Two operators sit on a white cyc for nearly two hours and take apart every place a booked sales call leaks before anyone dials in.
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1 weeks ago
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Interview
educational
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57 · 43
Big Idea
The argument in one line.
Show rate is a proxy metric that teams quietly game, so the number worth building your sales operation around is offers per closer per day, and getting there takes ten small fixes instead of one tactic.
Who This Is For
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
A founder running paid traffic into a call funnel who is watching booked calls evaporate before anyone gets on Zoom.
A sales leader with two or more closers who has never had anyone own sales operations as a job.
Anyone whose application form was built once, years ago, and has never been graded against close-rate data.
A closer or setter who wants to understand why their calendar fills the way it does and how to get more live calls.
An agency owner buying leads for a client and grading campaigns on cost per booked call rather than qualified opportunity.
SKIP IF…
You sell without a scheduled call, so there is no appointment to show up for.
You are pre-revenue and taking a handful of calls a week, where the fix is more leads, not routing logic.
You want persuasion and call scripts. This is almost entirely about what happens before the call starts.
TL;DR
The full version, fast.
Show rate is a proxy metric, which means teams game it by cancelling non-responders and counting fast disqualifications as no-shows, so the real target is offers per closer per day, ideally three or more. Google's mid-2023 calendar invite change cost one company 15.5% of its show rate overnight and made the rest of the system matter. The fixes stack: a one-to-two day booking window on rolling availability, six to nine open slots per closer, an application built on fill-in-the-blank questions graded one to four by someone who does not report to sales, best leads routed to best closers without cutting availability, a dedicated lead nurture specialist who confirms within five minutes, single booking above a 67% predicted show, and SMS rather than iMessage. If all of that is already running and the number is still bad, the ad itself is the problem.
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04:37cohostCole's SalesKick counterpart (not named on camera)
Chapters
Where the time goes.
00:00 – 04:37
01 · Why show rates matter, and the self-inflicted wounds
Two real client mistakes: cancelling anyone who does not answer a text within an hour, and paying closers to disqualify inside five minutes.
04:37 – 06:39
02 · The June 2023 Google Calendar update
Crypto-era invite spam pushed Google to block calendar invites from unknown senders, costing one company 15.5% of its show rate overnight.
06:39 – 10:28
03 · The real metric: offers per closer per day
Show rate is a proxy metric, so the target becomes offers per closer per day, which is what a sales operations department actually exists to produce.
10:28 – 15:26
04 · Booking window: one to two days out
Measured across hundreds of thousands of calls a month, show rate falls off past two days, and rolling slot availability beats rolling days.
15:26 – 17:39
05 · The end-of-month death screen
Desktop-era calendars show an empty month on the 30th and tell paid traffic to check back later.
17:39 – 28:19
06 · Availability, hours, and weekends
Six to nine slots a day per closer, follow-ups bookended around the day, Pacific hours as the default, Saturdays yes, Sundays no, and why fifteen-minute offsets backfire.
28:19 – 35:22
07 · Application grading 101
The identity qualifier, the one-to-four grade, and what each grade does: disqualify, triage to a setter, or book straight to a closer.
35:22 – 48:35
08 · Application mistakes and the BANT trap
Why financial multiple-choice questions get lied to 47% of the time, why fill-in answers of 50 to 70 characters win, and who should never grade applications.
48:35 – 1:02:20
09 · Contact info placement, and mining the application data
Where the contact fields belong, recovering partial applications, and grading ad campaigns on qualified opportunities in a single spreadsheet.
1:02:20 – 1:07:44
10 · Routing best leads to best closers
Preference-based routing that keeps full team availability, plus a reset month so newer closers can revalidate.
1:07:44 – 1:16:59
11 · The lead nurture specialist nobody hires
A dedicated confirmer who texts within five minutes, in human-sounding fragments, and never sends a link before getting a reply.
1:16:59 – 1:21:41
12 · Single vs double booking
Single book anything predicted to show above 67%, double book the rest, and add one live-transfer closer for every four closers.
1:21:41 – 1:36:11
13 · Confirmation cadence, emails, and the iMessage mistake
The full confirm sequence, value emails versus logistics emails, the pre-call video as a second VSL, and why SMS beat iMessage by 19%.
1:36:11 – 1:44:20
14 · Setter show rates: what good looks like
Benchmarks of 70% B2C and 80% B2B, the diagnostic for bad setters, tie-down language, and paying a setter like a salesperson.
1:44:20 – 1:53:02
15 · The marketing message that fixes everything
If every operational fix is in place and the number is still bad, the ad is the problem: direct offers live on offer strength, indirect on unique mechanism.
Atomic Insights
Lines worth screenshotting.
Google's mid-2023 calendar invite change dropped one company's show rate by 15.5% overnight, and nothing about their funnel had changed.
Show rate is gameable: cancel every imperfect lead and count only the rest, and you can post 95% while making fewer offers than ever.
One client's team was cancelling appointments when a lead did not reply to a text within an hour. Stopping that took them straight to 65%.
A manager who tells reps that disqualifying inside five minutes counts as a no-show has just paid closers to end calls early.
The metric closest to revenue that you can actually control is offers per closer per day, and three or more is the target.
Let leads book more than two days out and show rate falls off a cliff, measured across 300,000 to 400,000 calls a month.
Rolling slot availability beats rolling day availability, because a day with one open slot still counts as a full day of options.
On the 30th of the month, calendars built for desktop show leads an empty month and a 'check back later' screen you are paying for.
Six to nine open slots a day per closer is the range, and closers who bury follow-ups mid-day quietly destroy it.
Saturday costs you about two points of show rate. Sunday costs you twenty-five, so book those leads on Monday instead.
Offering call slots every fifteen minutes lowers show rate and costs a closer one to two bookable slots a day.
Shortening a call from 45 minutes to 15 does not raise show rate. Nobody decides to attend based on the length of the meeting.
In a 10,000-application study, 47% of people answered the financial qualifying question objectively wrong, in both directions.
Applications that are entirely multiple choice have the lowest show rates, because people can see which button gets them disqualified.
Across every fill-in-the-blank question, answers of 50 to 70 characters have the highest show rates, and one-word answers the worst.
Never let the sales manager or the CMO decide what counts as a qualified application. Both can improve their own numbers by changing it.
Asking for a LinkedIn or a website inside your application is telling a lead to leave your funnel and hoping they come back.
An automatic text to people who abandoned the application recovers roughly 20% of them.
Confirm an appointment within five minutes of booking and 70 to 80% of leads confirm. Wait until the night before and total throughput drops.
Do not send a link by SMS until the lead replies. Carriers read unanswered links as spam and iPhone blocks the tap entirely.
SMS beat iMessage by about 19% on confirmation rate in a two-month head-to-head, once Apple made all inbound messages the same color.
Above a 67% predicted show probability, single book. Everything below that gets double booked and an overflow closer catches the collisions.
One live-transfer closer for every four regular closers added 20% more revenue with no additional ad spend.
Raising setter pay by $2,000 a month each added $250,000 in monthly revenue and cut $200,000 in monthly ad spend.
'Will you watch this before the call' produces far more follow-through than 'can you', and the difference is measurable.
You can automate the labor but not the quality control, and for manual data entry the labor is the quality control.
Grade ad campaigns on qualified opportunities, not cost per acquisition, because CPA needs $20,000 and 60 days to say anything.
When an ad is genuinely good and attacks a false assumption the market holds, show rates land in the 70s and 80s without any of the operations work.
Takeaway
Show rate is an operations problem wearing a marketing costume.
WHAT TO LEARN
Every number that looks like a sales problem here turns out to be a routing, timing, or form-design decision that someone made once and never measured again.
01Why show rates matter, and the self-inflicted wounds
A metric your team is judged on will get gamed, so watch for the cheap version: cancelled appointments, fast disqualifications, and reclassified no-shows.
When a show rate looks bad and a close rate looks great at the same time, the two numbers are being produced by the same manipulation.
02The June 2023 Google Calendar update
Platform changes can move your numbers overnight without anything in your funnel changing, so date your metric declines against outside events before blaming the team.
Google's 2023 calendar invite restriction cost one company 15.5% of its show rate, which is what turned attendance into a system problem rather than a tactic.
03The real metric: offers per closer per day
Pick the metric closest to revenue that you can still directly control, which for a sales team is offers per closer per day rather than any rate.
Marketing, sales, and sales operations each need a distinct number, or one department will improve its score by damaging another's.
04Booking window: one to two days out
Let people book more than two days out and attendance falls sharply, because intent decays faster than most calendars are configured to assume.
A calendar that shows a fixed number of days will show an empty page on weekends, so availability has to roll by open slots rather than by date.
05The end-of-month death screen
Traffic you paid for can land on a page that physically cannot accept a booking, and nobody notices because the funnel reports it as a visit.
Watch the last days of the month specifically, when a month-view calendar is most likely to tell a lead there is nothing available.
06Availability, hours, and weekends
Six to nine open slots per closer per day is the working range, and follow-ups parked mid-day destroy it faster than anything else.
Book follow-ups before the first call or after the last one, so a thirty-minute conversation never consumes a prime new-business slot.
Sunday appointments show far worse than weekdays while Saturdays cost only a couple of points, so move Sunday demand to Monday.
Offering slots every fifteen minutes and shortening call length both sound like they should help attendance, and neither does.
07Application grading 101
An application's first question should name the exact person the offer is for and invite everyone else to leave before they become a tracked lead.
Grade applications on a scale that maps to an action, so a score decides whether someone is disqualified, triaged, or booked with a closer.
Route uncertain applicants to a qualifying call first rather than spending closer time proving they were never a fit.
08Application mistakes and the BANT trap
Nearly half of applicants answer money questions incorrectly in both directions, which makes any routing or ad optimization built on them noise.
All-multiple-choice forms have the worst attendance, because a form that shows which button disqualifies you teaches people to lie to it.
Open-response answers of roughly fifty to seventy characters predict attendance best, while one-word answers and pasted essays both signal trouble.
Never let the person judged on lead volume or close rate define what counts as a qualified lead.
09Contact info placement, and mining the application data
Do not ask for a link to somewhere else inside a form you paid to get someone into.
Put contact fields early enough that a partial submission is still a reachable lead, but only if someone will actually reach out.
An automated message to people who abandoned a form recovers a meaningful share of them for almost no cost.
Grade ad campaigns on qualified opportunity rather than cost per acquisition, because acquisition data needs tens of thousands in spend before it says anything.
Automation removes labor but not quality control, and in manual data work the labor was doing the quality control invisibly.
10Routing best leads to best closers
Send the best leads to the best performers, but never by restricting them to one person's calendar, because narrow availability costs more than the routing gains.
Reset the routing advantage periodically so newer people get a fair sample to prove themselves on.
11The lead nurture specialist nobody hires
Confirmations sent within minutes of booking get confirmed at far higher rates than reminders sent the day before.
Salespeople confirm appointments when it suits their schedule, which is why confirmation needs to be someone's actual job.
Write confirmations the way a person texts: short fragments, a reference to something the lead wrote, and no link until they reply.
Carriers and phones treat an unanswered outbound link as spam, so a link sent too early can hurt more than sending nothing.
12Single vs double booking
Confirmation should change what you do next, not just get logged, which means a confirmed appointment earns a slot to itself.
Above roughly a two-thirds predicted attendance, stop hedging with double bookings and give the appointment its own slot.
Once you have four or more salespeople, one person dedicated to catching overflow collisions is worth an entire extra calendar of revenue.
13Confirmation cadence, emails, and the iMessage mistake
Reminder emails split into two jobs: logistics telling them how to show up, and value content telling them why it is worth prioritizing.
Content sent before a call should sell the belief that leads to the purchase, not the product itself.
Test message channels rather than trusting the one that feels more personal, since a blue bubble stopped being visible to recipients after a platform UI change.
14Setter show rates: what good looks like
Setter attendance below roughly 70% for consumer offers or 80% for business offers is a fixable talent and training problem, not a market problem.
Lengthening a qualifying call to include a short section of genuine insight makes the next call feel worth attending.
Ask for commitment with 'will you' rather than 'can you', because one asks about ability and the other asks for a decision.
Pay the first human who touches a lead like a salesperson, and manage them separately from the people who close.
15The marketing message that fixes everything
If every operational fix is in place and attendance is still poor, the problem is that the advertising promises nothing new.
Direct offers live or die on offer strength, indirect offers on whether the mechanism is genuinely different from the status quo.
Attacking a false assumption the market holds is the single most effective hook, and great advertising produces high attendance without any operational work.
Glossary
Terms worth knowing.
Show rate
The percentage of booked sales appointments where the prospect actually attends. Treated here as a proxy metric that can be inflated by cancelling or reclassifying appointments.
Offers per closer per day
How many times a salesperson actually presents the offer in a day. The closest controllable number to revenue, and the metric the whole system is tuned toward.
Booking window
How many days into the future a prospect is allowed to schedule. One to two days out is presented as optimal for attendance.
Rolling availability
A calendar setting that always displays the next available window rather than a fixed number of calendar days, so weekends and full days do not leave the page empty.
End-of-month death screen
What a lead sees when a desktop-era calendar shows the current month, finds no remaining slots late in the month, and tells them to check back later.
Identity qualifier
A yes or no first question on an application that names the exact person the offer is for, designed to make everyone else leave before the form records them as a lead.
App grading
Scoring each submitted application, usually one to four, to decide whether it is disqualified, sent to a setter for triage, or booked directly with a closer.
Triage
A holding step where uncertain applicants go to a setter's calendar first, and only reach a closer if the setter can qualify them.
Setter
The salesperson who contacts and qualifies inbound leads and books them onto a closer's calendar.
Closer
The salesperson who runs the actual sales call and presents the offer.
