If You Don't Understand Data, You Don't Understand Personal Brands
A 39-minute walkthrough of the three numbers an Instagram coaching funnel lives or dies on, and how to trace every dollar back to the post that earned it.
Posted
2 days ago
Duration
Format
Tutorial
educational
Views
273
9 likes
57 · 43
Big Idea
The argument in one line.
A personal brand should be read like a direct-response funnel: three leading indicators tell you which department is the bottleneck, and lagging indicators under each tell you exactly what to fix.
Who This Is For
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
You sell coaching or an info product through Instagram DMs and have views you cannot connect to revenue.
You run or manage DM setters and sales reps and need a clean way to decide who is actually underperforming.
You are spending on DM or follower ads and want a math-backed budget instead of a guess.
You have one keyword and one CTA on every post and have never tracked which post produced a client.
SKIP IF…
You monetize through sponsorships, AdSense, or affiliate links rather than a call-booked offer.
Your business has no sales calls at all, so the collected-dollar-per-booked-call layer does not apply.
You want content craft advice. This is about the numbers after the post, not how to make the post.
TL;DR
The full version, fast.
Views only tell you how many people saw a post, so judging content by them hides whether the problem is marketing, setting, or sales. The video reads a personal brand as a three-layer funnel with one leading indicator per layer: new inbound leads, the percentage of leads booked onto a call, and collected dollars per booked call. When one of those is low, lagging indicators underneath it (skip rate, response rate, DQ rate, show rate, close rate, average order value) point to the actual fix. Attach a unique keyword to every CTA, pipe ManyChat and booking data into a spreadsheet, and you can trace cash back to individual posts. Then work backwards from a cash target to see which department has to move and by how much.
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Views are pointless if they do not sell. The data approach claims $100M in coaching sales for brands with a tenth of the audience of the creators people copy.
01:01 – 03:10
02 · Why views are not a scorecard
Read a brand like a direct-response marketer: lead generation, call booking, liquidation. Views only say who saw the post. Every problem is marketing, setting, or sales.
03:10 – 06:58
03 · Leading vs lagging indicators
Three leading indicators (inbound leads, percent booked, collected dollars per booked call) and the lagging indicators under each, mapped on a whiteboard.
06:58 – 09:22
04 · The million-view trap
A million views and 12 booked calls. A niche post can match the calls with better buyers. Content teams should think like marketers, not creative directors.
09:22 – 14:52
05 · Reading the content metrics
Skip rate benchmarks, retention graphs to find the weak part of the body, and when saves or shares matter.
14:52 – 15:40
06 · Agency pitch
Mid-roll ask for businesses at $100K+ a month to apply via the first link.
15:40 – 22:40
07 · Layer 2: leads and DMs
Why leads drop with views up (topic, CTA, lead-magnet mismatch), the fall in response rates, lead-to-call benchmarks, and keeping DQ definitions tight.
22:40 – 25:31
08 · Sales metrics: dollars per booked call
The $1,000 to $2,000 target, show rate and close rate thresholds, payment-plan AOV problems, and why closers struggle with organic leads.
25:31 – 29:30
09 · Tracking cash back to the post
A custom dashboard ties ManyChat keyword, setter, closer, and call status together so each keyword shows leads, calls, and cash.
29:30 – 32:45
10 · How to judge one post
Views for resonance, leads within 24 hours, a 10-day window to close. Comment CTA versus DM CTA, the 30M-view miss, and the Insights new-followers filter.
32:45 – 37:06
11 · Personal brand math
Work backwards from a $500K target: 878 calls and 17,560 leads at current rates, or 625 calls and 12,500 leads if dollars per call rises to $850.
37:06 – 39:26
12 · Set up the tracking
Zap ManyChat and booking data into a spreadsheet, set KPIs per setter and closer, grab the free tracker, and the closing application pitch.
Atomic Insights
Lines worth screenshotting.
A post with a million views that books 12 calls converted at 0.001%, and a niche post with 10,000 views can book the same 12 calls with better buyers.
Every funnel problem is one of three: a marketing problem, a setting problem, or a sales problem, and each has a different fix.
The three leading indicators are inbound leads, percentage of leads booked, and collected dollars per booked call. Everything else is a lagging indicator.
A skip rate under 30% gives a reel a real shot at going viral; the target is under 25% or 20%.
If skip rate is 40 to 60%, fix the hook or the topic before touching anything else in the video.
DM response rates have fallen from 80 to 100% two years ago to 40 to 50% today as comment-keyword funnels saturated.
Benchmark lead-to-call at 6 to 8% of all leads, or 10 to 15% of opted-in leads.
A DQ rate over 10% is a marketing problem, not a setter problem, because it means content is attracting the wrong people.
Collected dollars per booked call should clear $1,000, and strong teams reach $2,000.
