Episode 814: Are Wrong Leads Showing Up to Your Sales Calls? Here’s the Messaging Fix

November 3, 2026

Do you need help with marketing and scaling your coaching or book-a-call business?

Talk to us at: https://www.tiereleven.com/apply-now

Your calendar is full, so why is nobody showing up, and why are the wrong people booking? Most media buyers blame targeting. We see it differently. You can’t fix who shows up by changing who sees the ad. You fix it by changing what they see.

In this episode, I walk through a premium executive coaching client who came to Tier 11 with exactly that problem. Every ad said the same thing, so Meta found one type of buyer and stalled.

We built nine fundamentally different message lanes with our messaging engine and aligned the setter team to every promise. Show rates jumped from 50% to 81%, and cost per lead fell 48%. I also explain why we cut $20K of LinkedIn spend and how they kept revenue nearly flat on $137,000 less ad spend.

In this episode:

How to fix show rates and lead quality with creative diversification
Why Meta treats 30 variations of one claim as one ad
Building nine message lanes with the messaging engine
Why generic ad copy never gets the booked call
Which market subsets to target, and which to ignore
Matching your setters’ script to the promise in the ad
How to cut cost per lead without raising budget
The Meta and Google brand-search combo for a 10X return

Thanks so much for joining us this week. Want to subscribe to Perpetual Traffic?

Have some feedback you’d like to share? Connect with us on Apple Podcasts and leave us a review!

READ THE TRANSCRIPT:

Are Wrong Leads Showing Up to Your Sales Calls? Here’s the Messaging Fix

00:00:00:02 – 00:00:21:10
Ralph Burns
Before one of our clients came to us, a premium coaching company, probably one of the best in the business at what they do, they told me this: “Our calendar is full, and the wrong people are showing up, if they’re showing up at all.” Immediately, we diagnosed that as a messaging problem, not a targeting problem.

00:00:21:21 – 00:00:41:15
Ralph Burns
You can’t fix who shows up on your sales calls by changing who sees the ad, but you can fix it by changing what the messaging is that they see and making sure that messaging is diverse enough so that everyone hears something different based upon their individual desires or their individual pain points.

00:00:42:06 – 00:01:01:00
Ralph Burns
And that’s how we turn this six-figure-a-month business into one that is well over $1.7 million now in revenue. And today I’m gonna show you exactly how all of that works. Hello, and welcome to the “Perpetual Traffic” podcast.

00:01:01:01 – 00:01:18:09
Ralph Burns
This is your host, Ralph Burns, founder and CEO of Tier 11. And if you heard our episode 811 with Thomas McNaught, we went deep into what we refer to as the setter-closer model, and, that is how funnels work.

00:01:18:13 – 00:01:35:23
Ralph Burns
The best funnels that we see, the best businesses, especially in the coaching space, if you are in the coaching space or you have a high-ticket sale, that setter-closer model is an excellent model, and we go pretty deep into that. And we’ll reference that with this particular client here today.

00:01:36:13 – 00:02:00:18
Ralph Burns
But show rates differ dramatically depending on how a lead actually books, and that is still all true for sure. It’s the foundation of what I want to show you here today. However, there is a second part to this that is even more important, because if you have the setter-closer model down in your coaching business, which I highly recommend that you adopt and go back to that episode.

00:02:01:04 – 00:02:19:03
Ralph Burns
We go into it very deeply, and we advocate it for all of our coaching clients. That’s only part of the problem. That’s part of the situation. Yes, speed to lead is absolutely essential. The quicker you can get somebody on a, on a phone call, the better, especially if it’s a setter and then they pass it off to a closer.

00:02:20:00 – 00:02:48:18
Ralph Burns
We love that model. We use that for all of our coaching clients and for all our book-a-call clients. Basically anybody who has a phone call in the middle of their sales funnel, we recommend this model. Speed to lead, super important. However, if you are calling those leads and they’re the wrong leads and they’re not pre-framed to actually show up for the call or be receptive to your pitch, that’s what today’s episode is all about, and it’s the most important part.

00:02:48:21 – 00:03:07:11
Ralph Burns
Fundamentally, both of them work in tandem, and you have to have both sides working. However, in today’s day and age, especially with the Andromeda update and all of the stuff that we talk about on the Ad Lab every Friday, we talk about all our experiments that we’re doing there, and then we test those, and we bring them into Tier 11 and start using them.

