Trey Lewellen: How to Increase Monthly Sales With Your Ecommerce Business

Listen to our exclusive interview with Trey Lewellen:

What can you do to sell more with your ecommerce business? We decided to talk to one of Clickfunnels top earners, the ecommerce funnel guru, Trey Lewellen. Trey is know for setting the record for having the #1 physical product sold in the shortest amount of time using ClickFunnels. With well over $50m in sales now he has mastered product selection and sales funnels in the ecommerce world.

More about Trey:

Trey is know for setting the record for having the #1 physical product sold in the shortest amount of time using ClickFunnels. Trey’s entrepreneurial journey took off in 2012 after working several years at the job he thought he wanted. He quickly shifted from working for someone else to becoming an entrepreneur when he was inspired by a successful businessman to create his own wealth. The success in his sales career made him passionate about teaching others how to achieve their definition of success, and his own coaching business, The Trey Lewellen Mastermind, was born. He began to share with others the lessons, tips, and tricks he learned from his own experience and research to help them build their own long-term, sustainable online businesses!

Learn more about Trey Lewellen and his work at > www.talktotrey.com/

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Transcription of Interview

(Transcribed by Otter.ai, there may be errors)

Adam G. Force 0:03
Welcome to the Change Creator podcast where entrepreneurs come to learn how to live their truth, get rich and make a massive difference in the world. I’m your host, Adam forest co founder, Change Creator and co creator of the captivate method. Each week we talk to experts about leadership, digital marketing and sales strategies that you can implement in your business and like to go big, visit us at changecreator.com/gobig/ to grab awesome resources that will help drive your business forward. All right, what’s up? Ready? Welcome back to the change credit podcast show. This is your host, Adam force. Hope you guys are all doing amazing. And if you missed the last episode is with Peter Docker, he has a ton of experience, we talked about what it takes to be a great leader today. Really kind of putting some attention on building a good culture as a leader. And what that looks like, you know, as this these things evolve, right? Peter was one of the co authors with Simon Sinek, about how to find your why and that famous whole concept and that book, been around for years now. So a lot of good insights, Peter has a ton of great nuggets and experience to share. So don’t hesitate to go back and check that out think you get a lot out of that conversation. So today we’re going to be talking to somebody in the e commerce game, we wanted to bring some more e commerce stuff to the table, and his name is Trey Lewellen. So actually learn more about Trey because of Russell Brunson over a Click Funnels, Trey is known because he’s made I think over, I think he’s up to what $50 million. Now with his e commerce stuff. And you know, he was, he wasn’t always in e commerce, we touched on some of that. With him, and, you know, he is known for actually setting the record for having the number one physical products sold in the shortest amount of time using quick funnels, ever since he’s figured that out, it’s he’s just been off to the races, he knows how to pick the right products, how to sell them, and how to make money. He’s very good at these processes. So we wanted to bring Trey in here to talk about his experience and help any e commerce folks out there, learn how to get more out of their business and sell more. Alright, so we’re gonna dive into that with Trey. Okay, so, guys, we did we have some updates. One of them is when you go to change twitter.com, you will find that we have a new Insider’s Guide for how to discover stories. That’s a freebie. So we want it to just start getting you thinking like, where do great stories that actually mean something for my business come from? And what does that look like? And there’s a couple really great and effective, very powerful processes that we share, on how to discover stories that matter for your business, they’ll also help you grow as an entrepreneur. And, you know, if you want to really get into Well, how do I make them engaging? How do I get inspire people to take action for my business and join me? Will, you know that we cover in a workshop so there’s, it’s like 17 bucks, and we do a 90 minute workshop, it’s broken into three parts, and you can sign up. So when you sign up for the Insiders Guide, you’ll be given the opportunity to join the workshop for just a couple bucks. And there’s just so much powerful information about how storytelling really works with your brand, what it means to your brand and why it’s so important. And then we really get into we do cover on how to discover the stories in a little more depth. But then we get into what makes them engaging, how do I inspire action, we give examples and all kinds of strategies. So you know, it’s really powerful. And there’s a ton of great bonuses that we share this try to give you guys as much resources as possible because of how important this part this communication part of your business is to getting you know more clients, more customers, whatever you want to call that. So hopefully you guys get a chance to check that out and you love it. We always love to hear your feedback on it as well. Alright guys, we’re gonna jump into this conversation with Trey.

Okay, show me the heat.

Hey, what’s up, Trey? Welcome to the Change Creator podcast. How are we doing today, man?

Trey Lewellen 4:22
Good, man. Thanks for having us.

Adam G. Force 4:23
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I loved learning about your journey and everything that you have going on and just kind of seeing the wins that you’ve had and the risks that you’ve taken. Really cool stuff. So I’m excited that you’ve taken the time here today to talk with us. Just for everybody’s benefit. Maybe you can give us just a little background and kind of bullet out some of the key things you’ve been through on your journey that got you where you are right now.

Trey Lewellen 4:46
Yeah, we’ve been we’ve been. We’ve been we’ve been quite all over the place. So basically, just real quick about us. You know, we sell physical products out of China. We import you know, containers, we fly them over, we bought them over and then we sell them through funnels and then we use affiliates to Push traffic to those funnels. And that’s pretty much our gig. That’s what we do really well at.

Adam G. Force 5:05
Okay. Yeah. And tell me what interests you in that like, what, what even got you started in that space.

Trey Lewellen 5:11
So the space really began about seven years ago when my brother was graduating law enforcement school. So he’s gonna become a law enforcement officer. And I didn’t really want him coming home in the casket. So I said, How about we started business together. So we actually started a fan page is when fan pages were like really kicking some butt like getting social like engagement. And we did really great, we sold t shirts on there. And we really started selling physical products through funnels, this was kind of like pre Click Funnels. Think about that, right? This is how far back this goes. And so we are using websites like teespring.com to sell t shirts. And then we moved into Click Funnels once that arrived. And we’re really kind of I think we’re user number three, on Click Funnels is what I was told to selling physical products, and we use clickfunnels ever since to really sell those, those products online, and then built out more web hosting websites that we control, and then that, you know, speed up the process. But so we got started.