Show rate under 70% and close rate under 15 to 20% are the two sub-metrics that explain a weak collected-dollar-per-call number.
A $10,000 product with a $3,000 average order value means closers are defaulting to payment plans instead of collecting cash upfront.
A thousand DM-CTA leads produced five to six times more cash than five thousand comment-CTA leads because intent was higher.
Use comment CTAs when calendars are dry and you need volume; use DM CTAs when calendars are full and you need intent.
A video that hit 30 million views made less than $20,000 because the topic had nothing to do with the offer.
Instagram Insights filtered by new followers over 30 days tells you which posts to run as follower ads.
Closers trained on webinar-nurtured leads struggle with organic leads who have not watched three hours of content first.
Raising collected dollars per booked call from $570 to $850 cut the required lead count from 17,560 to 12,500 and the ad budget from $40,000 to $10,000.
Always round call and lead targets up, never down.
Takeaway
Three numbers tell you which department is broken.
WHAT TO LEARN
Read a personal brand as a funnel with one leading indicator per stage, then let the lagging indicators under the weak one tell you exactly what to fix.
02Why views are not a scorecard
Views only measure who saw a post. A million views that books 12 calls is a 0.001% conversion, and a niche post with 10,000 views can match it with better buyers.
Every weak number is a marketing, setting, or sales problem, and each has a different fix, so name the department before touching anything.
03Leading vs lagging indicators
Track three leading indicators: new inbound leads, percentage of leads booked onto a call, and collected dollars per booked call.
Under each leading indicator sits a short list of lagging indicators that explain why it moved, like reply rate, DQ rate, show rate, close rate, and average order value.
04The million-view trap
Judge content by what it does for the business, not how polished it looks. Tactical scripts with basic editing routinely out-earn hyper-aesthetic production.
05Reading the content metrics
Skip rate under 30% gives a reel a shot at going viral. If it is 40 to 60%, fix the hook or topic before anything else.
Use the retention graph to find the second drop-off and push it later, since more people reaching the CTA means more leads.
Saves signal value on tactical posts; shares matter when the format naturally gets sent to someone, like a couple deciding on real estate together.
07Layer 2: leads and DMs
High views with low leads usually means a topic, CTA, or lead-magnet mismatch with what you actually sell.
Response rates have dropped from 80 to 100% to 40 to 50%; a low rate means the opening message, the request-box problem, or slow follow-up.
Benchmark lead-to-call at 6 to 8% of all leads, and keep the DQ definition narrow so a DQ rate over 10% points to a real content-quality problem.
08Sales metrics: dollars per booked call
Collected dollars per booked call should clear $1,000. Show rate under 70% and close rate under 15 to 20% explain most shortfalls.
A high-ticket product with a low average order value means closers are defaulting to payment plans instead of collecting cash upfront.
Closers used to webinar-nurtured leads often fail with organic leads, so either nurture harder or retrain them for colder conversations.
09Tracking cash back to the post
Give every CTA a unique keyword, or rotate seven to ten days of keywords, so leads, booked calls, and cash can be traced to one post.
Feed winning keywords back to the content team for variations and to the paid team as DM or follower ads.
10How to judge one post
Judge a post in two passes: views and leads within 24 hours for resonance, then backend conversion over about 10 days for monetization.
Comment CTAs bring volume at lower intent; DM CTAs bring fewer leads that produced five to six times more cash. Choose by whether calendars are empty or full.
Filter Instagram Insights by new followers over 30 days to find follower-ad candidates, and by leads to find retargeting candidates.
11Personal brand math
Divide the cash target by collected dollars per booked call for the call target, then by the booking rate for the lead target, rounding up.
Compare levers before spending: raising dollars per call from $570 to $850 cut the lead target from 17,560 to 12,500 and the ad budget from $40,000 to $10,000.
A lead-quality problem calls for middle-of-funnel content and social proof; a lead-volume problem calls for more top-of-funnel posts.
12Set up the tracking
You do not need custom software: zap ManyChat opt-ins and booking-link data into one spreadsheet and set KPI targets per setter and closer.
Glossary
Terms worth knowing.
Leading indicator
A top-level number, one per funnel stage, that shows which department is the bottleneck. Here they are inbound leads, lead-to-call ratio, and collected dollars per booked call.
Lagging indicator
A sub-metric under a leading indicator that explains why it moved, such as skip rate, response rate, DQ rate, show rate, close rate, or average order value.
CDPBC (collected dollars per booked call)
Cash collected divided by calls booked. It blends show rate, close rate, and average order value into one number for judging a sales team.
Lead-to-call ratio
Calls booked expressed as a percentage of inbound leads. The main metric for judging DM setters.
Skip rate
The percentage of viewers who leave a reel within the first three seconds. Instagram shows it alongside a typical rate for your account.