00:03:08:07 – 00:03:39:02
Ralph Burns
Messaging now is more important than anything because if you have a book-a-call funnel, if you have a coaching business where a setter and a closer, or maybe you just have a closer, maybe you just have one sales executive, how they are pre-framed once they actually show for the call and their desire to show for the call is actually pre-framed in the newsfeed, in the ads, in the creative, in what they see before they actually take that action.

00:03:39:13 – 00:04:08:21
Ralph Burns
Because once that somebody actually clicks, and we’ve seen this now, like sometimes it takes for, you know, for some of our higher-end, executive coaching, for some of our higher-end e-commerce brands that require a salesperson to close the sale. The salesperson’s job is really is just to sort of guide and overcome objections because most of the selling, most of the convincing has already occurred in the advertising, and that’s what creative diversification does.

00:04:09:09 – 00:04:36:11
Ralph Burns
That’s what the messaging engine does. And we’re gonna talk about that today and how we did that exact process and that exact system and that framework with this client. Okay, so one thing that I’ve learned, uh, after being, uh, in 20 years in the sales industry and, uh, leading sales teams for years and years, which has been very, very effective for me personally in the agency space, because marketing really is just selling on a more massive scale.

00:04:36:17 – 00:04:52:12
Ralph Burns
however, selling, the selling part of it is absolutely important. But No two buyers for your business, for your coaching practice, for your health center, Or maybe you’re a franchise owner and you’re trying to get somebody to book a call for your landscaping business, for example.

00:04:53:14 – 00:05:23:19
Ralph Burns
What they believe about who you are before they actually show up on the sales call itself is almost more important than the effectiveness of your sales process. And what do I mean by that? Well, if you look at all of your buyers, and if you do an avatar analysis of this, and we’ve got a tool now which we’re testing on this to be able to do this for larger database clients to actually determine what the buying patterns are,

00:05:23:21 – 00:05:41:23
Ralph Burns
what the behaviors are prior to them even clicking on an ad, just based upon thousands of data points of how they’ve purchased products in the past. The person who books based upon messaging A and the person who books based on messaging B are not the same person.

00:05:42:12 – 00:06:03:08
Ralph Burns
So, and we’ve talked about this in previous episodes. I believe it was 809 where we talked about this pretty in-depth. We talk about the messaging engine. Meta especially, if we’re just gonna use Meta as our example here, ’cause it’s, you know, five-eighths of the world’s population are on there. And if you’re trying to sell anything, your avatar is on Meta right now, whether you believe it or not.

00:06:03:18 – 00:06:29:14
Ralph Burns
And we see this with B2B businesses, we see it with B2C businesses, it doesn’t matter. Meta is really is the place that we start because the algorithm is so dialed in right now, is if you’re throwing a bunch of ads out there, and I think in 809 I talk about this, is that, in that episode, we discuss, a client that had all the same ads, 30 or 40 different variations of one message, and they were wondering why they couldn’t scale.

00:06:29:17 – 00:06:49:19
Ralph Burns
And it was a large business anyway. The point of this is, as soon as you start to diversify and actually break down your individual clients, your individual avatars, and what their individual pain points are, and they’re not gonna be the same from avatar A to avatar B to avatar C To avatar E, go all the way through.

00:06:50:08 – 00:07:06:08
Ralph Burns
You might have 20 different people that try and buy from you. You might have three different people. When we first started doing this, we would always break down as three avatars. Now we’re seeing a diversity where it’s maybe up to nine, nine different personas, avatars, however you sort of want to talk about them.

00:07:07:02 – 00:07:23:16
Ralph Burns
Each messaging for each one of them is slightly different. And that’s where all of this began, and that’s what really made the biggest difference. It’s not necessarily that the sales process for these guys improved, like the other case study that we talked about, with Thomas on, episode 811.

00:07:24:04 – 00:07:44:02
Ralph Burns
But the messaging up front pre-framed everything, and that was the key to it all. so a little background on these guys, all right? This is a client who serves directors, VPs, executives. These are high achievers in the corporate world, and they feel stuck in their current situation, and this company provides a solution for them from a career standpoint.

