I hope you enjoy reading this blog post. If you want my team to just do your marketing for you, click here.
I hope you enjoy reading this blog post. If you want my team to just do your marketing for you, click here.
Author: Jeremy Haynes | founder of Megalodon Marketing.
Earnings Disclaimer: You have a .1% probability of hitting million-dollar months according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. As stated by law, we can not and do not make any guarantees about your own ability to get results or earn any money with our ideas, information, programs, or strategies. We don’t know you, and besides, your results in life are up to you. We’re here to help by giving you our greatest strategies to move you forward, faster. However, nothing on this page or any of our websites or emails is a promise or guarantee of future earnings. Any financial numbers referenced here, or on any of our sites or emails, are simply estimates or projections or past results, and should not be considered exact, actual, or as a promise of potential earnings – all numbers are illustrative only.
One of the little known ways that completely destroys your progress when you’re on your path to million-dollar months is something I call narrative violations. And it either gets detected rapidly or a specific narrative that you and your organization are currently convinced is real becomes the story you’re living in – and that story takes you down a terrible dark path that absolutely erodes your income potential.
Look, the odds of you ever hitting 10 mil a year, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, is 0.1%. Even smaller than that for cracking 12 mil a year or anything above that. But this specific lesson has destroyed so many deals that I’ve done that have been all the way up to the big multi-million dollar months. They start to convince themselves of these narratives that take them down terrible paths.
My Inner Circle has members already scaling up to $1M+, and it isn’t for beginners, it’s for those already at $100k+ a month, who want clarity, speed, and proven strategies to scale. If that’s you, let’s talk. Be a part of My Inner Circle.
Now, let me give you a handful of examples and demonstrate what you need to do instead of just participating in these stories that we all spin up for ourselves in order to make sense of things and feel more comfort as the chaos grows when we scale our businesses.
Narrative is very simple to understand. Narrative is the story that we all use. People in your company do this every single day.
You’ll jump onto a team call, you’ll share data, but data doesn’t just have a random place in our lives. Data fits in. It works its way into a specific part of a current storyline that goes on.
Our whole life is made up of listening to stories, watching stories, and living within stories. And most of us do this on a very subconscious level. We don’t ever bring it up to our conscious mental frame. And as a result of that, this can really take advantage of us if we go down the wrong path.
There’s a tremendous book called Vital Lies and Simple Truths. It’s written by a guy named Daniel Goleman, who also wrote Emotional Intelligence, Emotional Intelligence 2.0, Focus, a bunch of other really awesome books.
Vital Lies and Simple Truths, one of the very first things it has you do is open up the book and it has you move the book back and forth a little bit. There’s this little spot that you’re looking at on the page. And when you hold it just right, the spot disappears. It literally vanishes.
From there, the book makes an emphasis – things that are real that you know to be real can literally disappear from our vision. One of our senses, it can elude us. And the book goes on to tell us all the ways that this can occur.
The book’s real premise is to essentially emphasize that pain, whether psychological or physical, can take us away from reality. And we usually do it through vital lies and little truths, like little tiny manipulated things that we tell ourselves.
Piece by piece, we end up building what’s called a narrative, a grand story that we’re living within. And if that narrative, if that story is manipulated and is not reality based, there’s no progress to be made because you’re not functioning in real life. You’re not in the real world when you’ve operated off manipulated fake data.
Let me give you a perfect example of this. Literally earlier this month, a consulting deal that I’m a part of is reviewing their call funnel data. They have a two call close process. One of the managers of the sales team brings up that she thinks there might be some fake leads that are coming into the funnel.
We take it seriously when somebody says that. We immediately look into it. In the two call close process, the first call is handled by the setters and the second call is handled by the closers.
The first call had a big spike in no-show percentage for about two weeks prior to her bringing this up. And as we sit there and we look at the application data, it wasn’t one of those fake lead bot attacks that looked fake. A lot of these leads that were coming in, they looked real. They looked like they were legitimate business owner data filling out these applications.
But there was one clear pattern – every single specific question within the application that was a typed question was a very short one-word answer exclusively and it was pretty much the same word every time. That’s how she was able to catch the pattern.
For the two weeks prior, we had seen a drop in the first call show rate. And so, we’re thinking to ourselves, okay, well, what are we doing wrong? What specifically do we need to tweak? What back-end selling system do we need to implement? What do we need to change in the process? What do we need to change that the setters are doing?