DQ rate
The share of leads tagged as disqualified. Here it is limited to leads outside the countries served or with no ability to pay.
Speed to lead
How quickly, and how often, a setter follows up after someone opts in. Slow follow-up drags down response rate.
DM setter
A team member who handles inbound Instagram DMs and books qualified leads onto sales calls.
Comment CTA vs DM CTA
Two ways to trigger a ManyChat automation: asking viewers to comment a keyword (high volume, lower intent) or to DM a keyword (lower volume, higher intent).
ManyChat
An Instagram DM automation tool that captures keyword opt-ins and tags leads, used here as the source of lead counts and response rates.
AOV (average order value)
Average cash collected per closed deal. A low AOV against a high-ticket price usually means too many payment plans.
“It's easy to go and create content that gets a million, two million, three million views. But if those views don't translate into sales, it's kind of pointless.”
the whole thesis in two lines→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
07:03
“From a million views, you get 12 booked calls. That's not very good, is it? Because the conversion rate is like 0.001%.”
concrete number that makes the vanity-metric point land→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
08:02
“It's more often than not the guys with the non-sexy looking content or the guy with a bit like weird looking editing that make more money than the hyper optimizers.”
contrarian, names the industry mistake→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
09:07
“If your content attracts more dating opportunities than it does customers, you're doing it wrong and you should probably fire your content manager.”
punchline with a clear takeaway→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
21:51
“Content isn't just a magic pill where you post content and fairy dust arises and all of a sudden you're a multi-gazillionaire. It's actually a very simple funnel, similar to ads.”
reframes content as a funnel with constraints→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
30:48
“The thousand DM CTAs generated five or six times more cash than the comment CTAs just because the intent was so much higher.”
specific, counterintuitive data point→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
31:42
“It got like 30 million views. I think he made less than 20 grand off of it because the topic of the video was not related to his actual business.”
the negative example everyone fears→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
35:31
“It's potentially thirty thousand dollars in savings because I understand the math and I understand the data.”
payoff line for the brand-math segment→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
The Script
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If you don't understand data, you don't understand your personal brand. And you most certainly don't understand how to consistently and predictably turn viewers into paying customers for your intro coaching business. Because it's easy to go and create content that gets a million, two million, three million views.
On the surface, that looks really nice and successful. But if those views don't translate into sales, it's kind of pointless. Which is why the biggest personal brands don't obsess over vanity metrics like views.
followers, reach, impressions. They actually obsess over metrics like follower quality, cash collected per view, as well as many others. And I know this works because this data -driven approach has generated well over $100 million in info coaching sales for some of the now most well -personal brands, which at the time of starting to work with us, only had one tenth of the audience size of some of the biggest creators that you look up to and try to copy so desperately.
And by the end of this video, you'll understand exactly which metrics to track, the difference between leading and lagging indicators, as well as which content is actually growing your bank account, and which content is just building your big audience of people that will never give you a single dollar. And it all starts with understanding what views can and cannot sell you.
When I look at a personal brand, I follow the exact same path that the lead would take from post all the way up into sales process. Exactly like a direct response from marketer would. I read it in three different layers, right?
Which is one, the lead generation, aka how is the lead being generated, right? And what affects the quantity or quality of the lead being generated. Then I look at what the call booking looks like in terms of how are those leads now being turned into sales calls.
And last importantly, how's the liquidation from, you know, those calls. into actual customers. Now, starting on the lead level, we wanna go and start with the most obvious metric, which, you know, my thing is views.
And we wanna go through and what leads can and cannot tell you about. Views tell you how many people actually saw the post and potentially even interacted with it. That's it.
That's not really insightful data. They don't tell you where people exactly dropped off from the way from viewing your content all the way to potentially making a sale. And so for me, that's exactly where I want to go and get started, okay?
As much as you see basic metrics on here, I think there's really three key areas, right? It could be something as a weak hook, a weak DM setting process, or a weak sales process. But we don't know what is the root cause in the first place.
And second of all, each of those three problems actually has different solutions and different fixes to it. And so very simply put, there's really three numbers that I check and I look at that then also determine where I need to spend my time fixing it.
And again, this is very simple to kind of determine. in terms of the three areas i look at it's all either a marketing problem it is a setting problem or a sales problem right either the marketing department in that case content and potentially paid advertising they're not doing a good job they're bringing you bad leads or not enough leads then the dm setters right they're not you know doing certain things in the right order which is what's costing you a lot of leads or the sales team's actually not doing it the problem becomes very quickly that there's so many different metrics out there where people just look at this random stuff and they have 10 different metrics that they look at and at the end they're more confused than ever and especially when it comes to content there's no real like kind of system right for us because we have so many data insights and work with so many diverse sets of clients niches and verticals we kind of figured out that there's
two sets of stages when you look need to look at dms there is leading indicators and lagging indicators now leading indicators essentially the big picture pillars that show you which area whether it's marketing whether it's setting and whether it's sales are actually the bottleneck preventing you from scaling right and then lagging is more so the specific roadblock that you actually need to go and attack which i'll break down through in a second now the three leading indicators that we look at are inbound leads aka how many new people have actually reached out to you, the percentage of those leads, which then were booked, which we also call as the lead -to -call ratio, and last importantly, for every single call booked, how much revenue is technically being generated, also known as collected dollar per booked call.