00:07:44:14 – 00:08:10:02
Ralph Burns
So, and what happened was that they were delivering creative to one specific avatar or persona or buyer type, and they needed to diversify that. But most importantly, they needed to speak to very different versions of the feeling that would prompt them to click and actually book the call.

00:08:10:22 – 00:08:43:02
Ralph Burns
And in some cases, they would fill out the application but then not book the call. And we talk about that model on episode 811. The important part here is you can actually improve your show rates and your close rates by doing most, not saying all, I would say 80% of the heavy lifting just by the content and the creative that you produce prior to them even knowing anything about what it is that you do.

00:08:43:23 – 00:09:05:07
Ralph Burns
And in many cases, we see this all the time, is there are three subsets of every single market. There is maybe 10 to 15% of people who are actively searching for a solution. They are disgruntled with the current service or the person or the company that is providing that solution for them, so they are actively looking for a better solution.

00:09:05:19 – 00:09:22:15
Ralph Burns
And then there’s about 70 or 80% that have the problem that you solve but might not know that they actually have a problem or that there might be a solution for it. So, this is back to “Breakthrough Advertising” with Eugene Schwartz. These are people that are either problem-aware, okay, and that 10%.

00:09:23:02 – 00:09:39:18
Ralph Burns
But then there’s that 70 or 80% are aware that they have a problem to a certain degree, but they don’t really realize that there might be a solution. And so your advertising and your messaging has to speak to both of those people. That is 80 to 90% of your market.

00:09:40:02 – 00:09:59:00
Ralph Burns
The 10% that are happy with their current solution or are happy in their current situation, you don’t want to target them at all. Forget about them. So that opens up a large part of a market. And if you just talk to problems of one avatar or one type of prospect or one type of …

00:09:59:01 – 00:10:22:01
Ralph Burns
potential buyer, then you’re missing out on all that, the rest of that. And that’s where scale gets stuck. And that’s what we see with most of our clients and the ones that we talk to on a weekly basis, is that they’re just stuck. They can’t get out of sort of this middle ground of, you know, we’ve reached a certain level of success and we can’t get to that sort of next level.

00:10:22:11 – 00:10:40:22
Ralph Burns
So that is the philosophy behind this. If you have a salesperson that’s involved in that next stage, you want your sales executive’s job to be as easy as possible, literally. You want them to have a l- have a layup, you know? I mean, I come from a sales background, obviously, but… And salespeople want to close, of course.

00:10:41:08 – 00:11:01:03
Ralph Burns
But how can your marketing push people to make that next step so that the sales process itself, the sales call itself, and the proposal process is a real layup, and meaning it’s all the work has already been done, all the convincing has already been done. All right, so most brands think creative diversity is just more ads, more variations, more volume.

00:11:01:16 – 00:11:19:19
Ralph Burns
It doesn’t. That actually just creates more noise. So Meta’s algorithm, and we’ve done many shows on this, treats 30 variations of one claim as one ad. And it finds one kind of buyer, and then it basically just stops. And so that’s when your cost per lead starts to rise, that’s when your cost per acquisition starts to rise.

00:11:20:09 – 00:11:38:09
Ralph Burns
If you’re tracking, uh, CPM, that’s when your CPMs start to rise. So you’re basically running one ad 30 times. What really unlocks the algorithm, though, is, and we’ve found this is about the sweet spot, is right around nine fundamentally different things to say to that market.

00:11:38:12 – 00:11:56:16
Ralph Burns
And like I just mentioned, there’s only about 10% or 15% who are actively searching for a solution. You have to target the 70% or 80%. Depending on what your market is, it might be a little bit more or a little bit less. 70% or 80% who are in that sort of zone of indifference.

00:11:57:05 – 00:12:16:04
Ralph Burns
In that zone of indifference, you have to fundamentally present yourself with a different message, a different thing that they’ve been all tired of seeing. So it’s not one thing said nine ways, it’s nine fundamentally different things to say. And this is the basis for what we refer to as the messaging engine.

00:12:16:20 – 00:12:32:17
Ralph Burns
So the messaging engine for us is sort of a fancy way of, of explaining a five-step process, which every step is vitally important, but it’s the framework behind the entirety of this whole message diversity or creative diversity.

