How to Buy Yourself $1M In Social Proof (For Beginners)

I'm about to show you how to buy yourself a million dollars worth of social proof using nothing but your time. So, at my stage in my career, I have a fair amount of social proof. I have scaled two agencies to over $160,000 a month in combined revenue. I also have the number one community on school. I've spoken on stage with Alex Ramoszi and Sam Ovens as well as some other recognized business people. And I was even mentioned recently on the Diary of a CEO podcast, which is like the biggest thing ever. I wasn't mentioned by name, but they were talking about me. — The winner of the Blast School Games, he got to like 300 and something thousand a month. He started 16 months ago making videos about AI. And I mentioned this to you because I want you to know that all of this has helped me drive pretty ridiculous monetary outcomes over the course of the last couple of months. I'm now at the point where I'm making money simply by making money, which is absurd. A few years ago, I had none of that. I started as a totally broke ass entrepreneur like most of you that are watching. And uh I don't talk about it often, but there was a point where I was living in a converted garage eating mostly rice and beans cuz I felt like I couldn't afford the cost of meat in my grocery bill. Uh that's been a long time since. Um, anyway, since then I've bootstrapped everything and in this video I'm going to show you guys how you can apply very similar principles to me in order to achieve similar things. So, by the end of this video, even if you're 18 years old and you have zero dollars in the bank account, zero experience, you will very quickly be able to get to a point you can legitimately claim some pretty cool things. Okay, let's get into it. So, social proof, it is literally at the core of everything in client acquisition. If you've ever worked a sales job before, you know that customers are very unlikely to want to work with you unless you can demonstrate that you know what you are talking about and have done the thing before they buy. Uh now I do this in services but this is true in any industry whether it is e-commerce or info products or services or SAS or whatever. Uh the problem that most people have especially beginners is you know if you don't have any social proof it's hard to get clients and then if you can't really build social proof. So you're stuck in this really annoying catch 22 and I'm going to help you get out of it. Most people unfortunately spend years trying to build their credibility the fair way. They will build pitch after pitch trying to get people with no social proof and as a result they get nowhere. I want to be super clear here. The economy does not reward playing fair, as nice as it would be if it did. The economy is a game that you were signed up to without your knowledge and without your consent. So, instead, I want to show you guys some unfair ways to get social proof. And you know, some of you guys probably aren't going to like what I'm going to say, but I'm going to say them anyway. First, I'm going to show you the monetary association claim principle, which is where simple shifts in wording can completely change how people perceive your experience. Second, I will show you how to associate with big companies and teams using a piece of strategic positioning that can let you claim associations with major corporations, even if you don't really have any. And third, I'm going to show you what I call the overflow contractor approach, which is a very aggressive kind of hacky tactic that lets you borrow other people's social proof and as a result, buy a bunch of your own. So, the first way to instantly sound more credible is

