MKJ (00:00.817)
Hey, hey, CEO, Mischief Makers. Welcome back to the conversation with myself, MKJ, in case you don’t know who I am, if you’re the first time here, welcome, and my incredible guest, Josh Elitch. Josh, you ready to dive into impact and innovation? I think you

Josh Elledge – UpMyInfluence (00:16.738)
I love it, let’s do

MKJ (00:19.113)
All right. So if you haven’t listened to the first episode when we talked about mindset shifts and what Josh is doing, please go back and listen to that when you get a chance, because it will set you up for what we’re going to talk to next. So Josh, the last conversation we had, were you you went into some details about what your next step is going to be with up my influence and how you are loving impacting the people that you work with. But you want to be able to impact more people than you know. Personally, you can’t do that just by yourself.

Josh Elledge – UpMyInfluence (00:47.746)
No, no, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, even in, I’m sorry, go ahead. Yeah, yeah, please.

MKJ (00:47.767)
So take me through that process. Hang on a second. So take me through that process of how, so first off, identify for me what your business is. Do you consider yourself just in terms of a, so people can kind of start with a starting point that they might understand. Are you an agency? Are you a consultancy? What is that basic premise to start with?

Josh Elledge – UpMyInfluence (01:14.094)
Sure, so for the B2B world and usually you’re six and seven and some eight figure businesses, if they’re agencies, B2B service providers, consultants and coaches, again, as long as they’ve got some professional reputation, they have to be account -based sales and marketing. And also they have to be willing, and this is the most important thing, we don’t work

more bro -y oriented marketing and sales. It’s just, if you’re like a one call close kind of shop and that’s all of your scripts and stuff are designed like that, we’re probably not gonna be a real good fit for you. Now, if on the other hand, you believe in the relationships and that’s important to you, like you’re just not trying to work people through a sales script, but you’re willing to get to know one another before you end up doing business together,

this could be quite a perfect match, quite frankly. So what I do is I serve as that fractional virtual chief revenue officer. And my job is to take a look at your sales. And in most cases, the people that we work with usually have very good offers. Like they’re very good at what they do. The value is typically bigger, right? So at a minimum,

It would be a $10 ,000 ALV, but usually it’s more, you know, in the 20 to $100 ,000 range in terms of, again, average lifetime value of that client or first year value. But we have clients that sell seven figure engagements. So when you’re talking about your potential customer like that, being a Broie salesperson is going to be very challenging today. LeadGen is going to be exceptionally

challenging today. So we’ve come up with a platform, we’ve done this close to 250 times now. We’ve worked with close to 250 different clients. And so my role is to just simply get you more at bats. Like if your offer is good, your conversion is good, generally your customers stick around for a little bit of time, right? Well, then the only other variable you need to fix is you just need more opportunities.

Josh Elledge – UpMyInfluence (03:34.702)
So in that case, that’s where we zero in all of our attention. You need higher quality people and you need to spend time getting know one another. So we create a system where we facilitate not high volume, but generally about two very high quality introductions consistently week after week after week after week with your dream ideal.

persona, your ICP, your customer avatar, right? They have to fit demographically and psychographically. And what our clients typically find are conversion rates around 15 to 25%. Now, so again, what this means is rather than thinking about this is someone who’s in need and I have to compete with them versus all of these other vendors that they’re shopping, it’s not like that. Instead,

MKJ, here’s the goal is you want to make a relationship with someone and have them come to this conversion on the first call. good, this is really important. So please don’t mistake what I’m saying here. You want the other person that you’re meeting with to come to this realization. good, now I have a friend who does what you do. If you can get there in the relationship, business is an inevitability.

Because what I know about high value business leaders is they will move heaven and earth to try to do business with their friends. I do it. I constantly look for excuses to do business with my friends. And so if we can get that kind of caliber and quality of person on your schedule week after week after week with no lead gen, no paid ads, none of that stuff is necessary. What do you pay with? A little bit more time on the front end, a little bit more generosity.

