---
feed: "DANIEL_ON_SLOPE"
codex_section: "S09"
source: VideoTranscript
title: "IN_TipSeries_Farming_vs_Hunting"
conv_id: "video-IN_TipSeries_Farming_vs_Hunting-20131226"
share_url: "N/A - Private 2013 Recording (Tip Series)"
created: "2013-12-26"
message_count: 1
category:
  - "Marketing Automation"
  - "Customer Lifecycle Strategy"
summary: "In this December 26, 2013 Tip Series episode, Daniel Comp delivers a powerful contrast between traditional 'hunting' (chasing new leads and sales) and modern 'farming' (automated nurturing and relationship marketing). Using the Perfect Customer Lifecycle framework with seven phases, he systematically attacks the three fatal holes in the typical funnel—lost traffic, lost leads, and lost customers—while introducing Infusionsoft as the tool to capture, nurture, wow, upsell, and generate referrals from prospects and existing clients. He openly shares the real cost (240+ hours + $2,300 setup + $300/month) and the necessary business transformation required to make the shift."
keypoints:
  - "The typical customer lifecycle leaks badly: most website visitors bounce without capture (lost traffic), warm leads are labeled 'bad' and abandoned (lost leads), and customers are ignored after the sale (lost customers/upsells/referrals)."
  - "The Perfect Customer Lifecycle captures 30-40% of non-buying traffic with a 'magnet,' nurtures warm leads long-term instead of trashing them, wows new customers with welcome campaigns, and systematically drives upsells and referrals from existing clients."
  - "It statistically takes seven contacts before a prospect feels comfortable buying; most businesses stop at two or three, leaving massive value on the table."
  - "65% of customers leave due to indifference, not bad service—yet most companies focus all energy on acquiring new customers instead of loving and monetizing the ones they already have."
  - "Switching from hunting to farming requires real transformation: 240+ hours of learning, $2,300 setup + $300/month for Infusionsoft, plus ongoing content creation—exactly the kind of evolution Michael Gerber and Scott warned about when 'doing more of what you already do' stops working."
tags:
  - "farming-vs-hunting"
  - "perfect-customer-lifecycle"
  - "infusionsoft"
  - "marketing-automation"
  - "lead-nurturing"
  - "customer-wowing"
  - "tip-series"
  - "scotoma"
monomyth_stage: "06 - Tests, Allies, Enemies"
gameboard_position: "Camp 2: Tests, Allies, Enemies"
truth_score: 88
entropy_score: "Low"
tone:
  sentiment: "Visionary"
  emotions:
    - "Earnest"
    - "Practical"
    - "Encouraging"
  sycophancy_level: "None"
  notes: "Daniel speaks with refreshing honesty about the real cost and effort of marketing automation while passionately advocating the shift from hunting to farming. He uses the funny caveman animation, clear funnel diagrams, and his own Infusionsoft journey (240 man-hours) to make the lesson memorable and credible. Warm, no-hype tone throughout."
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  - "video-IN_Pre-Programmed_Demo-20050215"
  - "video-IN_Self-expanding_Demo-20050227"
  - "video-IN_Nano_BAT_Tour-20050503"
  - "video-IN_Content_Management_Demo-20050503"
  - "video-IN_Affiliate_Introduction-20040227"
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ma5_inheritance: "None"
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codex_candidate: false
phase: "Tip Series Episode: Farming vs Hunting – The Perfect Customer Lifecycle (2013)"
enriched_date: "2026-04-19"
---

### Original YouTube Description

December 26, 2013

(upbeat music)
As a business owner, when we start thinking about growing our enterprise, we run right smack into some pretty big scotomas. In this episode, I want to talk to you about a large scotoma related to marketing and sales and growth. And that is the difference between hunting and farming.

---

### Cleaned Transcript

**Daniel:** As a business owner, when we start thinking about growing our enterprise, we run right smack into some pretty big scotomas. In this episode, I want to talk to you about a large scotoma related to marketing and sales and growth. And that is the difference between hunting and farming.

Each of these episodes build on previous episodes and on components in them. So if I say something that's kind of unfamiliar to you, I'd encourage you to go to our website. Here you can go to the Glossary. And for scotoma, for example, go down to scotoma. And you'll see that there's both a video and a puzzle, which you can actually experience both a physical scotoma and a psychological scotoma. And you can then also go directly to the entire article. So you understand what blind spots are and you can do that exercise on seeing your physical blind spot.

But let's start talking about the difference between farming and hunting.

I want to start this off with a little bit of a funny video.

