Episode 786: Your Comments Section Is a Sales Floor. Is Anyone Working It?

March 24, 2026

Are you burning cash on the wrong strategy? Share a few details about your brand, and we’ll show you exactly where you’re leaking profit.

Book your spot: https://www.tiereleven.com/audit (only 3 spots available).

Is the classic sales funnel dead, or are we just missing the point? Your customers aren’t following a simple, linear path anymore. They’re multitasking, researching, and engaging in ways we can’t afford to ignore.

In today’s episode, we talk about the overlooked power of post-click interactions, specifically the importance of responding to comments. We break down why engagement on ads and social media is critical to building trust and converting leads.

If you want your sales funnel to work, you can’t afford to leave comments hanging without a response. Quick responses are not just customer service but sales. Join the conversation for tips and tools to ensure you’re getting the most out of your social media and ad engagement.

In this episode you’ll learn:

Why social media comments are an untapped source of sales
Creative responses to comments to keep the conversation going
Assigning comments to sales teams, not just customer service
Why high-ticket products need personalized responses and not just a link
AI tools and automated responses to optimize comment management
Why the social funnel is as important as the pre-click advertising funnel

Mentioned in the Episode:

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READ THE TRANSCRIPT:

Your Comments Section Is a Sales Floor. Is Anyone Working It?

00;00;00;00 – 00;00;04;27
Ralph Burns
Is the funnel as we know it dead or what is full funnel actually? Really?

00;00;05;00 – 00;00;17;17
Lauren Petrullo
Do you think your customers are still ducks that are just going to follow the one click upsell and only look at the rest of that and not be interested? Anything on your website? You’re wrong. Go into any store and look at people googling their stuff while they’re trying to buy a product in store.

00;00;17;19 – 00;00;23;26
Ralph Burns
You have any tools you can think of up the top of your head that might help people with this issue? Yes is totally overlooked.

00;00;24;01 – 00;00;28;07
Lauren Petrullo
We use high levels because that’s where our CRM is. We use this one called.

00;00;28;09 – 00;00;54;01
Ralph Burns
Hey, before we get in today’s show, my marketing manager finally convinced me to run a wild experiment in this episode because he wanted to prove what the conversion engine can do for your brand. So we are giving away three of our $10,000 deep dive audits for free in this audit. And this isn’t one of those audits that you get from some AI generated bot.

00;00;54;01 – 00;01;15;14
Ralph Burns
This actually takes us two plus weeks, 7 or 8 of our team members, and it is incredibly in-depth. It will give you insights into your media, buying your creative, your actual business metrics, and find out exactly where the gaps are and where your growth is stalled and what we can do about it, or what you can do about it when you get the audit.

00;01;15;18 – 00;01;29;12
Ralph Burns
Now here’s the catch. We only have three spots, so head on over to tier 11.com/audit right now. Fill out the form and let’s see how we can scale your business in the coming year.

00;01;29;14 – 00;01;50;24
Lauren Petrullo
Hello and welcome to the Perpetual Traffic Podcast. I am still your new voice host Lauren Chula, the founder of Mongoose Media, alongside my very fabulous co-host Ralph Burns, founder of The Fabulous Tier 11, alongside his amazing colleagues like Angela, Lauren and John and so many more.

00;01;50;25 – 00;01;52;29
Ralph Burns
So what should we talk about today?

00;01;53;01 – 00;01;54;14
Lauren Petrullo
Let’s talk about the good in the funnel.

00;01;54;15 – 00;01;56;16
Ralph Burns
Now that you know that you’re the host.

00;01;56;18 – 00;02;13;14
Lauren Petrullo
But I’m the host. The hosts are the masses. Yeah. I mean, I know that like we’ve been talking about, like, the funnel and how, you know, consumers aren’t ducks anymore. Like following in a line. Let’s say I’m only going to do this and this and this because you told me to only click on this one button. So I think we should talk about the goodness of funnels and.

00;02;13;14 – 00;02;14;25
Ralph Burns
Goodness of funnels. Okay.

00;02;14;27 – 00;02;18;20
Lauren Petrullo
The crisis of funnels.