We start making real world decisions that are changing the funnel and the setter process and the business. Then two weeks after that, so going into week three, come to find out, it was manipulated data. It was fake data. It was data that didn’t exist. It wasn’t real. It was false.
When you removed all those fake leads and you looked at what the actual show rate was, it was like 2% off in a favorable direction comparatively to what it was before all the fake leads came in.
A perfect example of the narrative messing us up in that example. It’s a bunch of wasted effort. It didn’t do anything other than just waste a bunch of effort. That specific bot attack technically deviated the business for about a two week duration of time.
Thankfully didn’t lose the business money. They actually had a great record month anyway. But I can’t stress it enough – think about this. That can affect closer morale. That can affect everything. But it was manipulated data.
In that example, we have people who are all smart enough to recognize that we’re operating with manipulated data and can take us back to the real world. Remove the fake data. Look at real data again. Calculate what the real data is and what we need to do based on what the real data says.
I’ll give you another example, but this one very different. This is a couple years ago working on a client account and the client had a very key belief. The belief that drove the behavior of this individual was this specific type of product can only have life for a year.
The client was adamant about the fact that this product that was being sold that was generating literally millions of dollars a month was going to die within a year. There wasn’t a single data point, nothing that would confirm this belief that this individual who ran the business developed.
This was a handed down belief. This was a belief that came not even from running previous businesses that the guy had. This was a belief that came from somebody that the guy admired that he heard say it that he inherited as a belief of his own that started to dramatically manipulate his earning potential.
He goes into running a business that generates anywhere from like two to almost 3 mil a month, give or take the month, just cranking revenue. This thing was a money printer, dude. This was an awesome business.
This guy’s belief and a lack of data validating it started to drive his behavior the closer and closer we got to one year of this product having life. The guy came out with a new product. The new product flopped extremely hard. It also took the attention of the key players that were driving the revenue in the main product off of the main product into the new product.
The new product failed. The main product started to make less money. Didn’t start to lose money, just started to make a lot less money because where attention goes, results flow.
The client was again still sold on this belief that that original course was going to die after a year. And now a little bit more than a year passed.
Let’s just look at this for what it is real quick before we continue in the story. That client’s belief started the process of nuking the revenue. That is what started to lower the revenue of the main product. Not the fact a year had passed. Not the fact people were buying less of it. Not anything other than the client’s behavior of driving the people in the business to take their attention off of it to start lowering the revenue of that specific product.
The subconscious when it has a key thing that it’s attempting to prove to be true, even in examples like that, that is how it proves it to be true. We manipulate behavior to prove ourselves right, to view the world the way that we’re attempting to view it. This phenomenon is well-documented in business psychology research.
The client launches a third product. Again, attention gets diverted away from the main product, put onto the third product. The third product doesn’t do terrible, but now the overall company revenue is below where it was with just a single product when all our attention was on the single product.
Then the client goes and creates 50 new low ticket products. And again, revenue goes down. And at this point, key players start to flake off one by one by one by one.
As an agency owner, half my job is results. The other half is narrative management. It is me managing the story and the view and the perspective of everybody within the organization that contributes to the storyline that we collectively participate in to stay on track with highly beneficial revenue-driven expansion-oriented stories.
As soon as we get into a place where the story and the narrative starts to lower our morale, where it starts to lower our potential, and there will be things along the path, just like any great story, that are obstacles, that are barriers, that are essentially just revenue preventative walls. There’s all these little nuances in a story. Every great story has it.
We will come across things that will make us simply slow down or that will force us to reassess. But here’s the key – I’ve always used this view from Ray Dalio’s principles visual where he’s talking about goal setting and he says look, we start to gain momentum and then somewhere along the path we deal with a problem.
The goal when we deal with a problem – reassess, readjust and just start the process of being able to successfully take action again and grow. And then again, inevitably we deal with another problem situation and we repeat that cycle. And obviously, as you can see, we continue to go up and to the right throughout that cycle timeline.
The key to avoid with these narrative violations is where it looks more like this. You’re growing, you have a problem, you’re growing, you have another problem, and you just go a completely different direction and everything starts to get messed up.
The story violations that I want you to really pay attention to are like these little tiny things along the way. And they show up in all different shapes and sizes.