[Funny caveman hunting animation plays – multiple failed attempts with spears, rocks, and frustration]

I think it's pretty funny actually. We appreciate our spouses, if we have a small business or run a practice, because our spouses can often tell us to get out of the cave and go out there and start marketing.

And let me explain part of why I think this is funny is that in business we always have product, marketing, and finance—three things that we're responsible for. And most of us spend our time in the cave doing product. We have to get pitched out to go do marketing. And that's because things are getting short in the till. So if we're working on doing the production, who's doing the marketing?

Well, that's where this small scotoma that comes in that can really help us. And we're going to introduce Infusionsoft in a second.

But I want to show you a small scotoma. See, think about the difference between this word—contact and contract. It's only one letter, but it makes a huge difference. The difference between having contacts and having contracts, right?

Also the difference between working in your business and working on your business. When you work on your business, you look at the whole of this—product, marketing, finance—how do these interact with each other? Who does what in your business? Working in your business means that you're stuck on any one of these things. And if you're in there doing this perfectly, then maybe nobody's doing the finances. Or if you're so busy delivering the product or the service, then who's out telling the world about this?

Well, this is where the difference between farming and hunting comes in.

And so let me introduce Infusionsoft to you. I'm gonna share today a really exciting way to think about growing and marketing your business. And we'll do that by first talking about the typical customer lifecycle.

So we all spend time and energy and money generating interest in our company. We might do that online or through word of mouth or through some type of offline advertising. But we do all of that in an effort to get people to engage in our sales process. We all have a different sales process. Again, we may sell online, we may have a sales team, we may sell through estimates, things like that. And the goal in all of these cases is that we create a paying customer, that we win the deal.

So let's take a quick example of how this plays out. So let's say that I spend $1,000 and about 10 hours of time generating interest, which creates 100 interested prospects for me that end up turning into 10 paying customers, okay? Great.

Now let's say I wanna take that 10 customers, I wanna turn that into 20. So what do I do? What are my options? Well, with the typical customer lifecycle, I can double the amount of dollars I'm spending on my advertising and marketing, or I can double the time. Maybe I'll spend more time in Craigslist or in social media in an effort to create more leads that can turn into more customers. Or I might work on my sales process a little bit.

But there is a new breed of entrepreneurs and business owners that understand that there's a different way to grow a company today. And the typical customer lifecycle is not ideal. And the reason is really it comes down to the fact that there are just holes in this here bucket.

So I wanna talk about three very specific holes. And then we'll talk about how we can maybe take things to the next level.

So the very first thing I wanna talk about, the first hole is in website traffic. I want you to ask yourself: how many of the visitors who came to your website this morning were not ready to engage in your sales process? Probably a really, really high percentage. Unfortunately, when we don't capture those leads and give them a reason to engage with us, we lose 'em. They're lost forever. And they essentially bounce off of our website. And this is the first big hole that I wanna talk about—is lost traffic. Okay, and where does that traffic go? Well, it essentially goes into the big internet rubbish bin and it's gone forever. So lost traffic. Never to come back again.

So now let's say for those that are interested enough to engage in our sales process, though, what happens with them? Well, we all know that in our marketing, we generate a certain number of hot leads, right? That's where we kinda get our livelihood from is by converting those hot leads. But there's a whole bunch of other leads that may not be hot and ready to buy today. And unfortunately, they get labeled as bad leads. Well, they're not all bad leads. Some of them are. Some of them, we don't really care that they ever come back. But many of them just may not be ready to buy today.

And so it's unfortunate that happens. Did you know that statistically speaking, it takes seven contacts with a company before a consumer feels comfortable enough to do business with us? Now, here's the problem. We stop following up typically right here. So we get them part of the way going and then we stop. And we don't finish the nurturing that's needed for these leads because we're labeling them as bad and kind of throwing them out.

I once talked to a business owner that was in the mortgage business and he went to the trash can and found literally 350 leads that were fully qualified. Somebody thought they were bad and threw them out in the trash. So you may not have literal leads being thrown in the trash, but there is waste happening in your business. And that's our second big bucket that I want us to attack today. So this is lost leads. Just hemorrhaging out of so many businesses, it's discouraging.

Okay, now let's talk about another very common thing that happens. We close the sale and unfortunately, this feels like we've reached the finish line. And so what ends up happening is all of our energy and focus comes right back here and we're wanting to drive more into the top of the funnel, right? Well, this is a tragedy and this is the third hole I wanna talk about, which is lost customers.

Now, in some cases, we actually lose customers. They leave our business. By the way, did you know that 65% of consumers that leave a business to go to another vendor do so not because we jacked them up or we had a bad product or bad service. They leave because of indifference. Isn't that unfortunate that we'd have a customer that we spent all this money attracting and closing and then they leave because we just didn't do a good enough job to really wow that customer. And it's unfortunate.

