After $150M From Ads, We Rank The Best Marketing Funnels in 2026

We've done over 150 million cash collected from just spending money on ads. And this is my CMO, uh, Spencer.

Blaming the Treasure Recession for your ads not working is like one of the lamest excuses. You just run a bad business.

Yeah. But like just cuz someone buys a $27 product doesn't mean they're going to buy a $10,000 product. But then we're just like, dude, we just put in all this effort. Let's just scale our phone. We have clients that make 3, four, 5 million a month with that phone. So like it can absolutely work.

We shouldn't even tell people this. Yeah, it's so easy to copy. I know.

Hey, so before we get into the podcast, today's actually a very special day. So I'm here with the CEO, Spencer Von of Saleskick. And essentially, we've released something that is going to really revolutionize the industry in terms of sales ops and sales processes. And so if you want to check out what that is, you can click the link in the description. You'll see all about it. It's one of the coolest things. We've been working on it for how long?

Two years.

Two years. So this is something that I am just so freaking excited about for our industry. And it's going to help you decrease your cost per book call, increase your show rate, and so much more. So, click the link below, check it out. Now, we'll get to the podcast.

So, we've done over 150 million cash collected from just spending money on ads. And this is my CMO, uh, Spencer for closers, and also business partner with SalesK. We'll get into that later. So, what we want to talk about is what's really working now with marketing. So, we're going to go through what's working funnel-wise, what's working offer-wise, what's working media buying strategy, what's working creative-wise, and what's working show rate wise. And so, we're going to start with funnels. And I want to I want you to give me a funnel tier list. So I'm going to give you the funnel and you're going to give me S tier through F tier.

Yes.

Okay. So the first one is the good old where I got started back in the day. Groupfunnel.

Oh dude.

Well the the traditional sense of a group funnel being on Facebook. It's whatever's below an F tier. Whatever whatever's below that that's where the traditional one is, you know. I mean, there there are some people having some success obviously with like a a paid school or a free school uh group funnel with ads. I still, you know, in order to have that work, you need a dialed in, you know, setting team. Uh you need good high ticket offer. And I just don't think it's the most optimal way. like you you'll see as we go through this. I prioritize simplicity over everything else because if you have something that's simple, it's going to be easier to scale than if you don't, right?

So, I mean, I would say it's probably like the school version of it is probably a C tier from ads. Obviously, organic totally.

Yeah, but you're talking page that actually is low ticket, which is totally different, but even free from ads, school, I don't think we I tried it on Sam's behalf cuz he asked me to. Uh this was in like when school first started. I was like, I'm going to validate the school free school funnel. And we just had we had a struggle with it. Now, it could work better now because there's more network effect in school back then. Nobody was using school. Like I was, you know, we were one of the first people even on the platform. Uh I would give it an F tier as well. I already have my grades, but I'm going to let you grade it first.

All right. The DM ads funnel.

Uh I think in certain niches it's okay. I mean it's it's certainly a way to get to your first 50K a month. Like fit very popular in fitness. getting past 50 to 100k a month extremely challenging and everybody gets stuck like 70 to 100k a month. Um so I think you know if you're starting out probably C to B tier. If you're trying to get past 100K a month and like build a consistent business and actually scale something probably lower probably like D tier my person I put C tier because it is good for certain niches like you said who maybe your messaging is not as dialed in. So you can kind of make it up through the conversation to get your first 50 maybe 100 grand a month. Uh I've never seen anybody scale it really to like 250 to be honest. Uh but it is a good like just to get your ads working and then it sets you up for another funnel we're going to talk about next which is I know one of your f the app funnel which is by the way just add right to the application.

Yes. Right. Yes.

Yeah. I think I think um it's so simple. It uh you know I talked about this yesterday at the event. It just allows you to focus on the most important parts of getting something to ads to work which is like having a great offer. Extremely important obviously dialing that in. uh having an excellent ad like also overlooked because if you have for example the DM funnel or the other funnels I'm sure we're going to talk about um it's easy to get confused and focused on on other parts of it when the funnel is not working because there's so many moving parts that funnel it's just like add application sales call pretty hard to not focus on the right thing.

Yes. Um, so I think I think you know legit we still use this.

Well, yeah, exactly. It's definitely A tier. Yeah. And I would say there's two there's two parts of it. There's either a direct messaging app funnel where that's the classic. You just state the offer. You state, you know, you just follow like a very direct like the first line is the offer and then it's a lot of proof and then supporting stuff on the offer. And then it works really well because it's just so low friction. Yeah. And it really makes sure your ads work first. The other way you could do it that we do it is appunnel indirect to direct but all in the ad, right? Where you're starting with maybe a messaging that's not, you know, it's a hook or it's content driven or whatever, but then after about like 30 seconds in a video ad equivalent, yeah, you're pivoting to something that sounds like, so if that sounds interesting to you, here's my offer to you, you know? So that's a way you can actually scale the messaging once you cap out the direct. So I think that's important for everybody to know. And the other thing just so everybody knows what an appunnel is really the key of it is saying everything you need to say to get somebody to book a call in the ad. Yes. Right. So like before I we called it the app funnel. I used to call it like the adel because instead of used it used to be you know the ad was just to get them to watch the VSSL. Yes. Right. And then the VSSL, you tell them everything they need to know to book a call. Yes. The ad f like the app app funnel really, it's like you're just saying everything you need to say in the ad, which works better because more people watch the ad, so you just have a higher impression account and so a lot of times you get better people. Now, the quality depending on your niche could vary, but a lot of times what I think we found is that the quicker we could just get to the point, the more people who have money just book because people who have money don't want to, you know, rig them around with your VSSL and your 30-minute thing or whatever it is.

Correct. One thing actually on that note, and this applies to all the funnels as well, but most people don't realize this and I know we were talking about this a couple weeks ago, but there's um I think this came from Facebook directly. I heard this first in the acquired podcast that uh the engagement of ads is greater than the engagement of organic content. Like the the overall engagement on the platform increases with ads, which is like insane. It's like the first time in history it's ever happened.

Yeah.

And so I say all that to say like that's why like when we talk about focusing on the ad and making a really excellent ad is so important with I mean with any funnel and the application funnel forces you to do that, right? you can't, you know, oh, I'm going to have kind of a, you know, halfass ad or so so ad and I'm going to have a really dialed in VSSL, which typically doesn't happen anyway. If you're not going to have a good ad, you're not going to have a good VSSL. Um, so it forces you to do that and then it sets you up to do more complicated stuff later if you want to.

Yep. Okay. Next funnel on the tier list, the callunnel, but direct callfunnel.

Yeah. I

And we have to explain for the audience what that actually is.

Yes. So direct call funnel is you lead with the offer. So, the offer is coming out, you know, usually in the ad or extremely early in the marketing process. Um, and you know, it's like the polar opposite of the way things used to be back in the day, back in the OG days. I'm sure we'll talk about that.

Yep.

Um, I think in general, um, let me kind of separate the two things. So, first of all, just direct advertising I would almost always start with, um, for two reasons. number one is much easier in most cases to get that to work than to get you know some indirect super long marketing process uh or you know copy. Um so that's number one. Number two is and I think this is just as important even if you're in a niche or or you know offer where you're not sure like it it kind of seems like indirect might work better the direct is just so easy to make you might as well just try it. Like there's not really a reason not to do it.

Mhm.

So, um, if we're saying, you know, direct, because you said callunnel, that could be an app funnel or VSSL funnel or anything, right? I would just say in general, I would typically always start with direct. If we're talking, did you mean by callunn like a VSSL?

Well, yeah. So, in this the the difference between the call, it's really a VSSL funnel. But the the traditional call funnel is if it's direct is the ad is direct and then the VSSL is direct. And it's essentially the ad might be 90 seconds. The VSSL is going to be 5 to 15 minutes.

Yeah.

And but it's all direct. So the VSSL is also going to start direct and then you know our framework is you state the offer. I mean the first 90 seconds of the VSSL is very similar to the first 90. It's basically the ad. Yeah. But then the only difference is is you tack on more information supporting why it works so well. So, it's kind of like a reverse sales letter in a way where it's like here's everything you need to know, but then like there's more stuff at the end for the higher information buyers to want to know, okay, well, why does it work so well? Which is why the second part of the you probably want if you want to know why this works so well, you know? So, that's probably why it works. I mean, if you've watched my ads, this is like that and the app funnel is basically the

Yeah. Yeah. I would say both of them are I know I said A tier. I guess that would say S tier. Maybe I said A tier for the application funnel.

Oh, yeah. We met S tier. Yeah, we met S tier. Yeah.

Yeah. Obviously, direct call funnel. I mean, same thing. Like, it's it's very very good.

Let's just let's just remove S tier and only go A tier because it's now we've already confused. So, A tier is the best for us. So, I would say that the call funnel uh yeah, add to the VSSL, then do an application, etc. Still A tier.

And u sub question with or without an opt-in.

Well, let me just say this. uh most of the time now if you track things properly without having no opt-in is going to yield just a better result lower CAC all that if you can get the optin to work that's ideal from a building your your you know email list and and that whole standpoint. Um, with that being said, for the love of God, if you do get an optin to work, please do not uh uh you know, do your pixel conditioning on a lead event. Like, for the love of God, do not do that with a call funnel.

Yeah, that that's terrible. Uh but in general, I mean, we we we removed our opt-ins a long time ago. And um mainly just from a front-end cost per uh you know, acquisition, it's it's significantly better in most cases. But it's one of those things I would always test and and see.

I would say for anybody wondering, basically the advantage of having an opt-in is that you have more you have leads more leads for your setters and you have more leads that are going to book through email marketing on the back end.

Correct. So, how do you know? Basically, if you remove the opt-in, you have to get a cost reduction as such that it outweighs what you would have gotten from the setters and the emails. So, the percentage I tell clients is that it's about 30%. So, I would be willing to pay 30% more cost per book call from like only ads, direct calls, not obviously with everything combined. If um the if it's through an opt-in, if it's anything more than 30%, it's just better just to remove it. Does that make sense? So, if it's like I'm trying to think of what you know, if I was getting $130 or $100 calls, I would pay probably, you know, 30 to 150 cost per book call if I could add the opt-in.

Yeah.

Because the setters are going to book the best calls and also a lot of good closes come from email for whatever reason they do. But once like we've tested it to where we've had certain funnels where essentially adding in the opt-in doubled the cost per book call or like flat out just it didn't even work. It was like $2,000 cost per book call. So in that case it obviously works better.

Well this this preassumes that you have a good setting team and you're doing consistent email marketing.

Yes. Which most people aren't doing. So then if you're not doing any of that you just don't do that. They definitely don't do. Okay. So the next one is the VSSL callfunnel indirect.

Yeah.

What tier? And again, A tier is going to be the best because we we started basically saying A tier was the best. So

Yeah. Yeah. A tier. A tier is the best. Um I would say for the vast majority of people, it's probably C tier. Uh in my personal opinion, the the people that can get it to work these days are exceptionally good copywriters that are advanced marketers. What's actually interesting about this is, you know, pre you blowing up and like making the direct call funnel a thing, everything was indirect. It was all indirect.

Yeah, it was.

And back then there was much more of an emphasis on marketing ability rather than sales ability. And you kind of coming in has shifted the focus now to sales ability. So, in the last five or six years, you've had all these people flood into the market, start a business, and they've built their business from the ground up with direct offer advertising. And for those people going from direct offer to indirect, they're like, "Oh, it's just a tweak in your messaging." It's like an exponential increase in difficulty because it's putting a lot more of the emphasis on the acquisition or the the uh you know, shouldering the weight of the acquisition on uh marketing rather than sales. And most people that have come in the last five years just don't have the skill set to do that fundamentally.

Yeah.

So I would give it a C-tier from that standpoint. If you're like an excellent copywriter, you've been around for a while and you're in, you know, you've tried the direct offer, you've you've tried multiple offers, it doesn't work, you have to go direct. I mean, honestly, it it'd be like one of those things where like I might just do a different offer. Um, but I know I've written indirect stuff, I've written webinars, like I know I could probably get something to work if I needed to.

Yeah. Um, so that's

So you're kind of like between it depends on your skill set. That's why I put it B tier because essentially if you are really good at copywriting, obviously it can work. The the the case is when to have indirect messaging, which means the ad is going to advertise like a free training or a free video training or whatever it is, a free case study, and then the VSSL starts with more content driven and then pivots to the offer. So, I mean, that's what we did with RCA back in 2020. And I mean, that funnel did 20 million a year. I mean, I don't know how much it collected over its lifetime, but it was a lot from when we did it. So, it obviously works. It works less now because people's I think it's a couple of different reasons. People's attention spans are just less. They just want to get right to the point. I think the other thing is that there's kind of more of an information asymmetry issue with the market to where buyers are becoming more and more skeptical and demanding more information upfront. And then the way they're trying to kind of essentially sort who's essentially the good providers versus the bad is or like if I'm if I'm a seller, the way I'm trying to essentially signal that I'm a good provider because everybody's so skeptical is doing like all these guarantees, which is that's what I think that's a big reason why like a lot of people think that it's Hormos's book that essentially created the whole like offer guarantees thing. I think that's part of it. I also think it's people are so freaking skeptical that that's just what they respond to is like they want to go towards stuff that eliminates their risk as much as possible because that actually happens in all markets over time is as buyers kind of get burned and the market sophisticates it sort of shifts towards like the sellers essentially have to signal that they have a guarantee or like you does that make sense essentially like they're trying to signal that they're a good person. It's almost like kind of business peacocking. Yeah.