00:12:32:20 – 00:12:50:22
Ralph Burns
So it maps out all the different things your buyer might be feeling, the different moments, their fears, their frustrations, their desires that could lead someone to your offer. So each one is its own message lane, in essence.

00:12:51:04 – 00:13:12:05
Ralph Burns
And for this client, these were high-level, VPs or higher level executives, like people obviously with a, a very strong market here. These are folks that have money and are dissatisfied for whatever reason with their current career choices.

00:13:12:10 – 00:13:32:13
Ralph Burns
So the point is, is executives in this band of, potential avatars, they all have different reasons why they’re arriving in the same place. So, for example, one director might be stuck because y- you know, somebody else in the, the business keeps getting promoted over her.

00:13:33:08 – 00:13:55:21
Ralph Burns
You know, maybe another VP is making tons of money, but he feels like he’s left more on the table. Or maybe a third, in this particular case, so there’s a different type of messaging, is about to hit a restructuring or maybe there’s a layoff that’s coming and needs to start moving fast and thinking proactively about what the next stage of their career might be.

00:13:56:01 – 00:14:14:17
Ralph Burns
So completely different reasons to act for a similar type of solution. And like I said, this is a business that helps executives and VPs and VP-level people sort of, reach their potential, in essence.

00:14:14:21 – 00:14:33:07
Ralph Burns
So the beauty of this is that the messaging engine identifies all nine of those moments. And we’ve chosen nine because our creative strategy team and Mir, who came on here, and we’ll leave links in the show notes for that episode, explains how this all works. And nine just always seems to be the number for whatever reason.

00:14:33:09 – 00:14:56:03
Ralph Burns
I, you know, if you do go to Tier 11 and hire us, don’t expect nine, but nine is a r- right around like where we think it should be. We just actually did this and it came out to be many multiples of that, you know, upwards of 20. And then we boil it down because there’s only so many ads you can run, of course. But from those nine different moments, then each creative batch runs one lane.

00:14:56:09 – 00:15:17:20
Ralph Burns
Not nine variations of one fear, for example. Nine different fears, each with its own ad, like I mentioned before. In this niche, in this example of this case study here, each one of these individual executives had a different reason for being dissatisfied, and you have to get to that.

00:15:17:23 – 00:15:44:18
Ralph Burns
And the best way to understand that is to really go deep, not necessarily about just thinking about what your marketing message is today, but really go deep into why your buyers bought from you. And I had a call with a current client just this past week, sort of in a startup mode, and had a tremendous amount, like tens of thousands of opt-ins, but very few people bought.

00:15:45:07 – 00:16:02:22
Ralph Burns
And I said, “You know, one of the great things about what you’re doing is you have proven that your message works. People are… What you’re doing is in demand. Now you have to figure out why they’re not buying.” And so the next phase of our involvement with them is to actually do a survey.

00:16:03:07 – 00:16:21:06
Ralph Burns
And I just saw it actually this morning, done by one of our, CSMs here at, at Tier 11, in which we’re actually assisting with that whole process. So why are they not buying? So these are all the things that you need to understand. You need to understand, like, what’s the psyche? What’s inside the head of your prospect?

00:16:21:22 – 00:16:38:21
Ralph Burns
Not necessarily just banging them over the head every single time with a sales pitch, because nobody enjoys that. Trust me, we’ve all seen those types of ads, and what ends up happening? We scroll right by them. And that sends a very strong signal back to Meta. We’re using Meta in this example.

00:16:38:21 – 00:17:04:02
Ralph Burns
And this is, you know, this is a B2B niche, really. The majority of the advertising that we’re spending here is on Meta. So, you know, does LinkedIn have a place here? Absolutely. we’ve done LinkedIn here numerous times. We always go back to Meta, and then the Meta-Google combination, obviously, with the brand name we create, actually the brand awareness of the product name, the business name, and then people go and Google it, and we grab them that way.

00:17:04:05 – 00:17:21:10
Ralph Burns
So the last click over on Google. So very low ad spend, which is, I think, doing a 10X return right now with this client, which is always very good to see, but it’s not the majority of their ad spend. So what the messaging engine identifies is nine of those moments, and then each creative batch runs one lane.

