Death & Redemption of 100M offer.

I watched a calm, smart, and successful guy blow a team telegram chat to pieces with the F bomb.

I couldn’t physically hear his voice but I could feel it through his text. I could hear the frustration.

Anyone who’s ever sent or received one of those texts knows what I’m talking about.

His target is 100M.

This offer specifically would contribute 6-12M/yr of that along side his other offers that are already successful.

This offer did great organically but failed massively with paid traffic.

It all started when a face from the past popped into my DM’s.

A closer from the team, who had worked on projects with my agency team long before reached out. His show % was 30%.

He said the business owner wanted me to see if something was wrong with what they’re doing.

When the sales reps aren't happy about lead quality or show % they will all quit, and it cost thousands of dollars and 100's of hours to build a team of rockstars.

So I knew I had to move fast.

If you're new here, I'm Lance C. Greenberg—an entrepreneur who's advised hundreds to 7 & 8 figures. This newsletter offers an insider's view on marketing, lead gen, systems, delegation, and scaling.

Here’s the beginning of my notes to get you up to speed:

Here’s the question I’m trying to answer:

Why is the show % so low? It was reported to be 30%. 

I haven’t been able to get confirmation from anyone. This means leadership doesn’t have sheets readily available with this information.

The other questions I’m trying to answer: 

What could be problematic in the future?

What needles could be moved to make this more scalable?

Straight out of the gate I realized there was some kind of issue with the team dynamic.

This is very common.

The business owner assured me that this is not the case.

This kind of response is also very common.

I personally know one of the scariest and most embarrassing things I've ever done is let a consultant interview my team and find out I don’t have my shit together.

It’s also no fun to take your TV to the repair man for him to tell you that it’s not working because it’s not plugged in.

(idk if people still do that. At this time I don’t own a TV, I use a laptop or projector)

So I’m going to have to do this the hard way and ask LOTS of questions.

It’s hard because it will involve pushing back to the point where I will offend someone and risk the relationship.

This is my rule in advisory work and has always been my rule even when I was a solo guy at the advertising agency.

Be willing to risk the relationship to help the owner find the truth.

So here we go…

“How often is your sales director and CMO meeting?”

His reply: very often

So I ask the CMO the same questions..

His reply: not very often at all for this offer

So now I’m digging into Product, Processes, and People to see where the leaks are before I even get to ads (I’ll share those insights too)

From my notes:

CMO confirms that communication for this offer has been low. Which could make the bandwidth of the team a legitimate concern.

• I wasn’t able to find a sheet that has a roll-up of all objections, dispositions, and prospect notes. I advise having someone on the team export all this info so they can write ads based on this info. Update: I did eventually get a sheet but need the following:

  • Based on shows, what is the close %

  • What is the number 1 objection that has the highest % in the sheet

  • What is the actual overall show %

  • Formulate the sheet so that leadership can make decisions about what’s happening based on the data

There wasn’t a way to look at the information and make a decision, which means their leadership team isn’t doing this.

• Sales and Traffic team aren’t communicating enough on this offer. The traffic team, especially leadership, should be looking at what is happening to the calls coming through on a daily basis. I confirmed this by talking to the team. It is especially important when you’re trying to get proof of concept that you have a tight feedback loop in a slack or some kind of text channel so the traffic team understands what is happening on the other end.

I asked the owner if he knows his CMO or media buyers personal and business goals and he said he would ask.

I let him know that this is an issue.

This is something I’ve personally been guilty of many times. You get caught up in the day to day of trying to grow or scale a company.. Or companies.

It’s such a powerful lever though.

And for all you know, you could have people on your team who actually need to go because their goals are not aligned with the company goals.

I continued to ask the owner questions and then ask the team the exact same questions. I shared the answers with him.

Usually this is where if someone’s going to blow a gasket and get defensive, they do.

Not him, he was very receptive.

His response: “Ask me more questions, Lance!”

I then dug into the landing pages, ads, and went through their entire sales process.

This should provide you a great deal of value, especially if you have a highticket offer. Here’s the notes:

• Lots of claims and numbers - I don’t see any disclaimers. Could get you in trouble or get your acct banned. Any time you make a claim, make sure you can back it up and include a disclaimer in the ad and landing page.

• The calendar is open too far. I’ve found that 4 days and beyond show % goes down drastically, or they show up and forget who we are. If they do show up your rep will waste a ton of time explaining to them and trying to regain trust.

• There’s no homework on the thank you page. 1 piece of homework that helps nurture will increase close and show %. Important for them to feel like you genuinely want to help them, they can trust you, and this will work for them. This should be 1 thing they get as a bonus for booking the call that also builds trust, shows proof, and gives more information.

• I recommend asking them if they want a “free training” or some other resource via text to get them to open their email. Right now all they have is an unknown sender email and then the text asks them if I saw the email they sent but it’s kind of confusing.

• Use this process for unknown sender email: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ICSXPmRcdSHL4OozN6WaHPn9_koMdliWfahjL-5--Ng/edit There’s no mention of the email on the confirmation page (shown in doc above), and no email prompting me to respond.

• Avg cost per call according to hyros in the diagram I share below is around 110 dollars. If this is true I recommend a better application that’s a little more restrictive. Do this in steps so that Facebook isn’t completely cut off from conversions. Add one thing at a time over time. Develop a point system depending on what they select or how they answer.

• Have someone outbound all apps that didn’t get through to booking. Update: I later learned there were setters at some point. It’s clear that the calls weren’t being listened to like they should have been. If there are setters in place and people are no showing closer calls then that’s a good indication that either the setter is not doing their job, or their script needs updated.

• Recommend getting these people on your list using the interception funnel. Since it’s hidden there’s a ton of skepticism in that market. Tons of people offering a lot of solutions. Some of those solutions are free courses. By doing a direct offer you’re hitting the smallest part of the marketplace and have little to no nurture.