00;02;18;22 – 00;02;26;10
Ralph Burns
How is the funnel as we know it dead or what is funnel? Funnel actually really mean when people say, oh, full funnel.

00;02;26;12 – 00;02;47;04
Lauren Petrullo
I you have a full funnel situation. I think and that is that you’re accommodating someone across the different levels of the problem and solution awareness stage. So just as we talked about how like coming at people from different angles, providing them information for where they are. I think that is a component of the full funnel, but not the only thing.

00;02;47;11 – 00;03;03;22
Ralph Burns
It’s interesting that so much focus on the funnel and how a funnel or the customer experience or whatever it is that you want to call it, the customer journey is so focused on just the front end, which is the ads, the advertising, the SEO.

00;03;03;29 – 00;03;06;13
Lauren Petrullo
The the destination. You take them to.

00;03;06;14 – 00;03;21;06
Ralph Burns
The thing that gets the click when in fact it really is. It’s everything. It’s all together. I mean, I always say 50% of the effectiveness of all your advertising is everything after the click, but probably 50% is probably undervaluing the rest of the actual equation.

00;03;21;07 – 00;03;44;18
Lauren Petrullo
I would argue that more than 30% is of your advertising effort. Is solidified by the after of click experience. But I think right now, I mean, it’s hard. Like I’m always going to lean more towards model or even like Amazon ads, the before the click power of comments and reviews. That has a lasting impact. But I think people often neglect.

00;03;44;18 – 00;04;01;25
Lauren Petrullo
And where I see that is when I look inside of ad accounts and I’m looking at ads that are generating a lot of comments and they’re having like these terminal types of responses. So I’m counting. This is like the full funnel experience can be like meeting the consumer with the information that they need, wherever they are in relationship to your brand and your solution.

00;04;01;27 – 00;04;18;09
Lauren Petrullo
But I think there’s more to it because it’s it’s over delivering for the consumer what they’re not even thinking about needing. So yes, it’s providing information, but it’s also showing up to them and being visible to them about what your brand represents. And where I see that the most is like within comments on ads and, and what I don’t like.

00;04;18;09 – 00;04;40;17
Lauren Petrullo
And if you’re listening to this and you have some on your team that responds to comments, amazing. Good start for having someone. What I would invite you to have them or encourage them to do is not reply and terminal comments. So like it’s you say, hey, this is an amazing iPad. I love this and my reply in a terminal fashion would be thanks.

00;04;40;19 – 00;04;57;08
Lauren Petrullo
Don’t thank me. Let’s continue the conversation. Social media is social first. So when you’re not continuing the conversation, you’re just stopping it. Like appreciate those words. Oh have a great day. No, don’t tell me. Have a great day. Tell me how to get deeper involved in your brand. So if you’re like, hey, this is a great iPad. I love this.

00;04;57;09 – 00;05;19;11
Lauren Petrullo
Like, oh yeah, we’ve been using it for four years. It’s actually won these three awards. What are you using your iPad for? Or if engagement like but it’s engagement back because when Elon Musk released the algorithm numbers as it pertains to x point scoring. So if you had a tweet and you had a comment you had a follow.

00;05;19;12 – 00;05;30;15
Lauren Petrullo
You had all these things. He published it. What you get from the algorithm. So I’ve used that and assumed it’s somewhat similar because I mean, all those companies just borrow people. It’s very incestuous.

00;05;30;18 – 00;05;32;16
Ralph Burns
They all sort of borrow the same kind of algorithm.

00;05;32;20 – 00;05;34;01
Lauren Petrullo
Exactly.

00;05;34;04 – 00;05;36;20
Ralph Burns
The exceptions to that, I think TikTok kind of changed it for everybody.

00;05;36;21 – 00;05;55;05
Lauren Petrullo
Well, that came from a different location. So with that kind of component where you have like such a terminal slope, you’re you’re ceasing the conversation from continuing. And I think conversations lead to conversions and, there was a statistic, I saw that 85% of people are not going to leave comments. So the 15% of people that are and you don’t respond to them, you don’t engage with them, you don’t extract more from it.

