Cole Gordon audits Ali Abdaal's coaching business live, table by table, until the real constraint stops hiding behind client success.
Posted
1 months ago
Duration
Format
Interview
educational
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18.6K
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Big Idea
The argument in one line.
When a founder over-focuses on making the product perfect before scaling, that focus is usually procrastination dressed up as diligence, and the actual constraint almost always sits in sales and marketing volume, not fulfillment.
Who This Is For
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
You run a coaching, course, or professional-services business past $100K/month and you're not sure whether client success or sales is the real bottleneck.
You're building a client success or account management function and need concrete structure for milestones, calendars, and daily meetings.
You manage or are building a sales team and need a system for admin accountability, call review, and rep onboarding.
You keep delaying growth because you feel the product isn't ready yet, and you want a framework to test whether that's true.
SKIP IF…
You're pre-revenue or under six figures a year; most of this advice assumes an existing team and real call volume.
You're not running a high-ticket coaching/course/service model with sales calls and account managers.
TL;DR
The full version, fast.
Cole Gordon audits Ali Abdaal's business, which just hit $300K a month after nine months of pure organic growth plus a month-old sales team and ad spend. Cole's core diagnosis: in demand-constrained businesses like courses and coaching, the bottleneck is almost never client success, it's volume or sales efficiency, and Ali is over-indexing on product because focusing on fulfillment feels safer than confronting sales performance. The conversation builds out a concrete client success system (segmented milestones capped at four, red/yellow/green sentiment tracking, front-loaded bi-weekly coaching calls, 60-80 clients per coach) and a sales team system (daily team meetings, admin accountability loops, reviewing 'fringe' calls that should have closed, baseline call recordings new reps model themselves on). The actionable conclusion: don't turn off lead flow to fix fulfillment, keep the flow running and fix systems under real pressure, and treat client success perfectionism as a signal you're avoiding the sales work that will actually move the business from $300K to $1M a month.
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Cole establishes that courses/coaching/services are demand-constrained businesses, so the bottleneck is volume or sales efficiency, not fulfillment, unless proven otherwise.
03:48 – 12:54
02 · Diagnosing client success
Ali describes his 30% first-sale conversion rate; Cole reframes client success as needing to be segmented by completed activities, not tracked as one binary number, and connects Ali's over-focus on product to fear of scaling.
12:54 – 21:43
03 · Operational complexity and support channels
Discussion of Circle vs Skool, one-on-one Slack support plus calls, and why account managers need to be leaders, not customer service.
21:43 – 28:47
04 · Coach capacity and calendars
Cole lays out the 60-80 clients per coach benchmark, Parkinson's Law applied to client load, and reverse-engineering a coach's calendar from calls per client times roster size.
28:47 – 33:40
05 · Milestones and red/yellow/green tracking
Cap milestones at four, separate quantitative milestone progress from qualitative red/yellow/green sentiment, and hold clients accountable for showing up without doing the work.
33:40 – 40:26
06 · Hiring a client success director
Why the director must have actually worked the CSM role first, running a daily team meeting, and the wins/projections/training meeting structure.
40:26 – 45:00
07 · Client success KPIs and curriculum ownership
Keep KPIs to renewals plus one or two milestone metrics, and Cole's rule of thumb for when a founder should personally create curriculum versus bring in an outside expert.
45:00 – 51:08
08 · Client acquisition for beginners
Warm outreach, niche discovery via Zoom (not written forms) to surface a founder's real story, and one-call vs two-call close for total beginners.
51:08 – 58:44
09 · Org design
How Cole breaks a company into marketing, sales, operations, finance, and fulfillment, and why coaches shouldn't touch billing or admin work.
58:44 – 1:08:46
10 · Building the sales team
The Taki Moore doc-close funnel that got Ali to $300K, why it stopped converting, admin accountability loops for closers, and reviewing fringe deals in daily call review.
1:08:46 – 1:16:03
11 · Ramping reps with baseline calls
Sales reps learn by observational reinforcement; record 10-20 near-perfect calls as the modeling baseline, and Cole's own energy around taking sales calls himself.
1:16:03 – 1:22:36
12 · Scaling the sales team without breaking client success
When to hire a fourth closer, controlling lead flow via ad spend and email segmentation instead of over-hiring, and around six closers as the point to hire a sales manager.
1:22:36 – 1:28:46
13 · Pricing reveal, guarantees, and LTV:CAC
Price-before-call trades volume for quality; guarantees are mainly a marketing hook rather than a sales-call lever; target LTV:CAC ratios by stage.
1:28:46 – 1:36:13
14 · Founder mindset and catastrophizing
Cole's own history scaling from $100K to $2.5M/month in 12 months, catastrophizing patterns, and challenging fear-based thinking with evidence.
1:36:13 – 1:39:43
15 · Consolidating email lists and closing recap
Merging four overlapping email lists into one relationship list plus a business list, and Cole's closing summary: stop procrastinating with client success perfectionism and focus on the sales team.
Atomic Insights
Lines worth screenshotting.
Courses, coaching, and professional services are demand-constrained businesses, so the bottleneck is almost always volume or sales efficiency, not fulfillment.
A founder's instinct to obsess over client success before scaling is frequently a form of procrastination rooted in fear of what a bigger version of the business will look like.
Client success should never be tracked as one binary metric; segment it by which specific activities a client actually completed, since results differ wildly between people who did the work and people who didn't.
60 to 80 clients per coach is the standard load for a real one-on-one coaching program; done-for-you services can run as low as 20, done-it-yourself programs can run as high as 80 to 100.
Work expands to fill the time allotted, so a coach given three clients will spend 30 hours a week on them exactly as they would with sixty, meaning capacity has to be designed and capped up front, not discovered by accident.
Cap client success milestones at four; four is roughly the limit of working memory, and five is acceptable but not ideal.
Milestone progress is quantitative data (where the client actually is) while red/yellow/green status is qualitative data (how the client feels and how fast they're moving); two clients on the same milestone can have opposite sentiment.
The best account managers tend to score high on trait disagreeableness, because leading a client up the mountain requires being able to tell them they're wrong, not just be supportive.
Daily team meetings, even at 60 minutes, are historically the single highest-leverage fix for an underperforming sales team.
New sales hires learn primarily through observational reinforcement, meaning 10 to 20 recordings of a near-perfect call teach far more than a written script or training video ever will.
Review 'fringe deals,' the calls a rep believed went well but that went to follow-up instead of closing, because that gap between perceived and actual performance is where the biggest coaching wins are hiding.
A daily reinforcement cycle, someone checking and calling out missed admin work every single day, fixes almost any compliance problem; letting it slide three or four days makes the rep's own numbers unreliable.
Over-optimizing a proxy metric degrades the underlying business quality, illustrated by closers who mark a bad-fit prospect as a no-show, or who withhold offers from unlikely buyers just to inflate their close rate.
For high-ticket coaching sold on largely organic/warm traffic, target close rates of 35% and show rates around 75%; a fully cold B2B sales team is closer to 20-30%.
Revealing price before the call increases quality of the leads that book but reduces volume; revealing price at the end of the call increases volume but reduces lead quality, and this is a deliberate lever, not a fixed rule.
Guarantees mostly function as a marketing hook to increase ad response, not as a meaningful lever inside the actual sales call; they only matter in the call as an objection-handling tool held in reserve for prospects on the fence.
A healthy LTV to CAC on ad spend alone should be at least 5:1, ideally 7:1 to 10:1, and as high as 20:1 is achievable early with a strong back end before acquisition costs rise with scale.
About six closers is the typical point where a founder should stop personally managing the sales team, though a truly exceptional hire can justify promoting to manager as early as four or five reps.
When bringing in an outside sales manager, still have them take live calls first, even quietly, so they learn the product, leads, and process before managing the people who already know it.
Don't turn off lead volume to fix a client success problem; the flow of new clients is what actually reveals which systems need fixing, and cutting volume for months to 'fix fulfillment' can make the whole offer unprofitable.
For email lists with overlapping content and audience, merge them into one relationship list rather than maintaining several near-duplicate lists; keep transactional 'churn and burn' ad-driven lists separate from long-term relationship lists.
Takeaway
The client success obsession is usually the avoidance, not the fix
WHAT TO LEARN
In a demand-constrained business like courses or coaching, an endless focus on perfecting fulfillment before scaling is almost always a way to avoid the harder, scarier work of building and managing a sales team.
01Framing the constraint
Courses, coaching, and professional services are demand-constrained businesses, so the bottleneck is almost always volume or sales efficiency, not fulfillment, unless there's clear evidence otherwise like refund spikes or public complaints.
02Diagnosing client success
Never track client success as one binary success/fail number; segment it by which specific required activities a client actually completed, since results differ wildly between people who did the work and people who didn't.
A founder's instinct to obsess over client success before scaling is frequently a form of procrastination rooted in fear of what a bigger version of the business will look like.
03Operational complexity and support channels
The best account managers score high on trait disagreeableness, since leading a client up the mountain requires being able to tell them they're wrong, not just be supportive.
Operational complexity cuts both ways: it slows scalability, but if chosen deliberately it becomes a moat competitors won't bother building.
04Coach capacity and calendars
Design coach capacity up front around 60-80 clients per coach for a real one-on-one program, because work expands to fill whatever time is allotted if the load isn't deliberately structured.
Reverse-engineer a coach's calendar from calls-per-client times full roster size to see whether the schedule can physically fit before hiring up to it.
05Milestones and red/yellow/green tracking
Cap client success milestones at four, since that's roughly the limit of working memory, and five is acceptable but not ideal.
Track milestone position (quantitative) separately from red/yellow/green sentiment (qualitative); two clients on the same milestone can have opposite sentiment.
06Hiring a client success director
A client success director should have actually worked the CSM role first; managing a function you've never done firsthand rarely works.
Run a daily team meeting for client success covering wins, projections by milestone stage, and training.
07Client success KPIs and curriculum ownership
Keep client success KPIs to renewals plus one or two milestone metrics; more than three dilutes focus.
Own as much of the curriculum personally as possible, since a founder ties concepts together across the whole program in ways an outside expert can't.
08Client acquisition for beginners
Use a live Zoom conversation, not a written form, to surface a beginner's real niche story, since people skip over their most valuable details in writing.
For total beginners, use a two-step close (discovery call, then a separate proposal call) rather than pushing a one-call close too early.
09Org design
Break the company into marketing, sales, operations, finance, and fulfillment as the base org chart, adding leadership layers to each as the business scales.
Keep coaches off billing and admin entirely; anything that isn't client-facing coaching work should route to an operations person via a form.
10Building the sales team
A daily reinforcement cycle, someone checking and calling out missed admin work every single day, fixes almost any compliance problem before it compounds.
Review 'fringe deals,' the calls a rep believed went well but that stalled instead of closing, because the gap between perceived and actual performance is where the biggest coaching wins are.
Watch for proxy metric gaming: closers can inflate close rate by marking weak prospects as no-shows or withholding offers from unlikely buyers, so track production in cash and units, not close rate alone.
11Ramping reps with baseline calls
Sales reps learn primarily by observing and mimicking, not by watching training videos, so record 10-20 near-perfect calls as a baseline new hires can model themselves on.
Founders should expect to personally take calls for a week or two to generate that baseline if no one else can, treating it as building a permanent department asset rather than a chore.
12Scaling the sales team without breaking client success
Control lead volume through ad spend and email segmentation rather than over-hiring closers just because leads are backing up.
Around six closers is the typical point to stop personally managing a sales team and hire a dedicated sales manager, though an exceptional hire can justify it earlier.
Don't cut lead volume to 'fix' fulfillment; keep the flow running, since real client volume is what reveals which systems actually need to be built or repaired.
13Pricing reveal, guarantees, and LTV:CAC
Treat price-before-the-call versus price-at-the-end-of-the-call as a deliberate lever: earlier reveals raise lead quality but lower volume, later reveals do the reverse.
A guarantee mostly functions as a marketing hook to increase ad response; inside the actual sales call it only matters as an objection-handling tool held in reserve for prospects on the fence.
Target LTV:CAC of at least 5:1 on ad spend alone, ideally 7:1 to 10:1, pushing higher early before acquisition costs rise with scale.
