Stop Using Facebook Lead Form Ads. Do THIS Instead.

In this episode, we dive deep into the debate between instant lead forms and full landing page funnels—and why cheap leads don’t always mean profitable marketing. You’ll learn how top agencies replace low-quality lead forms with “digital appointment setter” funnels that attract qualified prospects, shorten sales cycles, and improve ROI. We break down the exact funnel structure—from ad to landing page to qualification, booking, and nurture flows—along with real campaign examples, pricing strategies, and how agencies set expectations, scale accounts, and avoid the churn-and-burn model. If you run paid ads or manage client funnels, this is a masterclass in building systems that generate buyers, not just leads.

————————————

📺 Watch This Episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_EDVxnZinA

————————————

✨ Get My Best 20 Landing Page Swipe File: https://get.persuasionexperience.com/lp-swipe

————————————

⭐  Get My Landing Page & Funnel Templates, Training & Systems (Community): https://www.skool.com/the-obsessed

————————————

💸  Work With Me & My Team To Scale Qualified Leads From Paid Ads (Done For You): https://get.persuasionexperience.com/px-fb-ads-page

————————————-
💕 Connect on Instagram: instagram.com/alisha_conlin_hurd/

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

I asked you right before we got on the call, do you ever do instant forms? And you said no, never. It sounds like something that you're really strongly against. I totally get where you're coming from. I have done instant forms is sometimes when I'm just trying to help someone get their Facebook ads out. They want to get some leads. I'm not totally opposed to instant forms because I it can get some good leads, but I do understand that one of the biggest uh quality/slash quantity control dials that you can change is whether you're sending to an instant form or collecting the lead on your website. So tell me about your philosophy on instant forms and what your general page looks like that you're sending to.

SPEAKER_00 0:42

So effectively, when we run marketing, we're trying to solve a business problem. And sometimes our clients might say, I want more leads, I want more leads. But really, what they want is more buyers. And so with instant forms, it's very easy to say, look, I'm getting you CPLs for$6,$10,$20, whatever. They're really cheap. But the thing about cost per lead, CPL, is it doesn't affect the PL, the profit and loss. So what we do in my agency is we're actually tracking down to the CPA, we're tracking lead to sales time, and we're tracking CPA, ideally. So all we do is focus on lead generation, high, like high ticket legion. I've worked in e-com, whatever, but lead forms is obviously Legion. Now, what happens is when a client is running a lead form ad, and I hotly debate this with many media buyers, so I'm sure there's a lot of media buyers that disagree. The beautiful thing about marketing is there's not one way to do it, right? However, I do think lead form ads need to die and they should be replaced with what I call a digital appointment setup. And I'll talk about the layout like that you just asked in a second. But effectively, what we see with these lead form ads is other clients, they come to us from other agencies and they're running these lead form ads. The leads suck, they're no shows, they're wasting clients' time. Yes, you as a marketer are ticking the box and getting leads, but you're not actually solving the problem for a business. And that's why someone's coming to you so that they can actually make money. So, for example, we had a client and we were able to decrease their lead to sales time from going from their their forms to a landing page from 30 days to two days. Right? And their CPL was a bit higher, but the ROI was better. The ROI was infinitely better, and that's what we need to be tracking as marketers because I said at the start, we solve a business problem. So maybe before I get into the the landing page breakdown, because that'll be a long monologue that I can walk us through. Um I just finished a three-day, a three-day live boot camp um with a bunch of people building them out on Go High level. But what what do you think about lead forms? Uh do you have like a contrarian opinion or something different?

SPEAKER_01 2:46

Yeah, I I think over time too that they they might have kind of gotten worse. Uh uh that the you're always going to get such great cost per lead. Um and like you were saying, cost per acquisition is all that matters. And the other part of it is when you have a hundred leads to sift through, now you're paying an employee or doing this yourself. You have all this extra follow-up where you're like, yeah, I've sent them five texts, right? So like there's also the extra follow-up cost um with those um, you know, getting these high quantity of leads. I think sometimes I I've vouched for, especially if the business is a little bit newer and they don't have a ton of landing page experience and they're just like really wanting to get someone on the phone and kind of catering to their impatience in a way. I've said, all right, let's just get the instant form out. We'll make them go through a few questions first, we'll make them give you not just their name and email, but also their phone number so that they're a little bit more interested and make them jump through a few more hoops on the instant form, and that can get some good people. But I I uh what you said too about instead of like a 30-day process going down to a two-day process can help. A lot of times, like as the agency, the the client just like wants to see like where are my leads, right? So you kind of want to get them results quicker. But I do understand that if you already know exactly how to build the funnel and you can build one that's simple enough where you're not maybe sending them to their website, which is probably what you're um you know really vouching for here, is we're not just saying, all right, let me just use your working website and I'll send them there because there's just too many spots that they can get lost and go to the about us page or um you know, all of these different uh links that they can click on rather than just become a lead can be distracting. Um but yeah, you're you're making a funnel that is just a two-step process, is that right?