It's like you're trying to signal that you're legit by doing something that's costly to you that somebody who's not legit couldn't do. So, I think that's part of the reason. And also just mimicry like people see me doing it or whatever. So, you know, there's that as well. But also, people think it's people think it's a trust recession. Oh, we're in a trust. It ain't going to get any better. It's it I don't think it's a trust recession. I think it's really just the market's been around long enough to where if you're a buyer, you bought in several things and you just getting burned and burned and burned and burned and burned. You're looking for signals of people who are legit. And what are the signals? Okay, I'm going to give you this guarantee. What are the other signals? Just massive proof stacking. Like the best ads are literally uh did you hear Hermosi's story about how he had to go back in uh because all their ads weren't working at Gym Lodge and the private equity company didn't know what to do and all he found out was just like they were using way less proof and so he just like 10x the proof and the ads worked again.

Yeah. It's like if in the same thing with Becker and his ads like what does he just do? It's pretty much basic marketing principles 10x the proof of everybody else and that's why it works. So I think that's a big shift to that. I I I'll just say this as a as a final note to that.

Blaming the trust recession for your ads not working is like one of the lamest excuses.

Yeah. I always thought, well, we're at a trust. I was like, shut up.

You copy sucks.

Yeah. You just you just run a bad business. Yes. You know. Yes. People are more skeptical. They're more broke. Well, the market's more sophisticated and people are more broke. I will end off the indirect call funnel with this. The best way usually to do it is if you have direct working and then it's like a layer of scale. You know, first you kind of still do the direct funnel but indirect to direct and then you can try to go to colder markets by essentially being more the more indirect you go the more colder you get, right? So it can kind of layer on as a good place to scale. The only other time I think people should do it is if fundamentally people would have no desire for what you're offering, which is rare, unless there's significant education towards it.

Yeah.

Right. But even at that, I would still try to do it in the ad.

Yeah.

And it's very rare that stuff like that exists. You know, most of the times there is some sort of solution aware market and people think like that market's, oh, it's so small, it's going to get capped. It's like, no, you need to probably make more ads, make more creators or whatever. I mean, I've seen direct people with direct funnels get to like four million a month, you know, in in tons of different industries.

Okay. CallFunnel, indirect. Uh, okay. B tier. You kind of did like a A tier or C.

No, no, no. I'm saying C tier. C. Okay. C. Fair enough. All right. Auto your your classic your your baby auto webinar mid-tunnel.

Yes. In uh 2017 A tier. In 2026, uh I would say D tier. you know, it's pretty low.

There is people who have it working and when when you get it working, it it works. It's the best. The way to get it working now though, you have to do the upsell and all that. Yeah. I mean, in a traditional sense, yeah, it's it's D tier. If you have a and again it's like it's funny because people and I've seen this over and over again with our clients just with people in this in the space like they get one funnel working and then they they bump up against like scaling limitations challenges whatever it is and they're like I can't scale this funnel and they build up this whole narrative these false beliefs about like it's a funnel and they're like I need to jump from this funnel to that funnel. By the way, half the time when they like the challenges they're facing are like sales related that switching the funnel literally changes nothing problem again. Yeah. Like we're just going to have the same problem but now even even more. Um so so yeah. So I would say D tier it's hard for me to say that as like the former webinar guy.

Yeah. Yeah. You know. Well, what I would say is I do know people so they if you're going to try to get it liquidating on the front end or like very high liquidation, it's pretty much F tier nowadays in my opinion just because that's pretty much impossible. The way to get it to work, like the clients I have that do have it working, which is very few because you got to be also really good at copyrighting and like your offer has to be good. It would have to be some sort of fancy thing or just something that's like a really good offer. But the way we got it to work and also the way like I have a few clients the way they're getting it to work and it's kind of funny is you liquidate 40 to 60% on the webinar and then obviously there's an onboarding call then you do the onboarding call to a sales call then they credit the investment towards if it's like a two grand auto webinar 1 grand auto webinar they and they they credit that towards like a 10K. But what most people don't understand is the way we got it to work is all the people who just opted in who didn't even watch the webinar, we just called them and sold the 10K directly, which means you have to have a good setter team and you have to have a good closer team.

And just to give people like an idea, we would do 300 RCA sales a month at 10K. 60 of them would be from the auto webinar upgrades. Mhm. 240 would be from the setters calling people who were like, "Yeah, I watched like 10 minutes." Yeah. And then the nice thing was because the damn thing was so long, we just we just didn't even tell them about the two grand, which it was a limited time offer that they had to, you know, they had to pick. So, that was also being legit. All right. Different version. This one's an interesting one.

Mhm.

Is the live webinar funnel like doing it twice a week. This is kind of coming back.

It is.

It's making a comeback.

It's coming back. you know, it's it's one full circle, right? I think um look, some of these funnels, uh to go back to the point I just made are crutches for having a poor sales department.

Yes.

And what a lot of people are doing with the live webinar funnel now, the people I've seen do it, it's not like it used to be where you'd pitch your product and it was mid ticket. People are doing the live webinar for three hours and booking sales calls and they're like closing 60% of people. It's like, well, yeah, dude. No [ __ ] They just spent seven hours going through your your ad, your funnel, reading your email, showing up to a webinar. Of course, you're closing 60%.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Um, so from a standpoint of like building a sustainable business and not having to do live streams twice a week, unless it's like your thing, uh, you know, I'd say it's definitely better than the auto webinar. It's easier to do than that, but I would still say it's like C tier. Um, you know, the the only way I would rank it higher would be like if you have someone, this isn't a great example, but like the energy of like Pace Morby who's like willing to just Yes. go to town like travel the I mean this is obvious different example, but like travel the country, meet everybody, just like loves the community, just like that type of personality can pull this off and probably make a ton of money from it. Aside from that, it's not the best model in my personal opinion.

Yeah, it does work in some verticals though. Like I have clients that do crush it with this. Uh, the issue is getting people to show up. And I think a lot of that again comes down to the audience and the offer. Uh, women markets tend to like it better. Don't know why that is. Don't know why. I just I mean look at Shelby St's doing five million a month with so for her it's like S tier, you know.

Yeah. But but that's also organic but or or it's combin I mean I mean that's she got a million followers. she's been doing a long time. Like it's a combined organic paid thing going on, which is also why it probably would work for somebody like Pace Morby.

So I think if you're like that man, it can crush.

Yeah.

But and and for what I do see it work in a lot of women markets. I know if I ran it, I just feel like people wouldn't show up. I know. Remember we ran it one time for RCA and we were like I was so skeptical people would show up. I had Martinez do the webinar because I didn't want to do it and there was like six people who showed up and like three were clients already or something. The poor guy had to do the whole webinar for like three people.

So, uh, getting them to show up is the tough part. I do think it can work as a list reactivation monthly. That that's a good Yeah, that that actually that would be like A tier.

Uh, and I do think you mentioned just as a little side note if we can go on a little detour. Uh, a lot of people they essentially they they try to fix their sales team problems with marketing. And I think it's an important like side quest to go on. There's kind of two ways well, there's really three ways that you can approach acquisition. The first way is being so strong with your marketing that the sales team is like order takers, right? And like that that that's kind of what if you can knock this funnel out or even if you can do a liquidating auto webinar which is very very hard you can essentially do that. The problem is is you got to be extraordinary either on social media or it's an extraordinary marketer and have an extraordinary offer to do that. But like the OG king of that is Alex Becker, right? To where like he would just make his marketing so good that the sal because you know he didn't want to manage a sales team, right? So that's that route. Then you have my route which is like run the app funnel which is a 90 secondond ad and then just have a really good sales team.

Yeah.

Okay. The third route is you just do both. So that you know and that's very rare to see but I would say the only one of the only people I think is doing both would be Horoszi to where like you like if I took that guy's lead I'd probably close 95%. I mean I don't know how you couldn't you know but I know his sales team is like legitimately really good.

Yeah. and he's generating basically order like these people are just taking orders and they're really good.

Yes.

So the third route is where you want to I mean that's how you get hundreds of millions if you can nail that if you can nail both and and and on the note of those three paths I totally agree uh on the path of making your marketing so good that your sales team's order takers. If you're sitting around you're like wondering right now if your marketing is good enough for that the answer is no.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, like it's kind of like finding product market fit with SAS. Like they always say like you'll know it when you have it. You know, like if if you're just able to hire sales reps and they're just instantly closing at like 30 to 50% with like very poor ramp up, you probably have it. But like Cole was saying to get there with like pure ads nowadays almost impossible and uh you need some sort of large brand and ads can be a part of the you know your market or just a really good offer to where people are willing to go through and commit to a challenge.

Yeah.

Or some sort of virtual event or a live webinar to where they they're like the offer is so attractive and the like the market is so good and so new Yeah. that they're willing to commit so much time. That's why like for whatever reason there is markets and a lot of them I see with women to where they want to do that.

Yeah.

Um, if I tried to do that again, you know, I had like three people show up. Hey, if the way you sell your product or services through phone sales, you need to stop using booking systems like one subly, close, and other booking systems that aren't designed specifically for a phone sales approach or a phone sales team. So, we at Saleskick just launched a new calendar and booking system that'll decrease your cost per book call because it's conversion rate optimized specifically for call funnels, whereas most other calendar systems are meant for corporate all-purpose booking and it'll increase your show rates. So, we've had clients see 30 to 100% increases in their show rate because our calendar system is specifically designed for call funnels and other funnels that are high volume sales call booking funnels. And the software does so much more. It's really the only product designed specifically for sales teams with inbound booking systems. So, if you're interested, go to saleskick.com, check it out. Now, back to the video.

Uh, okay. Next funnel on the list. Low ticket. So, this is a low ticket to high ticket ascension.

Yeah, not my favorite funnel. Not my favorite funnel.

We're just crapping on everything. Um well look I for more advanced folks especially in the B TOC obviously you know I mean we have clients that make you know three four five million a month with that funnel so like it can absolutely work. Is it something that the majority of the people watch this? I think like you know kind of people go through this market they go through this cycle of like you know they try a call funnel and then like it's like oh I can't close the people it's like you know same thing you just said that's like okay well I need different marketing and then they like jump to like a low ticket funnel or a webinar funnel or something and it's hard to get it to work.

Yeah,

it's really hard. Um, I mean, case in point, you and I, I mean, did we we tested two or three between the RCA BookFunnel back in the day, a couple other low ticket, you know, variations. So, it's like, and we and and to be fair, we did get to a point where we had some pretty legit traction. But then we're just like, dude, we just put in all this effort. Let's just scale our call for what are we doing? It was just much easier to do that.

Yeah.

Well, what's the what's the how would you list it? Um, I would say for certain markets, uh, I would put it at B tier. For certain markets, I would say for the vast majority of people watching this, it's D tier. It's like either either they're in the right market, but they're just not ready to take on that challenge, or they're just in the wrong market, and it's just a complete distraction.

Yeah, you're a bit of a hater on a lot of these. Big big app funnel and call funnel guy.

Uh, I I I like it, but I mean, I agree with everything you said. It's it's a more heavier marketing approach. It's harder to get to work. It's also like it's usually best to try an appunnel or a callunnel first and really get that dialed. Like I tell clients try to get to 400 to 800 a month minimum with one of those funnels and then you can test that funnel on the side because if you can get the thing is if you especially if you're B toC, if you're B2B it don't even bother. But if you're BC, if you can get that to work, you can liquidate a lot of your spend and it essentially changes the all the economics of your business and you can scale way further. Because the other issue with B toc as well is it is tough to keep the pixel from just optimizing to the absolute worst people on the planet. And having a purchase pixel really does help that, but it's very hard to it's very hard to even know what those people are going to buy unless you have like if you've had if you've scaled a call funnel to 500 grand a month, you you get an idea of okay, here's my customers, here's the perfect person, here's what they want, here's the type of low ticket offer they would really respond to, etc. So, I do think if you can get it to work, it's like amazing. But the problem is is it's it's not where I would start and it's hard to get it to work. And for B2B, it's kind of meh.

I I also think it's funny. I was talking to someone at the event yesterday and I use this example and so I'll share here. So, uh, when you're when you're building your offer, you're hiring your first couple sales people. It's really easy to allow the salespeople to sell you on changing your business. Well, that's also true when you're on Facebook and you're allowing marketers to market to you to tell you you need to switch funnels. Mhm. And um like case in point, there's a lot of I think um I'm not saying these people are lying about this. Like I'm sure it's true in certain situations, but for example, um the old adage, buyer leads buy more often. Sure. But like just because someone buys a $27 product doesn't mean they're going to buy a $10,000 product. Like and from what we saw at least the day we had, like that wasn't necessarily correlated, right? Um even like the the idea that like show rates are better from people who buy lower ticket stuff because they're buyer leads wasn't necessarily true either.