  • Interception funnel

    • Opt-in for training

    • Redirect to call page 

    • Send training via email delayed

    • Make free training homework

    • Email list for a higher volume of booked calls and nurture Note: looks like you were kind of doing this with the lead forms, but there was no value for them in the email.

• There’s absolutely no email nurture. Important for show and close %.

  • Hook, story, offer & Hook, value, offer work great.

• Sending hyros events back to one pixel for multiple products that are totally different customers. This causes confusion with reporting, AI, and the people receiving the ads because they’re probably seeing ads for all of your offers.

• Best ads based on ROAS. 1 of the lead form ads had 9 leads, 5 booked, and 1 closed. Those are great preliminary numbers. Wondering what prompted you to shut them off:
  
  Update: they were shut off because the deals came in late and the project wasn’t profitable overall. Part of the issue is the volume of calls coming in. Sounds like some of the time they were direct to closer. In this case you need a stronger app. If they are going through a setter then this app is fine, but I would want to see the setter script and know what’s happening on calls. For whatever reason a low % of them are showing up. The leadform performed the best. Set up an email sequence for nurture and to get more booked calls. Below is a screenshot of my audit when I narrowed down to ads that actually had ROAS. they were all validated according to spend and front end KPI’s. They only had 1 sale each however.

• I wasn’t able to find a sheet that has a roll-up of all objections, dispositions, and prospect notes. I advise having someone on the team export all this info so they can write ads based on this info. Update: I did eventually get a sheet but need the following:

  • Based on shows, what is the close %

  • What is the number 1 objection that has the highest % in the sheet

  • What is the actual overall show %

  • Formulate the sheet so that leadership can make decisions about what’s happening based on the data ​

• Retargeting needs to be deployed. I recommend doing an engagement campaign that builds trust based on the low cost per call. The team shared that they didn’t put much spend behind retargeting because it didn’t bring the cost per call down. The goal of this wouldn’t be to lower the cost per call, it would be to increase the trust with the audience which would increase show, close, and overall roas.

  • Would be great to also see some reels explaining to people why they’re failing with [hidden] or what they could do to scale up what they’re doing

  • Would love to see more chat testimonials, those are pretty cool

  • Video testimonials

  • More product walk-throughs

  • Video of a customer showing how they use this product and the different things they like (UGC)

• Messaging on cold ads could be greatly improved. The ads in the picture could actually scale up quite a bit but the ads aren’t memorable. They don’t build trust. They don’t tell any stories. They just bait to the landing page. This is fine for concept testing and getting your first deals. It will ultimately lead to too much skepticism and low show % unless your setters are surgeons at what they do which is usually unlikely. There’s a higher likeliness that better messaging will help people show up than there is a setter being that skilled IME. That being said, I would scale your winners and follow all other steps above FIRST.

  • Implement a research system so the info can be fed to the copywriter.

Conclusion:

These are all things that can greatly improve success. What I’ve found is there’s always a lot more as the work goes on. Team implementation is always a whole other conversation. I look at People, Processes/systems, and product. As far as I know the product is great, Traffic seems like it was starting to work a little. The biggest bottleneck I see is around systems and people. The people seem good but the system/communication process is lacking which is not uncommon. It requires a tighter and more granular feedback loop.

To be continued…

Later I found some other issues present.

I did in fact start getting ads from their other offer.

It was a totally different product to a different audience according to them.

The reason I was seeing these ads was because the product they brought me in to help with was using the same hyros account as the other product.

Hyros sends events back to facebook pixel.

Imagine this..

It’s kind of like me sending 2 sales reps into a giant stadium of people.

The stadium is segmented in different audiences interested in different products and lifestyles.

Sales rep A sells shampoo and rep B sells razors for bald men. Everytime rep A gets a lead or makes a sale I put them into a box.

Then I accidentally mix them up with rep B’s lead information. Then he’s following up with crowds of people who have no interest in shaving their heads.

This is one way of looking at ad AI.

Another way to explain it is training a german shepherd to smell things. If you want the dog to sniff out drugs, but you accidentally teach him with dirty underwear in his training a few times, he’s going to get mixed up.

I also came to the realization that this team is full of smart people but they lack a process for getting proof of concept with ads and the communication wasn’t very strong.

I learned that the leaders of this team weren’t very strong when it comes to laying out a plan and executing.

I see this in businesses a lot where there are smart people who turn into “yes” men to the founder.

This creates a massive blind spot for the owner.

Here is my rule:

I want to be around people willing to risk our relationship by telling the truth. They are the experts. That’s why I hired them. Push back when I’m wrong. Lay out a plan and take ownership of it.

When the plans continuously fail, then that’s when I take control back and tell everyone what to do.

In the best-case scenario if it’s something out of your circle of competence you can hire an advisor.

You have to decide if these issues come from having team members who aren’t on the right bus.

If that’s the case then setting them free and hiring someone else is the best option. Or all of the above for some duration.

The client thanked me.

“Appreciate you shooting me straight

I’m always willing to learn and be teachable to get better and produce better results and build a better company”

When you’re building businesses it’s so easy to get caught up in the day-to-day..

The “tennis shoe in the clothes dryer” as I like to say.

You search and search for answers... reading, listening to podcasts, buying things, hiring people, downloading crap.. And it always evades you.

In the end, I could see his stress went from a 10 to a 1 after I sent over the audit and tasked the team.

Whatever you’re going through, just know others have and are going through it as well.

Myself included.

So many mistakes that I will save for another time.

Never feel embarrassed to ask for help, be the least smart in the room, or for things to be screwed up in your business.

Until next time..

- Lance C. Greenberg