00:17:22:07 – 00:17:41:05
Ralph Burns
Like I said, not nine variations of one particular angle, one particular hook, one particular fear. It’s nine different fears, nine different desires, each with its own ad, and then variations of each one of those ads. So the before state here is very interesting, and I think this is a great example for just about every business.

00:17:41:07 – 00:17:59:01
Ralph Burns
And like I said, I mean, I would say probably 90% of the businesses that we look at, we’re, we’re on a prospect call, and we look at their Meta ads library, we look at their ads that are over on Google, and we see the same thing. So… And this was definitely the same with this particular client.

00:17:59:02 – 00:18:17:16
Ralph Burns
So they had one message, before we applied the messaging engine, and all the ads roughly said the same thing, which was, “Accelerate your X.” “Get better Y.” Uh, “Are you frustrated with Z?” X, Y, and Z were actually sort of all the same thing.

00:18:18:10 – 00:18:35:15
Ralph Burns
I should have actually said it’s, you know, accelerate your X, get better over X. The point of this is y- it’s generic enough to get to those types of individuals, those executives, but not specific enough for any of them.

00:18:36:03 – 00:19:11:01
Ralph Burns
So important point there. Generic enough to reach them, but not specific enough for them to want to take the next step. in this case, the next step is not click or call or fill out an application, it’s to watch more videos of that brand or more images, more proof that what they have is going to solve their particular problem, is going to allay their particular and specific and unique fear.

00:19:11:22 – 00:19:33:22
Ralph Burns
We’ve allocated, and usually do, nine of them. could be more depending on how much scale we want to reach. But that is the key to all of this. And if you can talk directly to your avatar, your prospect, and hit them right between the eyes, the thing that’s bothering them the most, the desire that they most have, they’re going to pay attention.

00:19:34:18 – 00:19:54:01
Ralph Burns
And they might not buy on that interaction. But what they will do is the Meta algorithm is smart enough to say, “Huh, that person stopped the scroll, watched 12 seconds of a 30-second video, and I’m going to show them another video that’s similar to that but slightly different.”

00:19:54:11 – 00:20:13:04
Ralph Burns
And that’s how Meta works right now. And that’s where this creative diversification comes from, all of that. So… But the key to it is having all of those different moments, all of those different lanes. So a couple of different things from the playbook that we use on this, and we refer to it as the messaging engine.

00:20:13:10 – 00:20:38:02
Ralph Burns
And you can do this on your own, of course, but couple of things to keep in mind. Variety isn’t just new visuals. It’s new reasons to buy. And that’s why the ad platform rewards diversity of creative, because it gives different people their own individual sales funnel and different reasons to buy and keeps them engaged on the platform.

00:20:38:06 – 00:20:57:06
Ralph Burns
You’re satisfying Meta, but you’re also satisfying your business by creating compelling content that ultimately channels them towards what you ultimately want. And if you’re a coaching business like this, you want them to fill out an application, book a call with your closer, or get on a call with your setter.

00:20:57:20 – 00:21:18:11
Ralph Burns
So if every ad makes the same promise, the platform can only find one kind of buyer, and that is super important. And if you look at all your ads that you’re running right now and all your messaging, and it basically just comes back to one thing or maybe two things, you’re only finding those types of buyers.

00:21:19:11 – 00:21:35:12
Ralph Burns
My guess is if you follow this system, you will find 10 times the amount of potential buyers just by diversifying what that front-end messaging is. So, think about it this way, and this is a really competitive space that these guys are in.

00:21:35:13 – 00:21:51:23
Ralph Burns
I mean, they’re now, you know, well into the seven figures, almost multiple seven figures in revenue right now, but a highly competitive space. Every message that you’re not running is a lane your competitor gets to own.

00:21:52:11 – 00:22:12:10
Ralph Burns
So if you’re not doing it, your competition probably is, or maybe you’re being outbid by some of these big Fortune 500, Fortune 100 kind of companies, and those are the companies that can outspend you just with sheer force. And these guys compete in that space where there is big, big buyers out here.

00:22:12:13 – 00:22:29:15
Ralph Burns
So you’ve got to be smarter. And this is a smarter way of competing against the big guys that are out there who could potentially crush you, if you don’t do it right. All right, so here’s the timeframe here. So in July, we had four batches of fresh evergreen creatives, okay?