Yeah.

So I I just I think there's like um I'm not anti I mean I gave it a B tier for the for the right markets, you know. I'm not I'm not a hater of the low ticket funnel. I just think it's very complicated and you really need to be the right person in the right situation for it to make sense.

Yeah. And what's also interesting about that funnel is it literally does not work without a good setting team. Same thing with the auto webinar. So, if you need setters, you can book a call, right? That is what we do. So, um the last one we'll do is the uh challenge funnel.

Yeah. It's interesting. This one's kind of fallen out of style the last like like 12 months. Like I've I've heard about it less and less

really interesting. It's more like like the the people that I heard doing challenges are now doing webinars. More I I feel like um so I you know, I don't know. I mean personally this is the one I have the least experience with. I think it's it's okay. It's kind of like one of those things where it's like

give me a tier.

Yeah. And I will I will dude. I don't get I will.

All right. Um I think you know it's like look if you're going to do a live challenge first of all like weekly or monthly or whatever as a promotion A tier can be great as a backend promotion uh for front-end paid there are very limited situations where maybe it makes sense granted in my personal opinion, you know, it's like go through the the list of efficiency it's like challenge funnel multiple day thing that's live then you do a live webinar that's one day that's live if you can get that to work that's much better than It's just less time. And I think I gave live webinars of C tiers. I give us like a D tier in my personal opinion.

Yeah. I I've again I've seen it work. And when it does work, it can absolutely rip if your sales team is good.

Sure.

Uh the pro weirdly though it works the all the markets. I've seen it work with clients all women markets. I don't know why that is. I think just think they like challenges.

Yeah.

I don't know. I don't know. Live webinars too. But um it can work when it does work, it is one of those things where it can turn your sales team into order takers and then if you're actually really good with your sales team and your setter team with that funnel. I mean it can can scale really big. Um that's kind of how I look at it, you know.

Yeah. Can can we add a funnel? Actually, I'm

I was going to say any any we missed.

Yeah. Quizfunnel.

Oh, okay. Yeah.

What do you think about the quizunnel?

Well, we really never gave it a good hearty test.

No, I don't. But the idea of it, I really like

The idea of it. I am a big fan.

S tier idea.

Yeah.

Yeah. The uh it's interesting because the way we thought of the the quiz funnel internally, which I think would be interesting for people, is it's kind of like it's really just like an opt-in in disguise.

Yeah. you know, and going back to what we were saying before about the direct uh call funnels, um you know, optins, at least nowadays, for the most part, uh just make the cost per per call, cost per MQL too expensive to use. And so we stop using it. But then we're like, well, can we get creative and like give someone a little bit of incentive uh to to opt in via the form of a quiz and getting getting your your uh results? So, we gave it a little bit of a test. is something that I definitely want to test more uh this year. With that being said, what I will say is uh I know a couple of BTOC clients right now that were inspired by our our limited quiz test. Yeah. That are actually doing pretty well doing really well. I know another one too who's not even a client and I he's my buddy and I told him to do it because he was in the health space and essentially I was like add a quiz in front of your VSSL or whatever just like frame it like a quiz to do the pixel conditioning essentially so that like because you can get way more information if it's a quiz.

Yeah.

And I'm like only send the right things back to the pixel cuz he was getting like $10 quizzes. So, it's still a lot of data and that is the most effective way to really increase quality for B TOC and you can it's basically still just a VSSL funnel but you just frame it as a customized VSSL and maybe you do record two or three little versions of it and you can get way better quality that way.

Yeah.

So, I do actually like that. Where would we tier that one?

I think for B to C, like with what you're saying, if you can get the cost low enough, it's pretty good. Like it it can be B tier, potentially A tier.

Yeah. The key thing with this though, it's funny like this true with all the funnels. Got to have a good setting team. You know, you got to be able to set people on the quizzes. Extremely important. If you have that data, it can be great.

Yeah. Book a call down below.

All right. So, perfect. What about actually I missed one. Lead forms.

Uh, in almost all circumstances, F tier.

Yeah, I would say to D tier, but I I think I'm just nicer than super overrated in my opinion.

Yeah. The issue is I have heard that there's something Facebook released or there's something you can do to eliminate the spam and if you do that it's a lot better.

Yeah.

But the issue is is you just got a lot of spam leads. Um

well and people like they start with a lead form for whatever reason and then they like get used to having like you know $12 leads and then you put them on any other funnel where they have like a normal cost per lead then they're like upset. It's like who cares about your cost per lead? Cost per lead is stupid. I don't even look at it. People ask me what what's a good cost per lead. I'm like I don't even care. I care about cost per acquisition and ROI.

All right, so let's move on. And by the way, all of those that whole tier list is all about ads, right? So obviously if you're like famous on social media or whatever and you're like, "Well, live webinars work well for me." Great. You know, that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about specifically working when

You have no brand.

Yeah.

Basically, one one thing actually final note to hit on the funnels and you were saying this last night. I don't know if you want to share this a little bit more, but um you know, notice how we never said any of these funnels absolutely don't work. Like at some point, all funnels, all acquisition processes can work. It's not that they don't.

Maybe not the group funnel.

Okay. Yeah.

That that one might be that might be riped. Um, but aside from the group funnel, all these things can work and it's more about how you execute it, the simplicity of getting it to work. That's the big thing for most people. And then the level of skill set of your of your sales organization.

Yeah. And just your skill sets also as a marketer and where you are and your progression because again like low ticket can make a lot of sense or even the webinar thing can make a lot of sense, but you have to really know your market very well to be able to do it. So let's talk about offers. And this is just kind of general spitballing, but what offers do you see working best on ads right now? I I have some written down.

Yeah. Um well, the more done for you can get, the better. I mean that's just like the general macro trend of the industry. Uh, you know what's funny is I first experienced that because I had my bisop before we worked together obviously.

Yeah. And seven grand offer scale it to like 800 grand a month. It was it was good, you know.

And then had that following up with my business partner and then I was like, "Okay, I'm going to launch this done for you thing." And I don't ever told you like the story of like the results I got from that, but

Um, you know, I was like I had these false beliefs, these limiting beliefs about my ability to market because like like take something off the ground at that point because I had ran that one business for so long. I was like, can I do this again? Right? And so I wrote this VSSL for this, you know, same thing. It was just like we'll do it for you. We'll build you a business. And it was a 30k offer. You had to pay upfront and then you had to sign a five-year contract.

30k a year plus a profit share. And I was like, yeah. I was like, if we get like three sales the first month, like good. That's a good start, you know?

And we ripped like 26 sales and I was like, holy [ __ ]. And then I learned about fulfillment.

You know? Yeah.

But I say that to say like um I think both I mean even on the BTOC side especially obviously more you know make money niches kind of like we talk about if you want a higher quality lead solving a better problem solving a passive income problem on the side for someone is going to get you inherently a better quality lead typically than if you frame your offer as like will help you quit your job.

Yeah.

Um, so that's kind of the the general macro trend. Um, and then I mean, you know, aside from that, you have the the the the core markets of wealth, relationships, um, and health. And I mean, there's offers working really, really well in all of those right now that I'm aware of. I know you're aware of. Um, so I don't know if you have

Well, you the one thing I want to point out about what you said is kind of the I call it the barbell principle. So what works really well right now is on one end you have like usually more B2B done for you or just done for you anything in general. So that's on one end as you as you move up to wealthier customers or businesses or whatever. It's kind of like it needs to be done for you, right?

Yeah.

And then on the other side of the barbell is like mass market B TOC, right? That also works really well. Anything kind of like in between that is not great. You know, so I'll give you an example is people who go after co like if you want to go after people who start a coaching business, great. If you want to go after people who need a done for you service and already have a coaching business, great. But if you're trying to be like a coach that's done with you for somebody doing 10k a month, I call that no man's land.

Yeah.

You know, or like if you're trying to have work with a realtor doing 20k a month, it's like to do dumb with you. you're kind of on like this middle of no man's land to where you don't have the advantage of a super massive TAM and you also don't have the advantage of a really good done for you offer which again as people have gotten more sophisticated into the market they move towards I just want stuff done for me I also want guarantees I want to limit my risk which kind of reflects to Herozy's value equation of like yeah uh perceived likelihood of achievement how much work and sacrifice do they have to put in what's the time delay like that's kind of why that shifted more that way in my opinion One thing on offers too, and this is so funny because uh yesterday at the event, there was a few people I talked to and I was just like, man, I wish I would have said this like on on stage, a lot of if you're if you're, you know, pre-revenue or you're early stage, you're kind of just getting your offer validated. Uh, one of the big mistakes that I've seen lately is, you know, you have your vehicle and then you have the result that you're you're you're delivering. And a lot of folks early on confuse those things and like their offer becomes about the vehicle which in certain circumstances can work. But for example, like I was talking to a uh client uh that was like um we actually had big discussion about this. It's like hey like I help someone tell better stories, right? And there's a certain market we talked about, I won't talk about it here, but where that could work. But in most markets where that's going to work is going to be help them tell better stories to get a result, to get an outcome. Right? Another example of this is like talking to a lady with like kind of a mindset offer and like again same thing. It was like, oh, I help people, that wasn't even improve their mindset. I help people learn this process. And it was like, okay, yeah, but people want the result of the process, not the process, right? And so if you're early on or if you maybe you're getting like some clients through organic and you haven't really dialed in cold ads, that could be a reason why your offer is not working. So you're focusing on the vehicle rather than the end.

The way I explain that is you can't create desire. You can only channel it. So if you think of desire as like a moving parade that's all trying to move towards a result. It's like a stream, right? Like you can either in the case of like doing sales recruiting, we just with a direct offer just place ourselves in the stream.

Right? Yeah.

Whereas with RCA back when I launched it at least, no like there wasn't a big group of people out there that even knew what high ticketing was or remote or whatever.

Uh, let alone wanted to become one. So what I had to do is the stream was, okay, everybody wanted to do passive income, Amazon FBA, drop shipping, affiliate marketing, whatever. And basically the messaging had to essentially tap into existing desire and channel it to create new demand. Okay. So I was like, "Hey, don't do any of this. If all you want to do is make a little bit of money, blah blah blah blah blah, and do it remotely." Because back then, like remote work wasn't as like common as is now. I was I was like, "Instead of doing all that, do this instead." So I was basically channeling it to create demand. So in your example with like the storytelling thing, people aren't out there saying, you know, they don't wake up and they're like, I want to be a better storyteller today. I mean, there's maybe some people, but not a lot of people. But what they do want is to get clients. What they do want is, you know, a career shift or whatever. Or they're a corporate speaker. They want to get more clients and not be less boring at a corporate speaking. So you have to tap into that and kind of meet them where they're at. Yeah. And then through your copy channel it into what you're doing if that makes sense.

Exactly.

So I wrote down a few offers that are working well. Um, I would get your thoughts on these. So one is B2B SAS. So if you actually have product market fit and you can run ads to a high ticket B2B SAS I mean

Rips ridiculous hard part product market fit creating something somebody wants. Like so many people in my DMs pitch me new thing for sales managers that has to do with AI that I'm like yeah but nobody wants this. Your sales man the sales managers don't want this.

Yeah.

Um, etc. Yeah, on the note B2B SAS too. One piece of advice her Mosie gave me when I first met him back in early 2024.

And you know at that stage my SAS was like 10k a month, you know.

And I was like yeah and what he told me to do which everyone who has a B2B SAS hates hearing this but it's truth advice he was like yeah dude so get it to 100k um, you know a month and then just wait a year and see what happens. Yeah, like literally just get to 100K a month, wait a year to see churn, retention, like all those core metrics, fix the product, make it good, and then you can scale it. And every time I tell a SAS owner that, they go, I don't want to do that. It's like, okay, well, then you're not going to have success with ads that scale, and you'll be able to do

Yeah. What's really interesting, I you can tell me if you're wrong, uh, if I'm wrong about B2B SAS, but I feel like what people do is they really want to get the product right and then, okay, the product just grows like crazy. It's almost very similar to a service business where

You you got to get to like a million or two a year with CSM basically with a tech- enabled service. I mean, you have a product, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying you're selling a service. So, there still has to be a product first. You know, it's not like you're an agency who's lead genen and you happen to do a little bit of tech. Like, there's still a product, but it's basically getting there with, you know, you have a product, but it's a lot of service as well. And then you you have to get there to even know what the hell to build because you have to be working with customers who are actually paying you. Not saying they would pay you.

Paying you.

Yes.

You know.

Correct.

And that's what you've done. That's what Becker's done. You know, bunch of other people too.

Yeah. I think I think to some degree too where people go wrong is SAS is like it's such a wide category and there's different types of SAS. So like technically I mean obviously it's different uh business but Sam and Hermoszi and school is technically B2B SAS technically now obviously they're network effect based SAS.

Whereas what I'm doing is a, you know, sticky disc and uh switching cost based SAS completely different and the way you build those companies is completely different but people will confuse they're like they'll get advice from like this side and then bring it over this side it just doesn't make any sense.