That’s your ticket. So I’m gonna now from this point forward, MKJ, I’m gonna be referring to the book, The Go Giver by Bob Berg quite a bit, who has written what we consider to be part of our holy texts. For what we do around here over and up my influence.

MKJ (05:43.021)
my goodness. All right. So that my friends is a perfect example of innovation. So if you know what a chief revenue officer is, if you know what a fractional revenue officer is, if you understand the basic dynamics of that person in that role, what you just heard Josh talk about is nothing like anyone you’ve ever talked to. So even though I started him off with what’s the typical definition that someone can start with and put Josh in a

He broke that box apart because that’s innovation. So no one, no one on the planet competes with Josh in what he does.

Josh Elledge – UpMyInfluence (06:23.178)
no! No!

MKJ (06:24.159)
No one, there is no competition. There is no other chief revenue officer or fractional revenue officer that is going to be compared to him because that’s not what he does. He creates relationships. He helps move business forward because he knows. So now we get into the impact part. You know exactly who you are impacting. You know exactly who you love to work with. And that probably took quite a bit of trial and error to get to, I can imagine.

Josh Elledge – UpMyInfluence (06:48.398)
It did. It did. And I’ll be very frank with you in 2000 conversations of my own with potential customers, you which has led to, you know, about the 250 clients over the years. And those are just the VIP clients. I’m not including all the other clients that we used to work with. Here’s one thing in very, very intimately what I hear frequently. And we generally work with folks in their 30s, 40s on up. Again,

very good at what they do, they’re respected, usually in their space. I hear this refrain or this sentiment, you know, at this stage in my life, I didn’t think that I was gonna have to be competing for business. I didn’t think I was gonna have ups and downs. At this stage in my life, I thought that that would be resolved by now. I hear that a lot. And what I want you to know is if you identify with that sentiment,

You’re not alone. Generally, we have those feelings and we attribute that somehow to our worth or somehow we think that it’s a reflection of how good our offer is. It’s usually not. It’s because we talked about, you know, if your offer is you create results for your clients, if your conversion is generally okay, there’s only one other variable you need.

You just simply need to be building more relationships consistently. And if you’ll do that, so if instead of talking with two a month, you talk with 10 a month, in theory, you should have five times the number of new clients. But again, the frustration is, okay, well, if I want more people, that means I need to be out there doing TikTok dances, or I need to be slamming people’s DMs. No, you don’t, because that’s not how those higher caliber people do that.

very tactically, you’re going to have to give them something that they do want, a leader caliber invitation. It’s not to sit in on your webinar. I’m sorry. It’s not that that doesn’t work. It just doesn’t work as well as it once used to. I think you should still have webinars, but you should acknowledge that that’s probably gonna be somewhere else in the user journey. So an invitation to that might come at stage three or four,

Josh Elledge – UpMyInfluence (09:13.226)
Step one, step one is if you’re initiating the invitation with noble intent, then you’re just gonna have to be very honest on what they want. And white paper may not be it, webinar may not be it, coffee just to chat, that’s gonna be harder too. Again, I’m not saying that this stuff doesn’t work, it just doesn’t work as well as it once did because it’s not your fault, marketers have ruined everything.

Marketers, lazy marketers, flock to every good idea and bastardize it until it’s no good for good people like you and I. So it’s not your fault. So where do we have solace? We have solace in generosity. Lazy marketers are never going to spend more time with fewer people. That’s just anathema to how the lazy marketer chooses to operate. They are more about spray and pray.

the intentional account -based folks that we work with, these go -givers, these folks that are leading in generosity, they earn the time together and they get consistency and predictability. If every single month you get eight to 10 new high -level introductions, probably you’re gonna end up doing business with one or two of those people directly, plus secondary benefits of collaborations and introductions and other things that leaders that are friends do

Mary Catherine, know you and I are doing all kinds of fun things together that are going to help each of us. And most leaders have a lot of things going on. So it’s audacious of us to look at the world and assume everyone wants to buy our product. That’s not your job. Your job is to show up in service and then just see how you can provide the highest value. It might be they engage on your offer. It could be something even better. It could be something different or

you know, again, what I find is, you know, when you start networking with consistency, you get into these neighborhoods and most of us know lots of people just like ourselves. So I might not be your client, but I probably know someone who’s gonna be your client. So if we have the opportunity to get to know each other, we’ll get there. So we could talk a little bit more tactically about that generosity a little bit later.