14Founder mindset and catastrophizing
Catastrophizing patterns from earlier life stages resurface at every new level of scale; catch them by checking the thought against actual past evidence.
Rapid scaling almost always creates some dropped balls; the standard isn't zero mistakes, it's whether client results stay relatively intact overall.
15Consolidating email lists and closing recap
Consolidate overlapping email lists into one relationship list when the audience and content are similar, and keep short-term 'churn and burn' ad-driven lists separate from long-term relationship lists.
Glossary
Terms worth knowing.
Theory of constraints
A management framework that says a system's output is limited by a single bottleneck at a time; fixing anything other than that constraint doesn't meaningfully improve results.
Fringe deal
A sales call the rep believed went well and expected to close, but that stalled into a follow-up instead; reviewing these reveals a rep's biggest blind spots.
Churn and burn list
An email list built from cold ad opt-ins that gets hit with aggressive, high-frequency offers for a short window, since most of those subscribers were never going to become long-term relationship subscribers.
LTV to CAC
Lifetime value to customer acquisition cost; the ratio of what a customer is worth over time against what it costs to acquire them, used to judge whether ad spend is sustainable.
MQL
Marketing qualified lead; a prospect judged likely enough to convert that marketing hands them to sales, often gamed by loosening the qualification bar to hit a cost target.
One-call close vs two-call close
Sales processes that either try to close a prospect on the first call (one-call) or split the process into a discovery call followed by a separate proposal-presentation call (two-call), typically used to make selling easier for less experienced reps.
1:31:30bookElon Musk biography by Eric Jorgensen (Elon)
53:50channelAlex Hormozi LTV:CAC framework
1:28:30productSilo (Apple TV)
Quotables
Lines you could clip.
00:40
“It's a demand constrained business... your constraint is either volume most likely in terms of marketing coming in or it's going to be that you have enough volume but the volume is not profitable enough.”
Sets up the entire episode's thesis in one breath→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
10:20
“A lot of the reason people don't scale past where they're at is they're actually afraid of what that version of their business is going to look like.”
Contrarian mindset claim that reframes stalled growth as fear, not strategy→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
22:28
“Design your comp so it's around 60 to 80. Set the expectations of what it looks like... because otherwise the work will expand just to fill all the time.”
Concrete, actionable staffing number with a mechanism attached→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
1:06:00
“Sales reps learn through observational reinforcement... if you have 20 perfect calls of you doing the process perfectly, that's way more impactful than a video that overviews the script.”
Named training mechanism with an actionable prescription→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
1:32:50
“Your stance is very procrastinating by obsessing about client success... that's like what you do to occupy yourself to avoid the real thing that you need to do to scale your business, which is the sales team.”
The direct confrontation moment that is the episode's emotional peak→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
Topic Map
Where the conversation goes.
00:00 – 12:54denseDiagnosing the growth constraint
12:54 – 40:26denseClient success systems and structure
40:26 – 58:44steadyCurriculum, org design, and lead acquisition
58:44 – 1:22:36denseSales team build-out and management
1:22:36 – 1:28:46steadyPricing, guarantees, and unit economics
1:28:46 – 1:36:13steadyFounder mindset
1:36:13 – 1:39:43sparseEmail list consolidation
The Script
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So part of our $36 million a year business is we have a three times event a year boardroom mastermind, strictly people who are above a hundred grand a month, all the way to 5 million a month and more. And so today I have Ali Abdaal and we're going to help him go from 300 grand a month to a million a month in his business.
So Ali's got some questions and I'm going to answer them. So you can kick it off. Amazing.
Okay. So the first question is. We are currently 300K a month.
We hired a sales team like a month ago. We started running ads like a month ago. We've been doing entirely organic for the last nine months.
How do I figure out what the constraint of the business is? In the sense of right now, client success could, of course, always be better. I'm like, you know, the curriculum is improving and I'm doing this and that.
Currently, we've got like 30 students to a coach, but... from speaking to you and the people here a lot of people doing 60 per coach yeah but is that is client success the constraint or is actually could we just get more people in the front end it doesn't sound like a constraint i mean the easiest way to think about it and especially in our business which is like courses coaching professional services etc It's a demand constrained business.
So most of the businesses, I mean, you have to have a good product. You have to get your client's results, right? And you could have a constraint in terms of capacity issue on fulfillment, but you don't have that or you would have told that to me.
That would be pretty obvious. So your constraint is either volume. most likely in terms of marketing coming in or it's going to be that you have enough volume but the volume is not profitable enough because you're not converting up enough of that volume with your sales team or it's not efficient enough with the setters or the ads aren't good enough right so it's either a volume or efficiency thing right i mean that's how i would look at it it's going to be either one of those so it's definitely doesn't sound like it's client success to me um so you mentioned the thing around getting the client's results so like my My mission for this is to build the world's best online business school, because I think it would be cool to help beginners start their first online business.
Our goal is to help them get to their very first sale within three months, and then ideally to get to 10K revenue within the next, well, within six to 12 months. Right now, about 30 % of people are getting to that first sale milestone within three months, and a lot of them are not doing the work or mindset issues or all of this sort of stuff.
And so what I'm thinking is, do we have a results issue with that? I mean, ideally, I want that number to be 100%. It's never going to be 100 % because it's outside of our control.
How do you know when client results are good enough to where you feel like you're good at scaling the product? Exactly. Well, there's a couple of things.
I mean, I think one thing that's valuable for everybody to hear is especially like you do need to put some volume through the system to actually see where the breaks are in client success. And actually, as you scale, it'll become more obvious. where the breaks are in what essentially needs patched right because what happens is is it a low scale there's not a lot of volume and so like if you think about signal versus noise the signal doesn't separate as well from the noise because essentially the occurrences are going to be more spread out right but as you scale and you have more people going through the system you'll know right away right based on your kind of stance towards things, I think you should focus on just getting more clients.
I don't think you're going to be the type of person who's like - What do you mean based on my stance? Can you elaborate? I think you over -index on it.
People usually lean one way or another. Some marketing really bro -y type people, they lean way more towards marketing and sales, marketing and sales. I'm just going to make the product good enough so I don't go to jail.
Right. I don't think you're like that type of person. Right.
I'm not saying that's what they are, but they lean that way. Right. I think you're more I got to make the client results good.
They got to be good. They got to be good. They got to be good.
And at some point it becomes a procrastination of scaling. Right. I mean, it's like the classic fear of success thing to where.
A lot of the reason people don't scale past where they're at is they're actually afraid of what that version of their business is going to look like. Whether it's, oh, I'm going to have people post about me online and they're going to say negative things. Or if they have an association between growth and pain because they can't rely on other people, they're like, oh my God, well, I'm working 60 hours.
In their mind, they might think going to 400 grand a month from 200 grand a month might be working 80 hours or 90 hours. And they're like, oh, I can't do anything more. So they self -limit, they self -cap.
i could tell by your stance towards things yeah it's probably more you just need to grow it and i think as you grow it the the fulfillment problems will actually become more obvious because like a lot of times we don't know what systems to build until we scale to stress or even break the systems but then when those break it becomes very clear and very obvious what actually needs to become in place it's very hard to mentally masturbate it ahead of time unless this is like a you know if you're a serial entrepreneur and you're starting another business and it's very similar to something you started before i mean that's a little bit different but i think the way i would to give you some tactical advice though what i would do is for an offer like yours where a lot of it is predicated on them like they got to do stuff right you should segment the client results metrics to where hey out of the people who did all these activities what is the success rate then oh right so you should segment it like that because you can control that now frankly you can't control what can we do to reduce friction to get them to do more of the activities but that would be like a separate kpi you know and that would help you diagnose a different problem right so you would think about okay out of the people who have like a bunch of mindset issues to where they can't even make a post or whatever it is how do we decrease friction and also part of decreasing friction is decreasing limiting beliefs that keep them from taking action but
if you track that into a kpi like who even takes all the actions well then you know okay why aren't they taking the actions you could do research on that and then you can add in uh implementation or interventions is what i meant to say that'll actually make that better and reduce that does that make sense and then out of the people who okay let's say there's four key things they need to do to get their first client okay out of the people who did those four key things how many people got their first client and then okay the people who didn't why didn't they do it right and then the other thing to remember too is you also want to segment like you don't want to think about client success in a program like this is binary first client zero client because you know if you think about it to go from zero clients to one client you have to overcome mindset stuff you have to maybe learn a little bit of marketing you have to like okay learn a little bit of sales to sell a client and then you gotta also be confident and you're fulfilling enough to take on the client so somebody if you think about zero to one somebody in your program might not get to one but they might have gotten to three -fourths of building all these skills and they see themselves making progress and they're actually happy but you know you're like oh my god they didn't get their first client they hate my guts right so it's just one thing to think about too in terms of how you measure
Success as well. Okay. This is good stuff.
Yeah. Okay. So what I'm taking away from this is client success should not be binary and should not just be one non -segmented metric.
Because I am thinking 30 % across the whole board. Yeah, you have to segment it out. But there's a load of people that like have not actually done the stuff.
You got to think about it like a pipeline, right? Like there's like ad and then after that, it's like how many people got to the opt -in page? Okay, how many people opted in?
How many people, you know, think about it like moving people across. I mean, literally physically, you can build or have essentially a pipeline of people moving across. Yeah, like a CRM, you know, based on where they're at.
Did they make who made their first post? OK. And I think when you get clear, I think part of your issue is you're not you're thinking about the metric and you're not clear on where the breakdowns are.
And then so you're not even sure what the interventions are. But I would say this, you know, there's this concept of working in parallel. So like if you ever use clogged code, like sometimes clogged code will launch parallel agents.
Right. So if you think about that. You could do two things at once like you can make all these interventions with client success and probably increase the volume and start to scale your business.
Hmm So it's not in pure a theory of constraints like oh no, you know because the thing is is Like think about it this way if you're gonna make an intervention It is theory of constraints But let me explain if you're gonna make an intervention in client success It could you could make the intervention and then it could take three months to really see how that's impacting.
Does that make sense? And so what are you going to do in those three months? Right.
And I think so, you know, you we can work on multiple things at once. Right. Like Elon Musk has several different companies.
And I mean, I got the whole parallel things working in parallel. That comes from the book of Elon by Eric Jorgensen. That's where I got that.
And then I thought about clock. I was like, oh, yeah, clock could, you know, they work in parallel. So you can do two things at once.
But yes, you know. you do want to really focus on the constraint and know what that is because that should be you know really the priority but you might fix the constraint and then it's like okay we gotta wait 90 days until we know what's happening with this constraint.
If you ever wanted to get my one -on -one help in terms of scaling your business, then listen up really fast. So we're taking on a few clients where I can personally one -on -one audit their business across marketing, sales, operations, fulfillment, finance, to be able to tell you what your constraint actually is. And ultimately, what are the one to three things you need to do next to be able to scale working entirely one -on -one with me.
So if that's interesting, there's a link in the description that'll say Cole one -on -one that you can go book, but essentially not only will you get my personal advice, but we'll also be open. opening up our entire playbooks of my $36 million a year company across marketing, sales, operations, fulfillment, finance. So you can basically model the best practices of what we've done right into your business.
And it will include the opportunity to meet in person up at an event with me. So if that's interesting, click the link in the description and mount back to the video. Okay, let's take on client success a little bit because I also have questions about sales team acting like the whole shebang.
On the client success front, currently we have, I think, a reasonable amount of operational complexity in that some of the stuff is on Circle, some of the stuff is on Slack. We're offering one -on -one Slack support, but we've also got like accountability squads with a group and like a coach and stuff.
And there's like a lot of moving parts. One view is simple scales, complex fails, make it as simple as possible. Another view that I've heard is the business that can survive operational complexity wins.
Yeah, both are true, right? So operational complexity, it is like complexity is the enemy of scale. So it does reduce your scalability.
At the same time, operational complexity, if chosen correctly, is a mode against all the competition. Right. So a great story about this is like when I was scaling our recruiting business, I, you know, was big, you know, I was like an original Sam Evans student.
So, you know, I'm big on simple, simple, simple, simple, simple. And I had the sales recruiting offer and I was like, man, this thing will never scale because, you know, like it's too complex. It's done for you.
