The Complete Guide to the Deck Sales Letter DSL Strategy That Gets Higher Consumption Than VSLs

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.

We’ve had someone try to leak and claim one of our original funnel strategies as his own.

What a shame.

Benefit to you reading this content today? You’re going to learn in its entirety my DSL, my Deck Sales Letter funnel strategy. It is an incredible strategy.

I’ll go through all the details of how it works, why it works, why we initially started testing it, just the background on the whole thing.

I do want to give a huge shout out by the way to my co-creator of this specific strategy, Josh Troy, which is a guy from Wires From Strangers. You’ve heard me talk about him many times if you’re a returning reader here.

Josh Troy runs the only sales agency that I find straight up value from. Josh is an incredible operator, very serious person, and gets very consistent results through his sales agency. I love talking highly of Josh. He does consistent great performance. We’ve done million dollar month deals again and again and again.

All we talk about around here is how to hit a million a month. By the way we just hit our 40th. We had three people in the Inner Circle program this month in December that had hit their first million dollar a month.

So we’re up to 40 now. We have 40 different businesses over the last decade that we’ve helped get to million dollar months.

I just want to take a quick moment for an earnings disclaimer. That by no means represents that you joining into the Inner Circle will make a million dollar a month. As a matter of fact the statistical probability of any business on Earth, no matter what you invest into or what you do, hitting a million dollar a month is less than 0.1%.

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics says that it is a 0.1% probability that any business can exceed $10 million a year. That means you have a 99.9% chance of not hitting a million dollar a month.

Are you one of the lucky few people on planet Earth that will ever have the grit, relentless drive, skills, talent, right offers and luck to achieve million dollar months? Who knows, probably not.

The average as a matter of fact for the members in the Inner Circle group is about $200 to $300,000 per month. Does that mean if you join in you’ll even hit a $200 to $300K a month? No. By no means do we make any income claims when it comes to joining into any of my offers, let alone the Inner Circle program.

All the lessons in any of my paid products and here as well are exclusively for handing down for informational purposes only. Not financial advice. Just lessons. Lessons from businesses that have been there, done that, that we’ve helped, that we’re sitting here handing down to you and putting you on game.

If your business is already generating $100k+ per month, My Inner Circle is where you break through to the next level. Inside, I’ll help you identify and solve the bottlenecks holding you back so you can scale faster and with more clarity.

Why We Created the Deck Sales Letter When VSL Play Rates Dropped and People Stopped Watching Videos

The Deck Sales Letter.

So play rates on VSLs were diminishing.

Let me by the way just show you some proof here. November 23rd, 2023 by Jeremy Haynes, that was the day that this specific document for the DSL was created. The DSL was originated by Josh and I out of pure frustration that we wanted more people to consume the information that we were trying to give to people through VSLs.

But time and time again we saw what was known as a play rate going down.

A play rate is very important to understand. That is the quantity of people who hit the page that the VSL is on and press play. 

Literally just press play. 

Not even watch it, just start watching it. We would see play rates as high as 90 plus percent and as low as single digits. Industry benchmarks show play rates for well-optimized VSL landing pages typically fall between 70-85%, confirming this massive variance.

I want to disclose we’ve had many multi thousand dollar month deals and fewer million dollar month deals that have had literally single digit or even in the teens play rates. So although play rate is not necessarily a heavily weighted benchmark, when you have salespeople that are complaining about people not watching the VSL information and you’re not implementing any of the other supplement content marketing propaganda related ad strategies that we talk about, like the Venus Fly Trap, the Hammer Them strategy and all the others that we’ve originated over the years to help supplement turning your salespeople into cashiers, you have to ask yourself how could I get the information that’s in my VSL actually consumed?

That’s where the DSL came in.

We wanted to take just as what was mentioned, all of the same information that’s talked about in the VSL and articulate it inside of a deck.

The thesis here between Josh and I? We concluded that there was a higher probability that somebody could likely consume more information faster through a deck that they could scroll through embedded on a web page compared to the information that they would consume and the rate they would consume it through a VSL comparatively.