Very simply put, This one literally is just calculated as amount of new leads, which if you go inside a tool like ManyChat and you filter under new subscriber between the first and the 31st, you should see how many new contacts you get. That's your inbound lead flow.
Then you have the lead to call ratio, which is essentially just matter of fact, calls booked, right? Expressed as a fraction of inbound leads. So essentially that just gives you a very good percentage wise.
And last importantly, the collected dollar per book call is essentially like your cash collected. divided by your calls booked and that gives you on average for every call book here's how much revenue was being generated now these leading indicators tell me where to go and look closer first and then i use the lagging indicators to see why those numbers moved and what the actual root causes so that then with the individuals responsible for those specific departments i can go deeper as an example right if i believe that inbound lead flow is extremely low and i'll get to the kpis later on here right i could go and see that hey actually this could be because we had significantly lower audience growth so i would then understand that hey maybe you need to change the content strategy because you know maybe we just posted too much like niche content and not enough content that could reach new people or if let's say we are spending some money on audience amplification or dm ads right the cost per lead is too high which means we're not getting a big row ass which is why we're not spending more and aka for us to go and scale the lead flow we need to have a lower cost per lead or is that overall the impressions might just be low the last thing which i actually didn't list on here
is that what we could articulate is that the the view to lead ratio could be really low now this is a really made up metric but there's certain cases where you know you get a bunch of views but very few leads which i'll get to here in a second now on the setting side of things right i might see that hey percentage of leads booked onto a call might be extremely low but this might be due to a few reasons this could be the reply rate right this could be the dq rate and this could be a speed to lead problem now very simply put right the reply rate if we don't get a significant amount of people responding that means i need to change the initial message right so much called i am the initial message if the dq rate is bad this might be back to a marketing problem or if it's like speeds to lead or just a conversion rate in of itself then that might be a setter problem but in of itself i get to go and figure out exactly who's the culprit at fault as an example, right?
And who needs to improve. Now, if the collected dollar per booked call is the bottleneck, what I want to then go and figure out was what's the core reason of it. Typically speaking, the collected dollar per booked call metric, you know, is essentially a mixture or a blend between close rate, show rate, and average order value.
And very simply put, if I go and realize that one of them is particularly off, that's when I know the core constraint to go and fix. Maybe in the average order value, that's a closer problem, right?
The show rate problem could be like an ops problem where stuff's not being delivered or it could be a closer problem not reaching out. And close rate, to be quite frank with you, is probably a closer problem to be quite frank with you as much they don't want to admit to it, you know? The reason this is so important is because it gives you actually like some form of like truth on what's going to happen.
There's a particularly good example that I want to highlight, right? There's a creator that we know who had a post or a video that went extremely viral. you know, got over a million plus views and he had, you know, a thousand plus opt -ins.
But the problem was when he shared his statistic inside of a group, he only had 12 booked calls. Now, if you think about it, from a million views, you get 12 booked calls. That's not very good, is it?
Because the conversion rate is like 0 .001%. Now... I know on the flip side of data, a more niche post could go and get 10 ,000 views instead of a million and still book the 12 same calls.
And because it is more niche, the quality of people that actually book is significantly higher because niche posts usually attract a niche audience, which usually are higher caliber individuals. And those are the type of people that can actually buy. And that's a great example as to why the view count alone cannot tell me which post was better for my business or not.
And the mistake of judging by the views is actually really what the industry is doing right now. Every single expert is making this mistake of hiring a creative director or telling you you need a creative team so they can be super creative and make you look really good on camera, but The problem is that if you judge by the views or by how cool and attractive you look on the camera, it doesn't actually reflect in the cash collected.
If you look, whether it's YouTube or Instagram, it's more often than not the guys with the non -sexy looking content or the guy with a bit like weird looking editing or basic editing that make more money than the hyper optimizers who look super chat on camera and try to be over the top aesthetic with it. A great example of the counter is actually a guy called Brian Mark.