Certain people will start to develop things like “my current product doesn’t have the ability to grow anymore, like I’ve hit a ceiling.” That one is one of the most common ones I’ve seen. And generally this happens after they’ve attempted like two things, maybe three things to try to fix it.
A lot of this that creates the storyline of our conclusions, a lot of it is handed down data. You’ll hear things where your advertiser might say like, “Oh yeah, like I’ve tried to relaunch the campaign. I’ve tried to relaunch it with totally different creatives. I’ve tried like different audiences.”
If you didn’t watch one of my most recent videos where I’ve talked about the algorithm updates, there’s been two significant algorithm updates. And you’d be impressed with the amount of people that join into one of my programs where I get exposure to people one-on-one.
I talk to people that are spending a lot of money on paid ads or just starting. And I look when they say things like that, I’m like, “All right, pull up the ads manager and show me.” And when you literally look, it’s like they had like five different creative angles that they were testing.
You look at the account structure and it’s terrible. It looks like none of the best practices that should be there. They’re just terrible things that would obviously increase the odds the account loses money and doesn’t perform well. They disrespect the machine learning best practices. They don’t follow any of the simply put things that are probable to get the account to work better.
And then they tell the business owner, they’re like, “Oh, dude, I tried a bunch of different messaging.” And again, the business owner is thinking like, “What? Oh, you tested like a couple hundred different angles.”
And then again, with the audience example – “oh, I tested a bunch of different audiences.” You go look at it and they spent like a couple hundred bucks on a lookalike audience versus an interest stack. And they’re doing a bunch of stuff that’s super non-compliant and that has terrible messaging best practices.
Simply put, they have no idea what they’re doing, but they want to feel like they hired competent people. And so they make the conclusion to themselves, “well, I’m listening to my advertiser.” Obviously, you’d want to believe that your advertiser is good. That way, you’re not thinking to yourself all the terrible psychological pain things.
Remember that vital lies and simple truths principle. The whole point of the book is we’re trying to manipulate ourselves away from psychological pain. That’s an example of psychological pain. These cognitive biases in business decision-making are extensively studied and documented.
Imagine that. Having to actively admit that the person that you’ve hired is a terrible hire.
That’s obviously going to mess you up mentally and make you think, I wasted all this money. I wasted all this ad spend. I had somebody that sucked. It’s going to traumatize you in the future relationships that you choose to either pursue or not pursue when you hire another advertiser.
Instead, you’d rather just say, “Oh, no. My advertiser told me we tested a bunch of hooks. We tested a bunch of different messaging. We tested a bunch of different audiences.” And you don’t even go in there and audit it yourself because you don’t know what you’re doing. You don’t even know how to go in there and audit it because you never taken the time to actually learn this kind of stuff.
It’s like you’ll be conclusive about that and you’ll say, “Oh, my product.” That’s what you’ll then conclude to next. You’ll be like, “Oh, this product’s dead. This product doesn’t have life.”
And it’s like, dude, in reality, there are infinitely better, faster, more short-term probable to work solutions if you just had updated data. If you just had the right data to use, if you just had the right people to execute it on your behalf.
Instead, you make a conclusion and you kill a product and you just try to go and switch offers. And think about what that’s done. Think about how many examples either yourself, you’ve lived through this, and think about how many times you’ve heard it in others.
“Oh, I pivoted offers and I nuked my revenue straight into the ground.”
I want to be fair and say there’s plenty of people that I also know and have literally helped do this that have made offer transitions and made more money as a result on the other side of an offer transition. So, I’m not trying to demonize offer transitions.
What I’m attempting to make you self-aware of is I’m demonizing the fact that in a very inconclusive way of making the deterministic conclusion, “oh, my product’s dead.”
That’s what I’m trying to demonize. That’s a super dumb way to make decisions and make the wrong narratives real and start living in a story that’s on a different timeline than reality and you start optimizing all these decisions in a non-reality based environment and you’re hurting yourself as a result of doing that again.
So that happens a lot. Product based, “oh my product’s dead” type decisions. It’s the same thing with all the little ad stuff as well. Like “I’ve tested a bunch of audiences. Oh, I’ve tested a bunch of creatives. Oh, we’ve spent money on Google AdWords. That didn’t work. Didn’t work for us.”
And it’s like, well, yeah, when you hire terrible people and you don’t do anything and you make these kinds of conclusions. It’s like, of course, things aren’t probable to work.
