Improve your ads, guaranteed, or $ back. Coached 100s. 10K SQ FT Warehouse. Top AMZN Seller. Built 7 fig agency https://xitter.gq/t.co/i7Xn1xiyCc. Built https://xitter.gq/t.co/lBygkCctCc (8 figs).
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Joined February 2020
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Today I spoke to a high ticket coach getting $750 cac for a 6k offer
I told him to not touch anything
Every once in a while I get negative reviews or feedback
Jarring since it's so rare
Always getting better
Hiring setters
Lots of em
apply here, DMs will be ignored: hotpremiumcustomers.com/care…
"kumar the accountant" is one of the biggest marketing flops of all time
they had the whole world in their hands
too much ego
THIS GUY FOLLOWED UP FOR THREE YEARS INSTEAD OF RUNNING ADS TO FIND SOMEONE WHO NEEDED HIM NOW.
A developer told me this on a call.
An old client. A crypto payment project that didn’t work out. Three years of staying in touch.
Eventually, they started working together again.
Great.
But what’s the plan for the next client? Wait until 2029?
YOU’RE WAITING FOR SOMEBODY’S LIFE TO CHANGE SO THEY CAN PAY YOU.
They like you.
They trust you.
They just don’t need anything.
Meanwhile, somebody else has a problem you can solve and wants it fixed this month.
They don’t know you exist.
YOUR JOB TITLE IS A SHIT OFFER.
“I build enterprise software.”
Okay. What am I buying?
“We connect your factory’s orders, machines, inventory and accounting.”
Now a manufacturer can recognize something they actually need.
We pulled specific solutions out of his experience so we could advertise each one.
BUT YOU CAN STILL PAY META TO FIND YOU A PEN PAL.
A form submission doesn’t mean somebody’s ready.
Ask why they’re looking into this NOW.
“We’re exploring AI.”
Fine. Keep asking questions.
“Our order volume doubled and we’re manually reconciling inventory every night.”
Now there’s a concrete problem and a reason this conversation is happening.
Your form might label both people a lead.
Your sales call should expose the difference.
YOUR DASHBOARD CAN LOOK GREAT WHILE YOUR BANK ACCOUNT CALLS YOU AN IDIOT.
Cheap inquiries. Lots of calls. Everybody loves the idea.
Nobody buys.
So follow the lead past the form submission.
Which ad brought them in?
What did they need?
Did they accept a proposal?
Did they pay?
Could you deliver the work profitably?
That’s how we find something worth repeating.
He already knew how to stay in touch until somebody needed him.
I wanted him to find people who needed him already.
He thought he was too nice to make money. Then he told me what actually happened.
A woman he met at a networking event called him the next day.
She wanted him to come to her office and discuss how he could help her business use AI.
He could’ve charged for the consultation.
Instead, he asked her to send a brief explaining what they needed.
This bothered him.
His entire career had been giving, giving, giving. Helping people. Following up. Sometimes never asking for money at all.
He thought this was another example.
I told him that, in this particular situation, asking for the brief was intelligent.
Because what exactly was he supposed to charge her to do?
She wanted “AI.” He didn’t yet know what that meant inside her business. He wasn’t even sure he could help.
The brief could answer that.
And the moment she describes an actual problem, the conversation changes.
“We want to use AI” is hard to price.
“Our team spends 15 hours every week moving information between these two systems” gives you something to investigate.
How many people touch it? What decisions are involved? What happens when the information is wrong? Can the systems connect?
Now he can determine whether there’s a project.
But here’s where the nice guy gets himself in trouble.
He receives the brief.
Then he researches the tools for free.
Then he designs the workflow for free.
Then he builds a little prototype because he wants to prove it works.
Then he’s three weeks into a project nobody agreed to buy.
Asking for information wasn’t the mistake.
Continuing to do the work without defining a paid next step would be.
There’s a point where you know enough to say:
“Yes, I can help. Here’s what I propose, here’s what it costs, and here’s what we need to clarify before implementation.”
If the remaining uncertainty requires substantial investigation, that investigation can itself become a paid engagement with a defined deliverable.
You don’t have to pretend you know the answer.
You do have to recognize when you’ve started working on it.
That’s the distinction I wanted him to understand.
You can be generous, curious, and easy to talk to.
You still need to notice when the conversation has turned into a job.
Your first 20 sales calls are doing two jobs.
You’re learning what the market wants.
And you’re learning how to sell it.
Those two things interfere with each other.
Someone doesn’t buy. Was it a bad lead? A bad offer? Did you explain it badly? Did you spend 40 minutes discussing implementation and never actually ask for money?
You don’t know yet.
That’s why I don’t want someone who’s never sold through paid ads going guns blazing on expensive leads.
You can pay to get the perfect buyer on the phone and still waste the opportunity because you haven’t learned how to conduct the conversation.
Early on, I’m willing to accept weaker qualification to get more conversations within the same budget.
Actual potential customers. People who responded to a specific solution you can deliver. But we don’t need a 15-question application before you’ve had your fifth call.
Take the calls. Record them.
Listen to where you lose people. What they ask twice. What you struggle to explain. What information you needed but forgot to collect.
Then improve the ads, the form and the conversation.
There’s a trap here, though.
Cheap leads can teach you how to spend an hour with someone who was never going to buy.
So you have to distinguish between a call you mishandled and a call that shouldn’t have happened.