He helps fitness coaches scale, and he has very much the opposite approach. He basically just has very tactical scripts, and they're just focused on what are problems my audiences face, what are the things they want to achieve, how can I go and help them? And he just uses those tactical scripts, he executes on them, he puts very simple put editing on them, and then very simply put, they do the real job that content should be doing, which is...
actually turning viewers into paying customers, which is the shift I want to evoke into you. You want the content team to think like a marketer so that every post gets judged by what it does for the business, not how it makes you look socially. If your content attracts more dating opportunities than it does customers, You're doing it wrong and you should probably fire your content manager, unless that's what you're optimizing about, at which point my channel is probably the wrong one for you.
And so realistically, that layer of like, what does content actually do for the business on like passed down metrics as opposed to just the views is where we realistically start. but before we actually worry about looking at the dm setting and the sales process the first thing you want to go and figure out as i showed is exactly whether or not the content is doing its job and how you could potentially optimize the content to get more of the right people viewing your content in the first place now first things first i want to go and know whether or not the right person stopped and kept watching okay now these are some recent insights from our clients based content and what i really look at when i look at content insights is a few different things number one my biggest thing is we look at the skip rate okay so this is the script right right here this basically shows how how many people skip the real enough itself and so as you can see this this particular real good like you know i think a few million views and it shows that typically the skip rate is around 40 which in of itself isn't terrible for the first few seconds but we aim to go lower but this particular reel had a 20 skip rate and if you look at the graph inside of here yes there's a bit more of a drastic fall off but even there it's more gradual and then it kind of like slows it down which that shows you that in the beginning
the drop -off is not too steep. There's certain ones that go down just like this, which means there's a really bad hook, right? But it shows you that, you know, kind of people fall off, but then after the hook, the people who actually stick, they have a really, really good retention, right?
Which is very likely why this rule went viral. Now, to kind of articulate this to you, the skip rate is essentially the percentage of people who leave within the first three seconds. Now, generally speaking, anything below 30 % a skip rate has a really good shot of the video potentially going viral or just getting pushed to a significantly better audience but ideally for us you want to be below 25 or even 20 a few things right if your skip rate's high if it's 40 50 you know or even 60 in some bad instances it means that you need to go and fix your hook or you need to go and fix the topics before you touch any of the remaining videos because very simply put it just means that what you're saying in the hook doesn't resonate it doesn't attract the interest of your audience which is extremely simple.
Next up, what we like to kind of look at is the average duration, okay? Now, this really just tells us one simple thing. How long does the average person actually stay to go and watch our content?
If we open the retention graph, right, we can really go and see where the drop -offs happen and we kind of see like this like stabilization line here, which you can see is probably over here is where we start to kind of lose people again, which is at that 44 -second mark. Now, generally speaking... the further back we can we can push this second kind of like drop in retention the better because that means that more and more people are getting to this part here which is usually our call to action and the more people that result into our call to action right they will actually result into leads which that means that our content is actually doing its job.
Now, hypothetically speaking, what I like to go and do as an example here is I can tell that if you compare those two skip rates, right, you can tell that here there's a more significant drop off for a bit longer time, which means probably this part of the video was not very good. Whereas over here, we think actually the middle part's really good.
but here the drop -off is a bit too extreme, right? You want to go and use the retention curve and the average duration to go and actually figure out which part of the body you could potentially fix or which part that the audience doesn't resonate with it. Skip rate and average feed duration is really kind of the core elements we look at when it comes down to analyzing videos because they show us...
where do we lose the audience and how long can we retain them for for us if we can keep the average person for like you know 60 70 of the video we know that again on let's say a one minute video you know we get a hundred thousand views we know sixty thousand people will roughly make it until the end and if we know that sixty percent of people get to the cta we can then actually calculate what percentage of the viewers turn into leads which in my opinion is a really really good problem to go and have and so that then allows us to measure the effect of a CTA.
Now, on the topic of content, there's two more metrics that I kind of look at, right? Saves and shares. Saves to me matter more on like tactical and like more technical posts because it indicates the level of impact it had on people, aka how valuable the people think it was because they saved it so they come back later to it.
And especially on posts where we have CTAs, having those type of high saves rate is extremely valuable because it actually enables us to go and actually get people as leads later down the line. Shares on the other hand, they matter a lot more when the format naturally gets sent to someone else. This is why, as an example, a lot of people who have humorous posts or like meme pages do extremely well because they post a funny piece of content and it gets shared, right?
As an example, if I share a controversial opinion. or if I share something that I've achieved, or I share something that, hey, X, Y, Z person did this thing, and I do a breakdown of a celebrity or brand, I want a high share rate because it shows that people found it valuable enough to share it with a significant other. So for example, for some of our clients who are in the real estate space, we understand that a lot of people who buy into real estate opportunities are couples.
And so what we like to go and do is we like to then create content around couples where we look at how many shares are we getting? Because if we understand people make as couples, make real estate opportunities a core driver of.
financial freedom as an example, we then want to get one of the people to either comment or tag or share it with their significant other, which then shows that our content touched them emotionally, gets in front of more and more people, and probably gets more couple into our funnel as a result of that. To me, both of those numbers just tell us sort of like whether the content did its job.