It's going to require too many people, yada, yada, yada. And I was like, we got to do like a coaching thing. And that's why I launched the B2C RCA offer at that time is because I was like, that's how I'm going to scale.
But then the B2B kept scaling and I got to 500 grand a month and I was like, oh, this is probably it. But, you know, we'll grow it a little bit more. and maybe it'll cap out at 700.
Then we got to a million a month. And I was like, oh, this is probably capped. It's probably all it's going to do.
Then we got to 1 .5. And then we got to 2 million a month with the B2B offer. And at that point, I was like, you know, I think that I could just scale it to however big I want to scale it.
But what I also realized is that, you know, I bitched and moaned about the recruiting the entire time. Like, I fucking hate this recruiting. It's so complex.
You know, it... you know it's done for you so certain clients get more pissed but then i also realized like okay this is also why i have like no competition because like look at all i had to go through to build all this stuff who's going to build all this stuff right anyways what i would say to you regarding to all your things is i don't know why you wouldn't be on school instead of circle because the engagement's better in school i found that The accountability groups for beginners now if you're doing it, right?
I mean, I'm not saying it couldn't be bad Sometimes it can become a little bit of bitching and moaning sessions. Yeah, and the other thing is too is in it kind of also like You know, it's one of those things where it's sort of like Takes away, you know, it's giving them it's confusing right? It's giving them in confusing Where do I go for support?
Right? What we want to reinforce is you go to the account manager So I'm very good with like have a simple I do like the one -on -one support because it dramatically more than anything else you do will increase results.
What are your thoughts on one -on -one calls versus one -on -one asynchronous on Slack or Voxo versus a bit of both? Yeah, we do. Well, I mean, I recommend, even when I did B2C, I recommend one -on -one calls plus one -on -one Slack, you know?
So that's what I did. Why? Well, I mean, the one on one slacks to be able to get immediate support for questions, to review documents, because not everything has to be a call.
Right. Like if we're overviewing an offer, it could be just like, OK, we got to revise this offer. We could just do it over Slack.
I can send you a loom, whatever. Right. The one on one calls is a good like what a call does is effectively it adds a deadline to where, you know.
they have to get those certain milestones done by these certain calls. If your account manager is walking them through the implementation pathway the way they should be, right? And so, and also the calls is where you can address a lot of the mindset issues.
You can challenge the way of thinking, all that stuff. And what you want to be able to shift your account managers and client success towards is they need to be not customer service. They need to be leaders, right?
And the difference is the leader challenges the person's thinking and really pulls them up the mountain. And is always shining a light on what is around the next corner. What is going to be the next thing?
And so that's very, very important as well. Because you'll notice your best people, if you track client success correctly, your best account managers tracked on those metrics are also going to be the ones who... have the most amount of like as a trait disagreeableness in the sense that like they can have confrontation with a client and gain that client's respect and be able to tell the client like no you're wrong here no like this is your fault you know stuff like that right but client success tends to be like a touchy -feely thing which you know i'm not saying like oh that's bad it's just that they need to have that level of leadership as well um okay In the context of one -on -one calls, would you recommend doing it as a weekly thing, bi -weekly thing, or once you hit milestone X, you get rewarded with one -on -one call?
How do you guys think about it? So the default I would think about is front -loaded. On average, bi -weekly, but front -loaded.
So usually onboarding is week one. Week two, we do another call. Then week three, we skip.
Week four, we do another call. weeks then week six and then after that it might be we skip three weeks and then we might skip another three weeks then we might go four weeks right so it's kind of front loaded to get momentum and then it's check -ins and then you got the slack right that's how i would think about it and do you have a number of what is a good number of students to have for a given 60 yeah 60 to 80 i mean it depends and done for you it can go as low as 20.
As you get more done with you do -it -yourself, it can go as high as 80 to 100. If you're going to do a B2C coaching program with real one -on -one coaching, it ends up being about 60 to 80. Because right now we're at 30 to 40, and coaches are overwhelmed at the thought of it.
Yeah, they're like, oh, my God, I'm so busy. Well, what happens is, you know the law that is, what is it? Parkinson's law, work expands to fill the time.
Yes, it's like whatever. whatever expands fill the time you said it you said it better than i than i could have said it so essentially you know if you have 20 hours to do a project this is going to take 20 hours if you have five hours it's going to take five hours etc it's the same law with client success to where i mean you could give them three clients you know next thing you know they're going to be running those clients businesses right because essentially they got three clients they're going to work 30 hours a week in those clients so they got three you know they're like part -time employees for three people so The key is, and this is something that I thought I remember telling you this, but maybe I didn't tell you.
You got to really catch this from the very beginning. Design your comp so it's around 60 to 80. Set the expectations of what it looks like.
Hey, here's what your calendar is going to look like at a full roster of 60 to 80. You're going to have this many calls a day. The cadence is going to look like this, et cetera.
It needs to be very structured. Because otherwise, yes, the work will expand just to fill all the time. Does that make sense?
So you're showing them what the calendar will look like. Well, and the other thing is too, is you got to think like if you have, let's say it's an eight week program for simplicity and between that eight weeks you have six calls, right? And then so you know that essentially they're going to have, if they can do a 60 client load on an eight week program.
That's 30 clients a month new they can take on minus their renewals if they renew people and they stay on Yeah, right. So then that way you could think of okay. That's how many new people are coming on That's what that's what the full roster is gonna be.
Okay 60 based on those deliverables You can like Tetris essentially the calendar to see like what is their calendar gonna look like fulfilling six calls times 60 people. Does that make sense?
So 120 calls over an eight -week period. How is that going to fit in their calendar? And then do they have time on top of that to block Slack, team meeting, and whatever else?
So you could just reverse engineer it based on calendar. Does that make sense? It's the same type of thinking that if you're running group sessions at a gym or one -on -one, like if you're trying to fill your gym's calendar for all your trainers, it's like the same type of thinking.
If you're trying to fill the seats in a med spa, same type of thinking. Does it make sense? Yeah.
I often think like at the level of like the weekly time block calendar for myself, but I've never thought to actually think about it in the context of the coaches. So you have to reverse engineer that. And then what you do on the interviews is you show them what the sample calendar is going to look like.
And you say, can you do this? And some people will be like, oh my God, that's a lot of calls. Yeah, it is.
You're a client success director. You're going to be talking to clients, right? And other people will be like, oh yeah, that's great.
I love calls, you know? So, um, okay. Interesting.
Our coaches are often saying that Slack support takes up too much time. And we think that it's because they're context switching between... Yes.
Yeah. How do we... Well, they have to block it.
So this goes back to the calendar. So if you tell them in terms of best practices that, hey, the best thing for you to do is do two hours of Slack in the morning and two hours of Slack at night or an hour, hour, hour, right? That way because what happens is the reason slack will drag on in terms of client support is you get caught like okay?
You clear the whole batch right you have 30 unreads. Yeah, you clear them all yeah five people immediately respond Then you clear those and then four of them respond again You clear those the same for respond again you clear that and then you get down to one where you're talking to one person For like 40 minutes.
So what you have to do is you have to, if you have to batch and tackle, I would do like two or three rounds, stop. Then you should be on calls. Then you revisit in a couple hours, two or three rounds, stop on calls.
And in between calls, you can do it too. Do you guys recommend using any sort of Slack ticketing system or just raw dog? channel raw dog um but there is a way we have created like we hired a developer who's really good with ai and basically what he did is and he's doing this across every department in our company is he created essentially a software that sits on top of all of our other software that acts as like a control board for the manager okay so we could essentially see like what slack channel sentiments are yellow flag, red flag, green flag, based on a variety of things.
We can see, is there anybody on Monday through Fridays who has response time that's not in KPI? It's kind of still being built right now, but that's going to be... what it is, essentially.
Yeah, I've been trying to vibe something similar. So it's like, you know, because the typical and the really good client success system is the red, yellow, green system where every client has a status and also, you know, you know where they're at in the milestones and all that stuff. And then what you're really trying to do is you're trying to move them along the milestones and move them back from red to yellow to yellow to green.
Yeah. Right. But the visibility can be the hard part of that.
And I think AI makes it a lot easier. Okay. At the moment, we have milestones that are like, you know, niche identified.
100 people messaged, first sale, 10K. There's quite a lot of gap between, for example, messaging people and getting a first sale. For example, messaging a first person and messaging 10 people, having a first discovery call, having a first proposal call, presenting your first proposal, actually getting the first sale.
What is a good number of milestones and sub -milestones to be thinking about? Probably less than five. Probably five or less.
Yeah. I mean... Worst case, seven or less.
If you can get it on the four, that's perfect. Because, you know, four is the max we can hold and work on. Yeah, because we have about four right now.
Four is perfect. I'm concerned that there's like a Grand Canyon between some of these milestones. Well, you know, I mean, it's okay to have like a great course, for instance.
really goes over like it hits the like if you have a four week course like there's the four major milestones but then there's the milestones within the milestones yeah right and so that would be fine to have kind of almost like breakdowns but then that way you're always repeating these four things and those four things and those four pillars four is a good number because it's like the max you can hold working memory anyways so i like the number four if you can do it five is you know is it going to be the end of the world if you do five probably not and so you're tracking the client progress in terms of the milestones and then red yellow green is that client sentiment or like like what well you could do it in my case in your case that would be more the sentiment in like the essentially like the rate of progress like are they progressing and what's the sentiment and then the milestone is where they're actually at so think about it this way the milestone is almost like closing rate it's quantitative data yeah the red yellow green is a representation of qualitative data
Right. Of like, how is the person doing? You know, because like, for instance, you could have two people on milestone two.
Yeah. Right. One person's fucking pissed.
And then the other person's like, this is the greatest thing I've ever done. I'm so excited. Yeah.
Right.
So we have sometimes we have people on milestone one, but they're like, oh, my God, this is the best thing ever. They're attending all the sessions, but they're not like doing the thing. Yeah.
And so what we've been thinking is if they haven't done the thing for more than X number of times, should we automatically make them a yellow or red? Or is the radiated green basically how happy are they? Well, I mean, I think that's up to you.
I think you could do it both ways. What needs to happen is somebody needs to be like, don't come on another group call until you've done this thing. Yeah.
When I joined my first ever program that was group coaching, it was to build my agency. And I got on and I attended a group call and I was like, yeah, this is great. And then I got on another group call and she was like, have you launched your funnel yet?
And I was like, no. And she was like, don't get another group call until you launch your funnel in front of everybody. And I was like, oh, shit.
I was like, OK, I'm going to launch this fucking funnel. I launched it that day. And if it wasn't for that, I wouldn't even gotten results because I just was in my head.
I was like, I was just dabbling, you know, like I wasn't, which is which is crazy to think now. But it's like I just was, I don't know, afraid of taking this step, I guess. Yeah, because at the moment we have a lot of people who are rocking up to the group calls because it's Vibey and fun.
and not doing the thing so actually i've i've never actually thought to in a nice way call them out on it um i think you should okay sick uh what does a good director of client success do we hired one like two days ago well you probably should have asked that question before you hired but uh we spoke to elizabeth about it yeah okay great so for the sake of the pod and also because i'm curious about you so what is it what is it i mean first of all they need to know the job and they need to do the role so like Our client success directors, all of them that we've, well, Yegor is the only one we've ever had for SDA, but for RCA, we had a couple.
They all were CSMs and they did the role. They knew how the role worked, all of that stuff. So that's very important.
I would never, especially in this business, it'd be very rare to just put in a manager and be like, yeah, you're managing the team now. They have to actually manage the clients, know the clients, know the system, kind of experience firsthand what it's like to go through all of the, especially, If you're trying to coach a CSM on how to manage their calendar, pretty hard to do if you've never been a CSM, right?
There could be exceptions. Like, I mean, if you found somebody who was literally the client success director of a really reputable competitor who was doing the same exact thing you were doing, I mean, that could make it work. Yeah, that's kind of our situation.
That could maybe work. I would still have them ramp as a client success manager for the first 30 to 60 days, right? Just so they can learn the role.