00;05;55;05 – 00;06;06;14
Lauren Petrullo
You’re missing out on the opportunity for that person to learn more. But you’re also missing out on the 85% that would be creeping. So that’s a before the click one. But I think has an impact that’s like a silent impact that no one talks about.

00;06;06;15 – 00;06;07;17
Ralph Burns
You said defining.

00;06;07;17 – 00;06;17;19
Lauren Petrullo
Percent. The statistic I found. And it was in meta something that they said, but only 15% of people engage in comments. That means for me, 85% are voyeurs. They’re wanting to.

00;06;17;19 – 00;06;20;20
Ralph Burns
See it even higher. I like just off the top of my head, I was.

00;06;20;21 – 00;06;23;09
Lauren Petrullo
Higher, like more than 85% and less than 15.

00;06;23;14 – 00;06;24;26
Ralph Burns
Would be higher than 85%.

00;06;24;29 – 00;06;33;19
Lauren Petrullo
I would agree, but I’m I’m those commenters. I’m the person that leaves or views one stars or five stars. I don’t say anything when it’s three, but when something is great, I leave a review when it’s not.

00;06;33;21 – 00;06;36;04
Ralph Burns
Sorry you don’t. Or you do.

00;06;36;09 – 00;06;53;01
Lauren Petrullo
I do when it’s. I try not to leave a bad review, but when I’m leaving a bad review, I’m I’m being consistent and I leave more, way more five star reviews than one star. But when there’s one star and they could not rectify situation or something was bad, I’m talking about like ruining a $400 quote.

00;06;53;01 – 00;07;04;20
Ralph Burns
So we’re talking about engagement, having a social team or you like, how does how does somebody approach this if they say they don’t have the time to be able to engage? So you.

00;07;04;20 – 00;07;05;08
Lauren Petrullo
Don’t want sales.

00;07;05;15 – 00;07;06;22
Ralph Burns
Or you should have somebody on your team.

00;07;07;00 – 00;07;26;18
Lauren Petrullo
It’s a sales position. Your sales person should be doing DMs. Our sales comments are sales comments on ads or sales. I literally I invite anyone to check out the comments in your ads. Most of the time when people are leaving comments, it’s because they’re interested in the actual product. They’re raising their hand. I’ve seen it. I go into accounts and I audit them and I see, hey, do you have a location near me?

00;07;26;19 – 00;07;32;15
Lauren Petrullo
Hey, do you ship to this state? Hey, does this work with my current medicine? They’re asking cash.

00;07;32;15 – 00;07;33;07
Ralph Burns
I buy this.

00;07;33;08 – 00;07;48;27
Lauren Petrullo
Oh my God, that’s the worst. And I’m. And the reply is it’s on our website. Oh, I want to slap someone in the face. We need a hand hold these individuals. They just said, I don’t know where to buy this. We have to assume sometimes people don’t follow directions, and so we want to give them nice direct.

00;07;49;01 – 00;07;50;14
Ralph Burns
Link to where you can actually.

00;07;50;14 – 00;08;06;10
Lauren Petrullo
Buy a link. Is it right for Lucian or if there’s like whatever that process looks like a lot of products that we have that we have worked with have customizable elements. So say you’re doing a custom jewelry or say you’re doing a custom piece, like you’re doing a tailor and you’re trying to figure out which jumpsuit it is.

00;08;06;10 – 00;08;19;22
Lauren Petrullo
If you have 2000 plus SKUs and you’re in the fashion space, sending them a link without knowing or understanding what they’re looking for, it’s it’s like someone coming into your store. Think of the brick and mortar space and saying, hey, can I get help? And then there’s no one on staff.

00;08;19;25 – 00;08;47;24
Ralph Burns
Wait. My marketing manager finally convinced me to run a wild experiment in this episode because we want to prove what the conversion engine can do for your brand. We are giving away three of our $10,000 deep dive audits for free. We’re going to look at your creative, your media, buying your actual business metrics to find exactly where your growth is stalled.