SPEAKER_00 4:53

Yeah, somewhat. Pretty much. It's like a very not a crazy funnel. And I will say the caveat to lead forms, when I do ever run them, it's been twice. And it's for very big clients when I'm working, like when we're working with a marketing director or a marketing manager, and they're getting pressure from their C-suite to flood the gates with leads. And they're like, let's just turn on lead formats. And we tell them, well, they're gonna be shit, and your sales team's gonna complain. Every single time, that's exactly what happens, and then they're like, Okay, switch them off the sales team's complaining about the quality of leads. And it's like, yes, they suck, they're a waste of time. Like, just figure out how to scale a good campaign. And so what we do instead, and I'll I'll also just say, like, I it sounds like there's maybe like a lot of media buyers, a lot of like freelancers, people that are looking to go into um, like, you know, full-time entrepreneurship or business owners or agencies. And so I've been running my agency for this is my fourth year now, and over time, all we've done is just consistently try to evolve our offer to eat the complexity of our clients, right? And the like you get paid in direct proportion to the problem that you solve. So if what you do is just get cheap leads, like you don't really stand out, that's kind of what everyone does. So you have to think about what business problem you can solve for your target market and how can you help them. So effectively, when it comes to these landing pages, what we do is we think about them like a digital appointment setup. And so I'll go through some of the core sections that we have on there. But the other thing is with your funnel and the landing page being part of it, right? A funnel is not optional. It's just every single touch point that someone's gonna have post-click. So the ads are important. We do video ads, we we edit them all up, we do ad creative, whatever. But what happens after the click, that whole experience, which is why my agency is called persuasion experience and not like funnel experience, it's like how do we actually convert that traffic into a qualified lead who shows up, who's educated, who's excited to speak with them. So the number one thing that we create on our landing pages is the offer, right? Because on our landing page, there has to be something for someone to take up. Now, even going back to these instant forms, if you're getting a bunch of leads, I bet the show-up rates are really low or the contactable rates are really low. Why? Because there's not an exciting enough offer where somebody puts value to you. No one's attached value to talking to you. So what happens is when you can't contact anybody or you're getting no shows, you haven't built enough excitement, enough anticipation, enough value. So when we're doing our offers, either for Facebook ads or Google ads or any ad platform or any traffic source, they can be in one of two categories. It's either a consultation offer or it's a ready now offer. That's basically the two types you can do. And this comes down to the different stages of awareness. And if anyone's read Breakthrough Advertising, I'm talking about the levels of awareness. They can be problem aware, they can be solution aware, and they can be product aware. There's five, but that's usually the ones we look at. Problem aware is I have a cough. Why do I have a cough? How do I fix it? Solution aware is okay, I'm looking at all of the different ways to solve this cough. I know I have a flu now and I'm looking at cough tablets versus I'm looking at cough medicine versus I'm looking at going to the doctor. Product aware then is where I've gone, okay, I'm going to get cough syrup and I'm examining brand A, brand B, brand C. And as marketers, it's really important for us to understand to make our campaign work, which stage our market is in. So we need to understand what's the conversation going on in their head. And I'm just giving like a bit of like pre-work to making the landing page, because you can't just like, for lack of a better word, shit out a landing page. You actually have to think about it, right? There's message hierarchy. You have to have a clear headline, you have to have one strong call to action, you have to have um, we typically use like a problem agitate solve framework, but not too hardcore on the problem because then you bring in leads that are sitting in the wrong energy that are not very pleasant to deal with in the buying process. And then I can sort of flesh out the funnel, but I'll I'll pause there and that's kind of an overview of the landing page.

SPEAKER_01 9:09

Okay, so I know the offer is a big part of it. Is the offer going to be in the ad as well? Like, let's take, for example, uh a home renovation company that is trying to sell people new windows in the ad, and maybe they're running some kind of promotion right now where you can get 10 windows for 7,000 bucks. In the ad, are you going to be doing like here's a video where I'm just showing you the benefits? Like, check out these windows, they're really insulated, they look amazing, we can install them quick, not really maybe focused on the price quite yet. And then there's some kind of promotion where it's, you know, click if you would like more information about that. Is like the call to action of the ad. If you would like to learn more, go here rather than if you would like a quote. Like maybe are you doing like I guess that's kind of the question on the ad. Um, is the call to action click to learn more or click to get a quote? And then on the page, then you're kind of saying 10 windows for$7,000. And then maybe is there a do you typically have a video from the owner that's like a couple minutes long? And um yeah, I've got more questions there, but I'll stop there.