And then they can, you know, if they're as good as they say they are. Then you can move them up. Now, once they moved up, what are the responsibilities?
Well, they run a daily team meeting. On that daily team meeting. Daily?
Yes, daily team meeting. Why daily? Well, like we were talking about earlier, in terms of actually improving team results, the higher the frequency of the feedback, the better, right?
The more immediate the feedback, the better, right? And also, it sets a good rhythm for the team, especially if it's in the morning. to where it just kicks everything off on a good note, and it's daily training and projections and accountability for the team.
It makes a huge difference. I mean, if anything, back in the day when we only did sales teams, the number one thing I would try to get clients to do if they had underperforming sales, I mean, no matter what their sales team's performance was, the number one thing is just run a daily team meeting that was 60 minutes. The number one thing, if I could get them to do that, a lot of times it would fix a lot of their performance issues.
But, you know, they were running. once a week i i feel like it's more of a standard now but back when i started it was actually rare people did a daily meeting weirdly to me it's weird so you run a daily meeting okay sorry uh daily meeting multiple time zones how do you juggle well you gotta find a time zone that works for everybody and then you can't hire people that can't make the meeting so um you know and some people will stay up and they'll change their calendar or whatever and then you gotta assess does that make sense or are they gonna be able to really do this job long term they say they are but you know i would only if somebody's like okay i'm gonna have to work nights to work here oh but it's fine i would make sure they've worked nights before because you know you might get somebody who's good but they're four weeks in and then they're like yeah this isn't for me you know like i can't work nights And it's like, well, you shouldn't have took in the role, but they didn't know.
So you don't want them to test that out for you. And so the daily meeting has everyone or at some point, do you split it into two pods? No, I mean, it's going to have all the client success directors.
I mean, you might split into pods at a certain point, but you're I think you're pretty far from that. We've got seven coaches and one. That's enough.
Yeah, that's enough. And I mean, your coaches need more people, too. So you need to increase capacity.
But you have the daily meeting. You would do wins in the beginning. Then we do projections, which is based on.
For you, it's going to be if they do renewals, they're going to be projecting renewals or referrals. But then also you're going to be walking through how many clients they have in every stage. In terms of milestones.
Yes. Oh, nice. Yeah.
So that would be the next thing. And then you would do some sort of training, whether that's a call review, whether that's common situations or questions that are brought up, something along those lines. That's how I would run it.
Yeah. So we hired our sales team like a month ago. For a long time, I was resistant to it because I heard you talk about daily sales meetings.
I was like, who's got time for that? But the sales meeting is really fun. You get to hang out with the boys.
And if you run the meeting correctly, it is fun. When I started my company, I had a lot of people in the very beginning, and maybe people still say this, but I remember them saying, I used to hate meetings, but I like the meetings in this company. They're fun.
And so I enjoy it. I still hop on meetings because it makes me feel better. You know, I feel like I know what's going on.
Okay. Even though I don't need to. Sticking on client success for now.
I mean, renewals is a metric. NPS is a metric. There's all sorts of metrics in terms of clients reaching particular milestones.
Yeah. We could come up with a list of 15 different metrics. Do you have a sense of what are the ones that matter?
Well, renewals, referrals. Or testimonials. Those are good.
But if I had to come up with just a couple for you, it would be probably renewals because only happy people pay more. And then one or two major client success milestones would probably work. So like the first sale milestone, for example.
But I would keep it below three. I wouldn't have more than three. Okay.
And then these three are being reported. on the daily meeting or in the weekly leadership meetings like what's the well here's the other thing i was going to say so in the beginning phases you might already be past this but in the beginning phases what i used to do is we'd hop on the client success meeting and i would just pull up the client list and i just go down every single person where is this person at what are they doing where is this person at what are they doing and similar to projections like if you don't know where the client's at and where they are what they should be doing now you get yelled at right so i would go down every single person And just check.
And that was kind of like my inner control freak because I was giving away one on one fulfillment for the first time. And then what I did is eventually you're like, OK, well, if I do that, I'm literally going to only get through, you know, 20 percent of the roster on this meeting. So then what you can do is you can either do that on one on ones or.
What we did is we had everybody send a Loom video report of where all their clients are at and why. And they would have to do detailed notes in Asana at the end of each week. We might still do this.
Yeah, we started doing this as well. Yeah, that's very effective. Okay, so in terms of where the client is at, there's red, yellow, green, there's the milestone.
The bit we struggle with is the what should they do next sort of thing. And like, why aren't they doing the thing? And sometimes it's like mindset.
which I don't like as an explanation because I feel like anything can be called a mindset issue. And it's like, why is the client not progressing? Yeah.
Yeah. You should just have the account manager give them a call. You can do this on the meeting and then just be like, hey, Ali wants to know why you're not progressing.
It'll work. It'll work. Especially like, hey, he specifically asked about you in this meeting and he wants to know why you're still here.
Yeah. Is there anything we need to do to help? Or are you like caught up in your own mindset or what's going on?
Yeah. You need to put more pressure on people. It should be a little bit of a pressure.
This is what they want, even though they might not say it. I call it the drag them up the mountain mentality. It's like, look, you bought.
So now my reputation's on the line to make you freaking succeed. So even if you don't want to succeed, I'm going to make you fucking succeed. It's like that mentality.
And that's how I think about it, too, because I'm like, I'm not going to wait for you to just... go through and see what you do and don't do they're like no i'm gonna fucking like i'm gonna push you up there yeah and make you stay right because it's like you know i feel like it's my reputation on the line if they don't succeed no matter what right i don't like that yeah so what okay so if if you're looking at your like client success crm or whatever you've got red yellow green you've got the milestones what sort of stuff would your csm's be writing in the next action or whatever thing well it's where are they now what's going on And then what would be the next step?
That's always what we did. And then obviously now, you know, you would have all the fathom kind of summaries in there. And I'm sure you could do a bunch of cool stuff with AI with it in terms of like summarizing kind of the client journey and all those things.
I don't know if that answers your question. It does to an extent, but it's like in terms of the next step, like in our case, is the next step they're sending 10 DMs this week or is it they're going to try and book their first sales call or they need to get over their mindset issue or like, yeah. Yeah, it's the next step of what the account manager is going to do with the client.
That's how I would do it. What they're going to do with a client. Yeah.
So if they need to send 10 DMs, it's like, okay, make sure they're doing it. Or if they're not doing it, it's like, get on with them and be able to see, okay, do I need to sit with you and send 10 DMs together? Okay, that's good.
So it's like, yeah, the account manager. What are they doing next? Rather than what the client is supposed to be.
What are they doing next for this client? Oh, fine. Okay.
That is very different to what we're currently doing. And that would be super helpful. Yeah.
Because often in that list, it's like client has a mindset issue. It's like, okay, but what are we doing about it? Yeah.
What are you doing? Yeah. Right.
And I recommend too, it may help to have a professional mindset coach. You pay per session. Do you have this?
One of our coaches, two of our coaches are professional mindset coaches and former therapists. Okay. Clients absolutely love them.
Yeah. They're really great when you get good ones. Yeah.
And you know, you could pay extra per session and I wouldn't do it to where every client gets a session. It's just kind of like. It's something that you can use in your back pocket when the account manager is like, look, this is a little bit above my pay grade.
Like I can't like this person's got some emotional issues, you know, but people will. The nice thing about having that is people will say the investment was worth it for for that a lot of times, because especially like the issue with like mindset and therapy. is it only works to the extent in which something can be addressed real time so it's very hard to go in cold and be like yeah i need to work on my mindset but if like somebody can't send dms and then and it's obviously like an emotional block yeah and then they go see a coach that's good it's they can have a huge impact right sick Hey, if the way you sell your product or service is through phone sales, you need to stop using booking systems like One Sub, Calendly, iClose, and other booking systems that aren't designed specifically for a phone sales approach or a phone sales team.
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So if you're interested, go to saleskick .com, check it out. Now back to the video. What are your thoughts on...
Okay, so currently I'm spending ages on the curriculum and like the zero to first sale roadmap. And we did a V1 of it for the first... few batches of clients, got data from it, realized, okay, people are struggling with X and Y.
Okay, therefore we need to update the curriculum with this sort of stuff. I've noticed within STA, you only do some of the trainings. You have experts doing the rest of the trainings.
What are your thoughts on me doing curriculum stuff versus bringing in an expert to do some of it versus, yeah. Well, I mean, it just really depends. Like I generally try to do everything that I can do unless it's like a tutorial.
Like here's how to set up GHL. I'm not, you know, I don't need to do that, but I try to do generally everything. Now, if it's something to where I feel like, man, you know, it's like I could do it, but I'd be like kind of plagiarizing this other person.
I just asked the other person, Hey, like, can you just do this? You know? Cause like, I think your stuff's the best anyways.
I don't have a unique take on it. So that's how I think about it. But I mean, in mine, I mean, I would say 90 % of the stuff is me, you know?
So, um, does it answer your question? Yes. Okay.
That's good to know. I don't think about it too, too hard. I mean, the more I will say, The more it can just be you, the better, because you'll have an idea of the product better than anybody else.
And you'll know where everything fits in and you can tie it back to like, like you could be doing a training on, you know, YouTube ads or whatever. And you're like, you get to this one point, but then you're like, and we should have covered this back here. So make sure you did this.
You know, nobody else is going to get that. And you've probably been through programs too, where it's like a poopoo platter of like a million different people. And it's like, not like you're not learning a cohesive system.
Yeah. Right. i like it um a couple more questions client success uh any thoughts on uh i i'm currently feeling the the sirens call of building our own custom student platform with a developer and stuff and not using circle and because we can integrate our own ai tools and all of this sort of thing yeah i think that's just more uh client success masturbation procrastination i don't think you really and the thing is is that i don't even think you have enough clients to know what to build You'll have a lot better idea of what to build when you have enough of your clients.
I would really recommend school because the engagement is way better. And that is more valuable to the student than Circle because you can brand it the way you want to. I'm very biased as the first investor.
But I'm pitching. Nice. Okay.
The reason I don't like school is because it looks a bit janky and it has slightly make money online scammy bro vibes. Well, they tried to change that. That's why they stopped the school games.
Oh, okay. Yeah. Okay, fine.
yeah i would say i mean it's very like a lot of the people on there they're making pottery there's a whole new like school is actually allowed for an entirely different type of information marketer creator course seller whatever to exist like you couldn't you know sell a course on pottery high ticket with a sales call with ads because you got to basically do high ticket to make ads work now so i think it's opened up the market a lot of ways i don't feel like it has that brand anymore i mean i personally don't and i mean in terms of design it's very simple but it's intuitive which makes it easier for client engagement but we can move on i mean okay i don't have to convince you um okay when it comes to helping a total beginner get to their very first high ticket client for let's say coaching consulting or a service At the moment, the way that 95 % of our students are getting it is through warm outreach.
It's messaging everyone they know and saying, hey, do you happen to know anyone who needs whatever? Are there any magic bullets that I'm missing in terms of helping? Sometimes people are like they've literally run out of warm outreach and no one they know knows anyone who's in their ICP or even vaguely related to their ICP, which then I think is a niche issue and that we should broaden out a little bit, etc.
But then there's content. I know you guys have the stuff on the short form funnel. Yeah, I wouldn't recommend doing that for your clients if they're beginners.
Well, I mean, I also think, I mean, you're more the YouTube guy, but a lot of people can, I mean, you can post a video and get 200 views. And I mean, you can get book calls off of that, right? Like, so I think YouTube is a really good way.
Instagram for some other people can be a good way. The other thing to think about is when they're designing, like you said, the niche and the offer, you also like, you'll have people who, they're like oh i just want to make money and then like i think i have this idea and i'm going to do this thing where i'm helping painters and you're like okay why are you doing that and they're like well i chat you petite it and it said painters is a good market blah blah blah and then you find out that they're like a you know retired financial advisor and they went through all this burnout and then they had to do all this stuff to be able to like help them overcome their burnout and blah blah blah and then after they did that they made way more money and it's like their whole network's financial advisors And you're like, dude, why don't you just do that?
And they're like, oh, I didn't think it'd be good. Because the novel idea to them seems better than the obvious one because of dopamine. So oftentimes, one of the most effective things you can do for offer creation is just have them tell their story, but you have to do it on Zoom.