Adam G. Force 6:08
Yeah. And if I remember correctly, the survivalist flashlight was the first big winner, is that accurate for your first funnel that really kind of took off?

Trey Lewellen 6:18
That was the one that we call hit the Jetstream. So basically, it just I don’t know, I wouldn’t say that was the first one. No, I would say it was this other t shirt. That really gave us a sign of hope. We we were on, you know, Facebook, and we are doing a T shirt and we were doing t shirt t shirt t shirt. I learned a lot from Tanner Larsen. He’s a good friend of mine now. But he had a good course on selling t shirts at the time. And I watched that course. And what was funny was I started sending screenshots, and we are we were selling more shirts than him at about about like two months in three months. And which is kind of cool. Like we still you know, banter about it, which is funny. He’s a smart dude, like, dude’s genius. And, you know, he’s like, Alright, so how you doing that, how you doing that. And so we started teaching on that we started really, you know, expanding that process. And we It was called like the 300 Club, there was a thing on Teespring, where if you got over 300, it would discount the T shirts. So we always we always set the goal. This is what I recommend, like you have to have goals, like tons of stuff went into this, but you have to have a goal of 300 if you got 300 and then the T shirt, this T shirt amount would drop. So we just pushed extremely hard to sell 300 t shirts. And when we did we hit profit. And then we became extremely profitable after 300. So our goal was always to sell 300 and we call it 300 goal, right 300 club? Well, we did t shirt, t shirt t shirt, we had ones that said, you know, rock out with your Glock out. We had ones that said Glock paper scissors, right like all these really cool like funny little t shirts that did well it sold, you know 510 grand worth of T shirts and like a two week time. But then we came up with this one where was like this huge, huge prayer, I forget what it’s called, is like some sort of prayer that talks about, you know, dying in this, in this in this pile of brass and what not is like really huge, deep. And do that one, just that one just took off it launched and unfortunately Teespring didn’t have the best marketing ideas back back then were they pretty much let you run a campaign for seven days. And then once that campaign ended, all the links went away. And so you could only run a Facebook campaign for seven days. And then on a seven day, you had to kill your Facebook ads, because there’s no I know it sounds crazy. But back then you’re like, Oh, that makes sense. And so yeah, so we launched, we started scaling, we scale as hard as we could. This is back when when Facebook had $2,000 a day limits. And my credit card had a 2000 day limit. So I’d spend $2,000. And then the next day would decline because I had to go pay it off. Well, Teespring doesn’t pay you out in the next seven days. So I was like, you know, I was I was forward for self funding this whole thing bootstrapping it together. But that was like our biggest success. We did $117,000 in that month of T shirt sales, which was our largest month we’d ever done that month prior was 15 grant, you know, 20 grand, so that do $120,000 in sales in T shirts. Sales was just a huge win. That was like we finally felt the gesture and like it took off. It was just flying like things were happening. comments were coming in. People were just like going crazy about it and buying saying yes, I want it. It was just amazing. And so that was I would say our first one that gave us the hope and the dreams of the jet stream.

Adam G. Force 9:31
Yeah, he’s saying is Yeah,

Trey Lewellen 9:33
Then about six months later is when we hit that flashlight offer. Okay, that one did you know right under 30 million. So a long ways away from 100,000 right,

Adam G. Force 9:43
I say so

Trey Lewellen 9:44
That was a new level of jet stream. Yeah, we didn’t even know existed and and it tore us up, right. Like we just we just scaled it to the moon

Adam G. Force 9:53
and what so and I want to dissect some of those things and just kind of dig into it. But before I do just what’s happening today In your world, like what’s now that’s kind of like the kickoffs like what’s going on now, what’s the big thing?

Trey Lewellen 10:05
Yeah. So basically, I can tell I can talk about, like some products that we launched last year, which is really, really great. And and so one was we always like, go towards the media, we always look at what the media is doing. We look at what’s you know, what’s known what’s what’s big. This is when like, Netflix launched the gamut. Okay, which is all about chess. So a great year to sell chess set.

Adam G. Force 10:30
Yeah.