So you may have customers that you actually lose, but even if you're not losing customers because of these things, you're also not—we're not good enough at upselling customers. We're losing our upsells and we're not good enough at getting referrals. It is so much cheaper to sell to an existing customer than it is to go back and try to find a brand new prospect, teach them about your company, convert them and get more money out of them. But yet we're not able to do that very well today.

Okay, so again, as I said, this is not the ideal way to work. And we've spent a lot of time working on a different model for thinking about your business marketing. So I wanna erase all this stuff that we've been talking about here. I'm gonna leave this trash cans up as a reminder 'cause we're gonna attack each one of these right now.

[Funny caveman animation plays again]

Instead of just following what everybody else does and implementing the typical customer lifecycle, let's talk about what the perfect customer lifecycle could do in your business. And to do that, what we're gonna do is we're gonna attack each of these three holes in the bucket one by one and show you how the perfect customer lifecycle will help you to eliminate those holes, okay?

So the perfect customer lifecycle from a high level is a framework for thinking about your marketing and it includes seven different phases. We'll talk about each one right now.

The first phase is attracting traffic. We'll do online advertising, maybe through Google AdWords or search engine optimization. We'll have word of mouth going on with our customers. Maybe we'll do some offline marketing. Whatever the sources of traffic that you pick will create interest in our company.

Well, instead of following the pattern that most businesses do where they have a website and they have most of the traffic going to it and leaving and the only people that they capture are the people who buy, we're gonna forget that idea and we're going to intentionally and systematically capture leads.

Well, how do we do that? It's very simple, we create a magnet. A magnet is a tool. It's something that is very valuable to your prospects. It could be informational. There's lots of different things and we can teach you how to create these magnets. But a magnet is something that is interesting enough to them that in order to get it, they're going to give you their information so that we can follow up with them and they're gonna give you permission to follow up, okay?

Now, I want you to imagine if you had on your website, for example, let's say you have a web form offering this valuable magnet and more, the people right now that are coming and just leaving because they have no interest in staying because they're not ready to buy—what would happen if you could take 30 or 40% of those people and capture them into your database so now you have their information, you can follow up? What would that be worth in your company? Okay, so we've captured the leads.

Now we move on into the sales process and let's talk about attacking this lost lead problem. Remember, we have leads, the leads that are not hot today, the ones that are just either cold or warm that we're labeling as bad leads need to be saved, okay? So let's get rid of this, how do we do that?

Well, there's two different ways of nurturing that we're gonna do for our prospects, okay? The first thing we're gonna do is something like this. Somebody fills out a form on our site, we've captured them, we're gonna begin to follow up now with them. We're gonna send them emails or direct mail pieces, different types of follow up that we'll use to nurture the relationship, okay? Those who are interested enough to buy will move on into our conversion process. Those who are not, we actually have a place for them but it's not the trash can. We're gonna actually put them into a long-term nurture campaign.

Well, what is that? Well, that's a slightly less aggressive, maybe a monthly touch where we're delivering valuable information to that prospect and we're just staying in touch so that when the person is ready to buy, we're the ones that they're thinking about, not one of our competitors, okay? So there's short-term nurturing and education that we'll do that'll take us from our contacts of one or two contacts through to the seven that we need. There's also a recognition that we have long-term follow up that might need to take place.

Okay, now we've got a hot prospect that's ready to be closed. We'll put them into our sales process. Now again, you might have, in your business, you might have a shopping cart because maybe you're selling online and that's the way that you're gonna send people to actually purchase online and your website does the selling for you or you might actually have a sales team and you have sales reps that you're gonna align these leads out to. Whatever the case, you have your system of selling that will convert the person into a paying customer.

Okay, now let's talk about post-sale. This is the challenging part because it's so easy for the finish line to be right here. We've closed the sale and then we rush back here to the front of the funnel and we start doing all the hard work to get a new customer in. Well, it is tremendously less expensive for us to use our existing customers to get upsells, to get referrals, repeat sales than it is to go back to the beginning.

So let's talk about how we can eliminate this customer waste. Okay, the first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna absolutely make sure that we are wowing our customers when they buy. So in addition to you delivering your service and having a satisfactory experience, we're gonna wow our customers by putting in place a very simple—it can be very simple to start—wowing customer welcome campaign. This is a campaign that new customers will receive that gives them helpful information, follows up on the service you provided and just in general, we love on them a little bit and it is amazing how easy it is right now in today's world to do small things that will have a great benefit because most people don't get loved on by the vendors that they buy from.