Because if you have them write it out, what'll happen is they'll skip over the part that's really good. They'll be telling their story and then they'll just say something. And you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Like, what was that? And that's usually the thing. But they skip over it a lot of times because they don't see the value in it.
But a lot of times, like, your real value to them is you seeing the value where they don't see it. It happens all the time. Like, and it happens in different contexts.
So, like, when I look at people's VSLs, when they write VSLs, I like it when the client writes a VSL, even though if it's, like, 1 out of 10, it's, like, terrible. because I'll be reading it and I'll be like, okay, this is bad. And then I'll get like all the way at the end of the page on page, you know, three.
And I'll be like, I'll read one line and I'll be like, oh my God, this is the whole thing. The whole thing is this one line. It's like I found the big idea, you know?
So, but I could only get that by extracting it out of their brain. But if you really listen to their stories, a lot of times you'll find stuff in there. So kind of like a niche discovery Zoom interview.
with a coach rather than... Yeah, and I think the coaches, when they get good, they'll kind of know, like, is this offer legit? Is this not?
Who's this person's network? And they'll find stuff that fits because they're going to see a couple steps ahead. And they're going to be like, all right, this is a crazy offer.
I don't know how you're going to find anybody for this. But you could do this, and I know you have people in your network who would do this. Nice.
Thoughts on one call close versus two call close for a total beginner? It's almost all one call close, but that doesn't mean that certain calls won't go to follow -up. So the default shouldn't be a two -call close process.
It should be a one -call close, but then there's times where it should go to a follow -up. You know, if they got a run -up by their wife, they got a, you know, it's a real run -up by their wife. Like, it's a huge investment.
They have a shared account. Like, okay, obviously that's got to work. You know.
Wait, sorry. I meant for the clients, not for us. Oh.
Yeah. If you got some real noobs, it's fine to have them start with like a 15 -minute warm -up triage thing and then go to. uh the real call so that's a good way to like i find that helps beginners get decent close rates you know opposed to like the cold one call close yeah yeah so in that context i'm fine with it it's better to graduate to a one call close yeah yeah initially we were teaching the one call close and we found that the that was the point where everyone was absolutely crumbling.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so we changed it to like, you know what, you don't even need an offer. You just need to listen to them in the discovery call and go away, put together a proposal.
And then the second call is where you're presenting a custom personalized proposal. And that has skyrocketed. It's really, because it slows it down for the beginners.
It does, yeah. You know, and then they can get on the call and they don't have to like do it on the fly. And then they can graduate to one call close after they've had 10 sales or 20 sales or whatever.
Nice. Okay, I think that is all the questions I had around client success. Anything you would say from...
It's pretty comprehensive. I think you nailed it. I think we nailed CS.
Yeah, nice. Okay, how can it be? Okay, somewhat adjacent to CS is, how do you think about org design in terms of...
mean obviously the sales marketing um marketing and sales but then the cs operations products how do you how do you separate cs operations product product is really just client success and it's really just you making videos yeah and then and then in terms of strategizing about the client success fulfillment system and how the that's kind of like the csd and you you know so i would combine those things the way i break it down there's what marketing sales operations finance fulfillment right marketing sales operations finance fulfillment i have recruiting too that's why it threw me off so it's pretty basic i mean we covered fulfillment sales you have a sales director you have a sales team marketing um you know in the beginning it's like DIY with a media buyer or a tech guy or something But eventually you could have like a CMO and a whole marketing team and all these things and then finance and operations I mean operations is really like your army of VA's and the person who leads them at least in this business model finance, you know, you might need like a controller with a couple admin level people under them and then eventually that graduates to like a CFO with a Bunch of admin people under them and then on the operations unlike the VA front
one thing that our coaches are currently spending time doing is like billing and a bit of admin. And this client wants to pause their thing because they're going on holiday for a month and stuff. Do you think the coach should deal with that?
Or should that be a thing that's... They would submit a form in Slack. So we have a change of payment form.
We have a cancellation form. We have a going on pause form. We have all that stuff.
And the account manager submits that. and then the operations person does it. Oh, okay.
So the account manager has to chat with the person. Well, they submit a form because the form auto -populates in Asana task and then they check it. Okay, nice.
That's easy enough. So your coaches are not actually doing the going into Stripe, billing, blah, blah, blah. Well, yeah, because you want to eliminate anything that's not a client -facing coaching activity for them because that's what you're paying them for.
Yeah. That'll help you increase capacity too. Okay, nice.
Okay, so shifting our attention to sales team then. So we were salesless for a long time. For a long time, meaning like seven months.
And we're selling through the Taki Moore offer doc method. Nice. Which worked really nicely for the first like 100 or 150 or so people.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh my God, we don't need a sales team. And then we graduated to - For the people who are wondering, what is that?
How does it work? We had a VSL intern application and then - If they met vaguely qualified criteria in the application, we just sent them a link to a Google Doc that had like the offer and the price at the end of it with a Stripe checkout link.
Yeah. So it's basically a sales page. Just a Google Doc looks a bit more like authentic.
But they would watch a YouTube video, then they'd go watch another video. Yeah, there was like a loom of me walking through the Google Doc explaining exactly how the program works and blah, blah, blah, and the guarantee and this, that, and the other. So YouTube video to like an unlisted VSL YouTube video or YouTube video to like a VSL on a page?
It wasn't even a YouTube video. It was more like we emailed our email list. and sent them to a page that had a loom embedded at the top of it and a Google Doc linked underneath with a Stripe checkout link attached to the Google Doc.
And so that was great for the first 150 or so people who bought directly via this link. And then we started to feel some sales resistance where people are applying and even paying a deposit to apply but then just not converting. And so then Angus would try and DM close them and then there's all sorts of resistance.
And so then we're like, hey, we probably need a sales team for this. And so then you guys kindly helped us find two closers. So currently we have two closers.
And we have just brought in one of our friends, Aman, who's also part of Eight Figure Boardroom, as like a fractional sales director to kind of work with them and help them train them up and stuff. But the question that we were struggling with is, so we've got the two closers, but some of them are not following the process.
Inconsistent admin, inconsistent logging of calls, inconsistent filling out stuff on close .com. um and none of us had the capacity to review the calls and stuff like that so we're like do we need a sales manager or sales director as i yeah how do you think about well the the number one thing people need is a sales admin person who can just also probably be part of your existing operations team and so i'll give you an example like with admin very easy you tell them they need to do it okay then publicly on the meeting the next morning Anybody who didn't do admin the day before, it's like the admin person's there and it's like, hey, John didn't do his admin.
Then you as the person on the meeting is like, hey, you know, we already talked about why you need to do your admin and that you need to do it every day. Why did you not do it? Oh, I forgot.
Are you going to forget again? No, you promise. Okay, great.
And then the next day, if it happens again, you know, but the admin is going to catch it every single day. What's probably happening is you don't really have anybody looking and holding them accountable every single day. And so it kind of goes like three or four days.
And then you're like, John hasn't done his admin in three or four days. Now you're fucked because John doesn't remember his numbers. So now John's numbers are all wrong.
So you have, if you just do it as a date, if there's that, you see how that's a daily reinforcement cycle. Almost anything you ever want people to do. If you find a way to build a daily reinforcement cycle, which usually filters into your meetings, they'll do it.
So that's really like an admin. You probably already have that person on your team. They just got to be on the meeting and they got to just look at everybody's admin the morning of and be like, did everybody do it?
And then they, on the meeting, tell them, hey, you didn't do it. And then the manager's like, dude, you didn't do it. And I mean, at a certain point, if you have somebody who's like.
won't do it you know it's like you've asked him three times in three days and it's like look dude the next time you're gonna get a penalty to where we're gonna have to implement a system where if you miss like three times in a row um it's five percent off your paycheck or whatever i don't know you don't get any closes of that day so i never had to do that but yeah you could okay i'm not a big fan of like punishment as a consequence to it sounds like actually that's the the daily reinforcement of the yeah i mean when you do it like that it's never an issue yeah okay yeah i think we're being a bit too gentle handed with it and letting it slide for way too long yeah so there's that i mean you don't really need a sales director right now um if you're like you know what i don't really want to manage the sales team and i found this guy and he can do it i mean you know it's not the end of the world you could do it especially with organic you're not going to need like a crazy
assassin level sales team like if you were running ads so you could definitely get away with that where was gonna go with that in terms of I mean should be doing the call review every single day in terms of them following the process in the daily meeting yeah so like look looking at a random call or their wins projections that's 20 first 20 minutes the last 40 minutes is call review okay yeah opening up grain or fathom and actually watching through what you want to do is you want to look at their end -of -day reports that's where they list Everybody they spoken with yeah, what happened?
Like who were they what happened? What was the next step about three to four sentences? Then in the end -of -day report what you want the train the manager to do is look especially for deals that should have closed But didn't close or deals that oh, it was a great call sounded really good.
Oh, it's amazing and it went to follow -up Yeah, because even really good closers might only have a 60 % follow -up conversion. I mean, that'd be really good, right? and so those calls that were really good i mean we know it's baseline 60 if that so those are the best deals that i call the fringe deals to where you want to review those on the meeting the next day to give coaching because that's where their blind spots are because they thought it was a great call but they didn't see the angle to be able to close and so those are the ones where you can grab the most deals by correcting their behavior the other thing you could do is since they have a follow -up coming up you can strategize on how to handle that followup.
So it gets you kind of deals in both ways. Does that make sense? Okay.
So 20 minutes wins. So that's a big thing. 40 minutes.
And then the other thing is too, is if they're not following the process, there needs to be a very clear, like calls they can watch and training of what the process is because sales reps learn through modeling. So they need like 10 calls that are perfect to the T badass calls. They can just watch, you know, you or whoever.
do a call perfect to the t and then that way they have a clear idea what the process is because a lot of times if they're not following the process i mean that's like i talked about in the event i just let them go but we have a very strong if you go through my training you should know what the process is i mean the training itself is like 50 hours so it's like you should know what it is but the other reason i mean some people just don't have a clear process to begin with i don't think we have a clear process so like you need to make it very simple where you're like hey dude what's really easy watch this call just script everything i do out by hand on a google doc right watch this call just copy this if you show up on the call and you just say and say and basically do all the same i'm doing you're good right because like when you have the training right and you hire the right person and they go through the training the right way the impression you should get watching the first call is like dang that guy sounds like me that's what you should get if you don't get that
You know, hopefully you're close. Otherwise, you maybe just let them go. But you need stronger training and you need what I call a baseline, right?
There's not enough baseline. Like sort of the model of what good looks like for this. Yes, yes.
And just remember, sales reps win, or win. Sales reps learn, I mean, everybody learns, but sales especially, through observational reinforcement. So what that means is, is that if you ever read The Inner Game of Tennis, it talks a lot about this.
They will learn for like if you have a video that overviews the script. I'm not that's good I'm not saying you shouldn't have that but it won't really like Like it's good to have it just is not gonna be super effective for them to show the behavior that you want them to show if you have 20 Perfect calls of you doing the process perfectly that's way more impactful because they learn way better by observing mimicking and copying And then innovating later with their own personality than they do through like watching a instructional video.
Does that make sense? Like you'll, you'll find this as like your best closers who know what they're doing. If you hire them, they'll like just devour and script out by hand your calls.
Right. And then you'll be like, damn, like they'll use a phrase that you're like, fuck that phrase is not even in the training. But like they heard, I remember saying that phrase on a call and they use that phrase on a call.
Like that's what you're going for. So in my case, the last time I did a sales call was back in like nine months ago when I was selling the very first cohort where the offer was very different and I didn't really have my own script. I've never really done sales calls before.
Sounds fun. Sounds like a fun thing to start doing. Yeah.
So I'm probably not the model. Well, you have two options. You're a fractional guy.
Either they need to do it or you need to do it. The good news is, you know, max, it'd probably take you a week. to come up with a couple of calls that can act as that baseline.
It usually is not going to take that long. So I just take calls myself for like a week and try and figure out. Yeah, that or this other person.