Trey Lewellen 10:30
Right. So if you can use inertia, momentum from other media channels and like latch on to that stuff, you’re already giving yourself a benefit, right? Getting Ahead of things. So so the media, this was an COVID happen. So we launched on the masks. So we actually started buying k in nine, five masks, and everybody was going after b2b. So they’re going after like iOS, C’s, emergency operating centers, police departments, fire departments, nurses, dentists, all that stuff. And we took a different approach, where we saw a big storm happening, the storm was everybody’s buying mass from China. And they’re going to be, you know, inflated, right, the demand is going to lower because the amount of inventory is going to expand. And that’s basics 101. So we saw this coming in. So I said, hey, what while we wait for these ships to come in, because once these ships hit, we’ll be able to go and buy masks for pennies on the dollar, even though they just paid $1.60 or $2 for the mask. So these masks roll in, the exact thing happens along with a couple other things that worked in our favor, such as the FDA only allowing six of the factories of like 120, to be able to sell these masks that qualify. So so so these big companies, corporations paid millions, multi millions of dollars on these masks, on the way in, they haven’t even hit the dock yet the FDA calls and says, Hey, NASA, you just bought the you’re importing right now aren’t valid, they don’t work for these type of fields, they can be sold to consumers, but you don’t know how to do that. So now all these huge companies are sitting on millions of masks, all it took was a few phone calls. And we’re buying masks at 10 cents 10 cents a mask. And we were selling to consumers for $2.95 to $3.95, which was about about the market price in Walmart, and in other other retail stores. But we sold them in packs of 10. And really like took off at that funnel did I think right at $3 million in the time that we were able to launch, create and get it out to affiliates, which was which is a cool market. So like those are the things that we’re doing now. Right? we’re attaching ourselves to markets. And then we’re finding products that latch on to that stuff. So right now, you know, we have a big President Elect stuff going on. We have different politics that are going on. So we’re latching on to that stuff. You know, watching what cnn says what’s Fox News talking about? And we’re looking at what products can we create or relate to make that person stand out to make him feel like he has somebody like a monster cry or, you know, a be a part of something. Another one that we did was we did a Christmas ornament. It’s called the 2020 Christmas ornament. And that funnel that funnel did right at five little over $5 million in about a three month span is about 75 days because it got cut off on December 15. But we sold crap tenders, I think we did 92,000 orders of those that went out, which was fantastic. bought that bought the women’s for 60 cents sold them for $13 great profit margins around 2,000% markup, which was excellent. So those are the things we’re doing, man, we’re just we’re just hustling, we’re just we’re just finding products, put them in funnels and then launch into affiliates and scaling. Yeah, like like this is it. This isn’t where, you know, like we got, you know, little Facebook ads running. This is where we take it to affiliates, and it’s on cnn.com. It’s on the Today Show, it’s on Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, like when you log in, we’re on first page right front and center. So we’re getting the most amount of traffic most amount of impressions, that gets us clicks, that gets us conversions. And then it’s our goal to have high epcs Earnings Per Click to allow for those conversions to happen and be able to pay for that traffic. And of course, again, we get the scale, we get the database, we get the leads and the conversions. To give you an idea on the Christmas, you know, we did 92,000 conversions, but we also got 370,000 leads 370,000 leads, we built the database in 75 days. That’s incredible. So now we can go monetize that database, right? We can do push notifications, we can do text marketing, we can do email marketing, we do direct mail, we got all kinds of point data sets that we can use to go out and build a big business around.

Adam G. Force 14:30
Yeah, yeah. So you would just expand on more of like type products with that audience. Like I say

Trey Lewellen 14:37
Course. Of course we’ll segment it or we sell it.

Adam G. Force 14:38
Segment or sell it. Yeah. And and I’m curious though, like so for let’s just use the Christmas ornament example. I mean, a lot of these things are using the same funnel principles, multi product funnels, things like that.

Trey Lewellen 14:51
Yeah. So what do you mean by multi product funnels?

Adam G. Force 14:54
This isn’t, you know, here’s what you could buy this one ornament and then you know, oh, here’s an offer. To get like five more of them, right? So getting multiple of the same.

Trey Lewellen 15:03
Yeah, so with the Christmas ornaments is kind of funny. There’s heads. So you buy one head for a single guy, right? You buy two heads for a family of two, like somebody who’s got married, you buy three heads for a family of two plus child. So we had heads from one to seven. So they are buying one of 2, two of 3, one of 5. And so they were the the average was 4.71. So for every buyer that came in, they bought 4.71. ornaments,on avera44ge.

Adam G. Force 15:32
Okay, interesting. So I’m curious if we can break it down a little bit, just to give people a sense of what goes into this. And it sounds like maybe your strategies have obviously evolved over time, right, not just running Facebook ads, but getting into some bigger spaces in the media and stuff like that. What kind of investment goes into running a campaign like the Christmas ornament, one where you’re making $5 million in in that short period of time? I mean, just want to give people like, what does that look like?

Trey Lewellen 16:01
A lot of moving parts, man. A lot of moving parts, right. It’s not like, you know, sitting behind the chair in Redis, ranking in like, there’s a lot of things that are going on, you know, one thing I’ll get into that habit to do so. But one thing I want to make sure is is kind of like how we are creating our org chart or organizational chart? Yeah, so one big mistake I learned from the flashlight days, was I, the ego part, right? The ego got in the way where it was like, man, we’re doing great, we’re gonna go build out a huge fulfillment center, we’re going to go build out a huge Call Center, which we did, we bought, you know, we grabbed a 7000 square foot facility for fulfillment, we had 25 people working for us there, we built out a huge call center, we had 50, I think it’s like right under 50 people working for us in the call center suite like 75 employees at the time running that run that g 700 offer. But one thing that you have to understand about internet is it’s a cyclical business, for most of us. So with us, we have a good offer, it’s a lot of high, right, we’re having a lot of fun, we’re writing those highs, but as soon as that offer dies, we got to look to the next one, right? So there’s ups and downs, but over an average, it equals out to be a pretty great year, but the lows are low and the highs are high. So during those lows, you have to find out what to do with your call center, because now they’re just sitting there twiddling their thumbs saying we don’t got leads, you got to figure out what to do with your fulfillment center. And because they’re sitting there twiddling thumbs, they can only sweep the floor so much, right? becomes pretty clean. And they’re like, I don’t know what else to do. So that was a big learning lesson for me, because I realized that we have not an asset anymore, we have a debt center. And what I like to look at is one thing when we bring in mastermind members is we look at their debt centers and their profit centers, and we try to turn their debt centers into profit centers. So everything that’s a debt becomes profit. So for me, my debt centers were a call center, and a fulfillment center. There are both debts that are costing me money, I’m paying payroll, rent all the stuff, right. So how do I turn those into profit centers? Well, for us now, today, sitting you know, four years later from that, is we don’t have any of that we don’t have a call center. We don’t have a fulfillment center. We don’t have a Facebook agency. We don’t even run Facebook ads. Right? What else don’t we do? We pretty much don’t have that that much of anything. We have like two employees. Running a multimillion dollar company. How we do it is we outsource so everything is outsource the call center we run out of the Philippines, right, we have 20 agents that that work for us that receive calls on a high month, we can scale them up, we can take we can bring into 20, 20 more Philippines to bring in 40 agents if we need it, right. But with a click of a button, I can scale that back to 20. I don’t have to go and fire anybody. I don’t have to go and lower my rent, right? I’m working the big aha here is we’re working with constants, not variables. So every order that goes out, I have a constant I know this is gonna cost me $2 to pick it. This is gonna this call is going to cost me $2 right this month, versus with 50 people, I got babysitting, I got HR, I got quality assurance, QA, I have managers, I have executives. So just that right there is a business within itself. So what we’ve done is we reached out to other businesses that have that down, they have it dialed in. There’s other CEOs, entrepreneurs, presidents around those companies that want to wet that, that want to run a well oiled machine in the call center business or in the fulfillment business or in the direct response business or in the, you know, email response business. Like, I don’t want to manage over that stuff. I know what my superpower is, which is finding great offers and then scaling that up extremely fast. Right? So then what we do is we we lean into these guys for our fulfillment center right now. We’ll do 4000 orders today, but tomorrow, I might do one, and so it’s okay. Because I know for $4,000 I’m gonna pay eight grand for tomorrow and I pay for one or I’m gonna pay $2 Yep, If I had my own fulfillment center, it’s not like that I got that same payroll, that same overhead, that same fulfillment that I have to pay for. Right. So that’s the difference. That’s how we’re scaling so quickly inside our company right now is because our overhead is so small, we’re very lean, easy machine. Our facility is right at 1200 square feet. So we don’t have the 10,000 square foot facility anymore. We don’t have the 7000 fulfillment house anymore. It’s really nit close. We got it. We have our duties, we know our obligations, we know what to go get after. And we do it right. And we use these other resources to do that. To give me an example. we’re not the only ones doing this Papa John’s just actually hired an entire call center in the Philippines to answer all their incoming phone orders. So the next time you call Papa John’s and make an order. Listen, there’s nobody in the background. You can’t hear people throwing pots and pans screaming about the cheese or the Mariners sauce anymore. Right? It’s all order takers in the Philippines that are literally online, taking your papa john’s order submitting your credit card and then off to the to the most local. You know, Papa John’s place. This is the way of the future, this is how things are going is dissecting down getting small and little leaching out to the who you need to write to to expand your business at the right time.