00;08;47;26 – 00;09;05;00
Ralph Burns
This is two weeks of our best work, but we only have three spots. So go to tier 11.com/audit right now. Fill out the form and let’s see how we can scale your business. It’s unbelievable to me. And I think I mean we’re all guilty of it sometimes I mean.

00;09;05;00 – 00;09;05;14
Lauren Petrullo
Yeah yeah.

00;09;05;17 – 00;09;22;09
Ralph Burns
Stuff gets in the way we get busy etc. etc.. So I mean there is that a busy business owners like they’re doing other things, they think it’s the last thing the world that they want to do. However, if you do have a sales team, you have a dedicated time every single like I actually have time every single week where I go in and actually respond to comments.

00;09;22;09 – 00;09;40;07
Ralph Burns
Now, if you’re watching this right now, I haven’t responded to all of your comments. I might be a little bit behind this week. Your human point is, is that we dedicate time specifically to that, because it is a sales and indication it’s engagement. It’s in an ideal world, probably my sales executive should be it.

00;09;40;07 – 00;09;40;19
Lauren Petrullo
Should be.

00;09;40;20 – 00;09;41;09
Ralph Burns
EDR.

00;09;41;10 – 00;09;44;01
Lauren Petrullo
Like I say, SDR, it’s a social center.

00;09;44;01 – 00;09;48;15
Ralph Burns
The questions are a little bit more technical. So I end up answering those questions because.

00;09;48;17 – 00;10;02;00
Lauren Petrullo
That’s a that’s an escalation thing. Like I would say that we call it a social setter because if it’s high ticket, it’s like I’m trying to figure out if you’re interested in getting on a phone call. Right. So if you’re like, hey, yeah, this sounds good. I’m like a setter. That’s like trying to get you to get on the phone.

00;10;02;00 – 00;10;03;28
Lauren Petrullo
I’m trying to get your appointment booked.

00;10;04;00 – 00;10;23;10
Ralph Burns
I think the big point to this is that it used to be try to get everybody off of social and onto your sites. That was the goal. Like, we’re all sort of old school marketers. And the fact that you just want to get the click, get them off the site, not do a lot of the selling on the site and then the website does the selling.

00;10;23;13 – 00;10;43;29
Ralph Burns
I think that trend has completely reversed because as John and I said many times and some of our ad lab lives, it’s like we’re a bunch of Wally fat people, like, we just want, oh yeah, we just want stuff coming to us and just to be able to touch screens. I don’t have to click. I don’t have to put in my email, my phone number, all I want to do any of that, I want everything to populate.

00;10;44;02 – 00;11;27;17
Ralph Burns
Yeah. So a lot of the experience is really has gone online. And to your point, comments I think are really one of the under the seemingly undervalued and overlooked resource that I know a lot of businesses neglect. Yeah. And then when when the same thing that we see is like when we’re looking at an audit, in the first couple of stages of our onboarding process, I believe, like the second, it’s not the second or the third stage of our onboarding is examining all the pages, all the social content pages, and looking at and then actually using an AI tool to pull in comments through the API that then creates ideas for ads, consumer insights.

00;11;27;17 – 00;11;45;20
Ralph Burns
Yeah, like clockwork does this, by the way. Like there’s AI tools out there that aren’t able to do that. But yes, we use that for ads and for messaging and for all that stuff. However, what we find more often than not in that stage is that most of the comments are there’s no response whatsoever. There’s no way, no.

00;11;45;23 – 00;11;55;29
Lauren Petrullo
I hate if you’re going to ask people to come into your store and be invited to learn about your product or service, and then you’re going to ignore them, it’s like I invited you to a party, but I didn’t give you the address. Yeah.

00;11;56;01 – 00;12;14;03
Ralph Burns
Rude. It’s it is. It’s such a simple thing, but it and it can be resolved. I think it’s really it’s just a matter of dedicating time to it. And I do think that oftentimes, like the busy business owners that I talk to, our directors of marketing, they just like they have other things, they have other priorities.

00;12;14;03 – 00;12;21;23
Lauren Petrullo
But so you can use AI tools like there are AI tools to do the responses and you can or it’s party time.