MQL
Marketing qualified lead. An application that meets the grading bar, used here as a per-campaign metric rather than a raw booked call count.
TQO
Total qualified opportunity. Marketing qualified leads plus setter-generated sets, attributed by ad campaign, used as the closest fast proxy to revenue per campaign.
LNS
Lead nurture specialist. A dedicated hire whose only job is confirming booked appointments by text, fast, in a human voice, so salespeople never have to.
Speed to lead
How quickly a new lead or new booking gets a first human touch. Confirmations sent within five minutes of booking convert far better than later ones.
Single vs double booking
Putting one appointment in a slot versus two, on the assumption some will not show. Higher-confidence appointments get a slot to themselves.
Live transfer closer
A closer held in reserve to take the overflow when two double-booked prospects show up for the same slot.
Pre-call video
A second video sent between booking and the call, meant to sell the underlying idea behind the product rather than the product itself.
Direct vs indirect marketing
Direct leads with the offer itself. Indirect leads with curiosity or value and reveals the offer later. Each requires a different way of positioning the call.
Unique mechanism
The specific, nameable reason your method works differently from the status quo. Not a branded acronym stuck onto an ordinary process.
Permissible business use
The legal justification required before running a consumer's financial data. Booking a high-ticket sales call generally qualifies; opting into a newsletter does not.
28:19 – 1:02:20denseApplications: grading, question design, and data mining
1:02:20 – 1:21:41steadyRouting and booking density
1:21:41 – 1:36:11denseConfirmation, nurture, SMS and email
1:36:11 – 1:44:20steadySetter performance and management
1:44:20 – 1:53:02steadyMarketing message as the last lever
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So this podcast is going to be about show rates. And so I think between, you know, I would say it's safe to say sales kick and closers. Combined between both of them, show rates and increasing show rates is probably one of the number one things we help clients with because obviously more live calls on the calendar, more revenue.
And we routinely take in hundreds and hundreds of clients from whether it's 40 % to 60%, 50 % to 70%. I mean, we have several people. I know we were looking at some wins the other day that were in the mid 80s in terms of their show rate, which nowadays is like unheard of.
Obviously, I want to talk about the entire show rate and sales ops system that allows us to do that. And it's not one golden tactic. It's a lot of errors.
What? Not one silver bullet, but a lot of golden babies. So I want to go over the seven to ten major, major things that really will help people after they watch this podcast.
They can go and implement to increase their show rates. But first, you said you had some. funny show rate stories yes to go over some some big mistakes we'll start off with that and then we'll get into the series yeah and it's funny because there's like i always say to clients there's kind of three categories of things you need to do to improve your shirt to really maximize it and the first category is just don't do stupid stuff okay so two examples of just and i've seen this not with one client both these examples i've seen multiple clients do this the first one is we've had clients that have come on, whether it be at SalesCade, Closers .io, and my share rate's bad, my share rate's bad.
We do a full audit. We go through, we're like, I don't know, like people who are showing up, like it's like 30, you know, you book 30 calls, you know, 20 of them show up, everything seems good. They're like, yeah, yeah, but we're booking a hundred calls.
We're like, well, what happened to the other 70? And then we dig into it and it's just their team just, oh, this guy didn't respond in an hour. Let's just cancel the meeting and let's count that as a no -show.
And then we're like, dude, maybe you just don't cancel people because they didn't respond to your text in an hour. You just let them, maybe mark them as free, but you keep them on the calendar. You fix that, immediately 65 % sure.
It's like magic, right? So rule number one, don't do stupid stuff. Don't cancel appointments that are on the calendar because they didn't respond in an hour.
Number two is, and this is even more insidious how it can affect and how to actually find it. It can be much more difficult. So we've had multiple clients who, same thing, sure, it's really bad.
We don't get it. We don't get it. And I always know something's fishy when I look at someone's numbers and their share rate is like abysmal.
Like it's like 20%, but their close rate's like 80%. You're like, okay, this does not look right, right? And so the first time I discovered this, I remember I just started going through call recordings and like 70 % of the calls went exactly like this.
Hey man, how are you doing? Before we dive into it today, just so you know, this is gonna be $10 ,000 and is that gonna be a problem for you? Oh, you're not sure yet?
Okay. It's also, you know, just so you know, it's going to be like a three -month commitment, like a lot of time. So like, is that, oh, that's going to be a problem?
Okay, no worries, man. Talk to you later. Let's just talk about this later.
End call. And what had happened is the sales manager had told the sales rep, so like, hey, if you DQ someone within five minutes, counts as a no -show. So now we've incentivized people to just get people off the call as quickly as possible.
And again, both those mistakes, as crazy as they sound, I have seen unfortunate often amount of time. So rule number one of show rates, don't do stupid stuff. So I know a lot of what we're talking about with show rates is highly tactical and this is a dense podcast.
So just to supplement it, we put down everything we're talking about in this podcast into a cheat sheet, into a PDF that basically is this entire SOP that you can give your team. You can download yourself. The link is in the description.
You can check it out. Now back to the podcast. yeah well you know that's the classic case of corruption of proxy metrics so proxy metrics are good a proxy metric is like a kpi so anything that's a metric that represents something that's going on in the front lines but when you you have to be careful because anytime you optimize a certain proxy metric it corrupts the metric right and so there's like the classic case of um you know in like hospitals or something when they try to optimize for a certain outcome they just create like more prescriptions of medicine or more sick patients or more i don't even know there was one one exact study that's like the classic one of this but yeah you have to make it like closest to the actual thing that you want yes and so because with this that case what's happening is the closers are optimizing for close rate and so you know you can get more closes it's actually much easier to just reduce the first thing which is your live calls.
I know this because I was a closer. And so when you gamify the system, yeah, a lot of things can go wrong. That happens in how you track metrics, how you do everything.
So, okay. Well, let's dive in. The first thing I think people should understand is what happened in June of 2023, which is why show rates are so bad.
Because it really, I mean, it was always something we wanted to maximize. It wasn't as much of a massive issue, show rates that is, until that point. Can you just explain what happened there?
Yeah. So to set the stage a little bit, As Cole mentioned, in 2023, there was a pretty significant update from Google, specifically with G -Cal.
And essentially, if you think about that time in history, the year or two before that, we had the pretty big crypto boom, 2021. And what was happening is these bad actors, spam folks, were creating an account, downloading a list of millions of Google emails, and just inviting all of them to this event. Obviously, the vast, vast, vast majority of them would just see a random event on their calendar, delete it, not show up.
But there would be some people that would show up to this call and get scammed out of like hundreds of thousands of dollars, millions of dollars. And so Google obviously is like, well, this is a big problem for us because it's like kind of we're like allowing this to happen. We see what's going on.
And that was why they rolled out the update in May, June of 23, where they said, hey, if you get invited to an event. And you've never interacted with that email before. You've never sent an email to them.
You've never had an event from them before. It's just not going to show up on the calendar unless you basically go through an email. There's all this spam, scary text.
You got to click yes. And then sometimes still it won't show up for that. And they really just added a ton of friction to that.
And since then, we went back and actually reviewed the numbers at Closers .io. And there was basically immediately a 15 .5 % decline in share rate overnight from just that update. yeah i mean i yeah like for us it was a huge it was the difference when we could single book everything which is that's actually when we had to start double booking stuff which we had always done for rca which is b2c yeah but with b2b we never had to do it until then and so we'll get into the double booking all of that jazz but that's really and and honestly in the industry it kind of we were in like almost like a bull market until 2023 where there was like everything i think for so many people was so easy yeah and then mid 2023 and then especially in the 2024 is when a lot of people started struggling and a huge part is just let's call show up like i mean it is really a huge part which is why this conversation is so important so i do want to set the stage because really and you'll agree with this we always tell clients what you're really you know okay the first part of how to increase show rates we tell them
really you're not optimizing to increase show rates. What you're really optimizing to increase when you boil it down is offers per closer per day, which ideally you want to be three or more. right?
So three offers per closer per day. And so the way to do that, the way to think about it is there's sort of three parts of your acquisition. There's marketing, which is KPI on MQLs.
There's sales, which you might KPI on units or cash or whatever, not close rate, like we talked about because of the example earlier. And then there's sales ops. In sales ops, KPI is really offers per closer per day or offer per slot percentage is another way you could measure it and so on and so forth.
Would you add anything to that? Because the reason I want to bring that up and set the stage there is what we're talking about is show rate tactics, yes.
But when you're trying to address the show rate or the offers per closer per day, what you're really doing is you're developing a sales ops system and a sales ops department, which a lot of people don't even know what that is and don't even have one. Well, just like you mentioned with close rate, show rate is a proxy metric and can be gamified.
Like if you want to have a 95 % show rate, just cancel all of the calls that are not. you know, 100 % perfect fits. And then don't count those against your share rate and just count the, you know, the 5 % of calls that you leave on the calendar and almost all of them will end up showing up.
So obviously that's not what anybody wants. And I think one of the big reasons why people in our industry specifically struggle with the concept of sales operations the most is because typically the people who are, you know, doing exceptionally well are, you know, very, very strong marketers, very, very strong salespeople.
And those skills, don't as effectively carry over to a really operational efficiency based, you know, part of your business. And so it's kind of like a new, in a lot of ways, kind of like a new skill set that people have to learn and a new mindset they have to learn as it approach, you know, in terms of approaching their actual business.
But yes, in short, you're optimizing not for share rate, you're optimizing for offers per day per closure, and specifically per available time slot. And If you look at it that way, you start to expand all of the things that can affect that, right?
It's not just sure rate. It's well, what's my cancel rate? What's my reschedule rate?
What's my sure rate across specific traffic sources? And what's actually getting the highest offers per day per traffic source, right? And even, you know, we can get obviously very advanced, but like when we ran a report for you and we found that like, hey.
uh even things as simple as the type of email that they're using to book a call can affect this and that's how you know if you want to scale to multiply figures and you want to have a really dialed in sales operations process that's how deep you have to go to to really get an advantage to continue scaling yeah and like the thing we were talking about with proxy metrics too offers per closer per day is actually the closest metric that is controllable that you can get to that's as close to revenue which is really what you want like if we could just kpi it on and we could kpi every department on profit you know we would but yeah a lot of times it's not directly influenceable that one metric is so offers per closer per day is the best we can do yeah so what we have is i think it's about somewhere between seven to ten tactics we'll create chapters in the podcast because what we're going to do is we're going to cover each of the tactics and we're going to go from the easiest lowest hanging fruit to the most advanced which some of this initial stuff will sound easy
But I mean, you would be shocked how many people I speak with who are doing 400 grand a month who like they're not even doing what we're going to talk about, which is the first one. So number one is booking window. So best tactics here.
Explain booking window. What should people do? And then I have a few jump off points.
Yes. So the booking windows is essentially how many days into the future can a prospect book a call? So if, for example, today's Monday, can they book obviously tomorrow?
Can they book Friday? Can they book three weeks or not? Right.
That's that is your your booking window. four share rates is optimal to allow them to book at most two days out from whatever day that they're booking. Now there's exceptions to that, but in general, if you want to maximize share rate, you want to maximize offers per day, that is what we've seen across.
I mean, at this point, sales kick has 300 ,000 to 400 ,000 sales calls going through it a month. We track share rate across all those, obviously closures IO, you know, tons of volume there, all of our clients. And we've seen over and over and over again, as soon as you start to creep up three, four or five days, the share rate decreases like.
exponentially. Now, there's one exception to that, which is if you're a solo founder, owner, and you're taking the sales calls, obviously you have a bunch of things on your plate, marketing, sales, fulfillment, a bunch of stuff going on. So you may need to open up a couple more days into the future.
Ideally, it's four or less, and even four is pushing it. But you have to accept like, hey, that is going to hurt your show rate. And ideally, if you're already booking three, four days out consistently, you really should be trying to get to a point quickly where you can delegate that to a closer who you can then limit to two or start getting some of the calls off of your calendar entirely.
So that's in general, again, to summarize, one to two days out is optimal. The other key thing is the calendar system that you use is really important. So there's a feature in calendars called rolling availability.
So what rolling availability is, is that it always shows the next one or two days of availability. So what I mean by that is if we say, hey, for example, with a system like Calendly, I want to show the next two days. Well, if you're on Friday, the next two days is Saturday, Sunday.
You probably don't have any availability on Saturday, Sunday. Well, what that means is leads as they're going through your funnel literally cannot book. okay that's obviously going to increase your cost per book call rolling availability says hey if we want let's say the next two days of availability to show and saturday and sunday aren't there's no availability then we'll automatically show monday and tuesday and there's only a couple of calendar systems that actually do that it's basically required for any level of scale with ads especially yeah so i mean that's the rolling versus fix so yes just to be clear There's some systems that only do fixed, which is Calendly, which means that no matter what, like you have to basically get in there and like change the booking window.
If you're going to follow this rule, you got to change the booking window all of the time to make sure there's always two days, which like that means you got to have people logging in on a weekend and logging in on Thursday, then on Monday, changing it back. And a lot of times people just mishap it or what they do most commonly is they just set it for four days so they don't have to fuck with it.
But then, you know, you're not going to get as good a show rate. Then the next stage is rolling. days, right?
Like this is what one sub will do, where it always shows the next two days. Now that was kind of like the best we had for a while. The issue with that is that if let's say today is full and tomorrow I have one slot, then it will only really show the one slot tomorrow and then the one slot and then the day after.
So now what we have is just one day, which Also, what we're going to talk about later is that constrains availability, which will actually decrease show rate and decrease cost per book call. I would still do the rolling window.
It's just that that's like a drawback of that. So one of the things we did at Sales Kick was we didn't do it by rolling days. We did it by rolling slots.