Yeah, it’s so much more flexible, right? Seems like you just got a lot more control and it balances everything out nicely. So you’re not paying for things you don’t need. So now I mean, is this is this a viable approach for only if you’re at least making seven figures? like is this viable for the startup? Like should who should be looking at these types of approaches to cut down overhead?

Well, I mean, things that’s everybody. It cuts down it cuts down overhead immediately, right? Like for a startup? I mean, you wear all the hats, right? You’re doing the Facebook ads, you’re doing the funnels, you’re doing the creative, you’re doing the funnel build, like all that stuff. So then you have to ask yourself, what’s the one thing that I hate doing? Do I hate writing copy? Do I hate writing headlines I hate right you know, doing the Facebook ads, I hate doing this fulfillment because me licking envelopes all day, can can can be pretty awful, right? You get all those paper cuts. That might be the first thing you outsource. But then you have to equate, you know the time. So a great example that I give. And I love this example I learned I want to I learned it from but I didn’t invent it. Somebody else told me about it. But it’s great. So I’m going to steal it. I’m going to give it to you

Adam G. Force 22:24
Go for it

Trey Lewellen 22:24
Which is, I think a lot of people, they hate profit sharing. So when they say see is like, Oh, I gotta hire somebody, they see a lower income of profit. Right? Because I gotta pay this guy. I got overhead, I got payroll, I got taxes. Now I got employed and feel like, I got health. All this stuff that blends into it sucks. However, you are working in your business at 100%. You can’t go up. You can’t go more than 100%. Like you’re, you’re at 100% I want to one doesn’t really exist. So 100% you’re at 100% you’re like, man, there’s no more that I can do. I am just all in. I’m doing everything. However, if you hire somebody, and you say, Wow, dude, there, they only operated like 50% of what I can do, right? I know Excel. I know numbers. I know QuickBooks. I know. Click Funnels, I know, creative and copy like this dude, he only knows like three things that he’s added 50%. So he’s half of me. Yeah, having me. Alright, cool. So when you hire him on now your company is operating at 150%?

Adam G. Force 23:27
Hmm,

Trey Lewellen 23:28
No longer is at 100%. Now it’s at 150. Because you added him on, right? Even though he’s doing less, he’s doing more for the company. Now when you hire three people, and you segment them. And they’re all let’s say a 50%. Now you have them at 150%. And they can do more than you will ever be able to do

Adam G. Force 23:49
True

Trey Lewellen 23:50
By yourself. Because you’re only you’re only capable of 100%. But once you start adding on people, they will outdo you at a much higher rate. Like for instance for us to give you an idea. I have one guy who looks over the entire call center all day he’s answering answering calls he’s getting you know, hey, this customer says this Hey, this customer needs this Hey, can we do this? Can we lower the price? Can we raise the price? Can we do this big of a sale? I don’t know. Right? He’s doing all that. If I had to do all that. That’s taking up all my time, all my energy is to customer service complaints. Now I’m not working on an offer. I have another guy right who’s doing all the creative the banners, doing the videos, editing, he’s out running around making things happen, right make them look good looking graphics behind me if I had to set all this up, this would have taken probably an hour of my time just to set up Get ready for the zoom call. But you got to have people in place so I can go out and as soon as I’m off the zoom call, I’m in another meeting, right making big decisions that I need to go and do but if I’m troubled by all the inbound phone calls and the emails and the creative and the copy and all that stuff, dude, your business will essentially be extremely cyclical. You’ll have huge up and downs because you’ll no longer have to put a be able to put the energy Towards the places that need it from you where your superpower is, right things things fail.

Adam G. Force 25:06
Absolutely,

Trey Lewellen 25:06
exactly what happens.