00:22:29:17 – 00:22:45:14
Ralph Burns
We had founders voiced, you know, a lot of face-to-camera videos, built for the lead ad path or lead ads. Each batch had a distinct message for a distinct executive moment, like we talked about before.

00:22:45:16 – 00:23:05:00
Ralph Burns
There’s different reasons why people choose this service. It’s not for one specific reason. It’s not just to improve their career or get a better job. It’s, there’s multiple reasons. So then the setter team, started getting pre-framed leads, and we could notice this already.

00:23:05:03 – 00:23:39:10
Ralph Burns
The prospect, for example, who clicked on the messaging A ad already knew why they were on the call, and that’s a different conversation from someone who clicked on messaging B. So the setter team immediately realized that the prospects that were coming in had different reasons as to why they wanted to engage, and this was something that the sales team really had to communicate with and to be able to have messaging that matched some of the ads and that could also match what that desire is as to why they actually clicked on the ad,

00:23:39:13 – 00:23:55:02
Ralph Burns
what engaged them. So there was an immediate noticing of, of, of a different type of messaging and a different type of reasons as to why people were booking calls, scheduling calls, and having conversations with the sales team.

00:23:55:05 – 00:24:15:19
Ralph Burns
So… So a part of this which is really, really important is to have that messaging on your front-end advertising be known by your sales team. So if your messaging is going after nine different types of individuals And your team is only used to dealing with one or two types of individuals.

00:24:16:08 – 00:24:41:06
Ralph Burns
You have to have communication between the two. So the promise that got the click became the promise that the setter kept on the first call, and that’s an important point. So this is a setter-closer model. If you’re not familiar with that model, a setter, actually is the first contact, and then they set up the next call, make sure that the individual actually shows up for the closer call.

00:24:41:23 – 00:25:13:00
Ralph Burns
Sometimes we actually were testing a couple of different ways in which the funnel has worked here, but setter-closer model is very, very common in this type of coaching business, especially high volume, like what these guys are doing. So whether you have a closer or a setter or you have both or you just have a closer, it’s really important that your sales team understands what the messaging is and understands this whole concept so that their message when they actually get on the sales call is consistent with the messaging in the marketing.

00:25:13:19 – 00:25:38:17
Ralph Burns
And that’s where sales and marketing really do merge together. And like I said before, marketing basically is just selling on steroids to the masses. Selling is done one-on-one or in some cases in a group setting. So very, very important here. And, that as a result really did assist and improve the show rates, which is one of the most important metrics sort of after the click, and obviously something that’s a precursor to the sale.

00:25:38:19 – 00:26:00:08
Ralph Burns
If they don’t show up, they’re not gonna buy. So you gotta make sure that they show up and your ads, your setter, all of that messaging has to be consistent throughout your entire sales funnel. All right, so in episode 811, we talked about the setter-closer model quite a bit. And with this client, the old path was they clicked the ad, they booked a call, they showed up cold.

00:26:00:18 – 00:26:17:08
Ralph Burns
Big problem was half of them didn’t actually show up. So, uh, sort of defeats the purpose. And actually 50% show rates isn’t bad, but in high volume selling like this, you really can’t have that. You have to improve that to at least 60, 70%, if not more.

00:26:18:06 – 00:26:44:00
Ralph Burns
100% is ideal. You’re never gonna get 100% in these types of situations, but something to aspire to for sure. The ads that were getting the click basically pre-framed nothing. And without the setter’s conversation, there was no one to close that gap. So they would show up cold, they wouldn’t show, there was no setter in between, and as a result, the show rates were, less than ideal.

00:26:44:01 – 00:27:00:13
Ralph Burns
Well, 50%, like I said, isn’t terrible. So the new path was this, is they clicked the ad with the diverse creative, the nine different messaging concepts, nine, nine different messaging pillars, and then they would opt in and a setter calls them within minutes. And we talked about this on 811.

00:27:00:17 – 00:27:17:12
Ralph Burns
you know, different client here that they realized that their speed to lead was really was the thing that was holding them back. And so that was one of the areas that we really worked on alongside them. So setter calls them within minutes, pre-qualifies them, makes sure that they are qualified for, they weren’t just like tire kicking.