So it shows the next two days worth of slots. So if you have that weird situation where you have one opening the next day. a full day it knows to show okay i'm going to show the next day basically you know just to just to be clear yes uh the other thing i wanted to mention is a lot of people are like well man i have too many calls to just show the next two days simple solution decrease ad spend i i know that is like yes sounds so simple but i mean i've i've given that advice a dozen times and people are always like oh Yeah.
Just saying. Hey, if the way you sell your product or service is through phone sales, you need to stop using booking systems like OneSub, Calendly, iClose, and other booking systems that aren't designed specifically for a phone sales approach or a phone sales team. So we at SalesKick just launched a new calendar and booking system that'll decrease your cost per book call because it's conversion rate optimized specifically for call funnels, whereas most other calendar systems are meant for corporate all -purpose booking and it'll increase your show rates.
So we've had clients see 30 to 100 % increase. and their show rate because our calendar system is specifically designed for call funnels and other funnels that are high volume sales call booking funnels. And the software does so much more.
It's really the only product designed specifically for sales teams with inbound booking systems. So if you're interested, go to saleskick .com, check it out. Now back to the video.
Explain the end of month desk screen. Yes, so - This is a big thing too. Yeah.
First of all, let me give a little context. So most calendar systems were built in a time where desktop was the primary means of internet traffic.
So if you think about when did mobile really become the majority of traffic, it was actually in the mid 2010s, which is a lot more recent than people actually realize. And so because of that, between that and the fact that they were built for me and you to book a meeting between two team members or whatever, they're just fundamentally not optimized for a large volume of traffic from a marketing source.
And so one of the common flaws in these systems is you get to like the 30th of the month. And obviously you're spending your five, 10 grand a day, whatever, it's $1 ,000 a day, it doesn't matter. And now people are laying on a calendar and because the calendar was built with a UI that's optimized for desktop and it shows like the whole calendar and it's like, oh, we're looking at the month of August and it's August 30th, right?
Well, guess what? There's no available slots in August. So it literally pops up and says, Hey, there's no available slots.
Please check back later. And so now you have leads going through your funnel again that you're paying for and that land on a calendar that literally cannot book. And I've seen it as bad as that.
Some systems, what they'll do is they're a little bit better. You'll land on that. It'll be like, there's no slots in August.
Click here to see the next month. But now you're just adding friction for a reason. Some users don't even see that.
But at the end of the day, like you really optimally, you have a calendar system that there is no end of month death screen where people land and they physically can't book. Yeah. And so, The thing that is really key about this is I have clients who they're like, why does some days, you know, I consistently get $300 calls and then one day I get a thousand dollar calls.
Now, sometimes it just adds, but a lot of times, especially with people, let's say in the hundred to 300 a month range, I'll look at their availability and there's like two slots. And I'm like, well, that's why you got a lot of like people just landed on the page and didn't book because there's no slots. And so.
You'd be surprised how much that happens. And then you really want to watch that in the last day of the month because of the end of month death screen. So next thing that is just very basic is availability.
So this is number two. So let's explain optimal availability, how to optimize availability, really for show rates, cost per call, et cetera. Yeah, well, it starts with your closers.
So you really should be having six to nine open slots a day from your closers, ideally like eight. is the ideal range sometimes with follow us maybe it bumps down to seven but what you don't want and i've seen this a million times is like closers just start booking their follow -ups in the middle of the day and then they have like three slots available for new calls and it just kills your your your share rates it extends booking times it's just not optimal um so that's number one and that really comes down to just good sales management practices um number two is You know, Hermosi talks about how availability is the number one correlating factor when he had a software company, Allen, to high share rates.
So meaning, as Cole just mentioned, the more availability that you have, the more options someone has to choose, which actually allows them to choose a time that will work for them, right? Therefore, making them more likely to share versus trying to be like, oh, maybe I can make this time. Maybe I can't.
Let's just book it and we can just move on, right? um so those are kind of the two most critical things from from a uh you know just overall uh availability standpoint the last thing is if you want to touch on because people always ask me about this it's related to show rates but related and also not um but what you think are best practices for sales teams on the weekends in terms of available slots?
Well, that's a good question. Usually what we do is most of all of our guys, I mean, if they want to work a full day Saturday, they can. I just tell them to do five slots.
And then Sundays we found, and it can be different for everybody, Sundays we found aren't even worth doing. Now, like I have, I think, I don't know if I talked to Hermosi or his guy Jacob about this or something, but I feel like I've had a conversation with somebody over there. that they do every single day and then like they have guys on sundays and then those guys can take off other days the thing with that is if you have a massive brand where you're really famous i think that's great right in my experience like the difference saturday i think we've measured it and you might get a couple points lower than a weekday but i'm talking like if you're at 60 you might get 58 you know so it's still worth having that extra day having guys on saturdays and having setters on saturdays yes right With Sundays, I mean, we found that literally it could be 60 to 40, 60 to 35.
I'd rather them book on a Monday, frankly. And I think even sometimes just with the way the calendars are set up, some people will think that Sunday is Monday. This also goes to another thing is that the reason why Labor Day and Memorial Day, which is coming up, is so bad is because people book Monday and then they just, I mean, this is how it is for me.
I just, I had all these plans on, what is it going to be, Labor Day weekends coming up? and then i just forgot it was labor day you know i mean i'm still gonna like work or do whatever anyways yeah but i just forget another thing i want to say because you mentioned follow -ups getting scheduled in the middle of the day yeah general best practice this is just how you be a good closer okay you really should try your your first aim with any prospect should be to schedule the follow -up before the sales meeting or after your last call of the day so i mean yes that means working longer also yes if you want to be the best closer you can be this is just what it takes because Part of being a good closer is maximizing your availability.
So you have a lot more live calls that where you can make more offers, which means like what I would do when I was a closer is take two follow -ups for the meeting. And I'd have my last call of the day, take two follow -ups after, you know, so that's four follow -ups a day that doesn't affect my availability. That's very, very key.
Is it always possible? No. So if I have somebody at 12, my next one would be, I will take, I will cut my lunch in half.
You know, that's just me making a sacrifice. I'm not saying everybody should do that, but you know, for me, I just said, fuck it. But then, okay, let's say at 1 p .m.
I got to take it. That's a call slot. Okay, now if I can't do the bookends of the day, I'm going to like try to really force this, any other follow -ups to go at 1 .30.
Because that call slot's already burned, but the follow -up's generally a half hour. So what I can do is stack them in the same slot, right? I mean, it's like Tetris.
But this is also like, if you're a closer, this is how you make more money. So if you're a manager or a business owner, maybe you need to teach your closers how to make more money for themselves. But this will also help you get better show rates, better availability, all of this stuff.
Yeah. Do you have something to add? I do.
On availability, some more advanced stuff to think about. So, well, one very, very stupid mistake I see people make is, I mean, this is just like 101, but again, we're sharing these things because we get these questions a lot, okay? If you were, let's say, you know, you're a US -based company and, you know, you operate EST hours or whatever.
And then you start hiring closers in Australia or something. And shout out to all my Australians out there. And then you have them work Australian hours.
Do you really think you're going to get good show rates? No. But this happens so much.
It is just like beyond me of how people, they're like, yeah, I don't know why people aren't showing up at 2 a .m. in the morning. Well, yeah.
I wonder why.
On that note. A more common one would be like, I mean, I see this more commonly at like 5 a .m., 6 a .m. Yes.
Yeah. And they're like, well, it's 6 a .m. Eastern time.
I'm like, yeah, you know. okay like i don't and i'll tell you this what i used to do as a sales rep is i would track manually all the uh close rates of all my slots because i wanted to know what slots i should open and i did find that really um i mean before 8 a .m pst or sorry est was and honestly pst hours worldwide for if you're running big five countries PST hours is legitimately the best.
So you would start it, you know, your first call slot, eight or nine PST and then to five. So, I mean, if you're Eastern, if you have Eastern closers, you know, you got to teach them the Miami life where they end at eight and then they go out to dinner at nine, you know, like that. But that is really like the best.
It's the best closer. That's why if you're on PST, it's just a better as a closer. I think it's a way better system because that is a real thing because some people have to, you know, depending on your offer to.
they might want to take calls after work. Yeah. Well, and on that note, exactly of what you're saying is, I chatted to Matt Ryder.
He was the first person that I heard this from a few years ago. And we tested and we saw the same thing. Like there are drastically different share rates based on time slots.
Yes. And so like, I think we talked about this on our last podcast. And close rates actually.
Yeah. That like late in the day, post 5 p .m. PST hours have some of the best share rates.
That's also true, by the way, pickup rates. as well uh and then as you mentioned close rates so uh yeah i mean the the not only the the basics of availability of just having enough slots in the day but you know even when you get more advanced optimizing for where those slots are throughout the day so you you know can say hey these are the hours i want you to work because this is going to get the highest throughput um it's just incredibly important i think people often overlook it yeah i remember when i was a closer um so i would try to take calls at like 7, even 6 .30 EST.
And I found when a prospect shows up with bedhead and they're disheveled and they're like wearing a wife beater and they're like, you know, they got this face going on like, oh, I just got up for this call. They don't close. It's just like they're not ready to have you like tear up their business and give them a strategy.
And also you're fucking tired too. Last thing before we move on to availability. Common piece of Hermosi advice is to, you make your calls, let's say 45 or 60 minutes or whatever, but you offer them every 15 minutes.
So the calls aren't 15 minutes to be clear, but the calls would be maybe 45 or 60 minutes, but you offer them every 15. Or even if your calls are an hour long, you offer them every 30. And the idea is, is more options leads to lower cost per call and higher show rate because it's more convenient.
I'm curious your thoughts on this. I'm just going to tell you the closers experience because I want to know like the data sales kick experience. We tested this at some point.
I forget when. And number one, I think it made the show rates worse. My philosophy was that, dude, like I never think about having an appointment at the 15 minute mark of anything, you know?
So like usually I found the prospects would, if it was 8 .15, they would think it's 8 or 8 .30 or whatever. The other thing is too is, you as a closer you have less live call slots because what happens is is it staggers the calendar to her naturally you're gonna have like it's maybe instead of a 15 -minute break you have like a third weird 30 -minute opening or sometimes you have a weird like if somebody goes in what would it be 815 and then let's say it goes to 915 but then somebody books at 10 you have a 45 -minute slot nobody can book and usually on average I find it loses one to two call slots a day yeah right I mean, have you found anything different?
No, we've seen the same thing. It just, it makes calendar management extraordinarily difficult. Like you mentioned that you just end up artificially capping how many calls you can take a day.
The other one that's kind of similar to this as well that also I haven't seen evidence for is, but I've heard a lot of people say this, like, oh, you know, maybe if we lower the length of the appointment from 45 minutes to 30 minutes or something or 15 minutes, maybe more people will show up because it feels less like some sort of a big commitment.
And I'm like, dude, if someone's making a decision whether to show up to your call based on if it's 15 minutes, 30 minutes, or 45 minutes, I mean, unless you're doing four -hour calls, like, that'd be ridiculous, obviously. it ain't it ain't gonna make a difference and every time i've seen people test it no difference in sherry yeah well i don't even think to be clear i don't even think prospects think about when they're booking i mean when i book calls people i don't even look at what the time slot says yeah me too i'm just kind of like whatever okay so we can move on from this uh one thing i did i guess we could just end off with me saying as you get a bigger team you know what we do is most people try to work pst hours But we do have our UK and European people work like EST plus one.
So if we have like three of those and three PSTs, we get really wide coverage. That does maximize availability. Now I have had people be like, oh my God, you know, I have two closers.
Should I hire one European and one? No, I'm just saying if you have a team of eight people or something, it isn't the worst idea to throw in there, all things being equal. I still think the priority should be to just hire the best salespeople you can.
But if two people are equal and... This kind of gives you more availability. You could go with that.
Okay. App grading. This is going to be a long one.
So I guess a good place to start. I mean, what is app grading? What is the best practices?
And then what is the common mistakes? Yes. So just to set the stage, right?
Before you book a call, typically most funnels on industry have an application to fill out. And you're typically asking some qualified questions in the application. Now there's a handful of different types of qualifying question formats that we talk about.
The most basic one is what I call an identity qualifier. So an identity qualifier is typically the first question in an application. It's yes or no.
And you're asking them a question to basically qualify that they are the person that is a right fit for this offer. So something like, you know, are you a business owner who's booking sales calls looking to improve your share rate, right? Are you specifically this person looking for this thing?
The main reason too, just to add in with this, is it and then we say if you're not this person leave this page now the the reason i think i made that up i think i was the first person to do this but the reason that i did that was because i want people i want the very first step in the funnel to essentially be repellent to the people i don't want yeah so like i'm like are you specifically this person because Once you complete this stage, the pixel is going to know to get more of these people.
So I want you to bounce. I want the pixel to know, oh, people like this bounce, if that makes sense. Correct.
Yeah. And from a B2C standpoint where I've seen it be very helpful is it's almost like a future -paced question where you're asking them, hey, are you this person looking for this outcome? And people are subconsciously agreeing to that.
And I've seen a ton of data on this. If someone clicks no to that. 0 % sure.
Like just DQ, like you said, get them off the page as quickly as possible. So that's an identity qualifier. Then obviously you have like a multiple choice qualifier, pretty straightforward.
You ask a question, there's multiple options. You can grade them. Typically we recommend grading on a one to four scale, four being the most qualified, one being the least qualified.
And in most organizations, just to walk you through that for a second. So a one would be like an instant DQ. If you can have them not book a call, that's great.
If they have to book for some reason, then you cancel them, that's fine too. But like, these are people that, you know, for example, for Closers .io are like in an industry we can't even serve, right? They're like totally left field.
We cannot help them, right? Either that or it's spam. Or spam, yes.
