Lets Turn Keyboard Warriors into Sales People

Hey there,

Happy Thursday afternoon. My eyeballs feel like they are about to fall out after starting at the screen since 7AM. Also, I almost just ate a bug that was delivered in my Sweet Green salad (follow @chrismeade on IG for the live reaction). But shit this week has been super successful and I can feel the momentum starting to pick up. 

At this point, we're well over 10,000 readers so my advice won't be relevant each week but we're in full prep now for the biggest spring ever. I'm just getting back from our first ever pool retail show and was blown away with how many buyers were in attendance. 

2023 is the year the internet keyboard warriors are going to have to leave their bedroom and start making in-person sales to retailers & at tradeshows. If you can find a show that's affordable and for your industry, I highly suggest you go as they are one of our top performing ROI channels each and every year. Don't go crazy and spend a ton of money on a 20' x 20' booth, but a solid 10' x 10' for $2500-4000 is a solid investment. 

Start to think about things this way:

If you didn't have the internet how would your business survive?

This week Greg (my brother) and I shot our first ever founder's video for CROSSNET. I'm not sure what the hell we've been doing since 2018, but we've been seeing founder's have crazy success by jumping on camera and telling their story. What's cooler than a bunch of kids from a farm who left their jobs, risked all their money, to invent a new sport? 

How to Write A Good Ad? 

• Start with a hook & a problem within the first 5 seconds

• Come with the energy you want your product to give off

• Make the customer feel seen and provide them with a solution 

• Why should they buy now instead of waiting? 

• Close with a strong call to action 

30 Minute Meeting Idea

Each week I go through my calendar and try to cancel as many meetings as I can in order to find time to actually work. If you don't already do this, nothing is better than doing a weekly Sunday night cleanse. Here's one meeting that I'm always keeping:

• Use Triple Whale or your ad manager and find your top performing ads for February, March & April of 2022 & 2021 (if you were in business)

• What type of content worked best? (Static, selfies, UGC, high quality videos or photos) 

• Were there any common themes that you’ve noticed between the top performing & worst performing creative? If so, distribute this info to the entire team so you know never to do that certain thing again. For example, ads that show the game + retail box always perform better

• Plan a budget on reproducing new content for 2023. Think of affordable ways like leveraging your best customers and offering them free product in exchange for content, or finding a local hungry videographer who can shoot for a couple hundred dollars

Revenue Tactics You Might Not Be Capitalizing on:

1) Building out an affiliate program that offers your best customers essentially your acquisition cost to close a sale. Real life CROSSNET example: $30 CAC -> can offer the affiliate $30 per sale they make or $15 for each sale they make plus $15 for their friend so they don’t go buy it on Amazon

2) Tapcart - Having a custom app is sick af. Push notifications, exclusive products, place for videos and dedicated content. No brainer way to make your money back if you can get customers to download the app

3) Tradeshows - Sign up for 1-2 industry trade shows and come prepared. I just left one and we probably sold nearly $50,000 of product and my all in costs were $2500, talk about ROI 

4) Building a Tik Tok army of creators - One post a day from 20-30 creators at scale could lead to millions of impressions at a super affordable cost. Bonus them with a little extra for every million or hundred thousand views they get and you’ll probably get 2x the content for free just by them being hungry for the money. We just started a campaign with Minisocial to do this with a bunch of creators. Less time negotiating and got an awesome bulk deal

5) Stop discounting and use a tool called Fondue for cash back instead. We were sick of losing money discounting so instead we started offering cash back instead 30 days after a purchase on Good Sport’s website. We’ve seen email opt in conversion increase big time and we are expecting less than 50% of customers to actually take advantage of their cash back, meaning way more cash in my pocket

6) Partnerships! What brands would be a sick collab for you? Whose audience would actually want to hear from you and be educated on your product? CROSSNET x Prince would be an amazing collaboration for our pickleball game don’t you think? 

Short and sweet this week. No plugs or cute stories. Time to sign off or my wife's going to leave me if I don't walk our french bulldog Sosa. 

Next week I'd love to spotlight the answers to the below three questions as I'm sure they'd be super helpful to everyone. 

• What’s the best way you’ve been getting customers to opt in for SMS? 

• What’s your favorite ad you’ve seen on Facebook or Tik Tok recently?

• If you’re struggling with retail, what is the hold up? 

All the love in the world,

Chris