“I need this, I have the budget, but I don’t understand why I should hire you.”
You have work to do on the sale.
“I thought this was free and I don’t have a business.”
You have work to do before the call.
Different problems. Different fixes.
As you get better, tighten qualification. Pay more to reach the people worth speaking to. You can make better use of those opportunities now.
The economics change with your ability.
Customer acquisition cost is cost per held call divided by your close rate.
At $50 per held call and a 2% close rate, you’re paying $2,500 to acquire a customer.
At $150 per held call and a 20% close rate, you’re paying $750.
The calls got three times more expensive. Acquiring a customer got much cheaper.
But that 20% depends on both who shows up and what you do when they get there.
You have to develop both.
Your lead qualification should change as you learn what makes someone a good customer.
Had a call with a developer who gets almost all his business through referrals.
He wants to run ads. But we don’t know which of his services will sell best, which buyers he’ll work best with, or what project sizes make sense.
So if I build him a strict application today, what am I qualifying for?
My own guesses?
“Must do $1M in revenue.”
Why? A smaller company might need a valuable integration he can deliver in a week. A bigger company might need six months of procurement before he gets paid.
Revenue is useful information. But we haven’t established where the cutoff belongs.
Initially, I want to ask what their company makes and what they need help with. Then get him talking to people.
The calls will expose the missing qualifiers.
Maybe a technical point of contact is essential because otherwise every implementation detail has to travel through three people.
Maybe an existing system is essential because building from scratch creates too much scope uncertainty.
Maybe the best customers have a specific manual process repeated across 30 employees. The same software saves them much more money than it would save a three-person team.
Those are things we can build qualification around once we see them.
The sequence matters.
An inquiry tells you someone responded to the promise.
A conversation tells you what they thought the promise meant.
A proposal tells you whether you can turn their problem into a defined project.
A payment tells you they’ll actually buy it.
Delivery tells you whether you want more customers like them.
You learn something different at each stage.
If you optimize for form submissions, you can get very good at attracting people who fill out forms.
If you optimize for closed deals without looking at delivery, you can get very good at selling work you hate.
I want to follow the lead all the way through.
Which ad brought them in? What did they need? Why did they buy? How much work did it take? Would we take another ten of them?
Then tighten the form around what we learned.
Every new qualifier should have a reason. Something we repeatedly saw on calls or during fulfillment that made the customer better or worse.
Otherwise you can build a very sophisticated funnel that efficiently rejects customers you never bothered to understand.
Had a call with a software developer who gets almost all his business from referrals.
Asked him what he sells.
“Enterprise software. Fintech. Healthcare.”
Okay. But what do you actually build? What has somebody actually needed badly enough to pay you?
Twenty minutes later, we’re talking about a box manufacturer.
Their accounting and inventory systems are separate. They want machine sensors counting boxes against each order. QR codes on stacks so employees can scan inventory. Different permissions for accounting, admins and factory workers.
They want it running locally. They want nontechnical employees to be able to use it.
There’s your ad.
“We build simple ERP systems for manufacturers. Connect your orders, machines, inventory and accounting.”
Now a prospect can recognize their own problem before getting on a call.
That changes the entire sales conversation.
If your ad says “custom software development,” you still have to discover what they need, figure out whether you can build it, explain the solution and sell it.
If your ad describes a specific problem you know how to solve, some of that work happens before they submit the form.
We pulled out a bunch of these angles. Support automation. Internal messages converted into tasks. Finance dashboards. Manufacturing inventory.
Each one becomes a separate ad.
The important part: these aren’t just creative variations. You’re changing the problem being advertised, which changes the buyer who responds, which changes the sales call and the work you might get paid to do.
So the cheapest lead doesn’t automatically tell you which offer to build.
One ad might generate cheap inquiries from people with no budget. Another might generate expensive inquiries from companies with a painful problem, a technical decision maker and money allocated to fix it.
You have to connect the ad to what happens afterward.
Which problem do they actually have?
Who shows up to the call?
Can they authorize the project?
Can you scope it confidently?
Will they pay?
Can you deliver it profitably?
And keep track of which ad brought them in. Otherwise you’re collecting sales experience without knowing which promise produced it.
This is why I wanted him talking through everything he’d worked on.
He already had years of technical experience. What we needed was to extract specific things a stranger could recognize and buy.
Then put those things in front of people, take the calls and see where the money is.
We don’t know the winning offer yet.
But now we have concrete offers to test and a way to learn from the responses.
The forever business is a consultancy.
Think about it. You can advise people until the day you die.
Every business you build, every book you read, every fuckup, every person you meet. You can use all of it to become a better advisor.
That’s why I like it so much. I hate feeling like I’m wasting time. I hate starting something and thinking, am I even going to care about this in 10 years?
But becoming wiser? Understanding people better? Getting better at helping somebody make money or solve a problem?
I’m always going to care about that.
I love ads. I made all my money with ads. I can sit there and talk about somebody’s business and how to get them customers for hours.
And I want to keep getting better at that for the rest of my life.
I don’t want to keep waking up and finding some new thing to sell. Some new opportunity. Some new industry I know nothing about because somebody said the margins are good.
I want the years to add up to something.
If I’m 80 and somebody wants to sit down with me because I’ve spent 50 years building businesses and I can help them, that sounds fucking great to me.
A wiseman. A counselor. A teacher. An advisor.
You can do that forever.