Mhm.

Um, so yeah, I think for for the type of SAS I built that, you know, Becker did, etc.

100%. Yeah. You just kind of have to really work with your customers to understand like what are the things that drive them to stick around and not leave and that takes just a long time even for someone that was in the market, you know?

Yep. So, I would say B2B SAS if product market fit rips. The other one is instead of software as a just service as a service.

Service.

Service companies and uh obviously with with closers you know we're a great example of that but also with B2B services I mean there's a create I I won't say who it is because I don't know if they want me to say their profit margins but there's a UGC agency.

That uh people might know I don't know but a UGC agency that obviously works with like e-commerce companies home service companies companies, works with coaching companies, all sorts of stuff. Just does ads.

Yeah.

And they're doing $800,000 a month with $600,000 a month profit.

Not bad.

Pretty sick. But the key with that is just like a SAS, you know, because it's a service is you get the you get the customers, you get the businesses, and then the key is is how much they pay you after you get them. Yeah.

Right. I mean, that's cuz the marketing is going to be a lot more expensive and the sales process is much harder than B TOC in my opinion. It's much easier to sell a train a closer to sell a BTOC emotional sale, you know, make money or fix your relationship type product than it is to do, you know, B2B there's multiple decision makers. There's multiple calls. There's sometimes where like legitimately you can't one call close. The the the solutions could be a little bit more customized. The pricing could be a little bit different. But once you get those people, if you do a great job, they can pay you way so much more money for so much longer of a time and then you have great LTV to CAC which allows you to scale much further.

Yeah. And other services too. What you want to be careful of doing B2B is, you know, you start with like, okay, I'm gonna help, you know, I'm gonna do this thing in their marketing and then, you know, it's like clients come in then it's like, well, like they're not getting results because this other thing and the next thing you just know it's like your your business is just their business. You're just trying to do and then now you can't scale, you know, and so you do have to be disciplined not to do that. And uh, but if you can do that and you can consistently get people results um, there are certain services too like we've talked about this like email marketing services dude like from a fulfillment standpoint.

Now getting clients a little bit harder.

Right?

But uh, there's just certain services you can do where like they can provide a high clear ROI but they're easy to fulfill especially not with AI.

Yeah. Well, it's Yeah, that one's tough because as business owners get more savvy with AI, I think they're just going to write their own emails.

I agree.

But, um, there is probably an arbitrage window right now. What Eddie likes to do is sell them on ads and then give them the email marketing for free for a certain amount of months. I I don't know the exact offer, but it's something like that. Yeah.

And then he knows if he can get them on email, the LTV is like way longer because obviously like you got to send emails even if you fire your ad agency. They may be like, "Oh, I love your emails." But you know, whatever happens with ads. Another one I like, weirdly, is health. Uh, some of my biggest clients, 50 million in health, 100 million in health. Uh, the key with that though, is it's not just health, but it is differentiated health, especially if it has a medical telealth premium feeling to it with good messaging that allows you to charge a really high price point. Like I talked to John Madson on the last one and I mean he's doing 50 million a year and with a callunnel callfunnel for the win.

And uh, I mean the key with him is like he basically has the same lead flow is the way I think of his offer is he basically sells a health offer with the same lead flow as if I was raising money for like a multif family investment through ads. Like he basically gets accredited investors who want to invest in their health. The crazy thing is you can do that in any B TOC though.

If you frame it the right way.

Yeah.

So you can do it in relationships for sure. You can do it in health for sure, but you have to be not just like you can't just say in your ad busy professionals, right? Like the call out has to be there. It's more about how you speak to problems that only those people would have.

Which requires you to understand that market. So I don't know if you have any thoughts on that.

Yeah, I mean, you're 100% right. I think I mean, we had experience with a health company of our own that scaled exponentially.

We did. We didn't we didn't do the high net worth thing though. We did not do that.

We probably should have.

Yeah. We definitely should have.

Yeah.

You know, I mean, granted, we we had I think we had a lot of success there, but yeah.

Um, Yeah. Yeah, I mean, look, if you can dial the messaging in right, like you're saying, if it's differentiated either in, you know, the problem that you solve, how you solve it, which was kind of what we did, is like, you know, we're solving undifferentiated problems and with undifferentiated clients just in a unique way, right?

Um, or like you mentioned with John and his company, um, you know, going after a specific group of people that can pay a lot more. Yeah, I can it can definitely work and I completely agree. It's a

Yeah, the key with that is that you You can't do it's almost like a lot of fitness people just do online personal training. Like if you're doing that, you're cooked because that's just a commodity, right? That's like saying relationship coaching. Like you're cooked.

You know? You have to frame it. So in the dating space, it's it's more about okay, like what's something a high net worth like it could be um high netw orth people prenups or high net worth divorces or it could be really high successful people who have dating problems because those problems are way different than average dating problems. So if you speak it's more about if you speak to those pains, you can get those types of people, you know, same thing with health is

You got to differentiate. So what's bad again is per like online personal training bad. But hey, have you been to a bunch of different doctors and a bunch of different companies and you know something's wrong with you, but nobody can tell you what's really wrong with you and you've spent money doing this and you spent money doing that and like that's one thing like PMPA does so well is theirs is like so much more like functional medicine kind of like telealthy type of thing and obviously they do a lot of revenue. So another good offer is um, what do you think about this? Basically anything. It's like anything with AI, but specifically AI related business opportunities. So, there's a couple, right? You have

The big one is AI consulting, AI agency. That's like the new SMMA basically.

Uh, I've even seen it's just so funny. It's like everything's just AI now.

Uh, AI e-commerce.

Yeah. I've seen like AI, you know, because there's that one company, have you heard about the company that valued at 1.4 billion with two employees or three employees and they're a telemedicine company? I've also heard they're a scam.

So, I don't know what the

The situation is with that.

But, uh, that's like the AI kind of like ecom thing. Yeah.

But anyways, if you're selling that in the info space,

I think it's kind of the new frontier.

Yeah. Every every 3 to four years, you know, something kind of new cycles into the industry and it's like the hot thing for a couple years.

Yeah.

It's definitely AI right now. So,

Going to continue that way for most part.

Probably for for at least the next couple years for sure.

I think that no matter what your offer is, if you can figure out a way I was even thinking about this as I was prepping for the pod. I was like, if you could figure out a way to just add AI somehow into what you're doing. So instead of Amazon, you're now an AI Amazon agentic Amazon or whatever. I mean, that's probably a good offer. Yeah.

Uh, anything you could do like that.

I think the better, you know, because everybody it's just going to get people's attention.

Yep.

Okay. So, okay, let's move on to media buying. So, not creative. It could be creative testing.

Right? But we'll talk about creative as a separate section, like how to make good creatives or what creatives are working. But in terms of like actual media buying strategies, what's working right now or what's some things that we've actually tested? Which this could be a light section because I know that the main thing is really creative.

Yeah. Well, to hit that point for a second before I there's a couple things I could I could I could say, but

You know, just the general trend is media buying is becoming less and less and less and less important.

Uh, as platforms just remove targeting options and all that. So, and I think that's just going to continue, especially with, you know, uh, Metabot Manis and like who knows how they're going to integrate that into their actual ad platform. Like, who knows, you know? So, like I just think in general, like especially for high ticket, like ecom that's different, you know, like there's obviously different industries, but for what we do,

Definitely way less important than it used to be.

Can you explain why e-commerce is different?

Yeah, because the margins are much smaller and they need Well, a couple things. Margins are much smaller. So if they can figure out little pockets of the audience, they also have massive TAMs. Typically they have little pockets of the audience that uh have higher, you know, lower lower CAC and a higher return and they can specifically use media buying hacks to get to those people. That helps them a lot. They're also just because like this is just a general observation. I think you've seen the same observation. Businesses that have lower margins that rely on ads have to be on the absolute cutting edge of what's working.

Like case in point, uh, when we were, you know, couple maybe 18 months ago now, maybe a little bit longer, we were looking to get into Twitter ads, every single person we consulted ecom.

Yeah.

You know, so I don't know if you have any thoughts on that.

Well, I think you're missing the big one, which is there's a fundamental difference between lead genen or like high ticket and e-commerce. So with high ticket, you can only book like I only need to book as many calls as my sales team can take.

Right? But with e-commerce, that's why they use certain things like accelerating accelerated spending and cost caps and big caps and all that stuff because like it really doesn't matter if there's a pocket of 3 days where I could get five times the conversions that I can normally get.

Yeah. In that three-day pocket for whatever reason just because CPMs are low or the the iron roar or whatever it is, right? And advertisers aren't spending as much. If there's a weird 3-day pocket where I can get customers technically at a CAC that's going to get me, let's say a 1.3 is what I want, right? If I can find that pocket, I literally want to spend as much as humanly possible. Granted, there is probably like inventory and certain constraints, but those aren't like the constraints you have with a sales team. So the the reason the strategies I think fundamentally are so much more advanced is because it's more about how can I grab as many conversions in the day as I can or as little as I can.

Because also they don't want to like it doesn't like for us we have so much more elasticity in our spending because it's high ticket to where like we just want the calendars to be full for the most part every single day whereas with them it's like you don't want to overspend but you don't want to.

Uh, underspend either. And so that's why the cutting edge is always on e-commerce because they have that sort of dynamic to it. It's also why most of the strategies they teach don't really make sense for us.

Correct.

Because if I grab if I have a 3day span where I can get five times the say the conversions for the same amount of costs, all I'm going to do is book out my calendar for two weeks and then get terrible show rates.

So it doesn't make sense. I think that's the biggest fundamental difference. Anyways.

Back to back back to what whatever the loop was.

Yeah. So, uh, with our industry, the couple things that we've seen first of all, uh, in general, broader audiences are better. That assumes you do everything correct creatively, which I know we'll talk about in a second. Uh, that's number one. Even to a point where we have a lot of clients and to some extent us that have had success with just literally open targeting, right?

Yeah.

Again, pixel needs to be conditioned for that and you got to do things right creatively. So, that's number one. Uh, the biggest kind of update I would say in terms of um, what we figured out is in the last maybe 6 to 12 months um, you know, as you scale your call funnel obviously as you just mentioned the primary function is just to fill the sales calendar, right?

Now this creates an interesting dilemma where if the calendar's full and the ads are performing really well, you quite literally have no capacity to test because okay, I could cut stuff that's working well to test stuff that's working. We don't. It just doesn't. So, you end up in this weird situation.

So, what we started doing about uh, maybe six to nine months ago now.

Is launch a bunch of new creatives in $1,000 a day campaigns, $2,000 a day campaigns and cost cap it at far below the cap of a normal KPI. So, it probably won't spend. If it does spend, you're getting bookings for far cheaper than you normally would anyways. Spending 10% of its budget $2 or like nothing for us, right?

And that has actually been huge because number one is it helps us sort through well cool, which creatives should we actually break out and start testing with a regular campaign when we have the ability to do so. So, it's been huge from that standpoint. And I think, you know, as we haven't said this yet, but the last, you know, four months, we've had two months in particular that have had some of the lowest CAC numbers we've had in a long time. And this for various reasons, but I think some of the underlying changes we made to testing things certainly had an impact on that recently. So, um, that's I would say like the biggest thing. Aside from that, with you know, Andromeda being out, we've moved away from dynamic creative. We now just launch things, throw the ads in there, and let Facebook do its thing.

Yep.

And you know, it's it's working great for us.

Basically, it's chat mode.

Yeah.

To where you just throw them all in there and see what happens. How many do we throw in there?

You know, it depends. Uh, we for the testing campaigns, I mean, dude, I think as many as we can.

Yeah.

You know, um, once we have winning variations or, you know, winners,

Um, it's typically less, you know, but anywhere from 10 to 15. You could put 50 in there. Honestly, it doesn't even matter. So, just to be clear on the on the cost cap because I'm not even this is, you know, my this is my ad account. I'm not even 100% clear on what's going on. So, there's a cost cap campaign. The budget's like five grand or whatever it is a day, but obviously the the caps are so low and so competitive that we're never going to spend five grand.

Correct.

And we just throw pretty much all new creatives in there and just see if anything spends at all.

Correct.

Yeah. I think that's so much better than because I know everybody a lot of people do the sandbox and then the thing I we've tried that like three times because I always hear I hear somebody talk about it then I'm like we should try it because everybody's talking about it. I don't know. It just doesn't work as well for us.

And I also think there's an issue with that in the sense that number one, if you're sandboxing stuff and it's [ __ ] and it's super low budgets, it takes a long time to get statistical significance. So you're working off of a lot of data that's incomplete. And I think there's a lot of false correlation between stuff that works in there or doesn't work in there and stuff that actually ends up working. But it makes sense with the cost cap because if it does work in there and it's booking calls in KPI and and Facebook's serving it, that probably is a higher indicator because it's already in a campaign that's optimizing for cost per book call and is at a decent budget, etc.

And with the sandbox thing, the biggest mistake I've seen when people try to do with call funnels is they'll like judge the initial performance in the sandbox off a like like you said completely different metric. That's like, "Oh yeah, this one's getting a great cost per lead, so we should, you know, put in a scaling campaign." It's like, "Dude, that has like zero correlation."