We also had a thesis that hey, there’s this concept called the pendulum from a book called Pendulum where certain things work at times and then they swing the opposite direction where they no longer work and then eventually they swing back and work again.

During this time in particular we also had this idea. Could VSLs just be on the opposite end of the pendulum right now where people are no longer consuming them?

Kind of like how live events like webinars and challenge funnels worked. They had their absolute heyday and were crushing it. Then they had a long, long drought that seemed like it was years long where they just were suffering and not getting nearly the result that they were. Then vice versa today they’re in their heyday again, or at least swinging back into their heyday and working tremendously well again.

So during this trough period of time where we just wondered, are our VSLs suffering from the pendulum effect? Are people just tired of VSLs? What could we do to test against that and get this information consumed?

We decided to condense VSLs into a deck.

How the Deck Sales Letter Works and Why Seventy Percent of People Consume the First Five Slides

We’ve done this many different ways. We started by doing exactly what was discussed. Take exactly what’s talked about in the VSL and just turn it into a deck.

If we turn it into a deck using a tool like Google Slides, and there’s many other softwares that you could do this with, and we embed that right onto the page in place of the VSL, would that work better and would that get us a higher consumption rate?

The answer was yes.

We saw that by statistically tracking the consumption of the deck we could get 70% of the people that hit the page all the way to Slide 5.

Now the slides would obviously vary in terms of the total quantity of slides that every single one of these testing clients that we initially did it on would have. And then clients that we still do this with today have. Generally you can have a deck anywhere from 20 something slides all the way up to 50 plus slides depending on what your offer is and how much information you want to put into the deck.

Now here’s what we learned just in that initial test alone.

If we took all of the information that we wanted to get across and we put it into the first five slides specifically, 70% of the people that hit the page would consume that information.

The results we saw were staggeringly impressive.

What we initially got as kind of leading feedback before we saw the KPIs improve dramatically was the salesperson feedback rapidly improving. We saw a tremendous amount of sales reps that were saying things like, I don’t know what you guys did but night and day difference on leads coming through better framed.

They wouldn’t say they’re like red hot, ready to close layup deals. But what they would say is it definitely seems like people are finally consuming what we talk about in the VSLs that we feel like they’ve never understood before.

As much as I generally like to ignore salespeople’s feedback because generally it’s not valid with how they articulate it, that feedback was very true and the transition of testing the deck was well worth it.

So what we did is we turned it into a strategy. We called it the Deck Sales Letter.

How to Build Your Deck Sales Letter by Transcribing Your VSL into Slides with an Executive Summary

The Deck Sales Letter consists of a few different approaches.

You can either take your existing VSL, transcribe it, make it into a deck with words and visuals. Keep in mind you have to remember that pro tip, no matter what order you think you should put all the information in, try to keep it like an executive summary of the entire deck for the first five slides.

That way a majority of that information that you’re trying to get across gets consumed.

From there just treat the rest of the deck like as if the person read the executive summary and wants to read the entire book. That’s where you can really be more elaborate, more articulate with whatever it is you’re trying to get across.

What we also then did, keep in mind as a marketing agency over the years we had two different strategies that we liked a lot. One of them was this strategy that we referred to as the Mini Webinar. We just got tired of these 2 hour long webinars and we shortened it all the way down to anywhere from like 5 to 15 minutes in most instances.

Then we came out with what we called the Mini Webinar 2.0 which was specific to make money offers. If it was some kind of anything that involved financial investment and return we would use the Mini Webinar 2.0.

Mini Webinar 1.0 is more of a generalized template that a lot of our clients could use to create flow easily and walk people through information in a sequence that makes sense and has a high probability to convert folks.

VSLs are very effective and we have content dedicated to 8 figure VSL lessons. It’s very informative and very good. I don’t really hold a lot of stuff back. There’s a lot of people out there that you know genuinely think that although yes I put people on tremendous game that this is all I’ve got.

I actually had a student earlier today tell me that and then they bought one of my paid programs, the Master Internet Marketing course. He said to me quote “I thought your content, I thought you were one of those guys that was giving literally everything away and I thought your paid courses might not be that much hype. I might not learn that much more after because dude I was way wrong. I learned way more through your courses than I did through the free stuff. It’s highly impressive.”