Twos are clients that were like, okay, maybe we could help this person. Maybe we can't. They're, you know, they're not in some crazy industry, but they're in an industry that like, you know, there's certain industries for us that like, It's a great example of solar.
So like, for instance, if you're doing 400 grand a month in solar and you want more sales reps and you do inbound marketing, we can for sure help. If you do door to door solar, it's super high churn and you're doing 50K a month. We're not going to take a client like that on.
So our twos are like people like that. And then the other thing I would say is if we can't tell it's spam. So like sometimes if they're like 100K a month and then they just say solar.
Yes. Right. Like that's a classic too, because I don't even know if that's a real or if they just say.
agency it's kind of like i don't know if that's a real business right if like we ask what's your business and what do you do what's your price point just put agency a little little sus so like if it's uh we don't know if it's spam or not that's another two yes and then those calls as as cole mentioned if we're not sure we're sending them to triage so they're going straight to a setter's calendar they're not talking to a closer until after a setter actually qualifies them that puts them back on the calendar and then threes and fours are your people who are going straight to a closer and really the difference between those people is like a four would be like for us 100k a month coach or agency looking specifically for our help that's like the perfect lead right yeah threes is like someone we can definitely help you know, maybe they're, you know, not quite at a hundred grand a month or whatever, but there's no question that we can help that business, right?
So in general, kind of zoom out for a second and, you know, cause we're looking at the Closure .io specific examples. The general principle that we're trying to teach here is threes and fours are calls that are qualified enough to where they show at a high enough rate and they close a high enough rate to where, and they're, you know, within your range of ideal prospects that they're going straight to a closure, right?
twos are folks that you know again you have data to show maybe these people don't show at a high rate or like in our case they're they're just not um you know they're they're we're not so sure about them for whatever reason those are going to go to triage and then obviously ones would be like spam and that's pretty universal or just people that are extraordinarily bad fits and that you're never going to be able to help We're just finishing up our last eight -figure boardroom event in Scotland inside of a castle, chateau type of place.
It was absolutely phenomenal. We had 200 of the highest level operators in the space, people doing minimum at least a million dollars a year, but many people doing anywhere from 500 grand a month, a million a month, if not more. And so the next place we're going to be going is New York.
So if you're looking for a mastermind that specifically has two things, number one, It's specific to actually your business. So you can leave away with tactics you can implement.
I've been a part of a lot of masterminds. And the issue I constantly find when I join masterminds is there might be high level people in there, but they're in all sorts of different types of businesses. And you can't leave with specific tactics that actually apply to your specific situation.
The other issue of masterminds that I have is sometimes you join the mastermind and you're the most advanced person in the mastermind, which is exactly why there's a strict revenue requirement to be here. And the average person, even average but median person inside of this mastermind is at least probably doing about 500 to 600 grand a month and so we have people again doing all the way to nine figures that have been with us for the last three days so we're doing the next one in new york if you're interested in coming you can click the link below go to the next page there's information if you qualify we'll have to speak with you first and if it makes sense you can check out one of our masterminds so hopefully we'll see on the other side and there's different ways you could do it too like if you give an We'll get to this in a little bit, but if you get advanced with the data analysis, you might find that people with a certain credit score or a certain liquidity have a 7 % less closing rate on the team, team -wide.
That could warrant if the other segments are, number one, big enough and they close higher, you could send those maybe to a setter because some of those people will close, but not all of them. So there's that. The other thing is people are like, well, how do you decide what's a three and what's a four?
every company should decide this for themselves and i recommend it having some sort of utility function what i mean by that is you know threes might be a certain level of quality of lead but fours might be somebody who the two most common ones is going to be a you know if they put this in the application it is qualif qualified enough to single book yeah the second one is okay maybe it's not qualified enough to single book but It's a hundred K a month.
And I want to send that one to my best closers or, Oh man, when they put this in the application, it's my best lead. I want to route this. So it's usually the threes and fours are for delineation between single and double booking and also lead routing.
Yes. Would you agree? Okay.
Completely. So let's go with some common mistakes. And so I have a few things.
I want you to want your thoughts on this. Number one is too long of applications. You know, people just have like 37 questions in there.
And then they're like, why is my cost per call so high? Yes. We have like five.
Yeah. You know, and also you hit on a few of the questions. This isn't the perfect framework to think about this, but you know, the Bant thing.
So there's budget, right? Wrong way to do it. Can here's the I mean, look, if you have more leads and you know what to do with, this could be the right way to do it because you're but you're deliberately constraining lead flow.
But generally, if you're trying to maximize lead flow, the wrong way to do it is the program costs this. Do you have the money? Or if you were found to fit, there's gonna be a big financial investment.
Are you willing and able to make that investment? Yes, maybe, no. We found that, and correct me if I'm wrong, 47 % of people in a study you ran lie on that anyways.
So oftentimes you end up just cutting your lead volume down by half and having no result. So yeah, so let me dig into that a little bit. The best questions to qualify on are fill -in -the -blank questions.
If you think about it, right, like, someone just skimming through a multiple choice application can just click a bunch of buttons and, you know, they just use their brain and go, oh, if I click this button, I get DQ'd. So let me just click this one.
And people are not dumb. People can figure that out. Especially on systems like type forms, you click the wrong button.
The actual button for them to continue the form changes text from continue to submit, which literally tells them if you click this button and click submit, you'll be DQ'd. So like people, like two things on that. Number one is if your entire form is multiple choice questions, I've seen over and over and over again, those have the lowest share rates.
You have to have fill in the blank questions. There's no doubt about that. On the other side of things, what you're referencing, Cole, is obviously one of the things that we do at SalesKick as well as some other companies is financial data enrichment.
And basically, we have an agreement with a data distributor from, I almost said Expedia, Experian. Experian. I thought it was Expedia too.
But anyway. And we're doing essentially soft credit checks on folks that come through. And what we've seen over and over again in the study that he's referencing, we took about 10 ,000 of our clients' applications over at SalesKick that had both financial data enriched and we're still asking multiple choice financial -based questions.
The most common one was, hey, if this product was able to get you XYZ result, would you be able and willing to afford this? Essentially, it's like, yes, yes with credit. And 47 % of the time, people clicked objectively the wrong answer from what the company needed to actually purchase.
And that goes in both directions. So meaning people were clicking no when they actually could buy. And people were clicking yes when they couldn't buy.
And so think about that. That has two downstream consequences. Number one is, if you're training your pixel on that data, what are you really training your pixel on?
Nothing. Just random data, right? And number two is, if you're routing these calls to closer, which most people are, based on that answer, Again, you're just routing random calls.
So that was number one. The other one that we looked at as well was there were certain forms where they have that question. If someone clicked no, they then took them to a certain branch of the form logic and they started asking harder financial qualifying questions.
And I don't think I've told you this. The percentage of people who lied on those was even greater. Okay.
So it's like, no, I can't afford this. And then it'd be like, what's your credit score? And it's like, their credit score is 720.
They put like, sub 500. It's just completely unreliable.
So you might as well not even ask those questions. Yeah. The only thing just to give somebody a rebuttal is they might say, well, yeah, people lie, but maybe it's not qualifying the actual financials accurately, but it's qualifying a degree of intention.
Here's the thing I would rebut to that rebut is that when you cut your lead flow in half, it is pretty tough to make it up through higher intent leads. You see what I'm saying? And you're still getting people who are lying anyways.
And so it's just, There's better ways to do it. So anyways, the best way to do it for B2C, in my experience, is number one, you just ask what their occupation is, right?
Because the issue with that question, and also you'll get this with timing as well, is it adds an inadvertent sales pressure. And it adds, anytime you add a frame, so this is also with setters, to where the frame is, come to the call with a decision, right? So some people do this.
I had some guy who was like... He showed me his pre -call sequence. And it's like, if you have a wife, bring her to the call.
Like, you know, this, it's like, don't come to the call without it. I mean, it was so aggressive. I was like, dude, no wonder you're sure it's like 20%.
You're like scaring the shit out of people. And you think your close rate's good, but it's like anybody who's willing to go through that gong. And I'm like, you know, it's one thing if, again, it's contextual.
If you are so famous or you had a huge launch and you deliberately cannot take all the calls and you just need to filter down to like lay downs. we're solving different issues here. We're talking about for the average business owner who wants to like just have the system optimally working on cold traffic.
So again, ask, ask occupation is good, right? The other question that's a ninja, right? Because it doesn't add sales pressure is, this is usually for like a B2C biz op, is okay, great.
How much money would you have to make just to replace the amount of income you're making full time, right? Provided that's their goal. So it's framed as a goal oriented question.
Is it going to be 100 % accurate? No, right? But, it is like better than nothing and it doesn't add any friction and so then the third thing is obviously adding financial data we'll cover that in a little bit so that's budget budget for business for b2b is pretty simple because usually you just ask what the revenue is and so again when i ask what the revenue is i know for a fact we have a strong correlation between what they tell us is their revenue and how qualified they are financially duh okay so i don't need but but because it's like hey if i'm helping you grow your business knowing how much revenue you're doing It's not adding sales pressure, right?
That's budget. Then there's authority, which for B to C, I don't know what you think about this. I just don't ask anything like, is your wife going to be okay?
Are people around you going to be able to support you in this decision? I mean, people are just going to say what they're going to, it doesn't matter. You know, the dude who has to run it by his wife is going to run it by his wife.
The dude who doesn't have a wife doesn't have a wife. I just let them on the calendar, let the closer do their fucking job. Agreed.
Now for, For B2B, very simply, instead of asking a sales pressure oriented question, which is, would you be able to come to the call with a decision or are you the decision maker? I never ask, are you the decision maker?
I ask, what is your position within the company? And then it's like, CEO, COO, sales manager. And we know that for, I think it's for cold, like it's very interesting for us because we run this data.
If they come from the website and it's a sales manager, it's a three or a four. remember if they if they're a sales manager and they come from ads it's a two and that's because we ran those and we figured out that the closing ratio of a sales manager from ads pure cold is not that great and we'd rather have it go to a setter try to requalify get the owner on the call right but we know like dude it was crazy sale it was like 60 or something close rate from sales managers booking from the website and then it was like five from ads so this is why you got to run the data too but we ask basically um you know, what's your position within the company.
That's how we do authority. Then need, we already covered this again. What people want to do is ask like a question, like, you know, how close are you to moving forward?
Or like how fast, the main thing to assess need is basically the effort and the open response questions. Yeah. Right.
Which is like, describe your business. What do you do? What do you offer?
Or what's going on? What I really like is what's going on in your life or career right now. That's.
having you potentially look into doing X, Y, and Z or potentially looking into making a change, right? That's the really one I like for B to C. And what we found is one word responses, really bad.
Short to medium to like medium long. good and then there's another fall off between extremely long which is usually like they copy and pasted something from chat gpt or like in business they take their about page and they just copy it and then put it in there for whatever it's still not as bad as a one word answer but it's bad and then timing i don't i never i'm not like a hater if you really want to ask a timing question but frankly in my mind it's like the closer's job is to compress the fucking timeline So that's not marketing's job.
Now, if you have, again, more leads than you know what to do with, whatever, right? But like, it's just, you're trying to have marketing. This is a common theme, as you know.
It's like, most of the people in this industry are marketers. And they try to fix all their closers issues with marketing. No.
Make the closers fucking good. Hire good people. Train them.
Like, your whole job is to take somebody who wants to do this in six months and make them do it right fucking now. Yes. Period.
So I don't ask, I do ban. I don't do Bant. I think that covers all the major applications.
A couple of just advanced notes. So the first thing is on the length of fill -in answers. So we've seen this trend across all of our Sales Kit clients, across all fill -in questions, even questions that you think would make sense to be short, like what is your occupation?
You think that'd be a pretty short answer. And we have tremendous data to show that the sweet spot for character count is between 50 and 70. That typically has the highest share rates across all fill -in answers.
So you would think like, man, someone's answering what's your occupation with 50 characters. Yeah, some people do. It's kind of crazy.
Some people will go in and actually describe like, oh, I'm a school teacher. And you know, I've been doing it for eight years and dah, dah, dah, dah, right? Those people, again, across all fill -in questions have the best share rates.
As Cole was mentioning, anything above 80 to 90, like once you get past that, the share rates actually go back down. So it's kind of an interesting like bell curve. Um, and then some other notes on, on app grading.
So, uh, this is just such a common mistake for the love of God. Do not have your sales manager make the decisions of what is a qualified application. Like you, you, you, you're, you're gonna, you're gonna optimize over the course of a year and so far the wrong direction.
And you're not even gonna know what the hell's going on. Right. Um, there needs to be, and frankly, it really shouldn't be your CMO either.
Because again, The CMO can effectively, especially if they're KPI to MQLs, they can make, they can basically improve their performance by changing the application. By changing the application grading.
And it does happen in companies. The sales manager, or let alone even worse, the fucking sales rep. Some people do this.
They're like, oh, I just canceled the app. The fuck you mean you canceled my app? Like, did you pay for it?
Like, what the fuck are you doing? I marked it as free. I used to have this one guy.
He's actually still with the company. He just marked like five calls as free in one slot. And I'm like, what are you doing, dude?
Like, I just paid for all those leads. So there's, yeah, you want it to be independent. Yes.
Like not a third party, but this is why you have a sales ops department. You have a sales ops person. Yes.
And this person should probably report to you or like to somebody independent. Because the nice thing about being the CEO is naturally most times you just want to make money. You're like, I just want everything to work.
A couple other things. So just to touch on what you said, other common mistakes. I just want to emphasize this, even though you mentioned it.
A lot of people are like, this common thing I always hear. Oh, yeah, I do this. I use logic in my apps.
Again, what you said was one of the biggest indicators, if we know if it's a good app or not, is the short answers. You can't logic qualify those.