SPEAKER_00 10:26

Cool. There's a there's a few there. So effectively, when it comes to the ad level, if we're more focusing on Facebook ads, that should it has to mirror what's in the landing page, right? So home renovations, home remodelers. I've worked in that market before. And when we do a Facebook ad, we have to think, okay, what level are they in their stages of awareness? And when we create an offer, what is the next micro step? So I'll talk about this one and I'll come back to your window example in a second. But for example, when we worked with this client, they are um Dallas's number one home renovation and remodeling company, and they help women and families to stay in their homes instead of moving, right? But what we had to do was we saw everybody else in the market was running their offer to a free quote. But when we actually research the market, which is the most important thing, do you understand the target market, right? Marketing's just inputs and outputs, garbage in, garbage out. So most, a lot of marketers aren't spending time to truly understand the target market and to crawl in their mind and understand what's going on up in here right now. How do I enter that conversation right now? And so for us, when we were doing this campaign and we were like, okay, so what we're seeing is there's a lot of horror stories in the market, right? It's very male-dominated talking to a female audience. And what they're all pushing to is to get a quote. However, we know the target market, they don't know what they want. They have this mood board on Pinterest, on Instagram, whatever, and they're like, okay, I don't understand the design yet. So how can you get a quote for something when you don't know what you need? See, and see the next micro step. So the next micro step, what we did, and then we were like, okay, you know, selling sunset was really big at the time. We we were like, what would be a cool thing we can do? And we did apply for your free champagne design consultation with Dallas's um number one home remodeler, something like that, renovation home remodeler. And the target market goes, yes, because the the eyebrow above the headline said from Pinterest board to dream home. And and now we're starting to talk in their language, so it's much more important to do that. And and then the call to action was something like apply for your free, like dream home consultation or design consultation or something, right? Whereas competitors were going out to market saying, get a free quote, get a free quote. The problem is with Facebook ads, which is a colder temperature of traffic, the people we were talking to weren't in product aware, they weren't looking at home remodelers yet. They were stuck back here. I want to stay in my home. I have some ideas on design. Can you help me get to that next level? So then at the ad level, we'll test a lot of different things, right? Like a lot of different call to actions. Um, but the main thing is like we'll be testing big um message hypotheses and what sort of messages. So like a contrarian, pain, gain. Um, I'm sure everyone sort of knows them, but that's what we're more testing, and doing a lot of social listening to come up with our good ad ideas.

SPEAKER_01 13:22

Awesome, awesome. So uh I really like that angle, and I'm guessing you tested quite a bit of them. Um, the one I'm talking about is the Pinterest board to dream home. Um, and then that would match up with the landing page where would you have the client then film a video that matches up with that message where you're saying, hey, we want to take your ideas and bring them to life, book a call with us, and we will talk about some of the capabilities. We'll come out to your house and show you what's possible for you. And they're really not like saying, free quote, free quote. You know, they're just more talking about like it's more of a design pitch at that point.

SPEAKER_00 14:05

Well, that's kind of what the um landing page does. I can show you the landing page. I don't know if it's worth it how many people are on audio versus versus um like visually looking at it, but I can just share the page now and we can talk about it. So here's the example, right? And this is the above the fold. So I'll start talking I'll start breaking down um this the the part uh the parts of the landing page. So at the top, this is what we call the eyebrow from Pinterest board to dream home. Apply for your champagne design consultation with Dallas's top remodeling and additions firm. Then here we have what we call these like buyer decision questions. Like, what are these things at the time, what are on their minds? So on time and on budget guarantee. I said earlier there's a lot of horror stories in this market, right? So we've got to have this in here. Every home design is unique and on trend. That's important to them, and designed to construction. We look after everything. So again, going back to this, marketing's just inputs and outputs, right? The way that we make these pages is that we do really, really good research. And there's a couple of ways that you can get these right inputs because our job of this page, it's a digital appointment setup. It's meant to speak the language of the target market, not the jargon of your client. Nobody cares about them, right? What we need to be able to do on this page is show that we understand where they where they are. So do we correctly understand their problem and that we understand where they want to go? Then we can position the client as the vehicle to go from A to B. That's our jobs as marketers. Um, not trying to like just shove down the throat. So then we have the thing. Now, with this page, this is one of our ones with a longer lead. The lead is the first panel on the page. So we've got the uncomfortable truth about remodels and home additions. Dear fellow homeowner, you're here right now because you want to remodel, redesign, or maybe even totally reimagine your home. You have a vision, blah, blah, blah. So we're starting to um show that we understand them, right? But you're rightly wary of hiring the wrong firm or contractor to go on this remodeling journey. You've heard the stories about projects going over on time, blowing their budgets. Anyway, so this entry lead goes through problem agitate solve. If you ever use like Microsoft Clarity or any of those um platforms that record clicks and record scroll depth, you'll know that most people get like 30% of people might get to hear. So this is why we do these longer leads on Facebook ads campaigns where we'll go, hey, we understand your problem, we know where you want to go, here's our solution. Book a call if if this is something of interest of you. And then for those who go down further, the page will be more fleshed out. Again, like our digital salesperson, starting to think about what objections might they have. Um, how can we show them that we are for them?