Adam G. Force 25:08
So I guess you know, so your superpower is finding these great products and scaling them up quickly. So tell me a little bit about that. Can we use one of the examples and kind of break down just because I’m curious, it sounds like maybe the funnels and the approach have evolved over time. And I saw you kind of walk through the flashlight funnel experience, things like that. Can maybe we break down one of the more current ones like the Christmas Christmas ornament approach? And what I just want to get people a taste of like, what it looks like to operate at that level, and how you might be thinking about these things. And, you know, the other question I would get into is really, do we try 10 different products, and one is a winner, like, not like every product someone has is always a winner, right? So, you know, we all go through these experiences. And I’d like to share a little bit about maybe things that haven’t worked for you but then break down something that has right just to give people that vision.

Trey Lewellen 26:04
Yep. Yeah. So that’s the beauty behind a funnel is once you find a winning product, it’s just need more traffic. The world is missing good offers. The world is not missing traffic. There are hundreds of millions of people on this earth. Right. So what you’re not missing is traffic. It’s not figuring out the next best Facebook ad is not figuring out how to be a Facebook wizard or genius. Like that’s one traffic source. I mentioned. I didn’t even mention Facebook, if you remember, right. I told you CNN, I told Yahoo News. I told you Sirius radio, TV, newspaper, direct mail, like the amount of traffic that’s out there is I would say limitless, right? Whereas we think that it’s the traffic that we’re missing when realistically, it’s all about the offer. The world is missing good offers. If you have a great offer, you’ll sell yourself like bananas. Look at the iPhones. Great offer. People love it. They love it. They love it. So it sounds like bananas. Right? gasoline everybody needs it. It’s a great offer. doesn’t need much marketing. Right water. Holy smokes. You pay for water every single month. It’s like right.

Adam G. Force 27:09
Yeah, Mark trade. Oh, yeah.

Trey Lewellen 27:11
Boom. So it’s the office now the traffic. So that’s the one thing the next thing is you mentioned, you know, products so you can throw you can throw products at the wall, man, that’s spaghetti, right? That’s like a big big batch of spaghetti. You take the noodles out you throw it up there you’re hoping that something six sticks that’s hope marketing. Whereas you do market first approach where you do surveys, you go out to Facebook groups you go out to email list and you say hey, listen, I know you all love the Cardinals baseball like you’re all baseball Cardinals lovers. What is one product that you’re buying right now with that you love that you’re like you know really really good after really love buying every time you get the Cardinals app oh it’s I love these socks. These Cardinal socks are the best socks they’re warm fuzzy that was my lucky socks I put them on and Cardinal’s always win. I’m gonna go find those socks I’m gonna sell those socks to the other carnal people that don’t even know about those socks right now. So I’ve done March 1 approach, it’s not my idea my ideas suck, like you know I can look at all kinds of products and think they are cool but no one else thinks they’re cool. So I look at I studied the market and I asked okay what what products are you guys looking to buy? Right and testing testing the marketplace so we’ll do a marker first approach versus a product first approach when creating our funnel base and then launching into you know creation copy creative images, banners stuff like that and then launching into traffic. That’s that’s kind of the key of what we do.

Adam G. Force 28:33
And is there a testing phase for you so like let’s say you find the Cardinals Stock Show Hey, this seems like a hot item like

Trey Lewellen 28:39
Yeah, of course

Adam G. Force 28:39
Let’s find out in seven days if this late before we put too much time and energy and money into it like like what’s that look like for you to just confirm if this actually does sell

Trey Lewellen 28:48
Yeah, that’s that’s the simple process you can throw it up on like a Shopify store Shopify is really really simple to pop a product up and then send some traffic to it that’s a really good way to kind of judge your your market right to see if like, you’re on point and if not like visit price or is it? Is it the marketing is it the the angle that you used, and that’s will pop it up on Shopify? Now we won’t even we won’t even buy the product will sell the product, but we’ll arbitrage it usually from walmart.com or Costco or Sam’s Club or we’ll go to Amazon and literally put in their address and send it to them. So we’ll do things like that just to test the product and then if it’s a winner, then we’ll start importing from China.

Adam G. Force 29:27
So why test on Shopify instead of like Click Funnels or like creating a quick funnel like that?

Trey Lewellen 29:33
Time

Adam G. Force 29:34
Just the time? Yeah, so it’s faster just to pop it up on Shopify

Trey Lewellen 29:38
it’s really fast I can I can put it I can put a product up on Shopify and probably an hour. For me to go build a really good funnel and probably take two days.

Adam G. Force 29:46
right a couple days time. Interesting. Yeah. So and and, and then I guess once you get that process going you find a winner when you throw it up on Shopify traffic is coming from your current list or are you paying for traffic in any way

Trey Lewellen 30:00
users go to cold cold traffic because warm traffic is gonna convert way different than cold traffic is

Adam G. Force 30:06
yeah

Trey Lewellen 30:06
right they trust you right it’s it’s you. It’s Adam, I’m gonna buy from Adam. When it’s Trey I don’t know Trey. I don’t know what he’s selling I don’t know if his gadget or widget or product is as cool as I think it may be. And dude, there’s a lot of dropshippers out there. Drop shipper, like let’s make sure we understand the difference, a drop shipper somebody who’s who’s literally selling a product and then they’re going to China or aliexpress. com buying that product and then it takes 45 days to get to their customer. There’s a lot of dropshippers out there, we don’t dropship. We fulfill. So we use a fulfillment center, which means we’ve imported the product already from China.

Adam G. Force 30:43
Yeah,

Trey Lewellen 30:43
right. It’s in our fulfillment centers here in the USA, it’s already past customs, right? And then we fulfill so it’s it’s their doorstep within three to five days. So, drop shippers have caused a pretty big earth shattering dilemma in the space of e commerce right now. Because people are smart people aren’t dumb, right? They know what’s going on. So when you’re saying, Hey, here’s this product, they’re like, Oh, that’s probably from China. That’s the majority of the comments right now. So you have to hit that head on. Hey, by the way, we have these in the States, this will be delivered in your door in three to five days a drop shipper cannot say that. Yeah. Oh, by the way, here’s an 800 number to talk to us. How many e commerce stores have have a phone number for you to call in? How many? Hey, how about we’ll respond to you within an hour period, then within 60 minutes of you email in person.