A lot of people do it. Well, oh yeah, if they select, you know, I'm financially qualified versus not. Well, we already established number one, that's incorrect.
Number two, the real way to grade the applications is through the short form responses, which means you need either AI or a human, which leads me to the second big mistake, which is having VAs grade. Because again, they might be okay, but like a $3 to $7 hour VA. they're not able to like read it like again like look at my solar example it's it's pretty tough for me to cement into a va that look if somebody's door -to -door they're below 50k a month or below 100 a month in solar we can't help if they're above you know this and then they're doing this and maybe you check the website and they're doing this we can't help right it's just and again like if they let's say only make three percent of mistakes i mean that could be like twenty thousand dollars a month in revenue yeah that you saved because you skimped on, you wanted to pay $7 an hour instead of fucking 4K a month, right?
The next thing is, and you told me this, I was like, oh, that's silly, is like some people will have like meaningless questions, like what's your LinkedIn? Like it's - Anything that takes them off the form. It's like, hey, link your socials, website, whatever.
It's like, yeah, I'm gonna tell people to leave my funnel. and then hope that they come back. Yeah, yeah, I know.
So meaningless questions, questions, oh, I just, the sales team likes this question. No, the sales team does what you tell them to do. I don't care what questions they want.
This is not for them, you know? So any other, those are some common mistakes I wrote down. Any others?
Yeah, I would say the last question I get a lot as kind of in regards to applications is where to put the contact info. You put it towards the beginning, towards the end, et cetera. One of the dumbest things you can do is number one, like if you're running a funnel where you have no setter team and then you're like, yeah, I'm going to like move my content info to the front, not monitor if it has any drop -off.
And actually literally have it be the very first question of the application, which always leads to higher drop -off. You should always have a, again, identity qualifier first. Yes or no question.
And I'm not even gonna have setters call these leads. So when I have partial applications, I'm not even really getting the benefit. Maybe I send some emails, hopefully I generate some leads that way.
That's just really dumb, right? So the first thing is, is like, do you have setters and how effectively are they reaching out to leads? If you have a good setting team, then obviously there's a strategic advantage to moving the content info towards the front of the application.
Now that's not the only reason why you should have it towards the front in that situation. But to make it simple, uh what we've seen over over and over again is b2b it's much easier to have it up front without having a ton of drop -off um like again you don't want it to be the very first question but you're usually not losing much because business owners kind of get it's like yeah i gotta give you my information to book it's fine right b2c you really want to split test so i've seen it work both ways it really just comes down to how effective you know your your marketing is going into the application um but i've seen apps that are longer that actually have uh like little to no drop -off throughout the application and have content information towards the end.
And then I've seen the split test move the content info to the front and all of a sudden there's drop -off. So it's really just a matter of like what gets the ultimate, the full throughput or as much throughput through the system as possible using what resources you have. Yeah.
What I would say is for B2B generally, I mean, you want it to be like a slippery slope, right? So it's like... You order your questions from most invasive or sorry, least invasive to most invasive.
And then probably you have the multiple choices. You get the contacts so your setters can reach out. And then you might ask if you have a little bit more harder hitting questions or more effort, you might ask those at the end.
And then B2C, I would probably split test between end and the middle. And that kind of brings me to just something I do want to mention. You should, I don't know if you have any stats on this, but for the partials where you do get...
the contact but you don't get the full app and even for apps no bookings so when they get the calendar they drop off yeah i mean we recoup a shitload of those yeah not just from the setters reaching out but we also have this like a automatic text that goes out that's like hey you didn't you know finish it yeah and go back and finish it how much do you think i think we recoup like 20 yeah it's it's a significant amount i don't know the exact number but that's just 100 worth doing i think that's just through the text and then god knows how many the setters get the setters get a lot Completion rate, what do you see there?
Just real briefly. Yeah. Well, I'll give this simple answer, but let me just say, first of all, there's some people that I'm going to say this to, and then they're going to optimize their entire business around this metric.
So again, proxy metric, it's important to look at, but at the end of the day, what's your cost per call? What's your cost per live call? Cost per app is more important.
With that being said, the typical range that I would say is acceptable is 40 to 60 % completion rate. I've seen it as high as 75, 80. And that's true for even very, very long applications, which I would consider 12 to 15 questions very long.
I've seen it that high. I've seen it below 30. In my experience, unless you're getting traffic extraordinarily cheap through ads or organic or something, which is kind of different because you still would want to optimize for a higher completion rate.
If you're sub 40, sub 30, you start to get to a point where the funnel is just not going to work. It's going to break. Yeah.
And so in that case, I mean, In general, I recommend people start with the bare minimum and then test more as you go and see also if... what you're actually adding has any value, which brings me to this next point.
So I know it's like, how deep can you guys go on an application? Turns out pretty deep. So this is something we started doing.
And then I know that we added a feature to Salesforce to do this automatically because it's a horrendous project to do manually, which is basically any single variable that ever comes in the application, you can not only look at, so that obviously, like we talked about, it accumulates into a grade, right? And you can do weighted grades.
So like we say two, three, four, but. technically what you're going to end up having is like 2 .4 2 .5 2 .7 3 .3 so you have all these weighted grades then what you can do is bracket those and you can see the characteristics between close rate and show rate and really revenue per app and all these other things that you want based on the brackets in between and that can inform do you want to single book these do you want to double book these do you want to route these to certain people whatever you want do you want to i mean sometimes you're like oh wow like These types of people are like this.
Maybe you change your marketing message to get more of these. So that's like level one. Level two is, is that you can even look at every single response and even type of response.
Everything from the handle of the email, Gmail versus company email versus Yahoo, et cetera. Everything from the location, everything from what, maybe they just whatever they selected in this one multiple choice answer. Everything from okay.
occupations and then we bucket certain occupations into certain things and so saleskick does this automatically but it's a very interesting like i probably wouldn't worry about it if you're below like 400 a month but as you get bigger it's a it's an exercise i'd recommend doing you know once every other month because it's very interesting and then when you add a question you can run this exercise to actually see like does this question even add any value or do we just like it which A lot of times it doesn't add any value.
Just like, you know, and then you might as well just have less questions and then just have more responses. I don't know if you have anything back to that, because the other thing is, too, is. you can also take all that data and categorize your apps a certain way and then the apps that are all really good to follow all these cumulative characteristics you can feed back into the pixel well yeah so on that note we've done a ton of audits for clients at saleskick that's one of the first things that we do when a new client comes on we'll look at their previous data who showed up who hasn't etc and basically create a report for them and it is amazing to me how many people or how many clients we've had where hey i have this multiple choice that you know they select what industry that they're in And these are our best leads, option A.
And then we get to it and it's like, actually option A has the worst close rate and the worst show rate. Option C, the one that you said wasn't very good, actually is the best. And then we switch it and immediately get a 15 % show rate increase.
But that happens all the time. And it just goes back to, I think in general, with call funnels, everybody knows I need to focus on my ad, focus on my content, focus on my VSL, focus on the funnel, whatever, right? as you get deeper into the funnel people typically just spend less and less and less time and the application is like the most overlooked part of the funnel of like yeah almost all call funnel i always go through i'm like what is this yeah it's crazy and the thing i commonly see with a lot of clients is they either go so crazy with it and then they have this huge drop off yeah or it's like it's so non -existent that like like their closers are closing like 10 and it just like there's just there's no filtering at all.
So usually I see it at a lot of different extremes. I do want to drop a bomb. So this is something I'm very passionate about and nobody does it.
So I'm just going to say it and probably nobody will do it anyways. But if you did do it, it would make a huge difference in your business. So I don't know if you have a simpler explanation for this, but basically, when you have the application set up correctly, you know what is a qualified application and what is not.
So what else can you do with that data? What we do is we basically import all of our campaigns in Facebook into a spreadsheet. And then we track, you know, all the CPA data.
We also track, and this is between four day, seven day, 14 day, 30 day lifetime. And we also track four day, you know, all those timeframes of leads, call leads, apps, calls. mqls which is really important and then something called tqos but let me tell you why this is important so number one it's much easier to manage your ads this way because everything is in one view opposed to having to go to different ad accounts uh do a bunch of scrolling and then constantly change the time frames the other thing is to how many times do we have a campaign that's getting like 100 calls but then the mql is like the worst in the entire account right happens a lot a lot right also sometimes it's like let's say we want less than $500 MQLs.
We'll have a campaign that's at $500 cost per call, which looks horrible. And literally every single one is an MQL. Furthermore, we import our set data in attributed by campaign.
So that we call that, well, obviously sets, but then we add MQLs plus sets into total cost per qualified opportunity. So again, because you look at this every day, how often do we have campaigns that... mql even looks like shit but then for whatever reason the setters are just ripping this campaign apart all the time all the time there's almost no correlation like between cost per call cost per lead i mean there's like some general correlation between those two cost per call cost per app and cost per mql like generally speaking obviously if your cost per call is eight hundred dollars you're not going to have a better mql of course but uh you know there's really no pattern like sometimes lower means better sometimes lower is actually worse yeah and so It's interesting because, and you were saying too before you started working here, that you were like, I don't even know how I ran ads before without this.
What's nuts is I've explained this to high level agency owners and they just don't give a fuck. I mean, I don't know if you have any idea of why nobody else, because like it's very simple. Yeah.
Okay. I want to grade my campaigns on how much money I made per campaign, the best proxy for that. I mean, the issue with CPA.
Because somebody might argue and say, well, we'll all even out with cost per acquisition at the very end. The problem with that is that you have to spend, in my experience, probably 20K plus and probably wait 30 to 60 days to really get statistically significant data to create a campaign on CPA. So yes, you should do that.
I would rather make a decision. before 60 days. Yeah.
You know, so the best proxy for that is going to be TQO because the issue with CPA is high rose it because when people buy, they tend to use a different email, not always, but sometimes and what they booked for. So because of that, it doesn't always attribute correctly. Yep.
So I just don't know how like why would you ever want to run your ads not knowing what the camp not grading campaigns in your account on MQOs and TQOs? But I don't know. Do you have any idea why?
I've explained this to agency owners who are genuinely very good. Like I know they're good guys. Yeah.
Just don't care. Maybe it's too complex. Yeah.
What is, it is complicated. And the other thing is, is, you know, especially in the world we live in now with AI and vibe coding and stuff, everyone wants to like automate it. And there's certainly things we could do better automating it.
But there's also like the nice thing about how we have it is I know it's very reliably going to get done by this time every day. And it's. I mean, I don't think there's been a time I found a number on there that's been way off in years.
Yeah. You know? And sometimes when you automate stuff, you AI, whatever, it's like, then you get in, your ad numbers are messed up.
Now you spend the whole day trying to figure out what the actual number is. You got to fix this AI thing. It's all, it's just like, it's just a mess.
Like I prefer it to be extremely simple. Yeah. Look at a spreadsheet.
I've got my, you know, yesterday's view, two days ago, four, seven, 14, 30 in lifetime. And, you know, I have my internal numbers that I'm looking for to grade my campaigns. And it takes me like 10 minutes.
Yeah, it's so easy. This is how, I mean, I literally, before you came on, I was basically running a 4 million a month company, all the ads with me and Matt and some, maybe some extra VAs and tech help, but that was it. And I did it and I made all the decisions.
And the only way I was able to do that is through this sheet. I would never have been able to do that. I did have one client, Andres.
You might even watch this video. Yes. He did it.
He did it. I know. And then he told me, he was like, this changed my fucking life.
There you go. He was like, dude, he's like. Shout out to Andres.
Yeah, Andres. But the other thing I was thinking, this is just a good side note. So people want to automate everything.
And you got to realize that when you automate something, this goes for like AI stuff too. you don't you might automate the labor you don't automate the qc and so you still have to do the qc here's what people don't realize about manual data entry especially when it's through vas and stuff like that but people who are somewhat smart and know how to do it the manual labor is the qc yes does that make sense because what happens is like i'll i'll think about this for like lucas who does let's say some data uh sales data entry for us daily you know he's he's a really smart guy when the closers which they do report stuff that makes no sense instead of just putting it in there he hits him up and he's like what the fuck is this right he's like this doesn't even look right and then we actually get accurate data by the next day instead of you know it's like oh i think our automation's wrong oh we got a qc then you got to factor in all the time it takes you to retroactively qc yes you know so i'm
Obviously, we like AI, we like software, we like automation. But I think some things, there's value to doing it manually. Agreed.
You know, I really do think there is. Okay, I think we can move on from applications. But it's a good segue.
Do you have thoughts on best closers or routing best leads to best closers? Or do you want me to give my thoughts on that? No, I'll jump in.
So, you know, there's kind of two schools of thought in our industry. The first is like... hey, we want even distribution through all of our closures, give equal opportunity and see who does the best.
And that way there's no biases. That's great. If you're a communist, shout out to all my friends, USSR.
Socialist. If you're a capitalist like me. We call that the DSA method.
Yes, yes. If you're a capitalist, you want to make money, then it would make sense that your highest converting people get the best leads, right? Makes sense.
So how do you, now the problem is, how do you actually make sure that that happens without making other sacrifices? So what I mean by that is, traditionally speaking, when people do this, they have, let's just say, John, John's your best closer. And they go, we want John to get the best leads.
And then through the form, you know, they make it so like, hey, if someone's really qualified, we only show John's calendar. Well, what happens when John's busy? Right.
John takes a vacation. John is, you know, his, his slots are filled up now. Like one of your best leads doesn't have very much availability, which breaks one of the earlier rules, right.
Which lowers their shirt, which actually in this weird way actually ends up hurting you. Right. So what, what we found is basically you have to do blended availability and we've automated this through sales kick.