Like the one time our media buyer made a campaign and he just put the uh clip of Michael Jordan dunking a basketball at the beginning of the ad and it got like a 5% CTR. We're like, "Well, we don't really think this is because of uh that's going to convert."

Yeah. No, that was that was uh.

Yeah. All I remember from that is it was that was like my first two weeks working with him and I was just like running through the ads and it was I just remember like looking at the sheet it was like oh the Michael Jordan ad.

What is this dunking dunking a basketball and then after that after he dunks it's like if you need setters.

Dude, well let's not dude it was 10 it was a 10second clip the first 10 seconds of the ad was just Michael Jordan.

And then the headline was Michael Jordan business advice dude and then People land on a page. It was RCN. People land on a page and it's like getting into remote closing.

It was just like.

Didn't convert, but it did get good CTRs.

CTR literally was like.

I don't even know if we tested it because I was like this isn't going to work. Uh, what else? I mean, so you mentioned Andrew meta. Um, does targeting even matter?

You know, it's funny. I I think I don't want to say it doesn't matter at all, but I definitely think it's way less important than it used to be. But the way I kind of think about it now is just like, you know, look, Facebook's a massive platform. If we can help kind of nudge it in the right direction a little bit, probably going to help, but you know, certainly I don't I don't think it's like anywhere where it used to be where it's like now we need to like get down to the nitty-gritty and have very small audiences and all that. So, you know, I I listen, if if you have a brand new ad account, brand new offer, I would certainly have some targeting. If you have a conditioned pixel and you have a really dialed in offer like we've seen plenty of people crush it with open targeting at this point. So.

Yeah. I for anybody who's wondering I mean a lot of people it just works with open targeting um we typically do targeting but it's like the audiences are 20 to 50 million. I mean they're they're really big.

Yeah.

Uh, how do we test ads? Like not not that creatives but when we're testing a new campaign, can you walk through how we do it?

Yeah, that's the whole cost cap thing, right? So.

Well, not just the cost cap, but then when we launch a new campaign, $500 a day.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. So, all right. So, we get a whole batch of of creatives that are new, like I mentioned, throw it in a campaign. Cost cap. If you want to get very technical, we take uh, the KPI for that uh, that number. And we usually start the cost cap at 65% of the KPI. So if it's, you know, $100, for example, we'd start the the cost cap at $65, $60. And usually around that range, it'll spend 5 to 10% of its total budget, right?

Uh, then based on that, we watch performance and um, you know, basically 100% of the time, you know, two to four of the ads, depending on how many you have in there, will get all of the spent. Uh, and then you just take those ads out and you're like, assuming it got, you know, relatively enough spend to like know it's okay, that's some traction. We'll break that out into its own CBO campaign. We have obviously our control uh, audiences, which for us is.

Just classic influencers, like influencer stack. And then the other one is just a 10% lookalike. Um, and then, uh, roll that out $500 a day. Uh, we have our internal rules of hey, we're going to spend three to 5x the uh KPI MQL cost which for us is about $500 a day for anywhere between, you know, the lowest end, yeah, 3 days if it's like really [ __ ].

On the highest end, six days if it's kind of borderline and then at that point, if it works, it really just goes back to the thing I brought up earlier, which is like, okay, well, what do we need to do from a sales calendar standpoint? Is there a lot of room? We need to scale the budget. Uh, is there not a lot of room? If there isn't a lot of room, we just kind of cue it as like, okay, well, when we have ability to scale or we need to or whatever, this will be one of the highest leverage things we can do is just kind of duplicate this out and spend more on it.

Um, and uh, and then, you know, obviously if we can do that right, then, then, then we will.

So, what about what about creatives? What's working with creative right now?

Glad you asked.

Yeah.

Been excited for this one.

Fun story.

Yeah.

I love telling the story, dude. So, we have a couple of internal copywriters that work with us. Excellent guys. And there's one in particular that it's really grown a lot the last 18 months. Has become a really good solid copywriter. And for the first time in his time working with us, he's got not one, but he's got two winning ads at the same time, which, you know, I know that doesn't sound like a huge accomplishment, but to to give him his flowers because he deserves it. We we our standards for ads are extraordinarily high. We're in an extremely competitive direct response niche where your stuff has to be legit to even have a chance of working, let alone working.

And to have two ads at one time working is is awesome. So like great job.

But started to show up to meetings a little bit. Was a little bit kind of, you know, uh, egotistical, you know, was kind of felt like he was taking over, you know.

Yeah. And you know, it's like I'm like, man, I got to bring this guy back down to earth, dude. Yeah, I got I got to remind him that I'm the CMO for a reason, and you still have a lot to learn, pal. And so I was kind of thinking I was like, how am I going to do that? You know, with a sales team, it's like, you know, you just kind of get on some calls, close like six deals in a row, and you guys are like, "Yeah, you're not that good." You know, but you can't, you know, how do you do that with a marketing team? So, I was like, "Okay, I'm going to just like write a banger ad that's going to like outperform his two ads." And then I was like, "Well, I can't just do that. That needs to be like embarrassing. Like it needs to be like an ad that's like, "Dude, this ad's beating your ad, dude." And so I was on Facebook just like on regular Facebook scrolling and some guy had posted just like a regular Facebook post and you know like you could do like the background color thing. So he did that.

And he did it bright red and it caught my attention and I was like that's what I'm going to do. So I went I took our like all of our offer statements. I took like our our best performing banners. I just put them in front of red squares. Not even really that aesthetically to be honest with you. Like I just kind of did a like I don't want to say halfass job, but I did like a decent job, but like not great. And then we just ran that as best ad we have.

Like not even close.

Just a red square.

Just a red square with need setters and closers.

Click below.

Best ad.

We shouldn't even tell people this.

Yeah.

Cuz this is going to ruin it.

Yeah, I know.

It's so easy to copy. Yeah.

It's got a shelf life now. So, maybe we'll delay the release of this podcast.

Well, I think I think there is actually one lesson from that, you know, aside from don't just copy everything.

Aside from that, I think the lesson is um with copywriting and creatives, you know, we've said this for for years. Clarity is everything.

I was going to say the same exact thing.

Everything. So, a number one is uh it shows you how important having a great offer is and having it being not just great conceptually, but also easy to understand and clear. So, you can literally just put that on a red square and get people to click and buy, you know, or book book a sales call. That's number one. But number two is it also just shows you like, man, uh, I just think in general people way over complicate this stuff.

Yeah. And especially professional copywriters, but even just offer owners. It's like, guys, just tell them what you do. And if what you do is not compelling enough for your market to buy, then you know, either reframe what you do, but you can only polish a turd so much.

Mhm.

Yeah.

Yeah. I I totally agree. It's a lot of it when I look at clients ads, it's just like I don't know what you're saying.

It's just what you got to have clear communication. The clearer the communication is usually the better it works.

At least it should be your starting point. That's like the prerequisite. Yeah. You know, so it and it's it's you can write indirect stuff, but it's so tough if it's not clearly communicated. Yeah.

Uh, well, what else works?

Yeah. Well, I mean, just to go through the fundamentals. So, number one is you need to have a clear call out. We kind of mentioned in the in the targeting section of this podcast that like targeting is kind of dead or like pretty damn close to it.

The targeting now is done via your ad. Yeah. Via your creative. So very clearly calling out who you want and I think there's levels to doing this. So there's like the classic coaches and agencies like okay cool, that's a group of people but you can also segment that group of people by, you know, a certain revenue level ad spend level amount of clients or something even further to a point.

Or the problem they're experiencing.

Yeah. Or the problem that they're experiencing. And so I think, you know, both in what we just said about clarity also being not just clear on what you do but who you want to work with to a point where you're literally just saying it verbatim in the ad in the copy is like required today.

Um, so that's number one. Number two is um, you know, we talk a lot about risk reversals. One thing that I don't think works very well uh now this is a little bit more contextual. It's not as black and white.

Um, so risk reversal, if you don't know that term, is like a guarantee, right? It's just another another way of saying that.

And you know, obviously there's the classic or you don't pay, which still works great, right? No issues. That's where I recommend everybody starts.

Um, but there's there's sometimes, you know, this is especially true with like usually newer offer owners. They get a little bit like kind of scared about that and they have like some of the some like limiting beliefs and they have some fear associated with you don't pay or like having really a guarantee at all. And so then what they do is they kind of like water it down and they halfass it and they're like, "Hey, like we'll help you get the result and then if we don't, then we'll just like keep working with you, right?"

You know, and I just have always seen that doesn't work, you know, or if it does work, it's definitely not optimal and you can certainly get a huge cost reduction by having a stronger guarantee. So.

I mean, that's just like 101 stuff.

Mhm.

And then just, you know, being having strong pro, it's all the basic stuff like having strong proof.

Being clear about what you say, having a clear offer, having a a specific call out, and in some cases multiple call outs. Um, but yeah, I mean, it's it's And then if you want to get if you want to get a little bit more advanced than that, if you're doing direct offer stuff, obviously the the the next the next step once you have that validated and working and scaling is um, okay, we have this direct offer. Or can we just do an indirect hook to the direct offer?

Yes. Yeah.

That's also great. Works really well. Um, although I will say it's funny. I was talking to someone yesterday and they were spending like I don't know a couple hundred bucks a day on ads. Like very very low skill and but their rorowaz literally 20x cash.

Yeah.

You know, and I see this all the time. I'm like yeah like man, you're crushing it. And they're like yeah I just made like eight creatives to test. I'm like dude, I think you just got to spend more money on ads. Yeah. Like just on your one ad just spend more and they're like you think it's not going to like you're very far from creative fatigue, you're very far, you know.

Yeah, yeah, you are.

So that that's my general uh, you know, thesis around.

Well, a lot of people say just on that note, a lot of people, you know, Hormosi talks about more better new. What I found is that people they like to like at first they they're doing well at first, you have to do new because you got to start something.

And then what's funny is is people go like some people people r very very rarely stick with more. What happens is is they do a little bit more and then they shift to better and then they procrastinate in better.

It's like a perpetual procrastinate there when they actually need to go back to doing something just just more of what's working. Which is like the classic like well you're doing 10 or 20x on ads, why aren't you just spending more and hiring more sales people? And they're like.

Well, you know, I think I need to do this with my fulfillment. And it's like, "No, you don't. You don't even know what to do with fulfillment yet till you kind of like strain it or break it or whatever." Or they're like, "Well, I think my ad cost is going to go up." Okay, great. You're doing 20x, you know? So, there's that. Or they go from more a little bit of more, right, to new again. Yes.

You know, that's like the other thing that's very key is there's, and it just depends on, there's, it really actually both of it is actually driven by fear. And I'm not saying like we all have fear, you know. I'm not saying these are fearful people or whatever, but it's like they're scared to scale or fix the next problem. Yeah. So, they just go to doing something new and starting over until they hit the same barrier again. Or they just procrastinate and better forever. A lot of our clients, it's procrastinate and better forever, where it's like they just try to optimize and optimize and optimize. And I'm like, "I think you just need to add more sales people and spend more money."

Yeah. Can you actually share a little bit of what, because I, I just think this will be so impactful for a lot of people listening, what you were sharing yesterday about the, once you have something validated, there's like this phase of business that's like the limiting belief phase. And it's like the, "Oh, I have to like build all these foundations and I got to like, like," and without actually stress testing anything, they kind of get stuck there. So, usually this is between 50 and 250 or 50 and 300 grand a month, where essentially you get something off the ground and you get to this point where it's working. And really what happens is, it's, it's the first phase where you actually are required to relinquish some degree of control, right? To where either you can't have every sales call, you can't do, uh, all the, you don't know all your client's names, you don't work with every client individually. It's kind of that phase. And so what happens is, is people just procrastinate there. And there's just kind of this fear of like, "Okay, if I scale past there, like, are all my clients going to hate me? Are they going to show up at my house? Are they going to freaking egg me in the street if they see me in the street? Are they going to, you know, all refund and charge back on," you know, they don't even have refunds, but they're like, "They're all going to refund." And so people like to perpetuate in that kind of like, it's the biggest limiting belief sticking phase is usually 100 to 300 grand a month. And like they're trying to just like make their closers go from 22% to 28%. And they're just like constantly focused on that. And I'm like, "Dude, you're doing like 15x ROAS. Like, just hire your next closer. Spend more on ads." Or they're like, "I need to, I need to fix my fulfillment. Fix my fulfillment." I'm like, "You have to essentially grow a little bit more to stress or break the fulfillment even a little bit and you know, crack some eggs to make an omelet." Like, you got to, because once you stress the systems, it gives you clarity on what to build next. And so that's like the big concept here is that you can't, the people like to over systematize and just sit there and build spreadsheets and build systems and build this thing. And now with low-code, it's like you can just spend hours in that thing and you don't even know what to build until you start to stress or even break those systems. Then it becomes 100% clear on what to build.