I mean, somebody needs to do it. And the thing is, I mean, it sucks because you're like, oh, you know, I got to be a sales guy for a week. But the way to think about it is no, like my big constraint is ramping new salespeople, getting them to do all these things you talked about.
And I'm going to spend this week. And the way you got to think about it is after I'm done with this week. The reward is that I'm going to have these perfect calls they can model.
And my entire sales ramping will extend from there after this week. If you think about your reinforcement and your reward is that. It'll seem a lot more productive than like, oh, why the fuck am I taking these calls?
Fuck. You fucking told me to do this. You know, you're like, why am I in this fucking program?
I need to go back to talkies thing and just do the doc. You know, I mean, but you got to think about it like you're not taking calls. You're building.
the sops of this whole department for the next 10 years yeah and you got to do it once it's a week okay you're gonna you're gonna survive okay right you just suck it up and do it even if it was two weeks yeah and then the thing is too like if you do this it's the same with running your sales team you're gonna be like i kind of like taking calls yeah now you do it for two months three months you're gonna be like all right you know i i don't really want to do this anymore yeah but like when i take calls i mean i'm probably built a little bit different i mean i'm a sales guy if i take a call I like start foaming in the mouth dude like I'll close and then I will be so pumped I'll go outside and I mean I'm running like almost a 40 million dollar company and I'll like go outside of my room I'll be like babe I just closed a fucking call you know like I still get super excited like I did way back in the day when I I mean I get probably more excited than when I was a full -time you know I was a full -time sales rep like yeah I closed a call that's what I should be doing now I get on a call I'm like
Like getting into three -point stance like fucking you know sure about the shoulder somebody, you know throw my body weight around okay, so it's actually really fun and then I The last time I did this is two years ago, but I closed this call. I got so pumped I cancelled everything for the rest of the day and I just started taking other people's calls I Was like give me another one I took I remember because I we were having a sales manager transition and I just felt like the team needed a little jolt.
And so I was like, I'm going to take a day of calls. And I literally maybe I took like two days. But across that two days, I took five calls.
I think I closed all five. And it was so fun. Yeah.
Okay, but if I'm not like that, then... Yeah, what would you suggest to me? It's the same advice.
I mean, you might not start foaming from the mouth, but I do think you will enjoy it. I think you will like it more than you think. I think you'll be like, it's kind of fun.
Yeah. I kind of felt that in the first month of doing sales calls. I would wake up in the morning, I'd see them on my calendar, and I'd think, fuck.
But then I would get into the calls, and the time would fly. I'd be like, okay, this is not bad. You just make sure you get a good night of sleep.
The thing that really annoyed me was the whole, oh, I'm totally going to pay, and then I'm having to follow up via iMessage afterwards to... Getting to pay. No, you're going to pay now.
Yeah. Well, let's do it now. Yeah.
Don't be that guy. Just joke around. Yeah.
I know the game. Let's do it now. Yeah.
You know, draw the line in the sand and step across it. You said you wanted all these things. Let's get all these things right.
Let's take the first step right now. I'm here with you. Let's do it.
Okay. You just got to have fun. If you have fun with it, you can apply a lot more pressure.
Yeah, that's why I think Greg Cardone is so good. I think he like people are like I don't understand I think he's like so fun that he could apply like all these like higher What people perceive to be higher pressure things because that's what people criticize about him But I think he's so good because he's like hilarious, you know, he's like he makes buying fun Yeah, you know, so if you like buying make buying fun.
I like buying so I try to make a fun Okay Okay, so what I'm hearing is we need a baseline process that baseline process either needs probably me but maybe our fractional guy to Run some calls and find like okay. These are the canonical three to five really good examples of the thing Do we also need a script or a call map or yeah?
Yeah, you should have that too and then like a Training that goes over how it works Yes, but also have the recordings. Yeah. Yeah, okay.
There's other things you need to but you know just as broad strokes that's good and then presumably the script changes over time as you develop new yeah you just make a new video okay Let's not take that.
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Okay, so we have a lot of leads coming in and the closest calendars are booked out like seven days out. Initially, we were like three days and we're like four days. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But I have a fear around hiring another closer where I'm like, okay, now this feels like it's making the hamster wheel just go faster and faster. Where now it's like, now we need even more leads in order to... sustain the closest calendars and this gets heavier and heavier and like oh client success isn't still where i want to where i want it to be and i'm getting ptsd from a few years ago where we had to like let go of like a bunch of the team and i'm like uh what's can you therapize me help me figure this out yeah i mean the first thing is i mean how are you generating the calls um is it email ish partly ads plus organic ads and casual well okay look i mean here's the deal if you unless it's a youtube mid -roll where you're on your youtube video and like yeah okay so if it's an email list i mean you just segment the list and you send to half the list on monday and half the list on friday or whatever right so if it's email you segment it down if it's ads you just turn it down and then you can just have closers booked out for two days the only the only way that what you're saying will come up
is if you are doing like a YouTube mid -roll to like book a call and then like it's like everybody who sees it's gonna book a call and then it's a fuck ton of people booking calls which that's a little bit of a different issue but then you could just space out your you could also just space out your YouTube mid -rolls more yeah so we shouldn't really have like we what I'm hearing is we should be able to turn the tap down on our lead so that we don't have Closest Canada's booked out seven days out yeah yeah I mean you should just yeah I go for two days I mean you could get away with three But you're going to have a better experience in two days, for sure.
Okay. Why do we have so many leads? Why do we?
Because you're wanting to spend in ads? Well, I think it's just a new offer. You just turn down the spend or segment the list, right?
So, like, if you have a huge list... Like, we're not even emailing them very much about it. Well, then just spend less.
Okay. Yeah. We're spending so little already.
We're spending, like... Oh, we are? Okay, we're hiring a third closer.
Fair enough. Okay. Well, then have your third closer.
Okay. You'll be okay. You'll survive.
At what point do we think... How many closers then warrant a sales manager or whatever? About six.
About six. Okay. So we've got headroom.
I mean, I wouldn't, if you really found the right candidate, I wouldn't be like mad if you did it at four to five. But usually six is a good number for founders to stop doing it themselves.
But if you find, like, man, this is the perfect dude at, like, four or five, I'd hire him. I mean, hell, if you didn't find the perfect guy at three, if it's truly the perfect person and you have the money to do it, then you could hire him. But a lot of people, like, it works better when you have a little bit of a bigger team.
You might find somebody internally that you promote or whatever. What's the deal around promoting a good closer to manager versus bringing in an external manager? Well, both can work.
If you bring in an external one, I still, even if it's in secret, right because some of them get weird about it i don't care if it's in secret whatever have them take some calls because they have to know your process your leads they'll say they oh i don't need to do it okay yeah why don't you need to do it because i'm so good okay if you're so good just do it yeah you know do not deviate on that i'm telling you okay believe me so many managers they are not good but they think they're good and you have them take calls and you'll be like how the that you think you're a manager right So for the love of God, just have them take some calls.
And if they're as good as they say they are and they close fucking, you know, if you give them 20 leads and they close eight in the first week, okay, you're the manager now, right? Like if you're as good as you say you are, then you'll be manager after week two. But they have to learn the product, you, your brand, the leads, you know, maybe there could be exceptions where you could get away with it.
But even the people you could get away with it with, whatever, they could take calls for a week or two weeks. If they're as good as they say they are, they should be able to do it. Promoting internally.
I really like that if you have the right person and the bonus of that is obviously they're going to know all those things you're going to know they perform but what they have to have is like executive presence and essentially like you'll be able to know this it's hard to define this into like observable behavior but you'll know it you know if you can imagine them running a meeting like you should be able to kind of get an idea of like can this person run a meeting command attention command authority can they hold other people accountable they have they have to have an even higher degree of disagreeableness than even a good rep because they have to be able to hold people accountable publicly right and at the same time you know they can't have like lone wolf disagreeableness they have to have like very good team energy as well i don't know if that makes sense yeah Okay.
So the kind of unlock I'm having so far is at the moment I'm spending 100 % of my time on the client success side in terms of just trying to improve the curriculum and trying to increase these numbers of people getting their first sale, etc. But I've spent basically zero time. I don't think I've reviewed a single sales team call, which is probably a bad idea.
You can do both at once. Yeah. You can, especially because really your constraint is not...
a hundred percent identifiable to client success. And I think a lot of these things, it's not like, like, dude, like if I have a client whose constraints actually client success, they're like, yeah, dude, my refund rates, 15 % are trust pilot is like going down. You know, I have 10 bad reviews on Reddit.
It's like, okay, dude, you need to like fucking stop. You know, like you need to chill. Okay.
Um, you're, you're not that, so you can improve the product as you're growing the company. And I think it'll start to help, you know, especially cause like, i try to there's there's people who again you know when i'm working with clients i always can tell what their like natural tendency and stances yours is much more client success focused so i can already tell without knowing much more that you need to focus a little bit more over here yeah right whereas there's other people who are like we've mentioned like the go go go go go go go they gotta scale to a million a month asap and it's like all right dude like maybe you should try to get some referrals you know like maybe you need to like You don't have to get there tomorrow.
Like, slow it down. Because faster up is a lot of times faster down. So you'll see a lot of people in this industry, they'll get to a million a month or two million.
I mean, sometimes like even more than that, like four or five million a month. But they don't stick around. It's very rare.
There's very few people. This is why I respect Dean Graciosi so much, is that he's been doing this for like fucking 30 years or something. Like, at least 25.
I don't know the exact number. It's a lot. And just consistent crushing it.
Which is super rare, you know? Is there a sweet spot in terms of how fast to scale? Like move fast and break things versus go slow to go fast kind of vibes?
Yeah, I mean, there is definitely a sweet spot. How would I define what it is? I mean, I think you can scale.
I think you should, you definitely need to scale faster. But for... Generally, how I'd recommend it to most people is you can scale as hard and as fast as long as your client results remain relatively intact.
The reason I say relatively is like you're going to have a chargeback and, you know, your client success manager who's new is going to fuck up a client like that's going to happen. Like we scaled super fast. I mean, we scaled from 100 grand a month to 2 .5 million a month and in 12 months.
Oh, nice. And. You know, I don't think we like crazy dropped any balls, but obviously we had new recruiters.
We had new client success So like where's there people who should have gotten results who did it? Yeah for sure You know and if we would have went slower we could have mitigated that a little bit more But it wasn't like devastatingly bad or anything. So Yeah, I don't have a formula for how fast should you scale for you?
I know it's faster than your scaling. Yeah But I think for for most people it's like as long as the client success remains relatively sturdy and the clients are getting results and those metrics aren't, like if you're tracking those metrics and they're staying within KPI, then I think you could scale.
How do you define the KPI for these metrics? Do you just make it up or? What, for the client success ones or what?
Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, KPIs are essentially proxy metrics. Proxy metrics are used to essentially assess what's because the quality of your business is the quality of what's happening on the front lines that's defined as all the client facing aspects of your business right so proxy metric is a metric that is used which is like a kpi to try to best describe what's actually happening okay yep right and so i just think about it from that standpoint and then yeah like i just make stuff up you know like i just think about like i don't i'm not a i was never a big rule follower you know I like knowing the meta of any industry or system or like when I learned YouTube this year, like I first learned all like the principles and everything, but then I had to find my own way to do it.
I kind of had to like break some rules to get it to work. And so, yeah, I mean, I just kind of like what is going to be the most useful proxy metric to set up and make for this. But then the thing about proxy metrics is that, you know, what happens is, is over optimization of proxy metrics.
ends up reducing company quality. So the famous story about this is Jeff Bezos' podcast with Lex Friedman. I don't know if you ever watched that.
Yes, yeah. Where he talks about how their proxy metric for customer success answer time or whatever was like five minutes. But then he had all this gut feeling and this feedback that it's not five minutes.
So he just picks up the phone. Or no, it was like 30 seconds. It was supposed to be like 30 seconds.
He picks up the phone and then waits 15 minutes. And he's like, okay, like... this proxy metric isn't working.