Adam G. Force 31:34
That’s always nice.

Trey Lewellen 31:34
Yeah, it was always record times. Or how about live chat. Hey, we got live chat. And he talked to representative let’s chat right now.

Adam G. Force 31:40
Yeah

Trey Lewellen 31:40
Right. All those things are going to set you apart in the field in the in this bloody ocean of e commerce right now of dropship.

Adam G. Force 31:47
Time. Yeah, big time that sets the brand apart big time. So and if so how do you you do coaching for other ecommerce entrepreneurs? Is that correct?

Trey Lewellen 31:56
We do

Adam G. Force 31:56
Yes

Trey Lewellen 31:56
We do

Adam G. Force 31:57
And so do people come in sometimes, and they have an established brand, but they’re struggling to sell their products. So what happens when you’re not just hunting for a hot product that you can tap into? And you’re not just creating these funnels and processes based on you know, trends and such? So you have an established product that you are totally in love with in the sense that you believe in it, it’s meaningful to you, but you’re not able to sell it? How? What are the conversations you’re having with those guys?

Trey Lewellen 32:26
What what business are you in? Are you the business to make money? Are you business lose money?

Adam G. Force 32:32
Right? So I guess, are you saying that you may need to just get out of that business?

Trey Lewellen 32:36
No, I’m saying get rid of the product.

Adam G. Force 32:38
Change the product

Trey Lewellen 32:38
Change the product. Is not the it’s not the niche. It’s the product. Like there’s just it’s just not it’s just not working? Like you can’t get married to a product. There’s a lot of people that do,

Adam G. Force 32:48
like get emotionally hooked on it.

Trey Lewellen 32:50
They are emotionally hooked. They spent They spent their 401k on it. Like there’s some sad stories, man, like I know we’re kind of just kind of shrugging this off the shoulder right now. But like this, this is actually happening every single day people are, you know, out there getting like they think they need to go get patents, they think they need to create something new. They get these ideas off of like Shark Tank, right like Shark Tank, they see these guys coming in with this new crazy idea. And they made millions of dollars.

Adam G. Force 33:11
Yeah,

Trey Lewellen 33:11
I mean, yeah, that’s great. But the amount of people that are doing that is very few, right? The show is showing you the best of the best you’re seeing the cream of the crop.

Adam G. Force 33:19
Yeah.

Trey Lewellen 33:20
Whereas with us, they were picking a niche right? We’re Hey man, I love baseball lovers, or I love gardeners. I love truck drivers. I love mechanics that we just go to the mechanics be like, hey, what tools you buying right now? Man? I’m buying this really cool. That’s really cool. socket set. Sweet. Where’d you get that from? How much you pay for it? Oh, man, I love this thing. I use it all the time. Actually, I bought two more because I love it so much. Great. We’ll use we’ll use research tools to find out where there’s where they’re being imported from because most likely being imported, we’ll go to that exact factory. And we’ll import those same products, sell them for the same price or more or less depending on and we’ll sell it to mechanics right? Because here’s the thing you gotta understand is just because one guy loves this product doesn’t mean the whole entire niche of mechanics know about that product yet

Adam G. Force 34:05
Right

Trey Lewellen 34:05
That’s the whole purpose of market research. You’re finding this this this fear of the sphere of people that know about this product that love this product, like Hey, there needs to be an awareness campaign around this product. Let’s go build this awareness campaign and show the rest of this sphere of mechanics the same people have this product because this amount of people of mechanics love this product and like are talking so much about it. I guarantee you that all these other guys for the same person are going to just love it the same amount. They just don’t know about it yet. So it’s up to me to go out get traffic. Right put the offer out. I got a great offer now mechanics that come to me like Dude, this guy’s got a great product. I love this thing. I’ve seen this thing. I never heard about it before. But now I have and I gotta have it. It’s the same. It’s the same thing. When Dude, you’re at the yoga studio, right? You’re in the yoga, you’re in the yoga mats, and you’re sitting there and you’re new and you look over and you’re like hey, I’m new yoga what’s what’s going on? What’s like what’s what what kind of shoes do I need? What kind of We got a yoga mat Do I need what kind of water cut? Do I need? I Oh, man, you can go down to Michael’s and see, get this get this water cup. It’s really cool. It’s this that blah, blah, blah. And Dude, it’s just because like, there’s there’s a, there’s amount of people that know about all the products, right, like so they’re so immersed into that that niche that they know everything about it. Those are the people that we target, we ask questions, and then we launched those products to the awareness groups. Right. Is that? Does that make sense that clearly

Adam G. Force 35:25
Oh yeah.

Trey Lewellen 35:25
Okay, so that’s exactly. That’s exactly how we do it.

Adam G. Force 35:28
Yeah, I mean, and so do you find it worthwhile to pay for that kind of market research? Would you say, Hey, if you’re getting surveys from people and asking questions, is it worth paying them for that kind of insight?

Trey Lewellen 35:37
You don’t need to you don’t need to pay him? They don’t they give it free willingly.

Adam G. Force 35:42
They have no problem. I love that. Yeah,

Trey Lewellen 35:45
I mean, absolutely. It’s like going to the gym and being like, Hey, man, we’re where’d you get that cool t shirt? Or where’d you get your, you know, your gloves? Right? They’re like, Oh, dude, I’ll tell you what, hey, what settlements are you taking right now? Where do you get those from? Oh, then I’ll tell you what, I’m on creatine, I got this really good protein. I got these, you know, blah, blah, whatever. Right? Alright, cool. When you get all that how much you paid for it, they’re gonna give you that free will is the same thing as a service. Now, instead of going one on one, we’re going to a market to that niche. Right. And they’re doing a big survey like, Hey, you know, Jim nuts? who love working out? Take a quick survey.