Essentially how it works is we can create something called a routing preference where, and we use the word preference. Y 'all know I'm from California. We got preferences in California.
That's my joke. But preference, it basically means like, hey, if John's available, when this lead meets this criteria, he's going to get the call because he's the most qualified closer. As a qualified lead, we want to get the call.
But because, again, we need to maximize availability, we're still going to show all availability, right, of the closers, you know, the entire closing team. right and whenever john's available he'll get he'll get the slot maybe you know uh raul the second best closer is gonna get the slot picking some crazy names but um you know when he's available he'll get it and then after that it's just round robin right but that way we maximize availability we keep sure it's high but when our best closers are available they can get the call yeah i would just just to simplify what you said long story short is to do best leads to best closers properly without having to switch the calendar invite, switch the owner, which we find when you do that, it increases show rate.
You basically got a jerry -rigged type form to where it routes to a separate calendar. so that there's like you know the good like your best closers calendars than everybody else right well the problem with that is then obviously you have availability issues and and and it's also just jerry -rigged and it sucks so it is a little bit of a shameless plug but like the only way the only software that really does it is saleskick um i would kind of put though just the best leads the best closers there's sort of also two different there is an argument against it by the way which is okay if you have uh Guys who are on the come up, it's harder for them to ascend the ranks.
And also your best guys can get lazy on just cherry picking leads. So that is a valid thing in my opinion, but there's kind of two caveats. So number one is I found even for fully ramped guys who've been here for years, that like there is certain people who are better with higher, significantly better with higher revenue leads in more complex businesses than other people.
Even though maybe they've been here for like, two years, right? So in that case, that's more of a permanent thing where unless something drastically changes, I'm just going to, you know, it's almost like I might have, I might be able to bucket my prospects in a certain way and understand people who come from this background or are like this are just better with this person, right?
That's more of a stylistic thing. The other aspect is truly like, okay, team -wide, everybody closes these leads better than these people, but obviously my best closers close more of them. So what I would say is you do best leads to best closers.
You run it for maybe it's two months, maybe it's three months. And then what you do is a month reset period where everybody goes back to flat playing field and then everybody has to revalidate their data. And then that gives everybody a chance.
That's kind of my way to do both. Yeah, the other thing that is similar to this that I've seen people make as far as like silly mistakes is I've seen this where, you know, let's say you have a team with five closers and, you know, you have your top dog and you have the next couple closers and you have your bottom closer or two.
And they set the priority to be so aggressive for the top three closers that the top three closers are just slammed. And I mean, they're booked for like three or four days. And then you got like the bottom two guys who are like trying to prove that they could make it.
Maybe they're new, maybe they're whatever, they're in a, you know, some sort of a downturn. And they just have no calls. They have like one call on their calendar.
Yeah, well, the whole, like OnceHub and all these other calendars, their feature on whatever it's called, like preference, is like, it's all or nothing, basically. Like five is the best. If you even put one person at four, they're like.
Yeah, they just don't get any calls. Yeah, they don't get any calls at all. It's actually insane.
Like to the point to where the next person we booked out like days in advance and then this person has no calls today. It just, I don't know why they had to make it that way. It's just stupid.
Okay, so let's now move on. I mean, another meaty topic, which is the LNS. Yes.
So what is it? What's the process? Why is it important, et cetera?
Yeah, so LNS stands for Lead Nurture Specialist. And originally speaking, it was a actual human being you'd hire. you'd bring into your business and their entire job was to confirm sales calls like someone booked inbound on their own didn't go through a setter and now we want to confirm that they're going to you know attend the appointment through a text message now i can already hear people asking well i just have my setters do that right i just have my closures do that whatever well there's a tremendous amount of issues with that.
The first thing is salespeople are busy doing their main activity. If it's setters, they're cold calling, they're talking to triages, whatever they're up to. Their main priority is to generate income for themselves.
And they're busy doing their job. And so that means they're going to confirm the appointment whenever it's convenient to them, not at the most optimal time for the appointment to actually confirm, which therefore, obviously, this goes without saying, somebody who confirms is more likely to show up. Duh, right?
Same thing with closers. Closers are taking their sales calls. Maybe they get to it at the end of the day, maybe they forget, right?
Who knows? And God forbid this person actually responds with a question, right? After they confirm, they're never going to get a response, right?
So if you do anything, do not have your salespeople do this. You got to hire someone specifically for this role if you're going to do it that way. Now, the other thing is key things with this role.
So number one is You want to make it personal to the lead. So yeah, if you just have some generic, you know, text message through GHL with a reply to stop and it's like, hey, saw you booked for this time.
Are you going to come? You know, are you going to make it? And, you know, like, yeah, you'll get somebody to respond to that.
But the reality is most people know that that's a, you know, automated text message. They're just going to file it in their head almost like junk mail. They're not even going to take it seriously, right?
Again, that's why it's so important to have this be its own stream of communication, its own stream of text messages. The other thing is, is when should you confirm the call? Okay.
So we've done a tremendous amount of data on this and we've seen that just like with leads opt -in, speed to lead, speed to confirmation matters a ton. So what we've seen is that if you confirm someone's attendance within five minutes of them booking the appointment, the chances of them confirming are like exponentially higher.
It's like 70, 80%. And obviously that then carries downstream to more people showing up. versus we tested the opposite.
We said, well, what happens if you wait until like the night before or the morning of? 24 hours before, right? And you confirm.
Yes, the people who confirm actually show up a little bit higher than the people who confirmed at the very beginning, which makes sense because it's much closer to the appointment. But the amount of confirms you get is so much lower that the overall throughput is still lower. Yes.
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So if you're interested, check out the link in the description and get more info. So a couple of things I did want to mention on what you said there. So number one, just on the, you can't have your closers or setters do it.
If you do, and I can speak from experience having to back in the old days, confirm all my appointments myself. Well, I'm on calls all day.
So all my confirmations happen in the morning and then they happen at night. Or they might happen if I have a no -show, but realistically, the way I'm going to do it is I'm just going to batch them all out at once, which would be the smart way to do it if you were a closer just for time's sake. So you don't get speed to lead, which we just established speed to lead is super freaking important, both for setters, both for closers.
By the way, and check with your attorney on this. The text does not need to include the stop language. If it is for a appointment that they scheduled and you're not being like, I mean, as soon as you say something along the lines of like, by the way, we also have a promotion running 30 % discount.
As soon as you enter into that territory, which is like very e -commerce -y, that's when you enter into massive amounts of regulation. Check with your attorney because it is a little bit of a gray area because it's... Frankly, most of the regulations on SMS have been written for like e -commerce companies with lists of like millions and millions and millions.
And they're like new promotion, new promotion. So that's where all the regulations are. So for our industry, it's a little bit like up in the air.
But it's also good news in that because all the regulations are there, people aren't, TCPA is not as worried about like, look, the person booked an appointment. You're like, hey, do you want to show up? So you shouldn't, because as soon as you add that stop language in there.
It is very kind of like, it seems automated. Which the other thing is, is you want these to reference the application. You want to be immediate.
Reference the application. Come in at multiple texts. Like think about how you text your friend.
It's not a big block. It's like, hey, John, send. You know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I saw you booked an appointment. Send. Like, will you 100 % be able to, are you good for that time?
And did you get the Zoom link or whatever? Whatever it needs to be. Send, right?
So it's like three boxes of texts. The other thing I did want to mention, and actually we'll just do this first. So in terms of cadence, we do, let me know if this is right.
We do immediate. As soon as they confirm, we drop the pre -call video. Now we'll talk about the pre -call video later because it's a whole different topic.
If they don't confirm, then what we do is we bump that night or morning of, depending on kind of what the booking is, and then we bump two hours again before. But then anytime they respond, we essentially... we send the same pre -call video message.
And then we also always send again 15 minutes before the appointment. And the way we do that is we just say, oh, and hey, by the way, here's the Zoom link for our appointment. Like part of also, you know, there's a way you want to text people in general.
This goes for follow -up and lead nurture in a way where you have these good reasons to text somebody that's not just, are you going to show up? Or, hey, I'm following up. Right.
You want to kind of make it conversational. So, oh, and by the way, here's the Zoom link. You're in a way providing value because you're making it easier.
But effectively, you're not saying, hey, are we still good? But it's I mean, you texted them. It's a reminder.
Yeah. But you're not reminding them to see how that works. Yep.
So that's kind of a thing that you want to imbue in all that messaging. Do you have anything on that? Then there's a few other things.
Yeah, there's a couple of things on that. So first thing is do not send any link. to content, pre -call content, social media, it doesn't matter.
Do not send a link in your text thread until you get a response. It is basically useless. It's a way that the carriers spot spam.
is they look for, oh, we're spamming out links to people who aren't even responding. And on iPhone, if you've ever gotten a text from a new number or something, let's say you meet someone at an event and sometimes people will send you like a link tree or something and you haven't responded yet, you actually can't even click the link until you respond.
It's impossible. You actually have to go copy the link. bring it into your Safari browser and paste it in order to, and again, Apple's doing that to protect people from spam links.
So there's literally no point in sending a link until you've gotten a response. In fact, that actually hurts you to do that, which is why we wait until we get a response, okay? That's number one.
Number two is, again, to Cole's point, so I don't look at, like I used to look at confirmations as kind of binary. It's like, did they confirm or did they not confirm? Really the way to look at it the most effectively is like, okay, we got the initial confirmation.
Well, is this person like, continue like not continuing literally to say i'm confirmed but are they continuing to like engage in some capacity with our messages um like for example if we send that pre -call video and someone responds oh thanks right that's guess what they're much more like a show right right um so you you got to be careful not to look at it in in a binary as much as possible um And then the last thing I'll bring up, which I'm sure will come up in a second anyways, but is this is where you get kind of advanced and you want to do calendar management off of confirmations.
So again, we don't just do confirmation for the sake of doing it because it sounds like a fun thing to do. It drives a business result, which is people who confirm show up more often. Well, if we're double booking our appointments and we know that someone confirming actually improves their odds of showing up to a point where double booking is no longer necessary, then what we want to do is we want to mark that appointment busy.
hopefully before another appointment books in, sometimes that's not possible, so that we can preserve ad spend, so that we can ensure that, again, what are we optimizing for? We said this at the very beginning of this podcast, we optimize for maximizing the offers per day per closer. And if we know like, hey, in order to have an offer, you're gonna have a live call.
And we know that by this person confirming, the chance of them showing up is extremely high, 80 % plus. Then double booking that is no longer actually mathematically the right thing to do, even though it was two minutes ago before they texted. Yeah.
And so just to add a few things to that, I think this is a good opportunity to explain now the double booking and single booking because we've covered upgrading and we've covered the LNS. So in essence, what we do is we look at the confirmations and then over time we're going to track, okay, if you confirm, what's your likelihood of showing up?
If you don't confirm, what's your likelihood of showing up? And in general, I mean, it could be, it's really kind of like personal preference. found that some probably it's either 65 or 67 any data point that shows that this app this person or this confirmation is going to show above 67 we're going to single book so like for instance if you have confirmations that you know every single person that confirms shows up at 70 you single book every single one of those people it could also be all your four great apps are at 70.
you can also mix and match this stuff You might find that confirmations show at 60, but if it's a confirmation and a four, it shows a 70. So then that logic would go into your single booking, right?
Everything else is double booked. The common question obviously is, okay, great. Well, if I double book and two people show up at one slot, what do I do?
So if you were low four closers, you should just have a setter, right? If you have four closers or above, I would recommend getting a live transfer closer. So what I found that we used to just have the setters do it.
And then I was like, man, there's so many, there's so much overflow. maybe we should just have somebody take the overflow. It's like common sense.
It took me till 2025 to January, 2025 to test it. And lo and behold, granted this closer ended up being really good, but the first person we hired for it just off the live, we call them live transfers outperform the entire team. So.
we learned that okay great and like usually the guys who are ramping and testing or bottom of the totem pole they're always the live transfer guys we found though that you can be a live transfer guy and frankly uh do as much revenue as everybody else we've had two people get in the top two or even first place maybe even top three of the team as a live transfer so at the end of the day we found the volume is still a full calendar once you get above four it's a good like four to one ratio.
So for every four, you can have one live transfer. And for us, I mean, it increased our revenue by 20%. We added a calendar.
We got a whole calendar's worth of revenue with no extra ad spend. Yes. Huge.
It's pretty great. And then the other thing, just to be clear on this. So we established you don't want the closers or setters to do it because they can't get the speed to lead.
So that means you need somebody else to do it. Similar to the app grading, I don't recommend the VA because again, the VA, it's broken English, bad context, they can't handle a basic question. If they fuck up one deal a month, that could be 15 or 10 grand a month or whatever it is that you're spending basically to try to skimp on a $5 a month hire or whatever it is.
So you do got to hire actual... good people to do this if you want to do it manually yeah and and not use our product or sales kick or whatever so you do got to basically hire manual people because so what we used to do is we would have an lns person manual with an iphone the tricky thing is is this person wants to sleep and have weekends so then you have to hire a second person now to do nights and weekends and sometimes that even turns into a third person because your night person's like dude i also want weekends so I recommend doing it automated through AI, but if you do want to hire it, like that would be the proper way to do it.
Granted, if you're at like one closer and you're just getting started, like there's nothing wrong with, okay, fuck it. We're just going to do business hours and we're just going to accept that not everything's going to be perfect. Yeah.
And there's two kind of notes to add on really, really just stupid things. It's kind of, one of them is pretty stupid. The other one is just like a common misnomer in this space.
So the first stupid thing is if you're optimizing how many call confirmations you send out in general, LNS, your emails, whatever, and your reasoning for changing it is one lead said that they got annoyed because we texted them too many times. Very dumb. Very, very dumb.