He’s right. I put people on plenty of game through our paid offers like our Master Internet Marketing program and our Inner Circle offer.

I always encourage people if you’re rich and trying to get a hell of a lot richer the Inner Circle’s great. Twice a month we do one on one calls, weekly group calls that you can request the topic of. We have our group chat on Telegram, rich people trying to get a hell of a lot richer. We also have our quarterly in person masterminds right here at the penthouse in Miami, Florida.

Let me get back to the Deck Sales Letter.

This was working very well whether it was a VSL that was transcribed, a Mini Webinar or a Mini Webinar 2.0. This was crushing.

But there are a few nuances and I want to walk you through those nuances now.

How to Structure Your DSL Page with the Deck Embedded Above Your Application and Scheduler

First of all you have to follow the best practices of a traditional VSL call funnel. If you’ve seen any of my content on call funnels you know that I’m a big fan of a pretty simple page style.

Generally a VSL funnel looks something like this where you’re going to have your headline, you’re going to have the VSL, and then from there you’re going to have an embedded application and scheduler.

By the way, you never put a button on the page that increases your cost per application artificially. You always embed the application right below the video. Or in the deck, the Deck Sales Letter, the DSL, you embed it right below the deck.

Here we’re having our slides, this is where our deck is going to go. Then below that, that is where we’re going to put the application and the scheduler.

Keep in mind the reason I say both in both of these examples, whether it’s a VSL or whether it’s a DSL, we’re going to make sure that we have my favorite combination which is Typeform and Calendly.

And I will say this, I’ve had again and again and again with my own two eyes and all of my Inner Circle members’ eyes, we’ve tried to prove it wrong. We’ve tried to find another software combination that’s better. People have consistently challenged me. Every time there’s some nuanced thing about the way that they do it that just makes it perform less effective than Typeform and Calendly.

I don’t care about Typeform and Calendly. I’m not an affiliate for them. You’ll never find me actively promoting them as an affiliate. I just use it because I get a better cost per call when I do this specific combination because they integrate tremendously well together and reduce the steps of my funnel.

But I digress. I’m not here to talk about that. I’m here to talk about how the Deck Sales Letter page looks.

All you’re doing here is you’re swapping out the VSL and embedding a deck there instead.

But if you use Google Slides, which is typically what we like to use, it’s generally the easiest and the most user friendly. There’s a few little tips that you have to look at in order to really make it work well.

How to Embed Google Slides on Your Page So It Stays Centered and Looks Good on All Devices

I built an example, this is just like a dummy page where we have a simple site that we like to use to just demonstrate a Mini Webinar template embedded as a deck.

By the way this is another little nuanced thing. This is the original. It literally says DeckSalesLetter.com. This is the original template version of the site that we created.

If you look at this deck that’s embedded you’ll notice in the bottom left corner I grabbed this little character from Canva when I was first creating it to let people know because they’re not used to seeing decks on pages that they need to press that little button down there in order to scroll through the deck.

You’ll see on the second slide I have this other little lady pointing down to let people know that they can navigate back and forth.

Here’s the Deck Sales Letter in terms of just how the page looks. You got the headline at the top, you got the deck embedded, and then below that we have an application. In this case again, Typeform embedded with a Calendly.

You wouldn’t traditionally have this button. We just use the button there as an example to take you to the following steps of the funnel so you could go through the template.

So the Deck Sales Letter, here’s how it ends up looking. This is an embedded Google Slides presentation. So you build the DSL in Google Slides and then you make sure that you put these little people in the bottom left so it tells people this is how they navigate.

This is what I mean by the way where I say that people get all the way to Slide 5. Slide 5 is the average of how far people get into the deck for 70% of the folks that hit the page. We still have a lot of statistics for how many people get to the very end of these things. But you can see like it’s just rapid to be able to sit here and consume all the information on all this stuff.

Once you actually have your DSL built, the actual deck itself, you got to go build the page. Generally the easiest thing to do is just copy and paste your actual VSL call funnel page and swap out the VSL for a deck.

You can, I get some nuanced questions at this stage, could I use it on any page that has a VSL? Yeah, you totally could as a matter of fact. But you got to make sure that you do it the right way.