SPEAKER_01 16:50

Awesome stuff. Um so you've you've got it where right at the top of the page, they can become a lead if they're already ready. If they if they're not, keep reading on. Then you can become a lead. You've got another button. If you're not ready yet, keep going. You can uh learn more about us. You don't have a video on here, but I am not fully surprised to not see it because I know that that is a pain in the butt as soon as you're like, hey client, I need you to make this video, and then uh maybe you have to switch your marketing angles and everything. Is part of the reason why you don't have a video here because you want to have control of the messaging where you can just change the text at any point and you can um you know split test landing pages a lot easier, and um or is it also because it just kind of um distracts the client too much to have them watch something that long?

SPEAKER_00 17:44

It can be great to have a video, and especially like this client has a beautiful Instagram, right? And they're really, really good on video, etc. But when we are launching a campaign initially, we want to keep it minimum viable. So before you invest resources, time and money and energy into a video, typically what we would do is see what's resonating first. Then, especially if it's a brand new Facebook ads campaign, get feedback from what they're hearing on those calls, because then we can drop that language into the video script. Now, for this campaign, we just never needed to do a video like it was inundated with great quality leads, but there's plenty of times that we will use a video. The caveat to that is is that video can be damaging, right? Because just like ticking the box and having the video on the page is not the goal. It's meant to be a persuasive video that's actually good. So if the founder or the person that you're gonna put on camera, like, you know, is fidgety or like doesn't read with conviction or the script isn't right, then that can actually be damaging instead of helpful to the campaign. So typically what we might do is set our control, so this would be our control, and then put the video on and see how the video impacts the conversions and if it increases conversions and the quality of conversions, then the video would would get a spot on the page.

SPEAKER_01 19:03

After they become a lead, is there a bit more to the nurturing process before they get on a phone call?

SPEAKER_00 19:09

Yeah, there is. Do you want me to show you?

SPEAKER_01 19:12

Yeah. I needed to do this more often with uh my interviews, just share the screen.

SPEAKER_00 19:19

Yeah, you'll all have to just deal with my shitty um internet, Australian internet, the maybe not the worst in the world. It'll load one day. Cool. So again, with the funnel, it's not optional, right? It's just every single touch point that someone's gonna have. And so when we're going through this funnel, cool. So we have the traffic. We gotta understand the temperature of traffic. What is that? I'm gonna show you this um overarchingly, and then I'm gonna dive into each different section. Then we have the landing page, our digital appointment setup. The most important thing on that is the offer. What happens then is they'll click to a multi-step application. We typically do like a claim or apply or something like that, right? Not like a chat with sales and talk to somebody with commission breath that's gonna try and sell you. Like the offer has to have value, but not nothing crazy. Just like, here's what you're gonna get out of this call, because we're looking for in-market leads. Then once they fill in this multi-step form, they're either qualified or they're disqualified. If they're qualified, they'll move to a calendar page. And then if they book in, they'll go to a thank you page. And I'm gonna break these down. Then we have our different automations and flows, right? So with our funnel, at every point there's a decision diamond. Okay, yes or no, what do they do? If yes, if no, and we want to make sure that we're making the most of every lead. So um, what we'll have is a flow for if they fill in the form, but don't book in the calendar, right? And the salesperson will get a notification to call them as well. If they book in the calendar before the moment they have the call, we'll have our pre-suede flow. So, for example, for my agency, that's where I'll use FAQs. I've shot like a bunch of short videos to watch FAQs to make sure that like for the sales team that they're qualified and they understand these like common objections. We'll send them to the YouTube channel because our YouTube is what brings in the most qualified leads. So if they're coming from a Facebook ads funnel, I want them to consume YouTube to mirror the quality of a YouTube lead as much as possible. And of course to remind them. So these are not super heavy duty, but these are the things that we're doing. I'll send them to YouTube because because I've spent many years building my YouTube, it builds authority, right? Um, and just so everybody knows, it took me 586 days to get my first 1,000 subscribers. So this didn't just happen quickly, and I'm sure you can appreciate that, Dick. It takes time, but you've got you gotta like you gotta be committed. Um, and then we have a no show flow. Now, this is like typical because it does depend on the lead to sales process of a client, of course. But this is typical. So I'll I'll zoom out here. We've got this. Now, first thing, oh, this is kind of like step one, which is finding your million dollar ad. I won't go too much into this, but basically, like Epic Creative is where it's at. Media buying, sure, like you can get some wins, but creative, I think we all know this is just becoming more and more important. So we're testing video ads, um, story copy, long form copy always works for us, ad stills, and then like UGC and really cool AI ads. And then what we do is we test these really big, different big swings. So this is just some launch concepts for a client, just like on a pretty small, minimum viable budget, and we'll have like these new styles, comparison styles, native communication, ugly ads, testimonial images, blah, blah, blah. Like we'll be testing a lot. And at the start, as you guys would know, that means that the testing budget's very high, not the scaling budget. So you're not getting like the best results at the start. We've already sort of gone over this, but we want to then make sure that we have this landing page to send the traffic to. And the most important thing here is making sure that it's congruent with the ad and it has a really strong offer. So this is another one that we ran for a client. I'll quickly show you. This one's still running. So this landing page, it's for a smaller client. This made 500k in eight months. I have a video breaking this down on my um channel and an interview with this person. But effectively, the offer was this domino investment property strategy. And we came up here with their proprietary system. So, how does he get proven repeatable results? Happy to break that down, but I don't want to go on a side quest. Um, and then for example, here in finance, it's get up to 500k, apply today, and get pre-approved in just 24 hours. So earlier I was talking about offers, how there's consultation offers and how there are ready now offers. This was for a Google Ads campaign and it's a ready now offer, right? And then the same for for this finance one. In any case, moving down the funnel, then we have our qualification and booking system. So we have the ad to the landing page, now what? They click a button, then what? So what we want to do is remember that the goal is not leads. The goal goal is qualified leads that turn into buyers and to not be afraid to disqualify. So we've tested out straight to calendar and then they fill in the information. We've tested form to calendar, so like a pop-up form to calendar, and then we've also tested multi-step to information to calendar. Typically, this is what I prefer is the control being the multi-step to information to calendar, but it is actually different for every industry. So we have to test out what is going to be the best. So that's the qualification and the booking system, and then the thank you page. So this is one of the pages in the funnel that are the most slept on. Because when we have our thank you page, it's a chance for us to future pace and congratulate them and get them to do something else and get them to um be more qualified and more educated. So you can see here on this thank you page, we never say thank you. Because that sounds like they've just done something for you, right? We can congratulations. You're one step closer to dream outcome, which is for this hair restoration doctor, is getting your your hair back and regaining your confidence. Video of this doctor, FAQ questions, then getting them to add it to the calendar and some testimonials. And then there's the email and the SMS nurture that we just went through. So that was a big information dump, but effectively, add to landing page, to qualification system, to thank you page, and then your three email nurtures. The no-show um field form didn't book, and then the pre-slade flow booked before they have the meeting.