00:27:17:16 – 00:27:33:12
Ralph Burns
They were the exact type of avatar that they could actually, actually serve, the exact type of avatar that could actually buy, pre-frame the show up rate. And that changed the show rates from 50% to about 80 to 81%.

00:27:33:21 – 00:27:55:20
Ralph Burns
So huge difference there. So the intervention of a setter in many cases, especially with this type of high ticket selling, high ticket coaching, really, really important. However, you gotta make sure that your setters are aligned with the messaging that’s bringing them in to begin with, and very, very important, like we mentioned, just moments ago.

00:27:56:00 – 00:28:14:23
Ralph Burns
So this slight change in funnel, like I said, is, uh, we’ve gone through this pretty extensively, made the messaging diversity really, really matter for them. So without a setter conversation, without the setter actually talking about some of the messaging that they had seen in the advertising, oftentimes the ad was sort of the end of the journey.

00:28:15:02 – 00:28:33:11
Ralph Burns
but with it, now this combination of setter plus diversity of creative, the message became just the beginning of a conversation. It got them to the point where it already had started to spark an inner desire for them to work with this company.

00:28:33:14 – 00:28:58:16
Ralph Burns
So very, very consistent messaging here, and that’s what made a huge difference. Right around this time, we also cut out what you would think would be the best type of advertising for this type of niche, which was LinkedIn advertising. So we actually cut their ad spend by 20K, and they weren’t really dialed in there, and they, there was no reason for us to pay to prove that a channel wasn’t working.

00:28:58:18 – 00:29:14:16
Ralph Burns
We already knew with creative diversification, with some of the messaging engine stuff that we’re talking about here, that Meta was gonna work for them. You would think in a B2B type of sale, LinkedIn would be the place to go. Yes, will LinkedIn be reintroduced at some point in time in the future?

00:29:15:03 – 00:29:35:11
Ralph Burns
My guess is it probably will be. However, for right now, we’re gonna squeeze as much as we possibly can out of the Meta platform ’cause it’s working so well. So May to August, cost per lead was down 22%, cost per booked call was down 14%, Cost per show was down 19.4%.

00:29:35:14 – 00:29:53:22
Ralph Burns
Remember, the cost to show down nearly 20%, but the show rate, the show percentage on those sales calls with the sales executive, with the closer, Was up from 50% to 81%. Same budget, reduced the LinkedIn spend, started to ramp up the Meta spend.

00:29:54:01 – 00:30:12:23
Ralph Burns
All right, so one of the things that we try to do always is not necessarily spend more to make more. We wanna spend less to make more. So let me just give you an example of two months here, going back to June. Revenue was 1.63 million on $414,000 ad spend.

00:30:13:18 – 00:30:31:18
Ralph Burns
In September, just two months later, revenue roughly the same, about 1.5 million on $277,000 spent. so $137,000 less spend and only a slight difference in revenue.

00:30:32:09 – 00:30:55:05
Ralph Burns
So I don’t think any business in the world would say no to spending $137,000 less and making just about the same, if not the exact same amount. So squeezing efficiency out of the platforms is one of the things that we’ve seen, and we’ve talked about this on multiple shows here, Talked about here numerous times with the pet tech company.

00:30:55:08 – 00:31:16:06
Ralph Burns
This is one of the things that we really enjoy doing, which is getting to a point where you are spending less, making more, which is nirvana if you’re a business owner. All right, here are some of the stats for some of the results that we’ve seen so far, and I’ll actually give you the year-to-date revenue on how things are going.

00:31:16:22 – 00:31:32:12
Ralph Burns
Uh, we’ve got a cost per lead from June to August, which was reduced by 48%. Cost per booked call down 36% reduction, 36% less cost per lead.

00:31:33:03 – 00:31:48:23
Ralph Burns
Show rate increased nearly 30%. Cost per show rate, as I said, increased from 50% to 81% overall, and 47% from June to August. Pretty impressive.

00:31:49:19 – 00:32:09:15
Ralph Burns
And September revenue was the best month that they’ve ever had, about 1.7 million in revenue. And so far, we’re tracking just shy of a million as of the recording of this episode, which is about two-thirds through the month of October. So things are continuing to move in the right direction because all of this is clicking.