Adam G. Force 36:21
Yeah,

Trey Lewellen 36:21
Right. Tell us tell us what you love. Right now. What’s your favorite product? What’s the one thing that you got to bring to the gym every single day? That’s new.

Adam G. Force 36:29
Yeah, that’s what you want to know for sure.

Trey Lewellen 36:31
I want to know it. And then they tell me and then what you’ll see is things rise to the top and we go after those products.

Adam G. Force 36:36
Okay, yeah, that makes sense. Um, yeah, we’ll wrap up here in a minute. And I just want to tap into just, you know, like, I’m curious, like, all your experience. Now you have so many different funnels different products. We obviously just identified that we need a product that people actually care about, right. So what’s hot, what’s actually you know, going to sell good offer that markets itself at some level, and but outside of that, like, what’s the next most important thing? So you have now you established the product? Like, yes, I know, it sells, you know, people get hung up on like the copy the headlines, the video on the page, or whatever, those types of things, the mechanics of the sales funnel, have you found anything that really stands out to you, as you know, where we put our attention after we have that really good product?

Trey Lewellen 37:23
I’ll tell you where they don’t pay their attention to. And they don’t pay their attention to the most crucial thing, which is the profitability. So a lot of clients have come to us thinking that they have an offer that’s broken. And when we dig into the numbers, we find that it’s actually a profitable phone. So a lot of people are misled. And by math,

Adam G. Force 37:47
that’s interesting,

Trey Lewellen 37:48
though, I think it’s very crucial that people take a deeper step into the numbers of their funnel, knowing exactly what the cost of a product is, and taking that against how much they sold it for. plus shipping costs, picks, breaking it down per product. A lot of people we see a lot of people don’t know how to break it down per product basis, they look at an overall arching goal. And then in their mind, I don’t know how this even happens, but in their mind, they think they can only afford a certain amount for a conversion on Facebook. Like we had a lady come in, she was selling this this this. I’m just gonna go and nail polish. Okay, this nail polish. Yeah, sounds that she bought for $1 selling for $25 great profit margins really great stuff. She was she was getting a conversion for $20. And she’s like, Oh, I’m only making three bucks, right? And after shipping, and after my pics on negative. So in her mind, she was doing this math. But what she didn’t realize was that someone coming in the average buyer was buying 2.5 they’re buying two and a half nail polishes, which was a $75. cart. Right? So when we looked at the Facebook ads, I said, Hey, your Facebook ads are $20 you can afford 40 she’s like I can afford 40. I said absolutely. Look at the numbers. We broke it down, did the whole you know excel sheet dived in on it. She’s like, wow. And then and then and then a scary thing starts to happen. They start to backtrack of how much money they spent, and how much money they made and didn’t make and how much money they would have in their bank if they would have started with us sooner. That’s usually that’s usually what happens. Okay, we had we had that we have another another commerce King member that just posted yesterday is hilarious. He has he has a new continuity program for his t shirt club. Okay, he’s done over $500,000 in the last two months selling t shirts really great stuff in one niche by the way in one niche, and we tweaked out his his continuity, which means people get a T shirt every single month. Okay, so he’s sold $500,000 I think an additional like 8% Is that 2% now it’s at 10%. So for every 100 buyers, he’s getting 10 new continuity members now. So now when he started thinking, it’s like, Whoa, I have sold on what 500,000 I think the average t shirt he sells is like $25. Let’s, let’s look at that real quick divided by 24 says 20,000 times point 10. So he so if he started this right at the day one of selling his shirts, he would right now have 2000 members selling or buying t shirts every single month, right? 25 bucks. So you take 2000 times 25, that’s 52 grand, you’d have coming in every single month. As a fact, that’s a $600,000 a year program that he just bolted on to a system by getting on calls with us and saying, Okay, how do we tweak this out? Right? So you’re pulling your hair now looking back at all the numbers, but what’s great is is he’s still selling so he’s gonna work that up to 1000 members, 2000 members, right building is continuity of getting those numbers now. You know, I said this earlier man is like pure we’re getting started listening to this podcast, you got to think like this, this didn’t happen overnight. Right? This wasn’t something that just you know, walked in the front door, and all sudden, we’re selling products like this right now, I was selling insurance before this. And, and I tell you what I was making, you know, 60 grand a year. So when you hear these numbers, they when I first heard these numbers, they sound out. They sound outlandish, they sound unreasonable, they sound too good to be true. But I think you and I both know that they are true, right? Those numbers are can’t exist, you just got to go out and work for it. Right? hire the right mentors, hire the right coaches, get the right programs, there’s gonna be there’s gonna be bad programs that you buy, there’s gonna be great programs that you buy, and just lean into those great ones, ask for references, ask for referrals, ask for, you know, other places, other coaches, other mentors to go to, and I’m telling you what, like, you’re gonna you’re gonna be successful. So and the biggest thing is keep showing up to these podcasts. I mean, Adams did a great podcast here. So keep listening to this guy. I mean, that’s at the end of the day, what you need to be doing so that way you can go implement this stuff. Because what I think man, is, there’s a lot of podcasts out there that are just a lot of fluff. I’m a guy who loves tactics, right? Like, here’s what you need to go do. Here’s the steps, you need to go do it. Here’s how you do it, go and get it done. Right. So when I’m doing these podcasts, just like with you, I want to give tactical ideas, these guys can have strategies to think go implement laughter listening here, and go make things happen. Otherwise, if I just told my story, and they give me any how tos, well, this, this was just a waste of time. And I got to, you know, show off for a little bit.