SPEAKER_01 25:54

Awesome, awesome, awesome stuff. So um let me ask you as an agency too, because that this is obviously a lot of setup. Be like you probably you know do a few team meetings and really uh dial in all of this messaging, and um, you know, it's it's quite the build-out before you get ads going for a client. I bet when they see something like this, though, that they're super into like, all right, I want to work with you. Yes, this this makes a lot of sense. Like, I think this pitch right here, you just showing them all of this, it also makes them like, okay, never mind. I'm not gonna do this myself. I can I know that now. Um the complexity of it. But um how can I ask, like, how do you charge as an agency? Um, I'm one that I I really like charging by performance when I can. It's a lot easier for e-commerce than it is for lead-based businesses, though, especially when there's this much build-out and you're uh relying on their sales team being good. Um do you do performance-based or do you do a set price?

SPEAKER_00 26:59

So we have a set price for building this initial machine. So we do all of the research, all of the strategy. And by this I mean uh I wonder if I can find it. I can't find it. That's okay. I was gonna show you one of our strategy documents. But like we're going in-depth onto the target market, we're listening to sales calls, we're creating like this whole fleshed-out persona, we're creating the messaging, we're figuring out the positioning, we're figuring out the offer. So there's a lot of strategy, right? And it's just research, strategy, execution, launch. So, in any case, there's this, we have to set up this infrastructure. And then there's the month to month, which might be more what you're talking about. And for our month to month, we do percentage of ad spend, which basically for us, it's like the kinds of clients who come to us. There's clients who want to go from zero to one, and there's ones that want to go from one to a hundred. And so the people who come to us are looking to profitably scale. They have very aggressive, ambitious growth goals and they're spending, but they're capped because nobody's been able to figure out how to help them to spend more. And the problem is your traffic is worthless unless it converts. So that cap is coming from that they don't have the economics to scale. Once we plug this machine in, and then we will do more landing pages, more funnels, et cetera. That's when they actually have the economics to scale. So that we're incentivized to scale them, right? It's a percentage of ad spend. And then what they get, though, just in case anyone's interested, is like, oh well, what do they get? It's not just a media buyer. They'll get a um creative, I don't know, I should say a senior, a senior um strategist. They've usually come from running their own business, they've usually pumped at least$10 million in ad spend through. They're very, very, very smart. Some of them have been doing direct response since I was in high school. So I find very, very good pod leaders. In that pod, there's a funnel strategist and media buyer who's doing a lot of the CRO, the hands-on, new ads, analysis of results, and just like coming up with new ads. There's a full-time ad creative person, video ads, ad creatives, et cetera. And then there's what we call the pod technician, the person doing a lot of the tech, maybe some of the junior media buying and getting a lot of that stuff done. So what the client is getting, and this is what I was talking about at the start of the call, like our value proposition has evolved over time. And now for the right clients, what they get is a plug and play performance team ready to go with proven systems. We have this live in like three to four weeks, which is insane. Like it's insane. It's because our systems are so good and the team are trained so well. They go through like two weeks of onboarding and training, and then we're coaching them, depending on what role they're in, one to two times a week. Like it's it's it's pretty intensive. Um, okay, yeah, that was my very long answer to your very short question of what what do you charge on if a monthly?