00;12;21;23 – 00;12;33;03
Ralph Burns
Or you just allocate time to it because I think the the downfall of it oftentimes is that you when you go on social for express purpose of doing comments like.

00;12;33;03 – 00;12;34;14
Lauren Petrullo
Oh, you get distracted.

00;12;34;17 – 00;13;02;05
Ralph Burns
You get completely distracted. So the way that I do it, for example, like inside, the YouTube back end, for example, like to answer our YouTube comments. There is by video, there is comments. And you can actually click on okay number. So you’re not getting distracted by being on YouTube. But all you’re really doing is you’re going in there for a job, which is click on that comment and then you can actually answer the comment right on the back end of your YouTube so you don’t get distracted by.

00;13;02;05 – 00;13;08;16
Ralph Burns
Sure. Oh, look at that video. Because YouTube like for me it’s like guitar videos. And you know, it’s baseball videos.

00;13;08;16 – 00;13;09;21
Lauren Petrullo
Sucked in algorithm.

00;13;09;22 – 00;13;25;10
Ralph Burns
All of a sudden I’m like, where the hell the last 45 minutes, guys just guy came in. When I come in, they’re going to answer comments for sure. So I think that’s the that’s the problem. I think with a lot of the reason why I don’t go on TikTok, for example, is because they have me so dialed in like, I’ll never get off.

00;13;25;13 – 00;13;42;22
Ralph Burns
Yeah, you know, I’ll never leave because it’s so addictive. Yeah. So but if there is a way where you can discipline yourself to answer those comments, YouTube is as a great platform for that. You know, we also we have my social team does it for Facebook and for Instagram, but on YouTube specifically, that is great.

00;13;42;22 – 00;13;46;28
Lauren Petrullo
Your team covers the comment responses for your clients.

00;13;47;01 – 00;13;47;29
Ralph Burns
No. For us.

00;13;48;00 – 00;14;03;09
Lauren Petrullo
Oh, okay. I was like, I never do that. I tell clients like, they’re like, what do you mean you don’t cover comments? I’m like, that’s a sales or customer service job. Every comment is either a customer service inquiry or a sales inquiry. I’ve never seen it be either or. And don’t outsource your.

00;14;03;09 – 00;14;03;27
Ralph Burns
Yeah.

00;14;04;02 – 00;14;04;19
Lauren Petrullo
Customer service.

00;14;04;19 – 00;14;12;17
Ralph Burns
Sales knowledge. If it’s something you can really outsource, you really do have to have an internal team to be able to do it like we do. Do the social media marketing for a lot of our clients, but we don’t do.

00;14;12;17 – 00;14;15;21
Lauren Petrullo
Until you create the content. Yes, that’s content marketing.

00;14;15;21 – 00;14;16;25
Ralph Burns
That’s not it’s not.

00;14;16;28 – 00;14;32;16
Lauren Petrullo
Customer service and it’s not sales. And like you can outsource it to to someone that that’s what they do. I, I wouldn’t put that on your performance marketing team. Because the other thing too is like someone who’s in sales could be way more aggressive versus conversational. So that’s why I like it. Being an internal person. We used to do it.

00;14;32;16 – 00;14;50;20
Lauren Petrullo
We don’t do it anymore. I know again it’s a resourcing. We use high level. That’s our CRM. And so we have in the conversations that can I like it all. But I think a lot of it is people neglect it. And there are software solutions out there. If you are someone who’s like, distracted David. Yeah, absolutely.

00;14;50;21 – 00;15;01;14
Ralph Burns
Do you have any tools you can think of at the top of your head that might help people with this issue? Yeah, this is totally overlooked. It’s undervalued. And like you said, it is a sales conversation.

00;15;01;14 – 00;15;03;18
Lauren Petrullo
And there’s kind of a piece of the funnel.

00;15;03;19 – 00;15;09;23
Ralph Burns
Yeah, it’s a piece of the funnel. We’ll get into the other pieces and funnel in subsequent episodes here. But I think this is a really good one. I think it’s come to mind.