If you take the DSL and this is kind of the nuanced things that I’m talking about that you have to be good at, you’ll notice how some people format it wrong and the DSL, the actual slides hang off of the side of the page. It looks bad because people don’t know how to format it properly.

You want it centered and nice looking on the page. That’s one thing that’s kind of weird about Google Slides. It gives you three ways to embed it onto the page: large, medium and small.

You ideally want to take it in any form and change the embed code a little bit to be dynamic. That way it is optimized for mobile, tablets and desktops and shape shifts but stays center on the page.

If you don’t know what you’re doing and you use it wrong it’ll end up looking bad where it hangs off the side of the page and then you’ll have information that gets cut off especially given the size of the device that the person is looking on.

Very important to note that it will look bad if you don’t format it properly.

So you have to go to ChatGPT. It’s really effective if you do this in ChatGPT.

You can use whatever funnel builder you’re using. Take ClickFunnels as an example. You could say okay so I have this specific Google Slides presentation that I’ve created that I’m going to embed onto the page.

You’re going to take that little frame, it’s just an iframe and it says publish to web. This is where I said you have the size selection where it’s like medium and small and large. Then you want to understand that that iframe is what you’re going to end up embedding into the funnel.

But that’s what you have to take to ChatGPT and be like okay this is the iframe for the embed. Then ideally you take some screenshots of what it looks like on the page in the different size formats so ChatGPT can really understand it.

You want to say here’s what it looks like when it’s large and again it’ll drag off the side of the page tremendously. You want to see what it looks like when it’s medium and you want to see what it looks like when it’s set to small.

Then you want to tell ChatGPT like I want you to find a way to adjust the iframe to where it dynamically stays center on the page and it never stretches beyond the device’s dimensions.

Then what you’re going to get is an updated iframe. That iframe is what you want to copy and paste onto the page. That way it stays properly formatted.

That’s a very important step. If you just raw dog taking it from Google Slides and doing the publish to web option in the raw iframe it will look bad. Make sure that you follow and heed that instruction. It is so important.

How to Track DSL Performance Using Google Analytics to See How Far People Get Into Your Slides

There are several ways that you can track it. There are a bunch of unique softwares that you can use. One of which is Google Analytics if it’s set up properly because it integrates to Google Slides believe it or not and you can track how far people get into the slide presentation, how long they spend per slide.

But you have to do that very creatively. If you struggle with that I won’t sit here and walk you through the technicals of how to do that step by step. It’ll be super boring. I’m talking to you the business owners reading this and I know how you are. You’re too high level for that stuff.

If you’re going to try to do it yourself again just ask ChatGPT. If you’re going to tell your marketers to do this and give it a test, tell them to go ask ChatGPT. How do I get Google Analytics to track how far people get into the slide deck while it’s embedded in this page’s software?

It’s important to note you can tell it like oh I’m using ClickFunnels, I’m using Go High Level, I’m using whatever funnel software you’re building with. It’ll adapt it relative to that because you can also give or take the software, add functionality to where it tracks it dynamically without having to embed it directly into the slides.

Why the DSL Lowered Cost Per Qualified Call and Increased Show Rates Without Improving Close Rates

The Deck Sales Letter, super effective as a conversion mechanism. 

Generally a great way to test an alternative conversion mechanism. There was a client just recently, they had about a $3,200 cost per acquired customer for a $25,000 product. Very profitable. 

Research shows presentations with video backgrounds or embedded video see 32% more interaction than static decks, with 37% longer average reading time and 17% higher CTA click-through rates.

When we were pressing them to scale, they asked a very interesting question but a very valid question nonetheless. They said Jeremy, if we spent twice as much and our CPA stayed the same, we’d acquire twice as many customers. If we cut our CPA in half we can spend the same amount and acquire twice as many customers.

I generally bias towards the first which is well let’s just spend more money and acquire more customers because we’re already doing so extremely profitably. We don’t want to allow a greed perspective to take over and impoverish us. We want to really maximize revenue. Acquiring more customers is always a good thing especially when you have upsells in succession.