Whenever people tell me that, I always go, well, when did they tell you that? And they go, well, they said on the sales call. I go, okay, so they should.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? So like, It is extremely unlikely.
Like I have yet to see in my years of operating SalesKick, working with closers, being in this industry for almost a decade, I have yet to see someone actually send too many messages. It is possible. For sure, it's possible.
But like, I mean, dude, you really got to spam someone to get to that point. That's number one. Okay.
And by the way, unless your messages are like just terrible, they're like, you know, show up. please show up. You know, like here's the link.
Like you're like begging them. Like, okay, maybe that's bad. But like if you're following good practice with the messages, you're probably fine.
Okay. That's number one. Number two is, you know, there was a big trend a couple of years ago.
You know, I love talking about this. iMessage. Okay.
Yeah. It, you know, we, so at SalesKick, we used to be a really big iMessage supplier. We were all in on it.
We had significant data in 2024 to show that like, hey, it does increase confirmation rates. It does increase show rates. And what happened is, is over time, a couple of things changed.
So number one is. the UI for the iMessage app on your phone actually changed. And what happened is there was a big lawsuit years ago that was basically like antitrust, like, you know, you can't have a monopoly against Apple.
And it made it so that inbound messages, the messages that you receive as somebody with an iPhone, regardless of if it's an SMS, RCS, you know, iMessage, they all have to be the same color. It's white. Okay.
So that's number one. That took effect to where a lead can't even tell the difference between it coming from an SMS line or an IMS line. Until they reply.
Until they reply, correct. But then if it's after they reply, how does it affect reply rate? Obviously it doesn't.
The other thing is, and this was towards the end of 2024, I really started to see this, is we started getting a ton of shadow bans. you know, all of a sudden our confirmation rate with our iMessage line goes from like, you know, 70 % to like 5%. And we're like, what the hell's going on?
Like, we didn't change anything, right? What happened? And then we look, well, let's test the line.
Like, let's text my number. Well, guess what? I've already texted my number.
So it comes in perfectly fine, right? There's no problem. You go, okay, I don't know.
It must've been a weird week. And then two weeks later, you realize, oh no, actually we tested on a new number. Looks like this iMessage line was shadow banned.
And there's, you know, obviously it's shadow ban. There's no notification that this occurred. So what we need to do is we need to swap out the line and we go, we swap out the line.
And this started happening on like a weekly basis. And granted at SalesCook, we had a lot of clients, you know, obviously there's a lot of volume. So we're seeing it across many, many, many clients.
But the point is, is like. If you account for the time of the shadow bans that will occur, 100%, they will occur at some point, the response rate is significantly worse than traditional SMS. And so, yeah, between those two things, we did an internal study at Closers .io.
And I think it was May or June of 2025. And we looked at like two months of calls that we had confirmed. And we did a batch.
So we did one batch where if they had an iPhone, they got an iMessage. We did one batch where if they had an iPhone, they got an SMS. And what we found was the response or the confirmation rate was actually about 19 % proportionally higher with SMS than with iMessage.
And so at that point, we're like, okay, well, this investment that we were making, this doesn't make sense. We're just going to go to SMS and obviously... The rest, the rest is.
Yeah. And just to simplify what you're saying for everybody else, because it's hard to psychologically wrap your head around why the iMessage situation would work worse than SMS and green message. The way I would explain it is look like I don't I don't think it I get why it's like psychologically it might be better to be able to reply to somebody and see the blue button and click the blue button and see your messages blue.
You might think it's more real. I think that. if anything can convince you, just think about it this way, is that it's not a psychological thing.
It's more of a infrastructure tech issue because iMessage is like, I mean, Apple is like a very protective of the consumer type of company. And so like, you got to realize if you're doing SendBlue or any of these things, they're like iPhone factory farms. So they're not necessarily using Apple's TOS the way that Apple wants it to be used.
And so like Apple business, that's what it's supposed to be used for, but you can't outbound text. It's only inbound. So in a perfect world, if outbound business allowed you to outbound text, I probably would be better.
But because it essentially burns so many lines and it's so hard to keep up and then you can't tell when the line's burned and when the line's not burned. it overall, especially at scale, is just not worth it. That's just the way I would think about it, is beyond all the intricacy stuff, I think, because people just can't, I've tried to explain this to many people, they cannot psychologically get their head around why green is better than blue.
I'm just like, well, just think about it like cold email, you're just burning all your inboxes. If they don't get the message, it doesn't matter what the color is. That's how I would say it most times.
Okay, so we're rounding the corner here, but we do need to, and this can probably be pretty quick. cover we covered lns that's like the main thing right for lead like we covered the application we kind of covered everything to the book call we covered lead nurture through sms but we do want to cover the custom emails we send and then the automated sms and calendar emails that we send so do you want to go through that or i can kind of explain well you you kind of spearheaded the the custom custom yeah so i'll let you do the basic ones i call them custom and basic so custom is basically they're going to get an email from me um i think it's like six emails going up to the appointment and essentially those emails are all going to be value based right so i'm going to try to provide value my strategy is instead of me saying show up show up show up show up i'm just going to give them value which allows me to have a higher frequency yep because they can't get too mad at me sending them valuable stuff yep right so i think what we had was 24 hours out six hours out two hours out one hours out however one of the things that i want to test but our show rates are good so i was like i'm not going to test it is actually front loading it so they have more time to go through the actual emails yeah um the other thing that we tested is we were sending a lot of videos and we realized that people were our open rates were amazing
Our click -through rates and video watch rates were like non -existent. So we just basically had a copywriter change all of the videos into written value emails. And so now the open rates are the same and maybe they skim the email, but at least they get value that way.
All of the value ideally sells on the thesis. Okay. This is a good time to actually pivot to the pre -call video as well.
So really there's two sales you're making on every sales call. There's the sale on the way of thinking. that leads to the product.
And then there's a sale on the actual product. So the easiest way to explain it is think about Russell Brunson and ClickFunnels. Like when he was on his selling tear of ClickFunnels back in the day, he didn't try to sell you on ClickFunnels and the product and the features.
He tried to sell you on the idea that funnels are the most effective way to grow your business, right? And so it was very content driven. But if you believe that belief, the natural byproduct of that is you buy ClickFunnels.
So naturally in your pre -call video that you send, which is like kind of VSL number two, And in your written content, you want it to be about that. So like if I'm trying to teach somebody to become a high ticket closer and doing that instead of affiliate marketing, dropshipping, Amazon, whatever, which is what we used to do way back in the day, all my emails wouldn't be on like everything about our product.
They would be on the idea that the fastest, most effective and most realistic way to make 20K a month or whatever online. is to not do an online business and instead get in the high ticket closing and here's why so it all would be about selling them on the opportunity because i know if they're sold on that selling them on the product is easy yeah so that's kind of the now with the b2b offer there's no clear thesis sometimes so generally we kind of don't do that because people come in for different reasons but for anything like very singular that's what you would want it to be it's like you want to have everything hit those beliefs and so on and so forth so that's the custom uh for basic i mean it's pretty basic But let's just cover it, then we can move on.
Yeah, so we sent out a handful of emails, obviously, before, just to remind them of the appointment. The first email that we do is an email from Cole that effectively introduces the rep that they're going to be actually speaking with. Really, really simple.
It's like three sentences. I mean, I don't remember off the top of my head, but it's literally like, hey, just want to reach out, saw you got booked, wanted to introduce you to, merge tag, close your name. You know, he's been with us for a couple of years.
He's an expert on, you know, helping folks grow their business. Like, again, I'm paraphrasing the copy here. But that's the first email.
And then, you know, from that point on, the emails, again, are all logistics. So we have kind of a general framework about how we look at show rate called, you know, there's two things someone needs to show up, right? How do they show up?
Logistics. And then it's selling them on why they should prioritize it. What cold just covered the custom emails is all about why they should show up, why this is going to be great for their business, et cetera, et cetera.
These emails are literally just, Hey, your appointments at this time, you know, maybe I'm introducing someone or something. Maybe I'm just, you know, dropping them the, you know, the homework video that the one video that we really want them to watch, but they're very, very short to the point, just simple reminders, you know, leading up to the appointment time.
Yeah. And the thing is too, is. I think psychologically people expect the system to send them SMSs and emails and whatever.
So you might as well just, even though I don't think they're effective, like that shouldn't be the only thing you do. They expect it. So you might as well just do it because it just gives you more frequency.
Like the custom ones are the ones they think are coming from you. You know what I'm saying? So that's kind of how I think about it.
Okay, we touched on financial data. Is there anything with financial data we... didn't talk about because i was going to talk about that here but we kind of ended up talking about it with the application yeah there's a couple of big mistakes with financial data so the the first thing is is like i think financial is great i'm also biased because we make money from it so like take that with a grain well and to be clear too we don't use it at closers yeah but that's because in a b2b offer he just revenue he kind of like what's your revenue tells us most of what we needed to know so we did run financial data we just found that basically aligned with revenue.
So who cares? And I've seen, it's funny, I've seen with B2B offers, like it can go either way. There's some times where if it's more traditional businesses and they're smaller companies on average, that the personal finances of the owner actually matter a lot more because - Like a gym.
Like a gym, for example. Or a real estate agent. Exactly.
And then there's times where like, it just makes no sense at all. And that was kind of gonna be my first point, which is like - You know, sometimes I've seen in this industry over and over again, there's like a new thing that people are excited about or, you know, just a shiny object.
And, you know, I'll just tell you this straight up. Financial data is only useful if you actually use it. And what I mean by that is if you're just buying data just to look at it, like what is the point of that, right?
Like if you're not making decisions off of it, if you're not using it to feed your pixel, if you're not using it to route calls, grade more effectively, whatever it is, there's really no point to doing it and you shouldn't do it, right? Um, the second thing is, is, uh, when, and if you decide to test it, um, I mean, this goes without saying, obviously do it in a compliant way.
Um, so I'll give you common mistakes people do where they don't do that is number one is, uh, they go back in time and they just start, uh, running, you know, they, they download the leads that they've have opted in years ago and they run it through their financial, uh, you know, you know, data provider. And, you know, that, that is.
Obviously, look, the chances of you getting caught doing that are low, but the consequences are extremely high. So like probably not worth doing. And if it's really that important to you, you know, maybe you should find a way to do it in a more, you know, compliant way, right?
So that's number one. Number two is making sure like when we first started doing financial data, we had an attorney go through an audit, basically how we were going to implement it. And, you know, just give us guidelines into what's compliant, what's not.
And one of the key things you need is what's called a permissible business use, okay? Which in plain English basically means like, hey, the government doesn't want you running people's credit for no reason, right? Like you gotta have a reasonable use.
And they keep it very vague. So it's not like black and white, like this counts and this doesn't. But in general, the attorneys I've talked to agree on a couple of things.
So number one is if someone's booking a sales call where credit may be required or qualifying is required because it's a high ticket thing, that's totally acceptable, totally fine. If someone's opting in for something, someone's opting in for a newsletter, a lead magnet, a VSL, whatever, especially if it's an indirect VSL, right?
If it's even further away from this purchase, generally speaking, that's not okay. And that if you're going to do that, you need a lot more direct consent from the consumer. Like they need to know, hey, I'm about to get my credit pulled by opting in, right?
So, you know, number one, make sure you have a permissible use for it. And then the final thing with financial data that's extraordinarily important. And it's just, dude, you know people are doing this because it's just, this is how the industry is.
You're not allowed to keep this data forever. Like you can't keep it forever. So like, again, there's no like hard timeline of you have to delete it in X days.
They keep, the way the law is written is very vague intentionally. But generally speaking, 30, 60, maybe 90 days is acceptable depending on your sales cycle and all that, of course.
And if you have financial data that's older than 90 days, again, the chances of you getting caught are probably low, right? But when and if it happens, the consequences are so high. I mean, we're talking like a bankrupt level event, right?
Which is why like the way we've architected things at SalesKick is like the data that we store automatically gets deleted. We convert it to ranges. So this is an easy workaround.
Where if someone's credit score is 750, for example, well, after 90 days, you have to delete that unless you convert it to a range 700, 800, in which case you can keep that forever. Doesn't matter, right? So there's workarounds like that that we've implemented.
But obviously, even for our clients at SalesKick, and across the industry, if you're using an enrichment data tool and you're in whatever way, taking that out of that tool and putting it into your business and your Slack and your CRM, whatever, and all you need is a VA to go through and just delete every 30 days, and you're going to be good.
But if you're not going to make that commitment and be responsible with that, I don't think you should do it, just to be candid. Makes sense. So let's hit setter show rate.
And then I want to end on marketing messaging because that's a good way to end because that's kind of like the last, if I've done everything and none of this is still working, this is what I do. Okay. So I would say with setter show rate, first of all, you have to know what's good.
Anything above 70 % for B2C, I would consider good. Anything above 80 % for B2B, I would consider good. Now, I have setters in B2B who do like 95 % sometimes.
So you can clearly do a lot better than that. And I've always had the privilege, and it's because we're good at setter teams, that our setter teams have always been like way higher. Like our B2Cs have been in the 80s.
Our B2Bs have been in the 90s. But, you know, I think right now our B2B is like 84, right? Like, that's great.
But for most clients, I say 70 % B2C, 80 % B2B. Now, if your setters are not hitting those numbers, you have a huge opportunity. Because with a lot of what we've been talking about, obviously you should do it.
And sometimes like you do it and like certain things are going to move the needle more than others. And a lot of times it's like you got to kind of fine tune everything and there's complexity and operations and all this stuff to like really get the move. Right.
With setters, it's like if you just train your setters how to be better and hire better setters, this is like the TLDR. You can fix this in like 30 days and it can make a huge difference in revenue. So usually I'm going to give you a kind of a diagnostic framework.