So, the clear thing, the clear example I have is that when we were doing the recruiting in the very beginning, at first it was just essentially, uh, me getting people from my audience because I had a lot of sales people following me. And then, and then, you know, I had one recruiter and then eventually we had two recruiters. And we had no idea how to eventually build a 20-person recruiting team that does full cycle, that does outbound, that can do customized search, that can go to different countries, we can do multilingual, we can do in-person, we can do virtual, we can do door-to-door, we can do everything. I had no idea how to build that. But we just kind of took a step, took another step. We kept selling more clients. And then the systems would stress and then we would figure out, "Oh, okay, we need to separate roles and have recruiting coordinators and RAMs. RAMs work with the clients. Recruiting coordinators actually the ones who source the deals." And then it's like, "Okay, the next thing is we need to move over to an actual centralized like data system." So we use AA, then that broke, then we moved to HubSpot, then that broke, then we moved to an ATS. And so it just kind of. But would I have known any of that from the very beginning? I mean, I would know now if I restarted all over from scratch, but I mean, it was just easier and better to build those things over time and let it break or stress a little bit and then you get the clarity of how to actually do that.

The only reason I didn't go through that phase myself, but I, I really did like from 100 to 500, because basically really 150ish to 200 a month, which is where I was at, to 500 a month was a 30-day span for me. So, like we just jumped. And that was, I, I felt myself being super stressed because I didn't know who the clients were. I couldn't work with everybody. But what got me through it is, is when I was a full-time salesperson, essentially, uh, the program I was selling, all the clients, the guy who, you know, Taylor, who I used to work for, this was the main thing he would hammer home with people. They would stay in this procrastination over systematized type of phase and they just, "You need to grow to know what to build." Like, you need to kind of like stress the infrastructure to know how to actually build the infrastructure because it ends up being different for all the clients. So you have to create the problems and then you know what problems to solve. So that's kind of the, the main point there.

On the note of that, on the back end of that, uh, this is a very controversial take, but that is the single biggest problem with the theory of constraints. Is the theory of constraints presupposes that there's a problem that exists. And so if you're at 15x and you're like, "I got to follow the theory of constraints. My ROAS isn't or this is my close rate is not good enough or whatever," then instead of just realizing like, "Actually, wait a minute, the constraint, the theory of constraints is around a system growing until it breaks." The system hasn't broken. It continues to grow. You have to, you have to increase volume to know where the constraint is. And, and so I think, I think people can can sometimes misconstrue because obviously theory of constraints is very helpful, but people can misconstrue that and and be like, "Well, I need to keep looking for problems." When and then they're just kind of making up a problem that isn't.

Hey, if you're enjoying this video and you want to work more personally with either me or my team, we can help you in two different ways. Number one, we can help you install marketing systems so you can generate more leads and ultimately scale the revenue of your business. Or B, we can help you with your sales team by placing setters or closers in your business. And if they don't perform, you don't pay. We can also help you scale your sales team, systematize your management, all of that stuff as well. So if you're interested in either of those, there's a link in the description or in the first comment. You can check it out. Now, back to the video.

Back to creatives. So red squares work really well. But one thing I want to highlight what you said was, uh, what works really well in the beginning is just doing a direct offer. Okay. Um, now, and even if you do low ticket, we tested a bunch of ads when we've done low ticket over the years. Do the direct offer for low ticket where it's just like, "For $27, you can now get this thing."

Uh, that actually worked the best too. So you do as many different variations and versions of that as you can.

Right. I would say, and this is what you said, I'm just highlighting it to kind of come back to it. Then the way you scale that is you have to sort of enter into the conversation they already have in their mind, whether it's the problems they're experiencing trying to solve or something that's going to catch their attention and kind of go indirect for like 20 seconds and then you pivot to the same offer. And that expands your market so much for the direct offer, right? But it's still, I mean, you could still just make the offer in the ad. Everything is in the ad. Yes.

So that's kind of the concept there. Um, in terms of AI, are we, how much are we using AI for creatives right now?

Yeah, so we use AI primarily, uh, right now and, uh, well, for creative specifically, uh, for additional creative production and like UGC style stuff. So to give a shout out to a software that we've liked a lot is Arcads. And I know it's funny, we first got on Arcads, I think early on when Arcads was around and then like in the span of that coming up, there was like V3 popped up and like other stuff popped up. And we tested those things and obviously we had some stuff work with that. But I will say the way Arcads has their system structured where it's like it's a real person that like essentially is lending out their likeness and it was filmed like how an ad would actually be, like their their likeness was originally filmed how an ad would actually be filmed for space. It just converts really well. It's funny, someone yesterday, uh, at the event asked like, "Have you seen a difference in conversions or, uh, any changes in those metrics with, um, you know, AI ads versus regular ads?" In short, no. Uh, I do think it's kind of skewed data from our standpoint simply because all of our video ads are either edited to a point where it's really hard to tell the difference between a human and,

True. Uh, and then also, uh, you know, the ones that aren't that way are like the Loom style ads that we do, which is another format that's working really well right now, where it's literally just a Loom video,

With a document.

With with a doc. Goes back to clarity, right?

Yeah.

But then it's just like this little circle at the bottom of the screen that like, you know, it's kind of, it's such a small part of the screen that it's kind of hard to be like, "Oh, that's AI," you know?

Um, so that's that's the main way that we're using it now. Um, but yeah, I don't know if you had another point on that.

No, I mean, what's interesting is that we really only have, and this is what I talk about, is we probably only have like five to seven fundamentally different creative concepts. Like we have our direct offer, then a lot, probably several more indirect hooks into the direct offer. There's not that many like fundamentally different creatives. We get, and when we get one that can unlock like an extra hundred grand in spend.

Yes. Most of our volume is just creative ways to use different faces, AI, different editing, different backgrounds, different way it's filmed, uh, different formats like the Loom video, etc. The red square to just say the same exact thing. Yes.

And that's why, you know, I came up with this saying a long time ago. It's not how many offers you could sell, it's how many different ways you could sell the same offer, right? It's actually the same concept because in a weird way with the like the better new thing, what's interesting about like the better phase is you are kind of finding different new ways and new ads to just communicate the same thing that ultimately hits different pockets of the audience because it resonates in different ways or it's new or whatever. And then that essentially raises your ceiling for scale and on the curve of diminishing returns, it kind of like puts you back further on the curve before you actually have to, you know, and then it allows you to do more if that makes sense.

Yeah. Thinking like, you know, to go back to what we were talking about earlier about the people that are like 20x ROAS and have something that's working and they feel like this need to like make a bunch of different ads. It's not necessarily like a bad thing per se because it'll help you understand your market better if you do more research and all that. It's, it's, it's more of like, "Hey, this is just the easiest path to grow your business." And if you have something that's working, let's just spend more money on that, make more money from it. Um, and to your point, yeah, like there's angles and there's variations. Don't go make a bunch of angles. If you have one thing that's a 20x cash ROAS, probably don't need to do that, especially at $100 a day. But as we scale that, sure, if you go from $100 a day to $2,000 a day, probably want a couple different variations of you saying the same thing.

That makes a lot of sense. Um, so I, I think, you know, there's, there's nuance there where it's like a lot of our creative testing, the reason why we're able to spend so much aside from the change that that we made from a testing standpoint on the media buying side, is also just like, "Hey, like we emphasize making a bunch of variations of stuff we know works and it's much higher likelihood of working again."

So, show rates. What's working there?

Yeah. Well,

That's a big one.

That's a big one. Um, yeah. So, a couple of key things. Uh, the first thing is, is I mean, and this is just like following all the basics. Like, let's just, let's just recap the basics. It's like, number one, your booking window should be two days, three days maximum. Um, with very, very few exceptions to that. Like if you're like a founder doing all the sales calls and you have to have maybe four days or something, okay, not ideal. Um, but yeah, two days is like recommended. Also, this is a nuance thing, but rolling availability is so important. So, rolling availability is when your calendar shows you the next couple days of open appointments rather than the next day, the next two days just period.

Uhhuh.

Because what happens is like, you know, it'll be Friday morning, you're not taking sales calls Saturday, Sunday. And so now, you know, if you don't have rolling availability, it just shows you, "Hey, here are your Friday appointments," and then that's it, right? And obviously, yeah, this is kind of aside from show rate, but, uh, you ain't going to book any calls if there's no availability. So, let's fix that.

Um, on the note of show rate and availability, next thing is, and Hermosi says this all the time, is just opening up as many slots as possible on the calendar. Uh, this is especially prevalent this mistake, uh, with smaller businesses with smaller teams where it's like they have one sales rep or this them taking the calls and they have two hours open, you know, every morning or something, and it's just, that that doesn't work. So you want a good wide range of availability. I would especially preface, we've done a man, we should have pulled this up before, but,

Um, we've done a couple times show rate reports on per day as well as per time slot.

Yeah.

And we found that like PST in the afternoon and evening, specifically PST time, pretty good show rates. Yeah. Like that's usually better. So make sure your reps are talking that time, but also, you know, if you have the ability to to do that report, I would do that.

Right.

You know what's interesting? Matt found the same exact thing with dialer with answer rates in PST afternoons into evenings.

So staggering reps to do that. We should, we could do that, but you know,

My reps like to have dinner.

They do.

Family time.

We probably should do it though. Probably should probably should stick somebody on it.

Yeah. Yeah.

Um, okay. So that's on the like calendar side. I mean, other basic stuff is, you know, you got to separate ads call show rate versus setter show rate KPI. For setter show rate is minimum 70%. We've seen it get much higher than that.

Yours is like 85, 90.

So that's just like the minimum. You could actually probably touch on.

Well, I'll just, yeah. I was figuring I'd have to get to it at some point. So with setter show rate, I mean, the TLDDR is if your setter show rate's bad, it's usually not, like everybody likes to think, "Oh, it's probably something they're saying at the very end when they're booking." I mean, it could, there is certain things you should say. Okay, if you want to know what they are, I have videos on that. You can just check them out on my YouTube. But the main thing is usually that your setters just aren't good and they're just booking an appointment to get off the call. So if your setters are really good, and like, just think about it, if like you get cold called in the middle of the day, most cold calls are terrible. And you talk to an extremely intelligent person who makes you think about your business or your life differently, you're probably going to show up on the next call.

Yeah. If the like, if you call the person, they're probably going to have a 100% show rate, 90% show rate. Like if you, as the founder, called the person. So if we know that as an extreme, we know that okay, that's probably true. So the number one thing is training your setters to make them good. A lot of times is just hiring better setters. You know, uh, it's worth saying. I feel like I said it on every podcast like the last, you know, freaking three months is that we basically raised our setter pay by about 30%. It cost me an extra $25,000 a month. We got so much more production because we essentially were able to hire better setters just by getting into a different trough of like the recruiting talent pool. And because our setters were like closer level basically setters, they booked so many more appointments that showed and closed at such a higher rate that we were able to reduce our ad spend by $250,000 a month for for basically a $25,000 investment. So that was unreal. And it made the calendar way more efficient because the setters calls show more. So that's the whole setter deal. If you want to know how to train your setters, I'm sure there's stuff on the channel.

Other basic mistakes that come up surprisingly a lot is just a complete lack of consistency in the funnel process, uh, for the, for the, for the lead and prospect. Uh, where like they'll land on a like, let's say they're doing a VSL funnel, land on the VSL page, it's like a white background and they go to the application page, it's like blue, and then they go to like the thank you page and it's like orange, and it's just like,

Gez.

I mean, I've seen that so many times. Yeah. You know, another, another one that weirdly doesn't happen as much as the colors, thankfully, but like does happen sometimes is like someone will like, they're in their stage of validating their offer and then they've tested like three or four offers, right? And they finally get one that's like, "Okay, this is working." And then they start scaling it and they're like, "Oh crap, like my show rate sucks. What's going on with my show rate?" And then I audit it and I'm like, "Well, bro, your ad, the offer is this. Your VSL, the offer is like slightly different. It's this." But then you get to the application, you have your application from the first offer, completely different offer, like completely different pain points, desire, like everything. And then guess what your confirmation pitch is from your second offer? It's just like, "Dude, don't you think people are a little bit confused?"

Yeah.

You know? So surprisingly, uh, common.

Yeah. Better ads generally not always lead to better show rates.

Yes.

And we even do something, you have to do our audit system to be able to do it, um, because it's kind of complicated, but every two weeks we look at show rate per campaign.

Yes.

And because we're able to do that, we have identified sometimes it's, it's a more of a leading metric than waiting 45 to 60 days in a bunch of ad spend to look at CAC.

Yes. Because you know with Hyros, you can look at cost per acquisition per campaign, but to get statistical significance, let's say if your CAC is three grand, you're going to have to spend like $20,000, probably $30,000 in my opinion because also all the sales don't necessarily log to the right ad. Correct. So you're going to spend a bunch of money to figure out which campaigns have the best CAC. And it's tough because sometimes they'll get three sales in a week, other times they'll get zero, you know, or did they really get zero and it just didn't log? So, but you can look at show rate per campaign. And if the show rate per campaign is at 30%, I just know that's not going to work. I've had other ones that are 70%. You probably know that's going to work, right? And so, but it also shows because a lot of B2C people will get terrible show rates. I'll look at their ads and I'm like, "Yeah, well, you're just getting scammed traffic." Like, it's really bad. But also talk about, uh, what they should do with email, SMS before lead nurture, stuff like that.