to tie your claims to monetary outcomes, whatever the case is. Now, this assumes that you do have some claim to make. If you guys have no claims to make, I'll show you how to solve that in the next step, but for now, monetary association. So, most people position their past work really, really poorly. Just look at literally any resume and you'll see stuff like I built a marketing system for XYZ marketing agency during my summer job. Well, it's like, yeah, obviously, but what does any of that mean? What is the marketing system? Who the hell is XYZ marketing agency? Why do I care? And what the hell does the fact that it's a summer job have to do with anything? Right? I have basically zero context on any of the important stuff that I actually care about as a business owner. And so, I can't discern the magnitude of achievements when they're pitched like this. Also, to be honest, as a customer, I don't care that you built a system. That's a pretty low bar. What I care about is what did the system do for the company and can you do the same thing for me? So instead of saying I built a marketing system for XYZ marketing agency over my summer break, uh if you use monetary association, it'll have you look at the outcomes that you generated. First, what did that marketing system actually do? And second, why is the XYZ marketing agency relevant? Now, let's say your marketing system actually did something useful, which I know isn't true for all of you. Let's say it actually increased conversion rates on the front-end offer by 14% and that led to $15,000 in two weeks. Instead of saying, "Hey, I built a marketing system for XYZ marketing agency," just give them the outcome that you delivered cuz that's all they care about anyway. Frontload it. Your accomplishment is not that you built a marketing system for XYZ Marketing Agency. It is you generated $15,000 in 2 weeks through a marketing system. When you use dollar signs, you are now translating the accomplishment into the universal language that all business owners speak. You know, if a business owner is speaking Hindi to you and you are speaking English back to them, some things are probably going to be lost in translation. So, the best thing you can do is just speak the exact same language and that is what this does. We all operate off of currency at the end of the day. So, it is the exact same work but leads to completely different positioning and that's where it's strong. Also, a quick hack, always frontload your money. Uh customers and clients care about money. They do not care about the implementation details or who you did it for unless the person that was really big or notable, which I'll touch on soon. But what I mean by that is if you guys have generated an outcome, don't just say I built a system for a company that delivered an outcome. Say I delivered an outcome for a company using a system I built. Shift it around a little bit. Anyway, here are some more examples of this at varying degrees of credibility. Do with it what you will. Let's say it didn't even generate anything. You just built a system for the agency uh and it's a mid-size agency. They do maybe $1 million a year. Instead of what I said before, what you can do is you could say something along the lines of, "Hey, I built a marketing system for a sevenf figureure agency. " Okay, so now let's say not only did you not generate anything with the system, but let's also say the agency that you're working with kind of sucks and they don't really have very much social proof. Also, the marketing system you built wasn't even yours. You just took it from my channel. And that's okay. I highly encourage you guys to do that. Well, you could still make this work. You could say, "Hey, I built the same marketing system that Nick Sarif uses to make $50,000 a month for a local marketing agency here in Dallas. " Okay. Hey, now why this works is simple because regardless of how we pitched it, it associates you with money without claiming that you personally generated it. And it positions you as part of a successful outcome. And all of these things are technically truthful assuming you actually did contribute anything at all to that end result. Buyers want to work with people who have been around money. That's just how this works. Uh they assume that if other businesses have treated you with revenue impacting projects and allowed you to do this, then you're probably at least somewhat competent. You it is a form of pre-selection. It removes the biggest objection that buyers have, which tends to be, has this person actually done the thing before. So anyway, here's how you can actually implement this immediately. First, audit your past work. Ask yourself, are there any projects where the client made or saved money? Uh, no matter how small the contribution was. Then write it all out in a spreadsheet. After that, reframe your contributions to focus on the total business impact, not just your little piece. If you don't have a total business impact, that's okay. Just look at the company and see, is there a monetary claim worth associating with? If you don't have that, then look to see if similar people have implemented similar systems for monetary outcomes before and then just use that like the NYX system. And the advanced version of this is once you have multiple projects, you can also start saying stuff like, I've worked with companies that have collectively generated over X dollars in new revenue. Now you're associated with serious money. If you guys notice, that's exactly what I did at the beginning of

the video. Okay, point number two is the team association principle, and it works even if you guys have absolutely no experience whatsoever in the thing that you are providing. Okay, so from a bird's eye view, you are 18 and broke hypothetically and you have no social proof. But what you do have is you have some knowledge. You have watched my videos or you've watched somebody else's videos in business and you now know how to build some sort of thing, whatever the heck it is. So, how do you go from that to saying, "Hey, I built systems for members of Microsoft. " Easy. What you do is you make a list of people that work at a big company. Then you reach out to them and then you offer them something valuable for free or for super cheap. Many big companies have tens of thousands of employees. And when you tend to work with a big company, you tend to let people know because it's quite the accomplishment. So you will find information about who works for these companies literally all over the internet. Then when somebody says yes, you do the thing and you give them the value and then after that point you can legitimately say I have worked with members of the Microsoft team. I have helped deliver value for people that work at Microsoft. People do it all the time. It's not the same as saying I worked with Microsoft obviously but if you're smart about this you can truthfully claim that you have worked with members of Microsoft's team and that still gives you some positive association. The reason why it works is it transfers some of the credibility of this big successful company and social proof over to yourself despite the fact that you don't really have it. So, practically, how do you actually go about this? Uh, quick little plan here. Start by researching some big target companies that are wellknown in your target niche. This might be Microsoft, Google, Amazon, these big fang style businesses. Or if you work in a smaller, let's say, fintech niche, it could be something else. Second, I want you to look for individual employees. I do not executives because executives tend to get pitched constantly and so their uh, I guess amenability to the sort of offer will be a lot lower. And third, uh, offer to do something for them for free. Now, you can do it for free or you could ask for some money. It's all the same, but the idea is for it to be a total no-brainer relative to the value that you're providing. So, I recommend you offer at least $500 in value or more. Also, some thoughts. Uh, you can build them, I don't know, a free website in Card. co or Web Flow or Lovable or something. Uh, maybe you find that they like dog walking and I don't know, you build them a dog walking website and then you send it over to them. You could scrape their last 10 LinkedIn posts and then write 10 more in their tone of voice. Uh, give it to them for free. You know, if you have some asset, maybe you're selling a physical product or something like that for e-commerce, you could actually offer to send it to them for free without asking for anything in return. Literally, whatever it is, just make it very easy for them to say yes to you. Since what you're doing right now is you are trading your time for your money. Uh you don't need to make very large outcomes at this stage. Then here's how you scale this approach. Once you worked with one or two people across different companies, once you've tried this for, let's say, three or four weeks, when you reach out to the next person, you can now say something along the lines of, "Hey, I've consulted with or delivered for or built X thing for or given etc to people that have worked at Microsoft or Google or insert really big company here. " Now, there are obviously rules here. Uh, you have to use members of or people who work at or some sort of disqualifier to make it clear that you have not actually worked with a company proper. And you do have to focus on specific areas, not make some sort of a companywide claim. Otherwise, that would be total But it does turn you from, hey, I'm some dumb broke kid who has zero experience delivering anything of value into, hey, I've delivered actual value for people that work at major organizations like Google, Microsoft, and Facebook. And if they thought that I was okay, why don't you? The beautiful thing about this method is you get to leverage people that are at a pretty low level in a company and then still use the name of the company, right? That is leverage. You also obviously get to make connections with people in the corporate world which is just good to have frankly and you start with value and that sort of legitimate social proof tends to compound over