Number one, it's usually the setters just suck. Okay. Now I know me telling you, you said her suck.
Doesn't matter. So let me operationalize this a little bit better. First of all, what I see really bad tone.
So if they get on and it feels like they're a Filipino call center person, that's like an extreme, but if there are any flavor of that, or they just get on and it's like, uh, John, Hey John, it's me from this company. It's like, I see the worst stuff in the world, right? This is common sense stuff.
I'm not saying you gotta be like Jordan Belfer here. So tone. Obviously, this is the first impression of your company.
If the first impression of your company is like, oh, this is from a boiler room call center, not good. Second of all, just overall call execution. So everything from how deep did they get into the actual problem and diagnose the real problem.
And then also, in the transition from actually getting the problem to positioning the call with the closer, are they giving a little bit of insight? So I'll give an example of this. Like for RCA back in the day.
We're teaching people how to become high ticket closers. Like the setters, we found that elongating the setter call from like 10 minutes to 30 minutes and having a little like five to seven minute educational section in there that is basically just them verbatim saying what's in the pre -call video and parts of the VSL, which is like really selling them not on the product.
but on the idea of what their life could look like if they pursue this opportunity, why it's better than the alternatives that you also discovered on Discovery and yada, yada, yada, yada, right? And just giving them a little bit of insight. For B2B, it could be as simple as, hey, like I know you're on this call because like you think something's wrong with like your ads, but I can tell you this right now, like looking at your offer, the number one thing a lot of our team works with people on is changing your offer to look something like this, like see this case study or see this case study or see this case study, right?
Like see how their offers are like this. these offers work better with ads for these reasons whereas like what you're doing has these problems it's vague it's not concrete it's not a timeline or the you're going after a tam that's 2 000 people so i know you wanted the ad strategies and you can get those and we can talk about the best ad strategies in the world but really where we want to focus on is your offer like that would be like a b2b level thing and like you'll know your setters are good like when uh jj used to be my setter back in the tf days and people would get on the call and be like dude like he i'd be like how was the call with josh you know and they'd be like he made me think about it was amazing like he made me think about my business totally different yeah if you get that you know your center team is good right and like as a closer if you don't close that lead Shame on you.
I'll just say that. Shame on you. Okay.
Then the last thing is the tie downs. So obviously this is after the appointment's booked. You have to position the appointment to where they're going to learn something valuable on the call.
I don't do this in a non -intent way. Like, oh, it's going to be a free training. I'm like, look, like obviously this call just gave you like a little bit of taste of kind of like a little bit of what we do and how we would think about your problem.
Obviously just being candid, I'm an entry level person. The person I want to pair you up with is so -and -so. They work closely with clients, like I mentioned, like this, that, and the other, and can share with you some of the frameworks that we've used with clients like you to get to outcome, outcome, and outcome.
And then obviously, after they kind of go through what those frameworks look like, if you want our help implementing those, they'll walk you through what that looks like as well. Does that make sense? Great.
So you kind of got to position it so where there's also value on the call. Then once you get the times, Proper tie -downs.
Okay, great. And you're 100 % going to be able to make that time or is there any chance you've got to reschedule? Okay, awesome.
I want to ask you a few more questions just to prepare so -and -so for the call. Okay, and one last thing. I'm going to send you this video before the call.
Will you watch that before the call? Right? The key language here is will you, not can you.
it just gets i forget the actual psychology nlp behind can you versus will you but like they've done studies on this and will you results in way more committal behaviors than can you yeah so and it's kind of tough because like i even catch myself sometimes saying can you but it's will you Will you X? Will you Y?
Will you 100 % be able to make that call or is there any chance you have to reschedule? It's much more effective than can you 100 % make that call? The next thing is, so there's all of the training issues that usually happen.
If those are wrong, it's either A, the talent of the setter suck. A lot of people, this is the thing I like to tell people, hire a salesperson, not a setter. Because that's like the reframe you need to have in the sense where people think setters are like, the most entry level, crappy, like soft position.
And they just have this idea of, oh, I'm going to pay my setter like three grand a month, four grand a month. And like, yeah, okay, whatever. They're just so entry level.
And they don't like hire a fucking salesperson. Pay them 80 to 110 grand a year, right? It could be 100 % commission.
I don't care, right? I guarantee they will make you a fuckload more money. And I can tell you, you know, I have my whole story.
We don't have to go into this where I basically raised the setter team pay by like two grand a month a piece. We made 250 grand extra more a month from that. And we reduced ad spend by 200 grand a month.
So we made 450 grand a month extra from that. So if that doesn't convince you, I don't know what's going to. And then this is a big one, is that you have to have your setters.
Setters are the team in neglect. So you do not, if you have two setters, two closers, that's fine. As soon as you get bigger than that, you have to have a separate setter meeting, daily sales meeting with the setters.
Daily call reviews with the setters, the same way you would with the closers. They should have five to seven call reviews per setter per week, which is only a 15 -minute call. It's not that much, or a 30 -minute call.
It's like very, very easy. And this is a big one, is the closer manager, unless they have been a setter in their career and or a setter manager in their career, the setter manager or the closer manager should not manage the setters. Oftentimes, closer managers are horrible setter managers, and they just want the setters.
to be the closer's little bitch, right? Make sure this person only shows up with a credit card. And then you get the setter doing this massive overcorrection because so -and -so closer got mad, they made one bad set.
And then the setter goes into a two -week rut and doesn't set anybody because blah, blah, blah. So you really want it actually to be like you as a CEO, closer manager, setter manager, and then eventually a sales director who you trust can do both, right? And it's rare actually that you have closer managers who are really good at both.
But generally speaking, you want to look for direct experience and setting experience there because they got to like feel for the setters and do one -on -ones with the setters and be like an advocate for them. You know, the same way as like, you don't want your sales manager telling your marketing what to do or your CMO, you know, vice versa.
I think I just pounded that. That's like the TLDR. You know, you can do more of it and do setter training and go through my setter stuff, et cetera.
anything you would add to that or we could move no i think i think you hit all the main points yeah i tried to i tried to just drill it uh okay the last one so this is common if i have somebody on the call they're like dude i've been through the center i've been through the show rate training i've done all the things i've done and they actually have done it yes the last thing i usually look at is their marketing messaging yeah Do you want to hit this one?
Yeah, I'll hit it real quick. So first of all, we have to categorize the marketing. Is it indirect or direct?
So direct, as a reminder, is you're leading with the offer. Indirect is you're leading with some sort of typically curiosity or value -based thing, and then the offer comes out later. The way that you position the sales call in your marketing is different for both of those.
So with direct, it's really simple. It's basically the quality of your offer is gonna dictate a lot of the backend results. Obviously, we already know this, right?
But that also applies to share rate, right? Like if your offer is kind of like, yeah, I don't know, I'll check it out versus like, holy shit, I need to know more about this. That's gonna have a huge difference in how people perceive whether they should show up to this call.
And again, going back to that framework of why they should prioritize that call above whatever else they could be doing, right? So direct, it's really quite simple. It's just reminding them of the offer.
you know, basically CTAing them on a particular call. And then the one thing with direct offers that's good to add immediately after you CTA is just a reminder, like, hey, especially if you have a guarantee, hey, just remember, there's no pressure on this call. Yes, we're going to cover the offer and if it makes sense for you, but because of our guarantee, right?
we're not going to hard pressure you into anything. And that's kind of like the pressure release valve to where the prospect can see the call as, you know, not just a pitch fest, even if it's something they're interested in, but as something that's going to be valuable and they're not going to like be pressured as something that they don't want to do, right?
So that's direct, pretty straightforward. With indirect, you kind of have to walk this fine line of like promoting the call as value without going so far that direction that it's just like people expect to be a coaching calls. You don't want that, right?
On the flip side, you can't just make it about the offer and just purely about, hey, we're gonna sell you this offer because especially, you know, indirect, typically more B2C offers, you know, people will be like, oh, I'm just gonna get pitched. I'm not gonna show up to this, right? So you kind of have to walk this fine line.
Generally speaking, what I recommend is you do two things. The first thing is you qualify who should book and who should not book. So meaning, you know, hey, if your XYZ type of person uh then book a call this is only for people who are this and this and this and not this and this and this right the other thing that you can do that i used to do with my former uh bizop is you know you you do a harder cta but again kind of like similar with the whole like refund we have a guarantee on the direct side you do another pressure release you go like hey and look like obviously if it makes sense we're going to share exactly what we have going on see you know if it makes sense for us to work together But even if it doesn't, you'll still get advice from people who have accomplished X, Y, Z, right?
And so again, we're kind of walking the line. Like they know that it's a sales opportunity is gonna happen. But at the same time, there's like, hey, there's gonna be a little bit of value.
It's worth my time to show up. So those are kind of the two biggest mistakes. I mean, obviously zooming out, we could talk about marketing for another three hours because there's a lot of things that affect show rate.
Yeah. Well, let me just say this. So when I went through a diagnostic trying to fix somebody's show rate and they're like, I'm doing this.
I swear to God, I'm doing this. I'm doing this. I'm doing this.
I'm doing that. Then I'm like, okay, show me your ads. Nine times out of 10, it just looks like a scam.
Yeah. Yeah. Because it's always B2C.
It's always make money. And I'm like, dude, this looks like a scam, right? Like a classic one.
This one guy just pulls up in a Lamborghini with the window down. He's like. do you want to make money online i'm like oh my god i saw another one where they it's like they put the cash thing on the it's like a dollar bill counter or something and it's like they put it on the thing and it starts like flipping out dollar bills and i'm like dude it's like not 2016 anymore dude like you got to just evolve so um it's either it looks like a scam and or it's kind of the same thing it's just it's really bad and i don't want to litigate how to do good marketing but i will say you know study todd brown study john benson study about albuquerque kyle milligan study everything mark ford's written russell brunson's books are good i have like a whole you know my training on this if you want to go to creating your copy platform in my program like it goes through more of the hardcore stuff because usually it's like look dude like just being and it's so hard to you know usually by the time we get here on a call i'm like okay we're like
We have five minutes left in the call and I just realized your whole marketing platform sucks. But usually it's just, there's nothing new, unique, different about what you're doing that is really making people interested. So a great example is, is if I have a, this is like a crappy example, but it will apply.
It's like if I have somebody who is doing a dropshipping offer and their copy is very 2019, you know, it's very just like the basic benefits of dropshipping, trying to act like dropshipping is a new thing. That is the type of thing I'll see 25%, 30 % share rates. Now, granted, are they really 25, 30 % like we talked about?
Who knows? But I'll see that often. If I have the same person who then revamps their copy and it's like some sort of thing where it's drop shipping, but it's also very much using AI, I guarantee they'll be in the 60s, right?
Provided their copy is good and they're hitting all the basics. But like an AI is a... common, like just a new thing that that's an easy thing to pick on.
Does that make sense? But the key is, is if you actually learn how to like create a central marketing thesis, have sub beliefs, how to actually have like a unique mechanism that is good. Most people's unique mechanisms, the XYZ black box method is not a fucking unique mechanism.
right it is like what is it about the way you work with clients or the way you get them results yeah that is unique different superior than everybody else rather even if all your competition is doing that but not talking about it or if it is genuinely different yeah like what is different from the status quo that you're doing that you can compare and contrast or even attack a false assumption that the market has right yeah so like a great example is like one of our best ads that i think we shut down because we felt bad was like cancel click funnels you know was the head so when you attack a false assumption almost always that is like the one of the most effective things you can do for a hook you know and it's like it's new it's novel and so and this goes to show too it's probably the most powerful thing you could do with your show rates is when the ad is literally so good it is genuinely like i rarely ever see it but when i do i'm like dang this is good when i see really good offers really good ads very unique very different to a market that is not used to it
oftentimes their show rates are in like the fucking 70s, 80s, and they're not even doing a lot of the stuff that we talked about. So I'm not going to give a whole marketing training, what have you, but yeah, that's my thoughts. And yeah, just to double down on one point that you made, with direct, the strength of your offer correlates directly to your show rates and sales ops effectiveness.
With indirect, it's the strength of, as to summarize, the strength of your unique mechanism, right? And so, yeah, I mean, I'm going to repeat exactly what you said.
In short, if you're selling some sort of B2C indirect offer and it's like a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy, it's been like the 18th iteration of this offer and it's basically the same promises. And oftentimes, by the way, I see those people, they have like a little bit of a social following and they, you know, they do a hundred grand a month, 200 grand a month from their Instagram or something.
And they just, oh, I'm just going to bring that to ads. It's like, no, it ain't going to work. Totally different level of awareness and trust.
So just to end off here, obviously we talked about SalesKick a lot. If you guys want to use SalesKick, go to saleskick .com. It basically is the software solution to do everything we said in this video in a very easy way.
So we wanted to give you. Really, what we did is this was the old manual way we used to do everything. And then that cost a ton of money.
I had a ton of staff, et cetera. It was very effective. This is even more effective and it's way less money compared to doing all of this.
So if you want to check that out, saleskick .com. The other thing is this was an extremely tactical training. And even if you use SalesKick.
you should understand all this stuff because then you can better use sales kick. So what we're also going to do is put together basically a full training document and guide in a PDF that if you just want like a checklist and all of the things to essentially know everything about how to run this whole system, there'll be like a link in the description.
You can check it out, but that's it. That's the point. If you enjoyed this podcast, you're also probably going to 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.
There is no cold open here and no promise stack. Two operators sit down on a white cyc, say the phrase 'show rates', and then spend nearly two hours refusing to give you a single tactic, because the claim underneath the whole conversation is that there isn't one.
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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.
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.
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.
A 2-hour-43-minute training that turns 'my setters aren't performing' into a diagnosable system — from MDR vs SDR through dialing algorithms, the exact scripts, and how to comp the team.
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