Which this client did. They have many offers above 25K that people were buying in a pretty good percentage of upsell rate.

The question was simple. How do we cut the conversion cost of acquiring customers in half?

The answer was pretty simple. You don’t generally split test your way there. A cost of a customer getting cut in half at scale is pretty hard to do with split testing what you’ve currently got against iterations of itself.

If I split tested like variations of VSLs or variations of headlines I’m generally not going to eventually see half of my cost of acquiring customers all of a sudden materialize.

But you know what does have a high probability or at least a higher probability to make that possible? Split testing conversion mechanisms.

When it came to KPIs for the DSL it was sweet.

Outside of the leading indicator of salespeople giving us feedback that leads were coming in consuming the information that would otherwise not be consumed through a VSL, which is typically what you see first, we started to see cheaper costs of qualified calls coming through the DSL.

We started seeing, and this was the most surprising one, without using any kind of Hammer Them strategy, any additional emails, just the change of the VSL to the DSL, started seeing a higher show rate as well. It was quite interesting.

It was as if people were obviously from not consuming the VSL, going from not interested to curious and then all the way up to at least general interest or even highly interested.

Especially since we saw a lot of people, this is the craziest part, on average you’ll see about 25% of people who do watch your VSL complete it to the end. 

The DSL we were seeing upwards of 45%. A full 20% jump in the quantity of people that would watch or I should say consume to the very end of the deck. Crazy. 

Industry data shows high-performing VSLs achieve completion rates between 65-85% when extremely well-crafted, though the average VSL sits around 25% completion.

Analysis of over 1.3 million presentation sessions found that 82% of people who get through the first 3 slides of a deck finish the entire presentation, compared to typical VSL completion rates around 25%.

A full 20% jump in the quantity of people that would watch or I should say consume to the very end of the deck. Crazy.

So twice as much end of deck consumption compared to a VSL. That led to a tremendous difference in show rates.

It led to only a slight bump in close rates across the board. Every client that we tested it with we’d see the major revenue lift come from the drop in cost per qualified call and the lift in show rate leading to a lower cost in a qualified showed up call.

We wouldn’t see much improvement in close rate to be fair. Marginal at best. Like single digit percentages if anything. Nothing too crazy like maybe 1 to 3% if anything. We didn’t even necessarily attribute that to the DSL. That’s how unsure we were of whether it lifted the close rate or not.

So I won’t sit here and make that claim. But it did dramatically lower our cost per qualified call and it did dramatically increase our show rate. So we’re really satisfied with it from that perspective.

When to Use the Deck Sales Letter as an Alternative Conversion Mechanism to Test Against Your VSL

The DSL is something we still routinely do today. It’s not necessarily our go-to strategy but man does it rip when we do use it as a conversion mechanism.

Treat it as a whole other funnel type. That’s the best way to treat it. It is very different from a traditional VSL and it does require you to be good, very competent at what the flow somebody needs to go through with consuming the deck without any narrator.

That’s the upside of VSLs that we typically see. There’s somebody who’s walking them through what to think, how to think about it and the frame.

Whereas with the deck people can rapidly move through information just as they technically could with a VSL. But some of you out there you’ll remove the control for people to move through a VSL and scrub through it as they like.

With a DSL keep in mind they can move back and forth through that deck as fast or as slow as they want to. So that changes the consumption a little bit. You have to keep that in mind.

With the deck you got to be willing to test it in a few variations in order to get the type of results that we’ve talked about here today.

But man we are big fans of the DSL.

I hope this has been quite helpful to you. I don’t do this from any other intention than just try to help you out.

When something like someone copying a strategy happens, it feels like an ethical responsibility of mine to make sure that especially as the originator of the strategy we get that information out there in order to ensure that people who are going to learn about it actually know how it works in its entirety.

So they don’t mess it up doing it. And then when they eventually hear that people like Josh and I did originate that strategy, they don’t think oh those guys don’t know what they’re talking about.

Most business owners waste years figuring out what actually works. In my Master Internet Marketing program, I compress that learning curve into 7 weeks, covering copywriting, funnels, ads, and more. If you’re ready to invest $5k and get serious about your skills, apply here. Go get richer.

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