Because a lot of times what happens is people will over -optimize proxy metrics, sometimes change how it's actually being tracked, or all sorts of stuff that is in good intention, but it's nefarious, and then it essentially backfires. Like companies, in order to reduce MQL costs, which is basically qualified marketing application costs, companies will sometimes change the way they define an MQL.
in order to lower the cost they didn't really change anything they just lowered the quality of the business does it make sense it's a common example okay you know i'll give you another one yeah this is why i never optimized my closers on close rate oh okay because yeah what you could do as a closer and i know this because i did this as a closer not in my peak when i was really good but like in the beginning days i would do this when i was a little bit more beginner is if I could manipulate my close rate by, let's say, the prospect is kind of like not a good quality prospect.
And in the first two minutes of the call, they're like, I don't even know if I should have this call. You'd end the call and market a no show. A ton of closers will do that.
Right. The other thing is, too, is if you if you calculate their close rate on offer to close, they'll withhold offers on people they don't think are going to close because it makes their close rate look higher. Yeah.
right so that's a good way you know it's another example of like you got to be careful with your proxy metrics yeah so what do you look at if not closer i guess you look at close right but like what are your keys yeah the thing is is that we do look at it but it's not the only thing we look at it's not the main thing we talk about and it's not the main thing we reinforce so i make sure that they have enough slots open a day and they're taking enough live calls if they're doing that Then what I look at is essentially what's their production in the form of cash and units.
That's the main stuff. Do you care about contracted revenue versus cash collected, or are you tracking all the numbers? For closers, we look at upfront cash collected, and we look at units.
But units is really a representation of contracting. Yeah, sure. Makes sense.
At what point should we start thinking about setters? Well, here's the thing. It would help you.
I mean, it would technically make your marketing more efficient now. So like you could do it now. The thing is, is that it doesn't really address it.
Like marketing efficiency and ROI probably is not a constraint right now. Especially like the main thing it seems like is you got to get your sales team performance up. Yep.
right and then that would make your marketing even more efficient and your row is more efficient yeah so i would focus on that and then i'd probably revisit setters for you around three four or five closers now other people it's a little bit different like if you're pure cold traffic you don't have a brand you don't have an audience sometimes like like for our b2c offer if we didn't have a setter the the funnel wouldn't even work so for a lot of people who are doing cold traffic you need to have extra volume from the setter to be able to make the metrics work in the first place does that make sense so for a lot of people it's like you hire a setter usually right with your first or second closer for you i mean you could probably wait till four closers and then you you know okay you got the closing team down you feel really confident with the main sales team now let's start this new team yeah right but for now i don't think it's worth the extra department essentially that'd be adding so we currently have a 16 qualification
rates on our type form uh we use your leads one two three four score thing so a three and a four is sixteen percent uh the other eighty four percent is a one or a two right um and currently ones and twos just sit in the crm doing absolutely nothing should we be getting a setter to triage call the twos or i mean we've just seen a massive like the the primary lead score is just when we ask the income question right and so yeah so it's up to you because again If your return on ad spend is good, then it's 5 to 7x plus.
You can just let them sit, frankly. It's not the biggest deal in the world. Now, yeah, eventually, could you get one setter just to handle all the two great applications and set the ones that are qualified so that you get those set too?
Yeah, you could do it. It's just not fixing it. If you did it right now, it's fine.
But it isn't fixing a constraint right now. so it's really up to you like you know if it was me I'm I'm good at this stuff so I would just do it now but like to me hiring a setter and doing this set of processes and training a setter like I've done that a million times I could do it in my sleep not a big deal yeah right for you it's like I mean it is starting another department so if it's not addressing a constraint even though you are accepting yeah that's a little mini bonfire maybe you just wait until you have foreclosures yeah right If we were to have four closers, now that's like quite a lot of booked calls we need every week and every month to keep them fed and happy.
But if we then have a fire in client success and we need to turn down the volume in terms of like new people that we're accepting to fix up systems or this, that, and the other, what happens to the four closers? A couple of the closers are going hungry. As a worst case, first of all, I've almost never seen it to where...
You're gonna have a bonfire and client success so bad to where you need to turn down the volume Worst case if you did have that just give all your closures a week of vacation. Oh That'll reduce your volume by 25 % Okay, so say a guy summer vacation go get fucked up. Yeah, you know, whatever so But but man like any client success issue we've ever had We just fixed it while maintaining the same volume.
So I just doubt that's gonna happen Yeah, one mistake we made with our first attempt at a high ticket offer a few years ago was we spent five months with sales turned off because we were like, we need to fix fulfillment. Yeah.
And then the whole thing became unprofitable and we had to cancel it. Well, and the thing is, too, is that you can't even really fix fulfillment without the flow in the system. You've got to keep the flow in the system to fix it.
Okay. So I shouldn't be afraid of hiring a third closer and a fourth closer because currently I'm like... Yeah, you're free to scale, dude.
You need to scale.
Okay. Right now, we are currently ads or organic straight to a page that has a video and an application. So direct, all the ads are directly talking about the thing.
Yeah. The direct funnel, I guess. At what point should we think about like webinars and stuff that are more indirect?
Probably not for a while. I mean, I'd say probably you're going to be fine to a million a month plus. I think you're not even sending emails.
You could probably be going harder on organic. You're not spending much on ads and you're doing 300 grand a month. So it's probably going to be a while.
And then it really is like it's not like another ad channel, but it kind of feels that way. It's like you're adding another funnel to just have a little bit more variation in the marketing and increase the flow. It ain't going to happen for a while.
You've got a long runway. So I would just cross that bridge much later. All right.
So key constraint that's really coming up is just this sales process. Yeah. Our close rate is currently about 20%.
Show up rate is about 75%.
I think we can get both numbers up. Yeah, probably 35. Yeah.
Especially because a lot of people probably booking probably follow your content and know who you are. Yes. So it's kind of organic.
It should probably be like 35. Okay, nice. I mean, that can be high.
Like my closers on average don't close. Some close, you know, in the 30s. But they don't close 35 across the team.
But my guys are all really cold traffic. And B2B, so not everybody qualifies. Yeah.
so but it's real real cold traffic but when i have organic traffic like you can get organic close rates as high as 40 to 60. it's super high okay that's like pure organic you're kind of like organic or adjacent right so that's like 35 you know but even if they're all above 30 it's a good start okay nice um what are your thoughts on revealing the price before before the call versus at the end of the call i would do it at the end Yeah, it's just general best practice.
Not that before the call can't... Before the call reduces... I mean, here's the way to think about it.
Before the call reduces volume, increases quality. At the end of the call, increases volume, reduces quality. Hopefully I said it right.
It's the inverse of the... Increases volume, reduces quality. You guys get what I'm trying to say?
So, yeah, it's like a lever you can pull, right? It's a lever of friction. It's really up to you.
The only thing that I would say is if eventually you're going to have to move to a system where it is price at the end of the call because you're going to need to maximize volume, you might as well do it now because the thing is that the closers are always used to them knowing the price before. You're kind of building a team of order takers.
And so what will happen is eventually when you need to switch it. It'll totally change the type of prospects coming on and then the wall tank. Yeah, see it's in my opinion It's like you might as well do it now the exception would be like if you have so many millions of followers we are like dude like Even with telling them the price up front we could staff 30 closers, you know, okay Well in that case, maybe you just do it, but that's probably pretty rare Like you'd have to be working with a pretty like doggone famous person What are your thoughts on guarantees, broadly?
I mean, yeah, they're good. The way to do it is conditional, and the way to think about it is you just make the guarantee those things that you know if they do, they're going to succeed. Yeah, so you just align the interest that way.
A guarantee is really used in marketing to make your ad stand out and try to book more calls. Is it effective in the sales process? Yeah, but not really.
It doesn't matter that much in the actual sales process. The way I like to use it in the sales process is if you have somebody right at the line, there's a conditional guarantee they can pull out to... Nudge them across the edge towards like hey if I'm willing to do this for you to where I set this guarantee in place Yeah, would you move forward right now?
That's the most effective way to use it in sales It's like an objection handle when they're kind of right on the edge and it's like they're scared But if you're talking about the guarantee in your ads and stuff anyway, well, you're kind of stuck. Okay, fine You're kind of stuck the interesting thing about the guarantee is is that you could state it in your ads and state the Qualifications of how they need to call it like you need to be it I know it wouldn't be for you.
But like you could say hey you need to be it 10k a month to qualify for this guarantee you'll get tons of people even if you state it plainly you'll just get everything and then so you can literally point to the ad and be like hey you don't qualify for the guarantee we can still help you but you know just by the way the guarantee said this you know our current guarantee I would love your feedback on this so our current guarantee is we guarantee that you'll make your first 10K within six months.
Yeah. Or we'll work with you for free for up to another six months until you do. And if at the end of the 12 months, you still haven't made your 10K, then we will refund you the difference between what you made and what you paid kind of thing, provided you do the weekly...
Yeah, yeah. Whatever, whatever. Well, look.
There's really no value, in my opinion, of the guarantee unless you need it for your marketing. So if you're using it in your marketing as like the main hook, then okay, that's valuable and your guarantee, whatever, it's fine as long as you're happy with it, whatever. And it works with your client success.
If you're like, man, I can run ads without the guarantee, dude, just run ads without the guarantee. Interesting. It's really just a marketing thing.
It's okay, let's just know. So, yeah. Okay, because I think our ads don't mention it right now.
But our VSL sort of does, but we can always test. If it's not the primary hook in your ads, it's not why people are booking. I guarantee it.
So if you're saying it at minute three in your VSL, most people don't even know it exists. It would simplify our life a lot if we didn't have it on the back end. Like for me, I probably couldn't make my ads work nearly as well without it, but my hook of all the ads is the guarantee.
So, you know, our whole business has it, you know, it just is what it is. But yeah, I mean, if I could not have it, I would prefer not to have it. And so in that context, if we didn't have it in the ads or in the VSL or whatever, but then there's a back pocket conditional guarantee that the closers can use as an objection handling, which is only offered to a certain number of clients.
Yeah. One issue that we've had on that front is that like because we've changed up the offer just a little bit across cohorts And people are talking to each other someone from the March cohort is like speaking someone in the maker or being like wait They were you know, how come they got the guarantee and now we're there.
Yeah, but you're testing stuff You're changing it. Hey, the price is gonna go up over time like the offer is going to change and also like You know, that's why I don't like the accountability groups as much. I just like them working with a coach Yeah, I mean the community is nice, but that's more of like the school whatever your community thing is in school or circle or whatever and the group calls you know okay something angus just said is that he feels that our guarantee is more for my own personal conviction in the offer rather than really for marketing to our prospects i think that's kind of silly i mean dude i think your conviction in the offer should be independent of having a guarantee or not i mean i don't really know what to say say to that i i just feel like I mean, your offer should be in the I already know your offer.
You should have conviction in it. It's probably very, very good. It's probably better than most of other people who are doing similar stuff than you.
And I think you just need to believe in it a little bit more. Yeah, I think you need to believe in it a little bit more. And I don't think you need a guarantee to believe in what you're doing.
You know, like you don't need that to do this. I do appreciate this is what I'm saying. Your stance is very.
procrastinating by obsessing about client success mmm that's like very much your stance and that's like what you do to occupy yourself to avoid the real thing that you need to do to scale your business which is the sales team and yeah which is yeah you know increasing volume increasing conversion except you know whatever the main metrics are there yeah okay I mean everybody has that to an extent it's different for different people But yeah, your thing is you're avoiding the thing you really need to do by focusing on client success and telling yourself a story that it's not ready yet and it's not good enough yet and blah, blah, blah, blah.
So it's going to get better as you scale. You'll scale and you'll continue to work on it. Keep working on it and also do this other thing.
Okay. Objection, Your Honor. Is there not?
I've heard from various... people that when it comes to info coaching e -type businesses there is a sort of sweet spot range of profit people often say somewhere in between the two three million a year mark which we are now at where like beyond which it starts to like your margins start to go down overhead starts to increase it starts to feel heavier etc etc is this all just like yeah i mean i think i think people i always have a saying people can only tell you what's true in their own experience so the the most likely person to tell you that is somebody who's never like really scaled to a million a month and done it properly yeah yeah yeah you know this is just how the world is yeah that's a story they told themselves of what makes it okay for them that they got to 400 grand a month and then they're like oh no like 200 was better you know yeah whatever okay so um look the most the businesses who do the most profit that i know are pretty big yeah you know like in this industry the people who have done the most profit are the biggest now that doesn't mean like there's limits to that i mean i do know some companies doing 50 to 70 million and like they don't do as much profit as me and i'm like how the do you you know run your business so what i want to do is i want to have healthy profit margins but i also want to grow bigger yeah
I can do both of those at once. It's not an either or. Now, what happens is, I don't know if it's a 200 or 300 or 400, but let's say from 250, you could be really profitable.