MKJ (11:29.881)
Yes, absolutely. so if someone’s sitting out and they’re like, my gosh, this resonates so much. I wish I could do this. can’t, can’t, I’m so burnt out of this lead generation hamster wheel and I don’t know when it’s going to stop. What advice would you give them to innovate? So you’ve innovated your space so that you don’t have to go out and do lead. And Josh, it is so true marketers. I am so sad with what happened with chat bots, the way they went, the way they

Josh Elledge – UpMyInfluence (11:40.162)
Yeah. yeah.

Josh Elledge – UpMyInfluence (11:52.205)
no.

Josh Elledge – UpMyInfluence (11:59.938)
I know!

MKJ (12:00.207)
It was opposite of what I was doing. I was doing conversational design. I was helping people choose your own adventure from the customer’s perspective, not mine.

Josh Elledge – UpMyInfluence (12:07.405)
Yes.

MKJ (12:10.565)
and it just got completely ruined. was so sad to see. And clients came expecting that ruined piece, right? Just get me to a sale. I had a client who did, in 99 days, I got her a million dollars in her $99 course product. And she had a 30 % refund rate. I felt sick to my stomach.

I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to have a 30%. That’s not what business is about. That’s people feeling bad about the decision they made because they felt coerced into it. I don’t like that. So if someone’s sitting out there going, how do I innovate my space? You mentioned GoGivers, so that’s a great place to start. What other piece of advice would you give them?

Josh Elledge – UpMyInfluence (12:44.685)
Yes.

Josh Elledge – UpMyInfluence (12:55.694)
Yeah, if you’re talking, if you’re talking strictly about how can I innovate, I think one thing that we can do is stop pretending like you have all the ideas or you’re supposed to have all of the ideas. I don’t. I’m not smarter than the market. All I simply do is because of the volume of conversations I have with my ideal partners and clients, they tell me what they want and need. I have the ability to test a lot of messaging.

And so what I share today is not based on what AI told me to say or what Josh’s brilliant mind told me to say. I’ve just been doing this a lot. So we’ve been 100 % inbound for over four and a half years. I’ve had more than 2000 conversations in that time with my dream ideal clients, partners, et cetera. And so because of that, I’m just better at what I do

only because I just keep on showing up. It’s, you I started playing the bass guitar about a year ago. And when I started it, I felt like I had kid fingers, like I can’t do anything on this. And so I read a book and it was just so brilliant because it said, listen, when you do the activity, it doesn’t matter if you think you’re getting it or not. You are, your brain is getting it. You are always, this is activity knowledge. Do the thing, have the power.

but you will not have the power unless you do the thing. So in the case of innovating, the more conversations you have with people and you say, listen, this is what I’ve done in the past. But if, let me ask you, like if I were to give you the magic wand and I were to say, well, listen, Josh, this is what you’re good at. But you know, what I really need more than anything is X. Like if I can get enough people to tell me what they want.

either

Josh Elledge – UpMyInfluence (15:17.208)
they’re not gonna be good customers. it’s fine that you move on to people who recognize that, know, it’s sometimes like I hire a lot of people and I like to pay them well for the value that they bring. So, but yeah, validation through conversations will help you innovate in ways that you’ll never be able to come up with on your own. Just talking with real people. People have a credit card in their pocket, but don’t worry about trying to sell them on the first call. Instead, ask them what they want and need and then see if you can help them with

I like, you today our product is nothing like what it was at the beginning. It’s way more, it’s way higher ticket today, quite frankly, because that’s what our market wanted. And yeah, so yeah, it’s quite a relief when we give ourselves permission, MKJ, to not have to be the genius.