But if people watch and never actually raise their hand, then the business doesn't really benefit off of it, right? And so next, what we really look at is the inbound DMs as well as calls being booked. Hey, just real quick, if your business or coaching company is already making, you know, a hundred, a few hundred grand a month, and you think this is something you need, but you'd rather just have my team find these leaks, fix them for you, the first link in the description gets you a short video and then book a call with us.
Now, my team and I will literally just go dissect your entire business and figure out where potentially content could help you scale to that next level. Whether that is going from 50 to 100, 200 grand a month, whether it is, you know, going from 100 to 250, 500 grand a month, or if you're already at a million, dollars a month and you want to go to your next million dollars using potentially content or a mixture of content and hybrid ads then this is exactly what we can go and help with click the link below watch the quick video fill out the application and then our team will reach out make sure we you're all booked up and then from there make sure we get you your personalized brand scaling blueprint now with that being said Let's go back to the video.
First things first, let's start with leads. By the way, this is a screenshot from one of our clients. So this is real data.
So I can actually walk you through how we look at that data on a day -to -day basis when working with clients. Now, for me, when I look at leads, first things first, this tells me exactly if posts and our content strategy as a whole gets people to take the action. As an example, you could have really much views and have a bunch of inspirational audience, but not have enough intent with people to where they're like, wow, I get to go and actually take action with you, which is a big problem, right?
There's a bunch of creators out there that have millions of followers, but make less than 10 grand a month because what they're posting about and what they're trying to sell is a massive mismatch. And people don't respect them enough or look up to them enough to where they're like, wow, this is someone I want to buy for.
Which subsequently means that the views are really good, but leads extremely low. And so for us, when that happens, which it does occasionally, you know, we actually then check out what was the topic that we made a video over? What was the call to action?
And what was the thing we told them to go and do? a few examples are super simple right if we make a topic that has nothing to do with the client's business model the link between if you care about this business model you should message me because i can help you build this business is extremely weak which means the intent to go and do something is really low vice versa if you have a very relevant link right between a news article and your airbnb business i don't know why the i always use airbnb in my videos but that just seems to be niche we're rolling with here right and then if the link's strong there's a higher responsiveness Number two might be like, what's the CTA like?
If you realize the lead quality is dropping, it might just be that the CTA is too vague and the right people don't feel spoken to and the wrong people do feel spoken to. And if, for example, you're giving away lead magnets, last but not least, it might just be that you talk about a very broad topic and then give away a very specific lead magnet, which means there's a mismatch, right?
Or you talk about the very niche problem and you give away a very broad lead magnet, which again... there is a mismatch where they said, hey, I want to learn how to like, you know, garden flowers. And you're talking about like, you know, building a gardening business.
very vague response, right? When it comes to the DMs, okay, I want to go and talk about the number one thing that's changed in the last few years, which is the response rate. That's the second thing that I immediately go and look at.
Now, this client in particular is having a really, really good month response rate wise. But to give you context, about two years ago, when you would get 1000 people opting in, whether that's a DM funnel, or whether that's like a comment funnel, where people comment a keyword under your post, and then Manichat sends up the automation, the response rate typically will be anywhere between 80 and all the way up to like 100 % to be quite frank but with obviously like a saturation of understanding those comic gimmicks with a saturation of more creators and people might potentially getting burned the response rate has dropped quite a bit.
Right now, what we're seeing across the board is anywhere between 40 to 50 % response rate, which still we aim for above 50%, but even at 50%, it's not too bad. The response rate realistically tells me how many people actually respond and enter the conversation in the first place, right? The problem becomes if more than half of them don't respond, it means that there's clearly some mismatch.
The issue could be one of three. It could be either that your initial message was really off -putting and they don't care about opening up in the first place. it could be that a lot of these people don't follow you and as a result of them not following you they end in the request box which a lot of these people are really dumb They don't want to go and check that shit.
And so therefore, you essentially just lose a valuable lead, right? Or last but not least, what it could be is that they simply just don't really check it because they don't get notified, right? Each scenario has a different usage and they use a different fix that you can go and attempt.
The biggest thing that we also say is sometimes an impact of the response rates could be speed to lead, right? It's how fast you follow up, how soon you follow up, how often you follow up. To me, all that on the speed to lead really can impact the response rate.
But that's obviously something that we need to go and track in order to be able to show, hey, here's actually what's happening. right? Generally speaking though, the number one metric when it comes to the DM setting is the lead to call ratio.
Now, excuse me, but for some reason, our tracker here isn't accurate because it shows different numbers here. But right now at this point for this client, we have 300 calls booked. It's like 309, some chump change, which means the response rate here should be 5%, right?