Adam G. Force 42:30
I think you made a lot of great points today that should really get people thinking and shift their perspectives a little bit. So I really appreciate that. Yeah, so I think that, you know, we’re wrapping up, I had one more question, but I just slipped that in my mind. What was I gonna ask you about that I was gonna piggyback off something you were saying. I lost it. No big deal. So listen, Trey, how do Who do you work with exactly in your coach? And can you give people a sense of who that is? Do they have to qualify as certain status in their business? And then how do they connect with you? Where do they learn more and all that good stuff?

Trey Lewellen 43:03
Yeah. I mean, if they, I mean, obviously, if they want to, right? We work with both. So basically, we understand that we’re just getting started. And so we look we look for, you know, people who are just getting started, like, hey, I want to know, I want to learn how do I how do I make $1? online? How do I make my my phone? How do I make my phone ring at 3am with a cash register? When someone at 3am purchased and I was sleeping? I don’t how does that happen? I was I didn’t exist, I didn’t understand that. We showed how to do that. And then we also work with people who are doing, you know, multi million dollars a year. You know, we have a client right now that just flew in a couple of weeks ago that did 28 million last year selling, you know, doing, he did a sticker Club, which is awesome. $28 million, selling stickers, pretty, pretty incredible. So you know, we work with all types, because the thing is, is, you know, you want to learn from other business models, right? You might be selling a T shirt, or you might be selling machines, or you might be selling, you know, ratchet sets, whatever. But the thing is, is like if you can learn from other companies, and see what they’re doing inside their businesses and attach just one of those ideas or strategies onto yours, it is going to become a needle mover for your business. And I think that’s what every business owner is always looking for is like what’s going to move the needle in my business and that’s what we help entrepreneurs and business owners do we look for those needle movers in their in their businesses and walk them through that? And that’s that’s pretty much what we do, man.

Adam G. Force 44:26
Love it. And where do we find where can people find you?

Trey Lewellen 44:30
I say what’s the link Brenton? We Got talktotrey still? Yeah, talktotrey.com That’s the easiest one.

Adam G. Force 44:37
Talk to Trey. All right, guys. We’ll have that in the show notes too. Sure. I really appreciate it. One last thing. I’m just curious. You’ve had a lot of mentors over the years probably taken programs and now you worked with Russell and stuff like that.

Trey Lewellen 44:50
Still do, I still do…

Adam G. Force 44:52
A super cool dude. I’ve interviewed Russell twice actually and he’s a lot of fun.

Trey Lewellen 44:58
I’m saying we still have mentors. Like that never stops. That never should stop.

Adam G. Force 45:02
Absolutely. I’m with you on that. Who has been the most inspiring mentors in your life? I’m just curious.

Trey Lewellen 45:09
Oh, gosh, that’s, that’s hard. Jeez, trying to think of where, you know, like I’d almost have to say, you know, goes back there’s a really good friend of mine. We’ve become really great friends over the years. And he’s gonna let he was listened to all the podcasts, he’s gonna love the shout out. But Sean Lynnam is a great, great, great friend of mine. And he was the man who without pay, which is which is incredible, without pay, he came and we buddied up and he’s like, he’s he’s just a walking encyclopedia of like all trainings, which is incredible. Like, you ask him one thing he’s like, Guys, this is what you do. And it’s like, it’s mind blowing at the time of learning, just things like this, you know, that we’re talking about today on a higher level. But I was learning at a much lower level, because I didn’t know these numbers were possible. And so he was the mentor that really took me by the hand and said, Do these are possible, look at this guy, you know, look at this person over here, look at this company, look how they’re doing it. And we can start to do stuff like that. And so he walked me through those stages of steps. And I’ll tell you one thing about mentors. His mentors are really fascinating. But here’s what they can only give you one puzzle piece. I think a lot of people look at mentors for the whole puzzle. And they feel like they failed or the mentor failed them. And one thing I always want to point out is a mentor is usually gonna give you like one good puzzle piece to probably about a four piece piece puzzle, maybe a five piece, and I’ve had probably 15 to 20 mentors now. And each one has given me a piece of the puzzle did did one individual change the dynamic of my life? Probably not. But if you add all of them together, dude, it completely changed my life. Yeah, right. And so they gave like one dude, really good at Facebook ads. He’s like, dude, here’s here’s, here’s all my Facebook, they had no idea about offers. So I knew so much about Facebook ads, but I knew nothing about offers, I had to go find, you know, like Tanner Larson was the offer guy. He was like, Alright, so Tanner knows offers. So if I only learned what Tanner had to give me, he wouldn’t have changed my life. Yeah, but but I knew Facebook ads from another mentor. That combined changed my life. Sure, I think that’s one big thing that, you know, I always want to put out there is, I don’t know that one mentor will change someone’s life. But a variety of mentors will definitely change your life.

Adam G. Force 47:32
Yeah. So you gotta be willing to invest in yourself in the end at the end of the day, right?

Trey Lewellen 47:35
You do, you do start you know, start small, you know, negotiate, that’s always a great thing. And, and just and just keep pushing forward. You know, like books, books are great mentors. podcasts are great are great mentors. You know, as to keep reading, keep listening, keep pressing play, like, like Tony, Tony always talks about, and, dude, you’ll, you know, you’ll become somebody.

Adam G. Force 47:56
Yeah. And I think people misunderstand that, too. They think I have to get a mentor and that they don’t realize, yeah, even reading their books going to their courses. Like that’s their mentorship, right? So you just got to be willing to take those steps and sometimes it will suck and sometimes it won’t. Right. Listen, Trey, I want to be respectful of your time. And I appreciate you just coming in here being full of energy and sharing all these great insights. I love the I love your mindset on just kind of like figuring these things out and taking these risks. So really great to connect with you and just chat. Yeah, absolutely, man.

Trey Lewellen 48:27
Thanks for having us. Appreciate it.

Adam G. Force 48:29
No problem. Take care. Thanks for tuning into the Change Creator podcast. Visit us at Change creator.com forward slash go big to get access to free downloads and other great resources that will drive your business forward.