SPEAKER_01 29:41

No, such such great stuff. Um, if you guys already haven't liked this YouTube video, make sure you do so. Um yeah, this is incredible value. So um you're charging based off of a percentage of ad spend. How often do the clients get that right away? They're like, okay, yeah, it makes sense, versus like you kind of have to tell them, but I'm not gonna just spend stupid. Like, we're gonna make sure that this metric is always above this amount before we increase ad spend. Right.

SPEAKER_00 30:11

So I'll show you this. So that's a very good question. So some of them come in and then they're on the retainer, they're not at the percentage of ad spend because it's ad spend or percentage, whichever is higher, right? And we say, hey, that's gonna be a pretty good problem to have, considering no one else has figured this out for you. But we need to be incentivized to grow your account. We're never gonna be like, oh, that's out of scope. Like we are pumping out ad creatives every week, new ad creatives every one to two weeks, like new landing page ideas, new offers. We are throwing resources at this so that we can grow them because we're not taking on like local businesses or mom and pops, like these are big companies, usually looking for an exit in two to three years, who need to like figure out how to build a machine for predictable, consistent leads to profitably acquire customers at scale. That's a hard thing to do, right? Most businesses fail and it's because they can't figure this out. That's the problem we solve. So in our, we call these the 90-day game plan. We look at, okay, where are you now? And and we do this just so everyone like we want to set expectations with the client. We need to get on the same page. Where are you now? Where do you want to be? What is or isn't working? And then the client tells us, hey, these are the business goals, this is where I want to be. And then we just reverse engineer what it would look like to make that a reality. Cool. So if you want to be getting this CPA and this CPL, here's the metrics that we're going to need. This is going to be red, this is going to be green, this is going to be gold, we're aiming for gold, this is what needs to be true. And then every single week we work with our clients in Slack. Every week we're like, cool, here's what we did this week, here's what we're doing this week, here's our blockers, here's our wins and lessons learned. And then we get on monthly marketing and sales sinks so that we can get information from them for new ad ideas and then just keep working towards this. Now, the benefit of this is for anyone only listening to audio, what I'm showing here is a spreadsheet and it's breaking down the economics. So you can see here landing page conversion rate, calendar booking, show up rate, how many qualified, close rate, um, cost per click, etc. So we know how to change this. And the management's not always 10k, this is just a template, but um, we know how to change this basically, right? So if the landing page is low, we have a playbook, we know how to fix it. If the calendar bookings are low, we know how to fix it. And that's marketing, psychology, economics times technology. Uh so hopefully that's helpful.

SPEAKER_01 32:34

Nope, I didn't get any value. So I'll go a more such crazy stuff. Um, okay, so there's like the the different levels um to which you're making a different percentage of the ad spend. Is that what the those red and the gold levels were?

SPEAKER_00 32:50

This is more like um showing the client what's possible, right? So this would be like worst-case scenario. And these are again, this is just our template.

SPEAKER_01 32:58

This is like okay, you're getting paid worst case no matter what though.

SPEAKER_00 33:00

Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And going back to your question, okay, well, we're only going to scale an account that's hitting certain metrics. So it's on us because we need certain foundational economics. Because when you scale an account, we all know you don't necessarily get to keep those beautiful economics on a smaller budget, right? So you need to have a certain level of economics and numbers to actually be able to scale.

SPEAKER_01 33:24

And those numbers are going to be completely different for each business, or have you kind of found your like baseline metrics and then no? Okay.