It’s like the people who are like, “Oh, dude, I hired a bunch of agencies. That never works.” It’s like, “Yeah, right, dude. You hired a bunch of people that just came out of a course program and you were their first deal.” Of course, they had no idea what they were doing.
Those little tiny things. It’s like when you’re a kid and you had Brussels sprouts for the first time and then you didn’t drink any water the rest of the day and you ended up having a headache and you’re like, “Oh, Brussels sprouts give me a headache.”
Be super careful and mindful of the conclusions that you make because they determine whether you’re operating in reality or whether you’re operating in a false world. And when you operate in a false world, you’re not making progress in the real world.
That’s the whole moral of the story. You can hurt yourself by not being hyper aware of the story that’s happening in the business. And sometimes you’re so deep in the story, this messed up narrative that to shatter the whole thing makes you feel like you wasted months or years and so you just bury your head further in the sand.
Those are the ones that are sad to see, man. They’re like eight months, multiple years into just lying to themselves about some stuff, having people have no clue what they’re doing until it gets bad enough.
The craziest part is this happens in the businesses that are bigger compared to just the ones that are smaller. Of course, this happens to the ones that are smaller because they’re trying to figure out what the real world is. They’re trying to figure out how to get traction in real life.
Comparatively, the ones that make a ton of money, well, they start hiring people that they want to have confidence are the right hires. And nobody trains on this kind of stuff.
Therefore, when you don’t have somebody who comes in from the outside and just looks at the current story and just says, “Wait a minute. What are you guys talking about? It makes no sense. Here’s the reality.”
Then again, all you’re left with is “I’ve hired a bunch of people that I’m confident can make the right decisions.” They try to make the right decisions to be fair, but they’re not intentionally trying to hurt you.
Without the management specifically being trained on this thesis and looking for it and trying to hold people accountable to basing themselves in reality, you end up just taking yourself into such a bad place where you can lose so much money and momentum as you’re on your upswings.
The key is to always question the narrative. When data doesn’t make sense, dig deeper. When someone tells you they’ve “tested everything,” actually look at what they tested. When you feel like your product is dead, examine whether that’s actually true or if it’s just a story you’re telling yourself to avoid dealing with harder truths.
Reality-based decision making means:
Getting actual data, not handed-down beliefs from people you admire
Looking at the specifics of what was actually tested, not just taking someone’s word for it
Recognizing when psychological pain is driving you to create false narratives
Having outside perspectives that can spot when you’re living in a story instead of reality
Being willing to admit when you’ve made bad hires or bad decisions instead of creating elaborate stories to avoid that pain
Most business owners and marketers waste years trying to figure out what actually works. In my Master Internet Marketing program, I compress that learning curve into 7 weeks, covering everything from copywriting to Google Ads to funnel mastery. If you’re liquid $5k and serious about scaling your skills, apply at Master Internet Marketing.
The businesses that scale to those million-dollar months and beyond are the ones that stay grounded in reality. They don’t let false narratives drive their decision making. They question everything, especially when things aren’t going according to plan.
Your story needs to be based on real data, real testing, and real results. Not on inherited beliefs, superficial testing, or psychological comfort.
When you catch yourself saying things like “my product is dead” or “we’ve tested everything” or “that channel doesn’t work for us,” stop and ask yourself – is this actually true, or is this just a story I’m telling myself to avoid dealing with something harder?
Because here’s the thing – when you operate in a false world, you’re not making progress in the real world. And progress in the real world is what gets you to those million-dollar months.
Stay grounded in reality. Question the narrative. And don’t let false stories destroy your income potential.
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Jeremy Haynes is the founder of Megalodon Marketing. He is considered one of the top digital marketers and has the results to back it up. Jeremy has consistently demonstrated his expertise whether it be through his content advertising “propaganda” strategies that are originated by him, as well as his funnel and direct response marketing strategies. He’s trusted by the biggest names in the industries his agency works in and by over 4,000+ paid students that learn how to become better digital marketers and agency owners through his education products.
Jeremy Haynes is the founder of Megalodon Marketing. He is considered one of the top digital marketers and has the results to back it up. Jeremy has consistently demonstrated his expertise whether it be through his content advertising “propaganda” strategies that are originated by him, as well as his funnel and direct response marketing strategies. He’s trusted by the biggest names in the industries his agency works in and by over 4,000+ paid students that learn how to become better digital marketers and agency owners through his education products.
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