00;15;09;24 – 00;15;28;24
Lauren Petrullo
Like so we use high level because that’s where our CRM is. HubSpot might have some solutions that you can do depending on what degree you’re in. But there’s Hootsuite. There’s we use this one called not looker, but it was a Loomer or something like that. We use that for a while, but social media scheduling apps generally have a place that you can call it what I like.

00;15;28;24 – 00;15;35;23
Lauren Petrullo
Oh, gorgeous. Yeah. Great solution because you can fill in other locations and you have that back end and you can put in emails.

00;15;35;26 – 00;15;37;20
Ralph Burns
Yeah, I’ll blur is another one.

00;15;37;22 – 00;15;39;28
Lauren Petrullo
Oh, I’ve never used it, so I can’t speak to it, but I’ve.

00;15;39;28 – 00;15;43;12
Ralph Burns
Heard of that automated. Then you can also answer comments in there as well.

00;15;43;14 – 00;16;01;11
Lauren Petrullo
And gorgeous is like I think $100 a month. It’s on the higher up end, but it has the most integrations and is set up well. If you’re doing an I bought solution like many, chat allows you to do it. Chat bot builder allows you to do it many times, are at $15 a month, and you can cycle it all yourself if you’re trying to avoid that item.

00;16;01;11 – 00;16;08;14
Lauren Petrullo
But I definitely lean into what software do you currently have before buying a new software for learning? Anyone check your tech stack.

00;16;08;14 – 00;16;19;21
Ralph Burns
And then ChatGPT it gem. Oh yeah, Claude co-work it like just figure it out that I think that’s probably your best resource. Like, here’s my CRM. How do I best respond to comments?

00;16;19;21 – 00;16;21;02
Lauren Petrullo
What’s here’s my tech stack.

00;16;21;02 – 00;16;21;15
Ralph Burns
Like, yeah.

00;16;21;20 – 00;16;24;05
Lauren Petrullo
I’d say here’s my tech stack. Are any of the tools I already pay.

00;16;24;11 – 00;16;50;03
Ralph Burns
Or understand, or give me a solution that will allow me to respond to comments and engage with people who have commented on my social posts? Yeah, without me getting sucked in by social media. Yeah, there’s your prompt right there. Find that. So. Hey, guys. All right. This is step one of the entire funnel. We’re going to be getting into other overlooked aspects of the sales funnel, because the sales funnel itself is really the old school way of doing things is.

00;16;50;05 – 00;17;05;12
Lauren Petrullo
Is your customers aren’t ducks. They’re not following your directions in a line. They they’re all over the place. You’re in a store if you don’t believe that, your if you think your customers are still ducks that are just going to follow the one click upsell and only look at the rest of that and not be interested. Anything on your website?

00;17;05;15 – 00;17;11;14
Lauren Petrullo
You’re wrong. Go into any store and look at people googling their stuff while they’re trying to buy a product in store.

00;17;11;15 – 00;17;25;21
Ralph Burns
Like, all right, I like it when you run these podcasts. They’re pretty good. They take us in a completely different dress, commenting, who would have thought we didn’t even come into the show today? Thank you. We’re going to talk about comments. But anyway, a really good one. So how do you end the show?

00;17;25;23 – 00;17;44;14
Lauren Petrullo
Thank you so much for joining my podcast. We’re so happy to have you here. If you want to tune in to other episodes, you can visit, perpetual traffic com forward slash YouTube, especially if you want to watch them online and see our amazing setup inside of the Orlando library. Shout out to our libraries. Thanks so much for joining us.

00;17;44;14 – 00;17;49;13
Lauren Petrullo
On behalf of my amazing co-host.

00;17;49;15 – 00;17;52;23
Ralph Burns
See ya. So Chow chow.

00;17;52;25 – 00;17;53;06
Lauren Petrullo
Well done.

00;17;53;13 – 00;17;54;10
Ralph Burns
All right.

00;17;54;12 – 00;17;55;04
Lauren Petrullo
See ya.

00;17;55;06 – 00;17;55;20
Ralph Burns
Bye.

Episode 786: Your Comments Section Is a Sales Floor. Is Anyone Working It?

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READ THE TRANSCRIPT:

Your Comments Section Is a Sales Floor. Is Anyone Working It?

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