time. All right, finally here is the most aggressive tactic. It is one that personally got me from having very little social proof in a new industry that I was just looking to penetrate which is videography to being able to legitimately say members of my team have worked with some very massive companies in literally just a few weeks. So when I started my videography company called Video Kings, I had zero social proof. I'd actually barely knew how to hold a camera at the time. Uh but I was broke and I was very desperate. So, I started getting creative. Uh, first I found a lead source that was scalable, but one that I couldn't really afford at the time. This is called Bark. And at the time, it was a lead aggregator service that would basically run ads on your behalf, and then you could just buy those leads. I then bought a few of those leads. I spent more or less my last few hundred on those things. And at that point, I could now legitimately say that I had leads, which is what I wanted. From there, I created a big list of all the other videography agencies in my area with Google Maps. Then, all I did was I just went top to bottom, and I cold called every single one of them. They're around 200 at the end of the day. It took me maybe 3 days and I gave them all almost exactly the same pitch. It was, "Hey, I run a similar videography agency to you. Uh, I have some leads right now that I can't fulfill and I don't really know what the hell to do with them. Would you like me to give you some of these leads? I'd be happy to do so for a very small fee. I can give you more information if you need. Uh, just let me know. We could set up some sort of lead sharing arrangement for leads that I can't fulfill, but you can, cuz I don't want to waste them. " Now, if you approach any business with something akin to, "Hey, do you want free money? " Obviously, most of them are going to say yes. So, I set up meetings at this coffee shop just a block from my house. I arrived 5 minutes early with papers that I was shuffling and a nice shirt on. Basically, I tried to be the picture of success. And then during the meeting, I always just said something like, "Are you open to a relationship where when I get some leads I can't fulfill internally, I pass them off to you and you take a percentage. " They would say yes since obviously, why wouldn't you? And then I followed up with a killer line. I don't like doing corporate videography specifically. So, these are leads that I would be sending to you if I get one. can I show them examples of your videos and then mention that I have members of our team that can do this? Most people said yes immediately. Uh I had them sign a little agreement and that was it. So I had 15 or 20 different agencies I was working with at a certain point in time. A lot of them had very impressive client rosters. And then the next time I had a sales call because I had them agree to this. I could legitimately say, "Hey, I know you want a corporate shoot. I have a member of my team that's actually worked with Gillette. Here's how the shoots normally go. Would you be interested? " or maybe, hey, members of our team have delivered videos for Fortune 500 companies. Now, at the time, this was massive social proof. It was super powerful as a closing mechanism. Obviously, you did have to send over leads to the people for them to continue wanting to work with you, and that was something that I had to get through. But in my situation, the referral percentage that I was charging, which is about 15% if I remember correctly, uh, actually evened out the cost of the leads that I was acquiring on Park. So, all I had to do in order to be able to have this crazy social proof on my website and in all of my sales materials and all that stuff was I just spent my time on calls. I traded time for that social proof. This is one of my very first businesses. And we actually scaled to just under $10,000 a month before COVID shut down the videography industry. And at the time, it worked really well. I'm sure if they hadn't shut us down, we would have been able to continue scaling and then actually had our own really cool, really killer social proof. All right, so no level of fancy strategy will save you unless you actually dive into the arena and start getting your feet wet. I think anybody here that wants to land their first customer, that would be my recommendation. Aside from that, if you

guys want to scale your business, then definitely reach out to my team, Leftclick. We've worked with everything from SMBs to multi-billion dollar portfolio companies. You see what I did there? Uh anyway, hopefully this video was enjoyable and helpful. Have a lovely rest of the day and I'll catch you all in the next one. Bye.