SPEAKER_00 33:32

It's completely different. And even on sales calls, um, which I do less and less of now, but they'll be like, well, um, what's going to be my CPA? What's my CPL? And I'll put it back on then. Well, well, for CPA, what can you afford to spend to acquire a customer? Because the business who can afford to spend the most will win. That's all it is. So it's like uh your your business is not like going to be like marketing led in the sense where we come up with it. You tell us like what metrics you need to know your numbers as a business owner. What can you afford to spend? I can give you a guideline for clients in similar industries, what that could be, and we can like try and figure it out. But the business owner needs to know their numbers. And so the businesses that come to us where they're like, yes, we can afford this cost per qualified call that shows up. This is our North Star metric. At the moment we're here, as long as you're in this range, that is success. And that's the most important thing, right? Or one of the many most important things, getting on the same page as the client of what is success, and then us as the agency reverse engineering the plan to hit the goalpost. And now the client can't change the goalpost. Sometimes that happens because of business objectives change or whatever, but we're gonna create a whole 90-day plan that's agile if it needs to change. But I'm just yeah, I know a lot of people here, I've I work like a thousand clients, easy, and it's very frustrating when you're not on like the same page for expectations. Prevention's better than cure, just get on the same page for expectations. And one other thing is um, so we don't offer any guarantees, right? I just think like you can't guarantee marketing and all of the agencies that do have guarantees in their T's and C's in the fine print, no one can ever claim them. And so, even in the sales process, I might have someone say, like, well, do you guarantee results? Would you trust me if I did? You've just said that you've come from another agency that's burnt you, that had a guarantee. However, in business, one party has to assume more of the risk. So we have no lock-in contracts and we put a lot of resources in in the first like 90 days, six months, right? Like a lot upfront. Because for me, I'm not looking to out-earn the churn. I'm looking to grow an actual business. And the way that you do that is to keep clients and then to get more clients on top of that. Retention of your clients is clear key. So I think a lot of agencies are stuck in this churn and burn model where they're just like constantly on this hamster wheel. But if you have a really good fulfillment in the back end and you have a really good communication, and when it comes to agencies, it's just results and relationships. If you can get those two R's right and truly look after your client, and then you're just adding new clients on top of that, that's how you'll have like a very successful agency.

SPEAKER_01 36:05

I I'm with you on that. I don't do the minimum contract as part of my guarantee that like, you know, you can fire us at any time, basically. Um, you know, or at the end of the day, yeah, we prove ourselves any month. So um that's a way to do it. But I think the guarantee those guarantees, they worked a couple of years ago, and they probably worked extremely well uh until you work with one of those agencies that does not honor the guarantee. Uh what tapped into me, they're like, if we don't get you this many sales, we will refund you. And then uh I'm like, yeah, you didn't do it, and then they're like, Yeah, well, you didn't do this, so we're gonna ghost you now and uh never refund you. So um it's common that people have had those stories. And yeah, there is a bit of it's just not even understanding the process. Like if it's gonna work uh or or not going to work in e-commerce, it's because yeah, your your product just isn't gonna work. Like uh if you if you put together the right ads and you didn't set it up terribly and it really doesn't sell, it's so much more the product than anything else. So when people ask me that, I say, I can guarantee you that I'm gonna put your product in front of the the perfect customer at the perfect time. And if sales are gonna happen, they're gonna happen. But if they don't want to buy it, there's absolutely nothing I can do. Um that's my extent of my promise.

SPEAKER_00 37:31

I say that um marketing's a magnifying glass, right? And if you have a ship business and a ship product, you're gonna know about that very quickly. Um, especially like you can have really good marketing, and if your back end's bad, there's been plenty of businesses like that, but you don't last long, right? So I say to my uh like leads or clients, well, are you the best at what you do? Is there a large enough total addressable market for us to find them on ads? And obviously we can do viability checks and audits to check that as well. But really, it's like marketing is not a life raft. It's not going to save you. It's rocket fuel, right? And so if you come to me with a shitty business that's struggling and I come and pour rocket fuel on it, it's a dumpster fire. That's all that's happening here. But if you have like a rocket and you're just truly capped because you can't figure out how to make those ads go to the next level, and we come and put the rocket fuel in the machine that's running low on fuel, it will take off. And so I think a lot of the times, like in-house marketers or agencies, one, a lot of agencies just aren't very good. We all know that. There's like 54,000 of them in the States, and and a lot of them are doing it for like passive income or something bizarre. And this is like the most non-passive income business I can basically like I'm up at 5 a.m. on a podcast, you know, it's like it's not passive, it's active. Um, and you gotta love it. But a lot of agencies like maybe don't know how to like manage client expectations, and and I think it's something that just comes with time, like it has for me. And I think the sooner that you can do that and just be like push back on clients and know how to say no, right? Because even in our proposal, we say, we're not your waitress, we're your strategist. If you want to come and work with us and tell us what to do, we're not the agency for you. If you knew what to do, you wouldn't be coming to us to solve this problem. So we want to listen to you because you're the like you're the subject matter expert. But even for us, because we work in a lot of the similar niches, um, what we find is the clients have this curse of knowledge, right? And all they want to do is just talk about their product. And we have to be like, no, no one cares. This is what we're gonna talk about. And we can show you this from the research and the data.