00:32:09:22 – 00:32:38:08
Ralph Burns
Everything is working. And that doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re resting on our laurels here. The point is, is like we have figured out the solution to these types of businesses and have replicated it numerous times within Tier 11 because of the process that happens after the click, but even more importantly, how the messaging is done before anyone even realizes who you are as a business.

00:32:39:04 – 00:32:55:10
Ralph Burns
And that is the key. You have to have consistency throughout the entire thing before they actually say yes to your offer and when they actually say yes to your, your offer. Those two parts to your sales funnel, those two parts to your business really do matter.

00:32:56:02 – 00:33:15:00
Ralph Burns
And it starts with getting the right messaging and utilizing something like the messaging engine, which I said is a five-step process that we’ve gone through in, uh, multiple episodes here, and I’ll leave links in the show notes so we can, uh, you can get further into exactly how to do that as well. so the bottom line here is that scale and profitability don’t come just from pushing more spend.

00:33:15:10 – 00:33:38:11
Ralph Burns
They come from your messaging and how well you pre-frame people before you ask them to take that next step. Your funnel, your show rate, you’re matching your spend, and you’re matching your messaging with what your sales team says, it makes for a great combination, and that’s the combination that you should strive for.

00:33:38:12 – 00:34:04:16
Ralph Burns
And understanding all of this and how it works together is super important if you have a coaching business and your growth has stalled. This is the key to everything right now. The messaging engine and creative diversification is just a part of that. But having this all be consistent throughout your entire business is, a big key to growth right now, and to be able to do it oftentimes with less spend and more revenue and ultimately more profit.

00:34:05:09 – 00:34:22:18
Ralph Burns
So the easy lever in the past has always been more spend. But the harder thing, like I said, and the thing that actually compounds, is figuring out what those nine different buyers need to hear before they’ll raise their hand and take that first step. And nothing about their service changed.

00:34:23:10 – 00:34:44:23
Ralph Burns
They had repositioned themselves in the market and their offer, their actual products did not change in the course of this particular case study here. So what changed was what the ad said, what their messaging said, and to a certain degree, some of the mechanics of after the click and their setter-closer model.

00:34:45:10 – 00:35:10:22
Ralph Burns
And if you have a book-a-call business or you have a coaching business like this, you need to look at both sides of the equation. It’s almost like the scales of justice, okay? They can’t be tilted in one way. They need to be balanced so that they both work together and they ultimately are consistent all the way through your sales funnel to provide the service that actually helps your clients and your customers, and you do that by doing a combination of these two things.

00:35:11:03 – 00:35:26:22
Ralph Burns
So if you are running a high-ticket coaching program and your show rates are lower than what you want, your cost per lead is rising, your cost to acquire a customer is rising, and you just feel frustrated because you’re stuck, the answer might not be just your sales team.

00:35:27:06 – 00:35:49:02
Ralph Burns
It could be a portion of it. However, it might be just that the messaging that you’ve got and the messaging that got the click didn’t set up the conversation with your sales team in the right way. And when you have both of those things going correctly and you’ve got them consistent and you’ve got them in alignment, that’s where the real fun begins here.

00:35:49:07 – 00:36:07:08
Ralph Burns
And that’s exactly what we fix here. So if you’re interested in having us help you with your coaching business, your book-a-call business, you can find us over at tiereleven.com. So that is this week’s show. All of the resources that we mentioned in the past shows we’ll leave over in the show notes over at perpetualtraffic.com.

00:36:07:14 – 00:36:21:08
Ralph Burns
And of course, wherever you listen to podcasts, if you could give us a rating and review, helps us get this stuff, out to a wider audience and teach people how to do this stuff the right way through metrics that matter and growth that scales. So until next show, see ya.

Episode 814: Are Wrong Leads Showing Up to Your Sales Calls? Here’s the Messaging Fix

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Are Wrong Leads Showing Up to Your Sales Calls? Here’s the Messaging Fix

More Episodes

Episode 813: Why the Most Important Step in Your Creative Strategy Has Nothing to Do With Creative

Episode 812: Before You Add Another Marketing Channel, Ask This One Question

Episode 811: If Your Sales Funnel Has a “Book a Call” Button…This Episode Is for You

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