is churn.
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Chapter 4: How does Wes Schaeffer differentiate his offerings?
This is total speculation, but I bet I'm right. I'm usually right. I bet I'm right here. Wes, when they raise all that money from venture cap, from, you know, big, big bank Goldman Sachs, you know, they raised 50 million bucks. I guarantee you,
Their valuation took a hit because those banks and everybody looked at their statements and they saw in their cost of goods sold to 30% going to affiliates like you. It's forever, right? By the way, that 30%, they're supposed to pay you that forever.
Well, yeah, forever or until they change the contract, which they've done multiple times.
Interesting. See, I bet you anything they changed that contract from pressure after they raised money, and now they're pissing off people like you, which is not good considering you've driven about $7 million of market cap via the $120,000 in MRR that you've signed up for them.
Well, I think some of that could be right. But living through the changes they've made even before they got all that money, they have a history of making big changes to the partner contract. Without telling you guys. Yeah, they just kind of dump it on you. And it's not just $50 million. I mean, twice they had $50 million less than a year apart. So I think they're somewhere around $150 million.
And, you know, that's how they've chosen to go. I mean, HubSpot went public and, you know, they're killing it.
I think the reason, by the way, that Infusionsoft hasn't gone public, I think they wanted to go public a while ago, but I think it's because HubSpot's just killing them.
Oh, I don't know if HubSpot in general, I think the market in general has caught up. They are not as unique as they were seven years ago. Yeah. And so HubSpot and Infusionsoft, in a way, it's kind of like Cadillac versus Chevy. You know, they do so much more. They have a CMS, much better integrated reporting. It's a different tool. It's certainly priced differently. Yeah. But there is overlap.
Entreport is much more of a direct competitor. Now you have like ActiveCampaign. I mean, you can get started with 90% of the features of Infusionsoft on ActiveCampaign for $49 a month.
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Chapter 5: What are the pricing structures for Wes's services?
And these books are the ones that Mark Zuckerberg thinks every entrepreneur must read. So, Wes, before I get into my favorite part of the show, we know you're going to do about $40,000 here in October. Now, let's go macro for a second.
Your whole brand, The Sales Whisperer, selling all your different tools, whether it's HubSpot, Infusionsoft, ActiveCampaign, Entreport, all together, about how much are you doing in your business annually?
Well, just track that run rate. So yeah, I'll finish this year. It's about half a million. Yeah, I'll finish this year at about half a million.
Yeah, that's great. Well, hey, man, that is so exciting. People are going to want to follow you online, Wes. We will link to obviously all the links you share in the show notes at nathanlacka.com forward slash thetop101. But if they want to connect with you, Wes, online, where should they go?
Just visit thesaleswhisperer.com and you can find all my contact info right there. There you guys have it. Okay, Wes, do you know what time it is? Oh, I don't let me get my watch. I put my watch away. It's on my clock here. Yeah, on my computer. Yeah, yeah.
Time for the famous five. Are you ready?
Bring it on.
Number one. What is your favorite business book?
Oh, man, I'm going to cheat and give you two. All righty. When it comes to sales, check out Oren Klaff, Pitch Anything. The dude is a genius, kind of reinventing sales, busting up frameworks. Fantastic. If you are not in direct sales, even though everybody is, but some say they aren't, then fine. Then go check out Roy Williams. He has a trilogy around the Wizard of Ads.
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Chapter 6: How does Wes manage customer relationships and retain clients?
It's a great tool.
We are using word swag in some very weird and quite frankly surprising ways on my Instagram account, Wes. And I will tell you, we were getting, you know, 10, 11 likes per photo. We're now getting 90 or 100 likes per photo.
Oh my gosh.
Even there's one little thing, like you'll see if you go there at Instagram.com forward slash Nathan Latka, you'll see I've added a little signature, a vector signature on each graphic. And that spiked engagement almost by 300%. And I do that using Word Swag. So love that tool. And I love Ben, the founder. Wes, number four. Listen, you have, I believe you told me six kids, correct? Seven.
Un-freaking-believable.
Which one do you not like? Which one did you just delete?
Yeah.
I apologize for that. Seven kids. Holy mackerel. Hey, listen, you have CEOs for individual parts of your businesses. You know, when they grow up, that'll be good. There you go. Are you, here's the question. Are you getting eight hours of sleep every night? No. No. How many?
Um, six, six and a half.
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