Well, before I hit that, actually, on the note of doing that thing, new version of Salescake, uh, we'll be able to do that in Hyros natively.

Nice.

Which is pretty sick. So that'll be great.

Uh, on the on the note of emails and SMS. Um, so there's kind of the way I look at it, there's like three different reminder sequences for ad calls. You need to have. First is just your basic automated communications. Uh, this is like your, you know, automated messages that literally like very clearly automated. It's like your appointment was booked at this date, you know, do not reply or whatever, right? Um, same thing with your email. Like your booking system probably sends out some basic emails. It's just like, "Here's your appointment," you know? Then you have, um, what we do in HubSpot, but you have like your, you know, actual written copy emails. You know, for us, what we do is we introduce the sales rep that they're meeting. You know, we just have like kind of some similar copy that pre-frames them as an expert and all that and, you know, gets them bought into that a little bit, as well as, you know, continually sends them our homework video or like kind of confirmation page to get them more bought into the agenda and what they're going to, you know, learn or, you know, etc. Um, and then we have our LNS system, which is a whole another stream of communication. So LNS stands for Lead Nurture Specialist. And the goal of that is like, you know, first and foremost, this isn't rocket science, but would you guess people who write down and confirm via text that they're going to show up to a call show up more often? Yes. You know, like rocket science, right?

And so, um, a lot of times, you know, the reason why a lot of people struggle with show rate is it's like a lagging metric that could have, you know, as Hermosi says, there's no one silver bullet. There's 100 golden BBs. So, there could be like a hundred factors that affect your show rate. And because it's a lagging metric, it can be really difficult to identify what the core problems are. Well, what's nice about having an LNS is we, we track internally like, "Hey, we know our confirmation rate, meaning people who respond to the LNS and say they're going to attend the appointment is, let's just say 50%." And when somebody confirms the appointment, we know that their chances of showing up are like 90%. Right? So, okay, cool. Well, guess what? Uh, now we can, instead of having to like guess what affects show rate, we can just split test our copy when we send the messages, the vehicle in which we use, like, do we text on SMS, iMessage, we talked about that, right? WhatsApp, you know, etc.

Uh, to increase that confirmation rate because we know, "Hey, when people confirm this, they show up at 90%." Right? So it takes it from a lagging metric and gives you something actionable on the front end to to do that directly correlates. Right. Right.

Um, so that's been huge. Couple tips on that that like universally work really well is number one, when you send the initial block of text. Um, and I say block intentionally because human beings do not typically send massive paragraphs in one text out of out of the blue to somebody. It's usually like, "Hey Cole," and then send, then, you know, "This is D," send, right? Um, but when you send that text to make it personalized for the person, like legitimately from their application, that typically yields higher confirmation rates. We've tested and this is both at Closers.io as well as at Saleskick with a bunch of clients. Um, you know, the difference between confirmation rate and what we call confirmation show rate, um, based on at what point do you confirm? So, meaning, do, if, when the person books, do you confirm immediately? Do you wait till 24 hours before? Do you wait till five hours before? Whatever. And what we've seen is that it's almost always better to confirm as soon as possible. Uh, and the reason why is your confirmation rate will be significantly higher, obviously. Um, now the drawback to that is your confirmation rate will be a little bit lower. Like obviously, if you confirm an appointment two hours before the appointment and someone says yes, they're going to show up, right?

Uh, but in general, the throughput overall, overall shows is higher.

Yes. So, so that's that. And then, uh, if you have a, you know, good LNS system like we have at Saleskick and what we've built out at Closers.io, uh, it's not just about confirming them one time, but it's continually nurturing them throughout the process between when they book an actual call.

Sending more stuff.

Yeah.

Yep.

Um, so that's on the reminder side. Did I miss anything?

Well, there's email.

Well, the basic email reminders, right? The only thing I do want to add, we actually haven't run the secondary test on this because we forgot, uh, but I did notice our show rates have been a lot better the last month or two.

Yeah.

Um, and this could just be for no reason at all. Or remember, one of the things I noticed is we would send like six or seven content-based emails before because it's like, we want to hammer them with a lot of, you know, I kind of got this from Jeremy Haynes too. It's like, you want to kind of hammer them with a lot of emails. If you make them valuable and it's just content-based, they can't get really mad that you're sending them content.

Yeah.

But like by the nature of you sending them valuable stuff, you also, you also are reminding them about the appointment. No. So I started doing that and sending them a bunch of videos. And then I realized, okay, they're opening the emails a lot. They're clicking a little bit, but then they're not even watching the videos. So I like tracked it all the way through. So then I was like, "Let me just have all of the content just be written."

Yeah.

In the emails. And I don't know if that is a direct correlation in show rates, but since we did implement that,

Rates have been much better.

Um, the show rates have been much better. Yeah. And regardless, even if they're not better, I guarantee more people consume the content because it's written.

Yeah.

So, like, I don't know why you wouldn't do that. So, we do send a pre-call video. So, we do send one video still that's like the main video we want them to watch. That's the one we also send through the LNS. And a lot of people do watch that.

Yeah.

But like the other stuff I would send them on like, you know, I had a training on how to go from zero to eight figures and this and that and they're like, you know, 30, 40-minute videos, they just weren't watching that. So we just converted that into text.

Yeah.

And then even if they read half of that, that's more consumption than it, you know, they weren't even watching the video basically.

Yeah. In general, like if you want to improve your show rates, it's kind of to make, very simplify it, three steps. Number one is implement best practices in your marketing material, in your funnel, etc. Uh, to ensure you're, you know, you're getting the lead in the best possible place that you can from a show perspective. That's like the first third. Second third is do the exact same thing. Implement best practices, uh, for your like pre-call process, right? Um, and, you know, best practices are a lot of stuff we just covered. There's probably a little bit more, but in general, if you do what we say, that'll help a lot. Then the last third is where I think people can get stuck when they've already done those two things and it requires a very detailed level of tracking and, uh, data, you know, just review. We've been able to do that obviously at Closers.io, but like what you just said is a great example, which is like, yeah, sending them content is great. We found for our audience that actually having them read it yields a better result. In order for us to figure that out, we got to not only track the open rate, the click-through rate, but also the show rate of the people who read the emails. Yeah. Who watch the video, etc. So, uh, and I think that's where people can get stuck with show rate issues is, you know, to solve a marketing problem, to solve a sales problem, takes a very different part of your brain than solving like a deep operational issue.

And, um, and yeah, so I just, you know, it just goes back to like, you need a good operating system, you need good tracking and,

Yeah. And to be clear, with show rates, the overarching goal is yes, to increase the show rate, but it really is to increase the number of live calls held per month per closer. And so this is where the double and single booking comes in, which is we look at all of this data. A, a part of the data that we look at is you could even look at how much they interact with emails, but we actually don't do that. We look at, do they confirm? Do they not confirm? That's like the biggest one, right? And then we also look at stuff in their application. So there's different show rates depending on what they put in revenue level. There's different show rates even depending on the the handle of the email they use, Gmail versus company email versus Yahoo, AOL, whatever.

Company email is by far the best. Gmail is actually the worst. Yahoo and AOL for whatever like second, you know, but company email was the best. There's even, okay, what type of offer do they have? That could relate to the show rate. Uh, employee count could relate to the show rate. Uh, the length of response categorized into different buckets. Do they respond to the open-ended sections with one word versus a lot of words versus like paragraphs? It's like, I think we found the middle one,

Was the highest show rate. So if you identify segments of what their application data is and you identify, okay, that segment is, in our case, we like above 67 and a half percent. Then we let that stay on the calendar, single booked. Correct.

And then stuff that maybe is not as much, we double book. Yeah.

And ultimately our goal, and this is a hard science to get, is the optimal number. I mean, it really depends on your actual show rate, but if you know what your net show rate is, for us, we know the optimal number of double bookings is about 40% of the calendar, right? After that, it's just too many live calls and there's diminishing returns. Below that, the closers aren't getting enough live calls. We, we also have segmented by source. So we know that we, not weirdly, I mean, this makes sense, but if they come from the website, even if they originally came from an ad, but then went to the website and then they booked, that's like a, we always single book it. Amazing show rate. We also know similarly, if they even come from an ad, but then book through Instagram, whether it's through DM or link in bio, that's always a single book. And those are usually probably higher information people, so they've just done more research before they booked. That's my, I don't care what the reason is. I just know that's the reason. Or sorry, I just know that they do show higher. So those are all single booked. And a lot of times I think 100k a monthers are also plus people are single booked. YouTube people single booked. But then a lot of other people, depending on what they put, whether they confirm, don't confirm, uh, a bunch of other data points you can aggregate together, might be single booked or might be double booked. Correct. Right. So, that's the whole like, if you really want to have a fine-tuned sales op system, you have to have that all in place. And I know you're not going to be nice enough to say it, but Saleskick basically does that to, um, it essentially does all of that in a software that's that's pretty cheap, way cheaper than you could do to build a sales ops department. So, you can go to sales, saleskick.com.

Saleskick.com if you want to check that out. Plug.

Sir. Yeah, you're not gonna plug it, so I had to plug. I appreciate. On on on the note of, um, data points that correlate to show rate too. One thing that's really interesting because we, we obviously, there's some companies that do this now. We're one of those companies that has the financial data piece. And we've seen that by and large, credit score can directly correlate to show rates.

Yeah.

So, which kind of makes sense if you think about it, like it's a level of responsibility and all that. Um, so just easy trend to remember is anything 700 and above, significantly higher show rates than anything below 700. There's another data point you can factor in. And you can also like, kind of combine. And it's almost like, you know, how an audience targeting with Facebook, uh, this is getting pretty advanced, but, you know, how you could do like, "I want them to follow Tony Robbins, and they have to follow Grant Cardone, and they have to follow this person." It's almost the same. Like you could be like, "They have to confirm," like, "What's the rate of people who confirm and put this in their application?" And then those two things by themselves might not be above the threshold of single booking, but together could be. And again, like, you're not going to be able to do that on your own without like an actual software system to do it.

Correct.

So, uh, moving on. You had some questions for me.

I do. I do. So, well, we were talking yesterday at dinner and I know this, uh, couple days ago, you had a dinner with some of the larger names in the space. Dean, Dean Graziosi, Jeremy Miner, Pace Morby was there, uh, John Mattson was there, uh, Chandler Bolt was there, and Brian Brandon Pian was there. I think I hit everybody. If I forgot somebody, I'm sorry.

Well, and it's funny.

You're still, you're still important. I swear.

You were, uh, you were sharing some of the lessons that Dean was sharing with with.

He's the man. Yeah. So, well, I mean, it's, it's, I like I said yesterday, I can't, like, I'm going to say what he said and it's going to sound super basic because I'm not Dean and he just, the way he would frame it and say it, it, it was just dropping bombs. Like, they were just amazing. But, you know, so the thing about him that is I respect so much is he's been in the industry like legitimately the direct response industry, coaching, helping people, whatever you want to say it for 35 years, right? Which it's like, Dean and Tony, and then there's basically like, no, like, there's a huge gap between whoever the next people are. You know, he started in legitimately like infomercials with real estate. Then he's been through the auto webinar book funnel phase where you do the book to the auto webinar to the high ticket thing. He's done the challenges, the affiliate promotions. He's done, I mean, he's literally done everything. Which one of the things he said that was really interesting is, uh, after all that experience, he's just seen over time that everybody likes to cling on to tactics.

Whether it's this AI thing, or it's low ticket, or it's high ticket, or it's this funnel. And he was like, "It's all [ __ ]." He's like, "I've been doing this 35 years. There's never been a time where something like everything works." He's like, "Everything literally works. It's just what works for you. They're all tools. What's your problem? Find the right tool and like, how proficient are you at using the tool?" You know? So, like, everything has worked. And then things also just come back around again and again. Like now, like we were talking about, live webinars are kind of coming back.

I feel like the high ticket funnel was out, then it was all low ticket, now it's kind of like also back again. Um, you know, there's just so much stuff that just comes round and round and round. Another thing that he said was really interesting is, you know, most people have campaigns, not a company.

Yeah.

And so he was talking about, you know, when people, and you see this all the time, like they come out of nowhere, they hit a million or two million a month or five million a month even, and everybody's like, "Oh my gosh, look at this person. They're amazing." It's like, you have to weigh the person in a timeline and not just in, you know, what's their revenue right now? Oh, they just came out of nowhere for the last two years. Because so many people, they might be able to get a great marketing campaign. Doesn't mean they can number one, run a business. They can do it. They can, uh, have a great team. They can be a great leader. They can do right by their clients. And, you know, that really resonates because I've just worked with so many clients over the years who skyrocket like crazy,

And then boom, they're just gone. It's like, where did that person go? And, and, and sometimes even the, the fact that they skyrocketed so fast is like an indicator. I mean, they, they just, they left as soon as fast as they came up. Yeah. You know, because they can't build the infrastructure and everything behind it. So really longevity in this game, I think, is the coolest thing and the thing that you have to respect most about people. And it's just funny. I mean, from his perspective, it makes sense. Like he's been doing it 35 years. He's probably not even going to like recognize you as a legit person until you're in like, I don't even know, maybe at least five, but maybe even longer than that. I don't know what his barrier is, but, you know, I've seen that so many times with clients. Eight figures, boom, gone. Eight figures, have a client revolt and FDC or whatever.