Next up after the response rate, we kind of look at the lead to call ratio, which is the percentage of leads who actually book a call, which is the number one metrics that I look at. That's sort of like the leading indicator, right? That I look for.
and say okay cool if this is actually accurately that's what i can live with right so as an example here you know and this and this metric is slightly wrong so the total number of book calls here is 309 right which takes this booking link roughly to like five percent lead to book call ratio generally speaking what i look for is one of two things is either look for six to eight percent of leads being booked onto a sales call or i look for 10 to 15 of opted -in leads to go and book a call right so in this case scenario five percent we're just slightly below but because we have a decent sized volume we're actually doing pretty good over here if you if you multiply that by point this is probably like seven percent you know which obviously there's definitely some room room for improvement now instead of many chat we have this tag that's called dq which we apply to leads who are just disqualified it's either because they're homeless right those people exist and they're not in a country that we can serve so they're outside the us most importantly and so what we usually look for if the lead to call ratio is really high we look at hey is the dq rate over 10 now for the dq rate to be accurate you got to lay out very clear guidelines with your setters what you actually deem and do not deem competent as a setting you know
of a dq people some people are going to say oh this person had a bad credit score they didn't date their dq all of a sudden you have like 80 of people that are dq'd which is not what we're doing it's simply out of the country you know from like third world countries homeless those are the two kind of criterias right and the dq rate tells us exactly whether or not the lead quality of content has been pretty and so that is what we then use to go and say hey if the lead to call ratio is low is that the problem second problem could be the response rate is really low right or it could obviously be last but not least that we lost a lot of people in the follow -up so realistically there's three different scenarios two in which us as the setters have to do a significantly better job.
One, where we feed back to marketing, right? And because you're so clear on like, hey, if this metric applies, if this, then that, then you have clear accountability within the team, which is how you should be operating in of itself. Because content isn't just as like...
magic pill where like you post content and fairy dust arises and all of a sudden you're a fucking multi -gazillionaire it's actually a very simple funnel similar to ads where there's key constraints that you're going to face that you actually have to take serious and work on every single day second of all we actually can segregate those metrics further down into different poster keywords which then allows the show hey what is the difference between certain content formats and certain content topics because if one topic has a significantly higher dq rate right we might conclude that this content topic brings in the wrong kind of people which means we might actually do less of it even though the leads looked extremely good now once we understand how many calls were booked what's the percentage you know what might be reasons for high or low dq rates on the setter side we're going to look at sales metrics which then brings us to cash collected per booked call okay this is simply put
How much calls booked for every single call? And again, the metric here is extremely simple, right? We use that to judge the sales rep performance because it factors in show rate, close rate, as well as the average order value.
This gives me a very simple, strong view on a few things. Number one, the lead quality, right? Number two, the sales rep quality.
As an example, right? A few rates. If this one here, I would ideally want to go and see above a thousand, okay?
Better teams that we have, they have it all the way up to $2 ,000, right? And obviously it depends a bit on... product you sell in terms of the price point, right, audience you go and sell to.
So as an example, okay, if I have $1 ,000 collected dollar per booked call, I might go and let's say for some reason I'm below that, I might look at, hey, is the show rate pretty low, you know? And then if I understand that the show rate is sub 70%, right, I might understand, oh, we might actually have a close rate problem.
right a show rate problem if i understand that a close rate is sub 20 or sub 15 on some teams where you sell a really high ticket product i might understand that oh we have actually have a big problem and last but not least the average order value right if i understand that hey we sell a ten thousand dollar product but the average order value is three thousand I understand that, hey, the close rate might be high and the show rate is good.
But the problem is that when they close, they just default to doing payment plans, which we want pips upfront cash, right? Especially when you're running paid ads, this is super important. And so therefore, you're able to very quickly pinpoint, one, if your sales team's cheating, and two, where your sales teams could be improving.
And so very simply put, if we're booking a bunch of calls, but this number kind of fails, this allows us to really go and pinpoint that, hey, content's good. Call booking is good. We got to go and isolate what's happening on the sales call side.
Now, right now, and this is something I personally find a bit concerning, you know, we have a lot of clients who are seeing a decrease in collected dollar per booked call. Some of them are soaring at like $1 ,500, $2 ,000. Some of them are lagging.
And the reason for it is super simple. These clothes are used to like lay down leads. And so when they get a lead, which, you know, is still organic, by the way, but just hasn't watched a three -hour webinar and is like pre -sold.
they struggle to objection handle. And so now what we understand is, oh, either we need to go nurture them more and basically have them watch a bloody webinar, or we actually just need to re -school the good old sales reps into, hey, how do you actually speak to an organic lead? And how do you actually push people over the line who haven't watched five hours worth of content and are ready to essentially get married to you as the personal brand?