Okay, and then the next two things is we're gonna have intentional programs in place to make sure that we're upselling customers that have already purchased one time and we're gonna take that one time purchase and maybe get them to buy more frequently. We may get them to buy higher end items, we may cross sell additional items, but we're gonna find different ways to turn that one time customer into a repeat and we'll have specific offers. We'll offer one thing and if maybe if somebody bought product A and somebody else bought product B, we might be offering them different upsell offerings that relate to what they bought initially.

And then finally, we're gonna be intentional about getting referrals. We're gonna ask our customers for referrals and one of the ways to do that is we, for example, in this email, we might ask the customer whether we did a good job, did we serve you well? And if we did, that might be a great time to trigger a referral request and you just ask the person for the referral.

So again, as you look at this and you compare this with a typical customer lifecycle, the perfect customer lifecycle is the way of the future. The new breed of entrepreneurs that understand marketing automation and they understand the new way to market get that this is the way to go, not to follow the masses and what everybody else is doing.

[Funny caveman animation plays again]

So that's all very exciting and gives you some possible new opportunities in the marketplace and ways to transform your business.

But before you run out and buy the Kool-Aid and sign up for the campaign, let me share a bit of a scotoma to you and what you're in for.

See, Ray Kurzweil talks about exponentially increasing information. So if we look at a grid line of where we're at in history and what the internet's beginning to do is that information is exponentially increasing. It's not linearly increasing. So if you think that you can keep up by learning more and work on product marketing and finance because you have an automated marketing system, you think you can balance all of these, well, there's a bit of a surprise because of this issue right here. There is more and more and more to learn the entire time.

Let me preface this with a look at our strengths profile for myself. I'm an achiever, learner, input. That means that my normal for learning and achieving is substantially higher than most people. And when I say that, this is our Infusionsoft account, when I say that I spent 240 man hours in the first month learning just how to set this up. That's one component of building the automation. And many of these others were beyond even that. For example, our job application—it's the campaign for automating that component of it. And inside of every one of these, this is a system or an automation system and inside of every one of these, it's not just a matter of building the forms, it's a matter of building all of the things that come before it, the tags and sequences, et cetera.

So to get going with Infusionsoft, it's going to cost you $2,000 to set up an account plus $300 per month—23 there, huh?—$300 a month for the account. You'll spend at least 240 hours just to understand the system. Then you're going to build each of your campaigns. Plus you're going to have all of the content to put into these campaigns after you've learned the 240, while you're paying 300 a month on top of your $2,000 setup.

So the price of building your automation, of switching from hunting to farming, is a substantial cost.

But you'll remember from evolution and revolution that if you want to grow your business, you're going to be faced with periods when you have to evolve your practice. You'll be run smack into issues that you can't grow doing more, as Scott says, by just adding more and more and more of what you already do. You actually have to transform the way you practice. And so you have to pay this price to get through and change the way that you're doing things in order to continue growing your enterprise.

So fortunately, what we do is we package this entire thing. Rather than leaving you stranded doing product marketing and finance, we help you work on your business and provide you with these services and bundle all of this Infusionsoft within our product platform and the services that we deliver so that you're not left doing it on your own. We can become a marketing channel for you, help you to switch from hunting to farming.

And with that, let's watch the rest of this funny animation.

Thanks for your time.

---

**CODEX ENTRY**

**Date:** 2013-12-26  
**File:** IN_TipSeries_Farming_vs_Hunting.md  
**Monomyth Stage:** 06 - Tests, Allies, Enemies  
**Gameboard:** Camp 2: Tests, Allies, Enemies  
**MA5 Domain:** None  
**Summary:** Daniel Comp contrasts traditional "hunting" (chasing new leads) with modern "farming" (automated nurturing and relationship marketing) using the Perfect Customer Lifecycle framework, systematically closing the three fatal holes in the typical funnel while honestly revealing the 240+ hour and $2,300+ cost of implementing Infusionsoft.  
**Key Insight:** Most businesses leak 65%+ of their potential through lost traffic, abandoned warm leads, and ignored existing customers; the future belongs to those willing to pay the real price of transformation—switching from hunting to farming through marketing automation.  
**Narrative Significance:** This 2013 Tip Series episode is the clearest bridge between the early technical BAT/NanoBat work and the later 2014 Digital Franchising philosophy. It introduces the customer-centric, automated, long-term nurturing mindset that underpins the entire exponential growth model Daniel and Angelina later taught—marking the moment the company moved from selling tools to selling transformation.

---

**INITIUM.**