But then at 400, to kind of get there, you have to add some infrastructure, like a little bit more ops, a little bit more finance, whatever. but then what's going to happen is the profit from 400 to 700 will go back up but then at 700 you really got to invest in like an executive team and then so like the margin will go down a little bit but then that's more infrastructure it'll go up right so there is truth to yes you need to add more quote -unquote overhead as you scale but also eventually it'll go back up like right now i have the infrastructure to probably do five million a month so Every incremental next client that I add from this point on is more profitable.
Does it make sense? Yeah. Okay, while we're on this therapy session, another thing I worry about is what if it all goes away?
What if somehow the lead generation tap gets turned off overnight or something and now we have all this overhead and then the business sort of crumbles? Yeah, well, this is an example of catastrophing. So, you know, if I ever find myself catastrophing, you know, oh, my God, we're having a bad sales week.
And then I start thinking, what if it all falls down and all this stuff? What you want to do is first you have to be aware of that. And then you have to challenge and question that thought with any evidence.
So I'll start to think, well, how many other times has this happened and everything's been fine? A lot of times, even when things did go bad, was I always able to fix it or come back on my feet or figure it out or whatever? Yes.
Right. Is it me just catastrophizing and it's probably going to be fine? Yes.
Right. So that's how I catch it in the moment. And I mean, at the end of the day, even if it whatever, you know, you got deplatformed on YouTube and shut down on Facebook at the same day.
You're gonna figure it out like you'll find a way back on your feet. You'll be okay But these are just things that are like kind of like what Elliot was talking about our mindset speaker These are things that you need to work on personally as they come up and that'll really help you with the growth of your business Because these are the things that really hold people back.
Yeah is like fear of complexity fear of success Associating scale with pain Catastrophizing, you know, and that pattern will just show up late. I mean it patterns showing up right now in this form but like, you know, it'll I went through this phase when I I Went from a hundred a month Like I said to two and a half million a month in 12 months So I went from not a lot of money to making a ton of money really really quickly and all of a sudden I was like, I'm not even kidding.
I started looking for nuclear bunkers on on like listings for bunkers yeah and like getaway houses and stuff like this and it's just like the catastrophizing pattern that i had that was previously applied uh not having enough money or having been back in my parents or whatever it was just got applied to this other thing that's actually when i started working with elliot and he was like i think you're gonna be all right he's like i don't think you're gonna need a nuclear bunker yeah but i was looking at him There's some nice ones.
Oh, yeah. For a couple million. You can get one that goes deep, you know, like a silo.
Have you seen silo? No. Apple TV.
Yeah. I was looking at some silos. Love it.
Okay. Changing gears. What is a good LTV to CAC to be roughly aiming for?
Or is that the wrong question to be asking? No, I mean, it's a good question. It depends on the offer and the scalability.
Hermosi has a really good framework for it, and I forget what it is. it has to do with like essentially the more scalable your offer is the lower your ltv to cat can be long story short in this industry i would say that you want it above five to one minimum but really like If you can get it to 7 to 1 to 10 to 1, that's really good.
In the beginning, you want to really maximize it as much as you can because if you scale, it's going to go down because acquisition costs will go up. So in the beginning, if you can get it to 20 to 1, sick, right? But how is 20 to 1 even possible if your salesperson commission is like...
No, no, no. Okay, so I'm talking about just ad spend. Oh, I see.
Yeah, so I mean, you could do like, I think, fully loaded LTV to CAC or whatever it's called. So you could factor it in that way. I only think about it just with ad spend.
But as long as you measure it consistently, I don't think it matters how you do it. But if you think about 20 to 1, that would mean for every $5 of ad you put in, you get $100. So that would only mean that essentially on your P &L, 5 % of your total cash collected revenue would be ad spend.
Got it. So if you collected $100 ,000, you'd spend $5. Which is doable if you think about, okay, let's say...
Because 20 to 1 sounds like a lot but if you think about okay I spent 5 grand and then front end brought in 50 but back end brought in another 50 best see that's pretty possible like if we really profit maximized right now instead of like trying to scale We would be at like 10 to 1 But that's because we have a big back end.
I mean 50 % of our revenues back in you know, I know you so a front end cash collected If people are on payment plans and stuff, are you counting? overall revenue or is it just purely on that first transaction what you're optimizing for? If that makes sense.
Well, we KPI the reps on upfront cash collected and on units. Yep. Obviously, you know, revenue and payment plans and all that stuff's good.
I don't know what the question was though.
Okay, the question is when we're looking at the profitability of our ads and looking at our ROAS, should we do it? on the basis of the cash collected on that first transaction or on contracted revenue or theoretical lifetime value yeah so if you're looking at front end just specifically i like to say you know five to seven x yeah uh on contracted if not more hopefully contracted okay yeah hopefully more because five to seven x is even you know at scale that's even good like that's You're getting tighter levels at that point.
That's like the minimum. So ideally on contracted, if you can get to like 10 to 15, that's great. On upfront, it can be anywhere from like two to five.
Okay. You know, so I know those are kind of broad ranges. Okay, no, that makes sense.
That's good. It depends on where you're at. Like what I want to do is I want to get it as high as possible in the very beginning because I know eventually it's going to go down.
You know, ads are going to go up. The more sales people you have, the lower baseline closing rate your team is going to have generally. And then to what extent do you try and model the cost of organic as well or not really?
I mean, you could because you could take your media team divided by generated appointments or your media team divided by organic closes and you could see what the CAC is for that. I mean, it depends on how big your media team is. I think if you have big spend relative to the revenue coming in for organic, it's worth it.
Like for me, our media team budget is not significant enough to where I feel like that's a metric worth tracking. Yeah, in our case we'd be doing the media team anyway, so like I'm kind of like should we model it or yeah You can you could look at it if you want. Yeah, it's up to you.
Okay, nice Okay, this is a random question about email lists. So we currently have Four different email lists. It's kind of annoying.
We have life notes, which is my personal newsletter It's got like three three hundred fifty thousand people on it We have like a productive notes, which is just like a weekly productivity one that we used to that we still send We have a creator notes because we used to well still do sell a YouTube course And then we have a Freedom Notes one, which is now for this new business product thing.
And I feel like this is like three email lists too many. It's wild, yeah. Yeah.
The Creative Notes has 150 ,000 on it. Productive Notes has 150 ,000 on it. Freedom Notes has like 50 ,000, 40 ,000, but that's by far our highest conversion into the thing.
Now, some people are on some combinations of these different email lists, but I don't think anyone really knows what email list they're on. They just get an email from Alibdal. some amount of times per week depending on their preferences and stuff any thoughts on well i mean ideally what you probably want one list in an ideal perfect world right so i mean the thing that i would think about is what was the expectation of people getting on this list and then based on the content they've been receiving what is the future expectation of like what they're going to get on the list what you're going to email them and so on and so forth right and then if if you find that the expectation of each person on the list is if any of those four right if they're very similar like in terms of the con type of content they receive what it is blah blah blah if you find those are relatively similar i would just you could probably merge those lists without even telling them now if the type of list is like let's say one is uh your personal life updates and this other one is like only productivity yeah or like let's say one is
Money -making and the other ones like strictly productivity. Yeah. Well in that case That's a little bit different and what you could do is is you could still say let's say you want everybody on the money one You could say hey, I'm gonna be putting more time and attention on this other list let us, here's what I'm going to cover in this.
It's still going to be valuable. It's about this and that. Let me know if you also want to get those emails because I'm going to be sending out more emails there and less emails here.
I'll still be here. I'll still send some emails, whatever, but I'm going to like, and then they click and it auto subscribes them to the other list. Right.
And then it's your choice if you want to keep sending emails to the other list or not, frankly. But I mean, do you want to go deeper on that is like, what's the expectation and essentially. you know like what do people expect on each list like what's the content cadence for those lists for the most part each one is a weekly newsletter type thing just for like life notes is often just whatever's going on in my life but it's often related to either productivity or creator or business all of the above yeah creator notes is like how to be a creator productive notes is like productivity tips which often overlap there's like a large amount of overlap between these four verticals Yeah.
And so if it's really similar and you feel like people would just like the same type of content, you could probably just merge it on the one list and just let everybody know, Hey, I've been doing four lists. This has made the content worse. So I'm going to show up even a more powerful way.
And this new list I'm calling X, Y, and Z. And I mean, like probably what people are going to like is if you just taught like the life notes thing, that's probably like the talk about your life, talk about content, talk about business. Most talking about productivity most people will probably be down just to be on one list But that's probably something to where you don't need to have them like click and resubscribe and all this shit You can probably just merge everything and then focus on Really nailing email as a channel by focusing on just one list, you know It's probably not a problem.
There's two types of lists There's what's called a churn and burn list and then there's a relationship list. So you have four relationship lists. Yeah I have a churn and burn list and then I'm starting a relationship list, right?
Because I'm going to get opt -ins from the content and all that stuff. Those see like those, you don't want to mix and match because the churn and burn is I'm going to send like 10 offers in five days. Yeah.
Like, because I know it's, it's kind of funny. It's like, there's no point in nurture. The churn and burn list is when you are generating a list from ads.
Yep. So now granted, if your ads are retargeting, you could maybe put those in the relationship list. I mean, you know, not the end of the world.
But the churn and burn is like people who opt in from ads, they don't want to be on your list. So you're really just hitting them hard in the first 14 days to try to get them the book for what they originally opted in for. After that, they're almost dead.
Okay, interesting. Okay, nice. That's good.
What I'm thinking based on that is actually two rather than four. One is like Life Notes, which is the personal relationship list. and then because our lifestyle business academy is on its own domain lifestylebusiness .com and it's like like we can just have the lifestyle business newsletter if you're interested in building a business and then do a little bit of i think you could do both or you could cross -pollinate and send certain things to both lists that'd be fine um but i mean i almost i bet you could just do it all in one yeah is my thing and you could cta to the lifestyle business academy anyways easy okay nice love it thank you okay so The point of this was for me to just try and talk to you and to help us scale from 300k a month to a million a month.
Overall, we've been chatting for a couple of hours now and we've spoken on Zoom on and off over the last year and we've been working with you guys. What do you see for us as the key things to focus on? Well, the number one thing is don't procrastinate with...
perfectionism and client success is a way to keep you from doing what you should be doing. That's by far the number one thing, because that's a pattern that's going to reoccur beyond just the tactics. And then in terms of the tactics, we talked about the client success, KPIs, client success structure, milestones, all stuff like that.
And then I think the main thing is, is, you know, focusing on your sales team and doing all the things that we talked about there, turning down your ad spend a little bit until you're ready to hire or no, I guess you're hiring a third person. So keeping the ad spend where it's at. and you should be good dude easy million a month and then we can and then in the next episode we can go a million a month to three million there we go perfect brilliant thanks if you enjoyed this podcast you're also probably gonna like this podcast i also did recently that you can check out by clicking the screen right here
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Cole Gordon opens by name-dropping his own $36M/year business, then turns the mic on Ali Abdaal for a live, unscripted audit: is the constraint client success, or is Ali just hiding from his sales team.
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Two direct-response operators sit on a patio and trade the actual numbers behind their businesses: setter pay, application grading, spend cuts, and the leadership gap that shows up once you're past eight figures.
Two direct-response operators trade notes on the offer changes that took a low-ticket start to nine figures, and why most health offers stall at the same monthly number while a handful pull in millions more.
A first-generation immigrant built a home-service empire on the one thing his industry refused to touch, marketing, then sold it in six and a half years for $108 million.
The Skool founder walks Cole Gordon through the whole build — the network-effect bet, the year-long hunt for one engineer, the 11x price cut, and why he still won't let AI write his code.
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