SPEAKER_01 39:34

Yeah, it only takes one customer experience before you throw something in your contract that's like you are not allowed to turn off the ads or mess with the ads once you hand over the keys. Um, because yeah, that that is annoying if you log on. I I've had a client there like, yeah, I wanted to turn it off, so I deleted the campaign. And I'm like, oh my gosh, you know how much work you just um you know took away. Like, I'm like, no, it's this toggle button, and you still don't press that. You text me and I'll do it right away. You don't like delete because you didn't like the sound of one of the captions. So um it really is like expectations is always what uh customer problems are gonna be around. So luckily it is in your control, but sometimes you gotta you know have that problem come up before you know to set the expectation for the next one. Um last question, it seems like Facebook ads is like what was uh part of that funnel that you showed us. Is that always where you are starting with pretty much every client is Facebook and Instagram ads? And then once that system's working, you say, all right, do you want us to add the Google ads or the the TikTok or the other traffic sources?

SPEAKER_00 40:45

It really depends on the client. Typically a client will come in one of two camps. One, they haven't started ads yet, but they're a successful business. Like you need to be doing minimum a million, but even then, we're looking for three to five million plus, and that means like your business is working. So maybe they haven't started ads before. Like we just brought in this awesome um client in the legal space, and we're gonna blow up their campaign. Um, and we're actually gonna do Facebook ads for that. It's uh it's a surprise. Stay tuned on my YouTube, I'll do a sick breakdown of that. Um, but there's also some clients who come to us, maybe in like the B2B lending niche, where we would do Google Ads first, because that, even though it's really competitive, while there's a lot of competitors, it's not necessarily competitive, and we we know we can make that work first if they're only gonna do one channel. In a dream situation, they're doing both channels because it's a sphere of influence, etc. Anyway, um, this is meant to be a last quick question. Or they're coming to us with something already kind of working, and we're taking it to the next level, at which point we're being guided by the data, and they're usually giving us one or both ad channels to take over.

SPEAKER_01 41:48

And uh one more last quick question. Uh so people can't work with you unless they're doing over a million for your done for you side. What do you offer? And then obviously, like, you know, pitch whatever you want. Um, for people who aren't quite there yet, do they just go to your YouTube? Do you have other resources for them?

SPEAKER_00 42:06

Yeah, so we do give like everything upfront and away for free. Like, I'm here for it. I'm happy to help any other agency owner. I'm very passionate about landing pages and funnels. And like my mission or my broader mission is how do we help more businesses that are ethical, that genuinely help people to get their product into more hands. So for us, no scarcity mindset. We can't service all of the clients in the world, right? It's it's gonna be a better world if we all do better marketing and agency owners have a better rep in the industry. So if you want more like DIY stuff, what I will do is I'll create a link at persuasionexperience.com forward slash Derek D-E-R-E-K. That's your name. And they can go there. And what I will have in there, I know, that's your name. Um, and what I will have in there is like a bunch of our like resources, so like research templates. I'll give you three of our top performing landing page templates totally for free. The caveat to that is they'll be built on Go High level for you. So they're all built plug and play. I just went through a huge three-day free workshop teaching other like agency owners and freelancers and stuff how to build these. It was epic. Um, so there'll be all of that in there, uh, a bunch of our like offer templates, all of this information. You'll actually also get the recording of that three-day boot camp. Effectively, what will be in the back end for you? It'll show you everything that we've been talking about today. The disclaimer is I'm an affiliate of Go High Level. So if you buy something, I get a small commission at no extra cost to you. That's my legal thing, I have to say. But in any case, if you want free shit, you're already using Go High Level or you want to try it out. We moved our whole agency onto go high level. Unbounce, they did it. They I was done because their pricing went insane because they wanted to pay you for like visit, like you had to pay for like visitors and stuff. Whereas Go High Level, we can have like we've got rid of a bunch of our tech stack, we have All of our automations, all of our snapshots, all of our like dashboards, all of like our invoicing, like everything now in one central hub. Um, and I don't normally talk about technology, but I just genuinely enjoy Go High Level and I recommend it very much for agencies. I'm not sure if you're using it as well.

SPEAKER_01 44:17

Yeah, absolutely. It it's really crazy to look at the days before go high level where you were like, okay, you're on convert kit and you're click funnels. Okay, I'm gonna log in right now. You're gonna get a code texted to you, and then give me that code, or I can't work on your business. So yeah, having everything in Go High Level is incredible. And um, yeah, whoever invented that company, I don't know much about the founder, but uh crazy vision and um yeah, insane. Like really, they they perfected something that the market needed. That I I really did not see that, but um yeah, huge problem that they solved. So um incredible stuff, guys. Uh, I really can say I've done about 500 podcast episodes. This episode and the last one are the best two episodes to ever be on this show, the best two interviews as far as just implementable value, never ending value. Absolutely amazing stuff, Alicia. So great meeting you, guys. Go check out her channel. Thank you so much for coming on.

SPEAKER_00 45:21

Cool. Thanks for having me.