Well, and it's sad. It's sad because it doesn't have to be that way. I mean, obviously, you, you kind of blew up and you had a skyrocketing moment and like, you're still doing great. Like, you're running a good company. Um, and there's, there's, there's examples of that, too. Like, it doesn't have to be that way. But I think people just, you know, they just focus on the, the wrong stuff. And, yeah, I don't know if you have a take on like a deeper take on what causes that to happen.

Well, I, I think just they grow faster than their skill sets allow them to build the infrastructure to support the growth, right? So like they, and the other thing is that, well, so on the first thing, what I mean by that is they're good at marketing and sales. They grow really fast, but where they lack is systems, client fulfillment, leadership. They lack on backend, uh, certain things like that. And so their clients just all like don't get results, or their team always leaves. Like team churn is something that just set you back and back and back and back. The other aspect of that, remind me the question because I had another, I had a part two. Oh, just what do you think causes the.

Yeah, it's the skill sets and then, oh, man. I had something that was also really good. Um, it'll come back to me.

Well, one, one I can add is just like failed partnerships.

Well, that is a huge one. Yeah.

Yeah, that's like super 50/50. A lot of, especially with younger people. Yeah. You know, you just get in a partnership and it's just the wrong person. Expectations aren't set up from the beginning. Also, both people come into money really quickly and then people change when they.

Get money.

Yeah. And then then you set up the classic like, "Yeah, we're, we're going to be exactly 50/50 partners, so if anything happens, we're going to be stuck."

Yeah.

That's what I did.

Yeah. There you go. There you go.

Um, cool man. Yeah. Last question. I thought it'd be kind of fun to end it with is obviously, dude, you've been a part of so many different offers. We've worked on a ton together, obviously. Uh, and I'm just curious like.

I remember what I was gonna say. I remember what it was. I was like, "I'm not gonna let this go." The other thing, and I've noticed this a lot recently more, I mean, it's always been going on. I've just always realized it. But the second thing in terms of why people they flutter out is it has surprised me how many people in the space just care about adding zeros. See, I was telling you this yesterday, adding zeros and just trying to get to 5 million a month, 7 million a month, or whatever million a month that is, the big number for them. Yeah. Yeah.

And I get it, you know, because when you make a YouTube video and you're trying to like get people to understand why they should listen to you, you want to state your, I mean, I do the same [ __ ]. I, I, I get it. It works better in marketing if you do it. So, you're kind of always trying to like, you know, build your authority. That's part of the marketing message most of the time. Um, but so many people chase the big revenue or cash collection figure. I mean, heck, a lot of people, they just report contracted, not collected, which if you're a corporation and you're working with enterprise businesses, that's fair because they legally will pay or they know because they don't want to get a lawsuit. Yeah. But, you know, if you're working with like small business owners doing 10 to 20, 30k a month, like if you're, I don't care that you locked them in for a three, a three-year contract, like they're not going to pay that, right? Uh, a lot of them are not going to pay. They're going to churn, right? But you're reporting revenue and not collected. So there's people who do that, but even if it is collected and they're reporting.

That, they just report that and they're like, "Oh, we're this big. We're this big. We're this big." And then behind the scenes, and I know this a lot because my advantage is, you know, we have a recruiting company. So when there's mass exoduses of companies, I get the recruits and then, you know, we just kind of hear what happens with the companies. Yeah.

And a lot of them are just, oh yeah, there was no profit, so they cut the staff by 40%. And I'm like, okay, well, that's what you'd probably get for scaling so fast. But people just want to be big. They want to add the zeros. And that's another thing Dean said is like, you know, he literally went through that phase at a certain time where, you know, he got all the way up, I think, in one business to 200 million. This is way back in the real estate days. And he was like, I was making literally the same amount of money as I was making at 50. And at 50, I had less stress and I was getting my clients better results, you know?

So, I've thankfully I've always been really vigilant about margins because you can't take revenue and deposit it into Chase. You can't take units. You can't Chase Chase Bank doesn't they don't they don't accept units contracted or your topline cash collected. They only accept profit. And I want to deposit in the Chase Bank. Yes. So, I've always been like, I want to grow the profit. And then sometimes I tell people, you know, what our profits been over the years. are like, "Oh man, you're so good at the profit thing." I'm like, "I don't know. I'm just trying to run a business." Like, "I just want to make money."

Well, it's so funny cuz it's like this industry is so well known for being a cash flow business and then people don't focus on cash flow. Yes. And that's the other thing that he said too. He gave this spiel about gratitude which sounds so basic. The way he did it though, I was like, "Yeah, I got to be more grateful." But also just how uh there is just few so few businesses where you can really you know if you go into the tech space and you tell somebody like what your profit is or what your cash flow is in a business like this they're always like oh my god like I wish they're like I wish I had I want to start a coaching business and then our our space is like I want to start a tech business you know and both work obviously and both are great and tech is a bigger opportunity vehicle you know clearly from market valuation and exits and generational wealth level. But I mean they you know you're you're delaying a lot of gratification with profits.

When I uh you know a couple years ago I brought my business partner at sales gig who's from the technology SAS space to a boardroom event and he left. He was like dude he literally his exact words were you guys found like this little weird matrix of the world where you can just make a bunch of money. Those exact words. I was like, "Yeah, dude." Yeah. Welcome to info running ads. And it's not even really info. It's I call it now cuz I'm trying to think of like what is our industry even called? Yeah. Because it's not really info. Info assumes that you're selling information. Yeah, that's true. And you got to have a really amazing new unique thing nobody's ever heard of that AI. You can't prompt AI now. you can't go to Google to actually sell information. I think that's dead.

I think what it really is, is we're in and is it the high ticket space where like first of all that just sounds terrible. It sounds like a scam and then you know it's like oh we're high I I just hate that name. And so I really would call our space the online services economy. Like I think that's what it really is because if I think about who I I I work with the industry and what's the requirements for businesses that I work with outside of certain revenues and you know they got to be ready for a salesperson etc. is that they sell a service that is highriced and generally they sell it online. Granted I can also work with inerson people but uh generally they're selling it online to anybody in the United States or potentially Canada big five countries etc. So, I really feel like it's the online services economy because even if you sell BTOC, like take somebody who's doing a health or a dating or whatever, they're not just selling them a course. They're selling them a lot of like you have to have the support, the coaching, all that stuff anyways, which is a service. Yeah.

So, I really think it is the online services economy, not the high ticket space, which sounds like a scam. And um certainly not info because I mean, we're not even selling info. Yeah, people only want to go through modules. I know. It's like I could probably remove I could probably I mean, it would we we need the modules. I could probably remove them though and like I we wouldn't make less sales. I'll tell you that they don't want modules. That's true. Yeah.

All right, dude. Well, last thing I had just cuz I thought it'd be kind of fun to end with. I'm curious and I'm going to share my story. I think it'll be funny. Is uh what's in your all of your years marketing different businesses stuff we worked on together yourself before getting into the online services economy? You know, I know you had an agency. I think you did some econ like I don't know. Oh jeez. Oh literally everything you've ever done. What is the most embarrassing or dumbest marketing mistake that you've ever made?

So I have I told you about the t-shirts. So okay, I'll just tell you. Yeah. So as I was a there was I had like kind of two different eras as a sales rep. There was the because I had an agency and I I ran out of money. So my initial goal of getting into sales actually was to just get better at sales, make money so I could like start my agency again or start some other business that was going to make money. So like the first era, that was kind of the first era. So I was selling and trying to get better at sales. This is really my first sales job. After I went to my second sales job, I I I cut this out. But I would like sell and then if I had a no-show, I'd like work on my little online business, you know, and so which is like that that's that's bad. Don't do that. Okay. Like I mean, but back then, you know, the culture was back was different back then because like you didn't like it was all about inbound and yeah, oh, we're not going to follow up or we're not going to do outbound to get clients. It's more about like you booking in and why should we work with you? Like that's kind of like was the meta in the space, which is also terrible. Like it just makes no sense. But anyways, I just was young and I was like not really fully bought in to loving sales yet. So, in my downtime, I was dabbling with other businesses and I I couldn't do an agency because you need to do sales calls and it's too much fulfillment. So, I was like, I'm going to do e-commerce. So, I bought this 30k mastermind and in that there was like different tracks you could do and I was like, I'm going to sell like I was like, I'm going to do the print on demand t-shirt track. So I create the way it was taught is you create a Facebook page and then you put out a bunch of like meme type of content to generate a following and then once you have a little bit of a following. This is when Facebook pages like got a little bit more engagement like fan pages is you would pull the audience on like different shirt designs. So you would like reverse engineer the product before you release the product. So you would create them through 99 design competitions, okay? And then you would pull a lot of the designs through um the audience and then you would feedback loop that into 99 designs. So like that took me like a whole month and I'm like I created the perfect t-shirt for my niche and then so I launched this t-shirt to my Facebook audience. Nobody buys. Yeah. And then I'm like, okay, I'm going to run ads. Yeah. So I'm like running ads to my t-shirt and nobody's buying. Like I was spending like I spent like probably a grand or two grand on ads. Like nobody bought like I had like three ad to carts. Nice. And so I'm like god damn it I'm gonna get a [ __ ] sale out of one of these ad to carts and I was a sales guy you know so I was like okay I called all three ad to carts and I only like I had to call them over the course of days. finally got uh an answer from an old woman. And eventually after about 30 minutes, I hardclosed her into the t-shirt for $7. And so that was it wasn't I wish I could say that was my first sale, but it wasn't my first sale. It was uh I had made many high ticket sales, but I was very proud of that t-shirt. And you know, and what was funny is I ended up buying one of my own t-shirts because I like I want to see maybe I'll wear this t-shirt. This thing like the print was like over here. Like I'm not even kidding. Like it was legitimately [ __ ] It was like like this lady this old lady. I mean the best she was doing with that t-shirt was wearing it to bed because you weren't going to wear that in public. It was like the logo was literally over here. Yeah. The only thing that would make that story better it'd be if she charged back. She didn't charge back. She didn't charge back. That would be pretty funny. Yeah.

Mine mine was from the same thing, very very beginning of my uh career. This is like my first uh month running YouTube ads ever. So, it was like 2018. Okay. And I had this like little, you know, auto, it was actually, I think it was still live at that time, webinar I was doing. And what we would do is we'd rent email lists. We had like, you know, we're in the real estate niche, so it's pretty easy to find email lists in our local area. and we do it that way and then joined Becker's mastermind back when he was doing the his info mastermind before the SAS one and um taught me YouTube ads. So I'm like doing YouTube ads and the way he taught it was like when you get started you do manual bidding like you get things rolling. It's like way back in the day. Don't do that today obviously but way back in the day. So I set things up manual bidding and dude like it worked. Like we skyrocketed. We did like 100k the first month. I was like, you know, I was like 21 or 20 and I was like, you know, I thought I was like a billionaire and then like the, you know, I was like Bisop and it was like, you know, like the old school Alex Becker ads where it's like the you're drawing on the screen, you know. Yeah. You were trying to draw on the screen. Yeah, I was drawing on the screen. Uh, and so like the second month, you know, I had like I was spending like maybe $1,000 a day maybe on ads. Which was like a lot. I was like, "Holy shit," you know. Um well the second month like maybe a third or half of my ads got rejected you know and that was the first time I ever went through that. So, I'm just like panicking, you know, just like, "Oh my god." And I was in this mastermind with Becker. And so, I was in the group and I was just like, "Guys, I need help. Please help me." And Becker, I mean, shout out to him, dude. Cuz now that I'm on this side, like I've been in the industry for a while, I'm like, "I cannot believe you did this in the first place." But he got on a call with me one-on-one on a Skype call. This like presume Skype call, dude. Gets on with me. We're on for five minutes. And he goes, "Yeah, pull up your ad account." He goes, "Okay, where do you have your pixel set up?" And I go, "Pixel?" And I don't have the pixel set up. He goes, "What the [ __ ] are you doing, dude?" And just for like the entire five minutes was just him cursing me out, calling me stupid. And he's like, "I'm not even going to [ __ ] help you. You can figure it out." Just ended the call. No way. Yes. And I was like, I needed to hear that, dude. I was like, that was pretty bad. Wow. Did you ever tell him that later on? Um, well, dude, yeah. I worked with him for a long time and I I what what I realized was a I needed to hear that because I was being an idiot and b he he gives direct feedback. So, you know, I I saw him not to that extreme because it was one-on-one with with with my call, but on group calls back like later on when he had iron, he would do group calls and people would ask like stupid questions. He'd literally just be like, "That was a stupid [ __ ] question." I was like, "Let's go, dude." I was in Iron. We were all in iron, man. Iron was great. It was. Yeah.

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