And so overall, again, those are the three key metrics that we look for. number of leads that we're getting and then using very specific content metrics to go and identify how we can improve the performance to set our value right how many leads are we getting how many of those turn into booked calls and ultimately like what's the catch with that and then last but not least how much money are we generating for every single call that we're booking but the biggest thing that you might have now is like that sounds all good but how can i actually tie those numbers back to the exact post that i'm posting and how can i figure out which post brings in the most amount of revenue well Let's get into that now.
When it comes down to tracking, the biggest issue most people have is that they have no clue how to track it because Instagram's API is, for lack of better terms, a black box. Now, we've spent close to 100 grand on actually building a tracking solution to where we now have a dashboard where we can literally go and show you the exact leads that we're getting inside of Manichat on a day, every single basis.
And we can literally go and see what is the keyword that they come in with, right? Who is the setter that gets them to? And what's the stage that they're at?
I can then also figure out, right, exactly how to... go and figure out where this individual lead is at i can figure out a setter board of see who is the setter it has the most amount of leads assigned who's the setter that books the most amount of calls and who's the setter that generates the most amount of cash obviously those metrics and stats are blurred to be quite frank so i want to give up the client stuff but this is the level of granularity that you need now if this person here turns into a call booked i can now see As an example, hey, this person was a call pitch, cool.
Let me just go and find someone that booked a call. Hey, this person booked a call. I now see this is his username, right?
And then if that person actually purchases, I see, hey, he came in with this keyword, right? And now I actually understand that, cool, now I can go and track that back to a specific post, which then... On a different level, I can then really figure out in a tracking dashboard like this one, right?
Hey, this keyword here essentially booked five calls and got me four different leads or four different clients, right? And this one got me two leads or let's say this is 20 leads and got me zero calls booked and zero cash, which means this particular post was a waste of goddamn time. Now, the way this works is extremely simple.
At the end of every single post, you typically have a ZTA and that is comment X keywords to get Y resource or DM me this keyword to go and learn how. get started what i want to go and do is i want to attach one a unique keyword to every single cta or just basically have seven to ten days worth of unique keywords and then recycle them Right, it's extremely simple.
And now because you track it that way, and there's about a seven -day delay, you can see which posts bring in leads, which of those keywords, then actually book calls, and which of those are actually won. On top of that, if I go a bit more granular, I can go and see, again, this is just some random sample data, I can see the lead, I can see the full name, and I can see the date message, I can see the keyword, and I can see the chat ID.
So if I wanna click onto that, I can literally go and see exactly which conversation it is. Boom, and I open it up. I see the phone number if they book a call, right?
And I can go and see what's the call status from the CRM. I can see who's the closer and who is the setter, which means I can literally have a keyboard of who's the best closer, who's the best setter. And I can use all that data to then also feed it back to the marketing team, which then can go and say, oh, great.
Well, this post brought in a bunch. Let's make a different variation of it or let's make different formats of this particular post so we can scale the impact or the effect of that particular post. Or most importantly, let's give that post to the paid marketing team so they can run that as a DM or follower ad, and we can just scale the impact that we have off that particular post.
Now, to make this a bit more practical, let me explain how I usually judge like a piece of content, right? first things first like everyone i kind of look at the views you know i kind of look at okay cool did we have a good skip rate did we have a decent sort of like retention overall are we getting views to me anything above again this is depending on follower size but usually over 10 000 views i'm like that's pretty good that to me just kind of shows you the resonance of like okay people actually care about the topic and they actually want to go watch content around that topic right then next things first i look for how many leads are we getting so let's say technically speaking i did a video with the keyword training, right?
I would then go and say, okay, cool. Maybe on the views, it's not an outlier, but within 24 hours, I've gotten five leads off of it. Usually I get like two leads.
That now shows me exactly how well that keyword is doing, which is pretty cool. And then well look at those leads you know over or that lead count over a 10 -day period which that's kind of how long it takes for them to go get nurtured spoken to booked out and ultimately closed right and so that then allows me to go and look at over here you know what's the response rate of those leads what's the lead to call ratio and how much money have we actually made and again same thing here i see five leads 100 of them booked good keyword by the way and won four deals it's like the things of dreams that everyone wants you know now we just need to 10x 100x those numbers That's really, to me, how I view it, right?
Views and delete flow is how I judge the resonance. And then the backend conversion is how I judge the monetization aspect. It's extremely simple.
And by having what we call essentially our tracking dashboard, we can literally just go and figure out exactly what is and isn't working. If I have a few posts that are working the best and my paid ad team wants to use that as an example, I can now go and check, hey, which one actually has generated the most amount of cash and which one has generated the most amount of cash per booked call, which then again allows me to go and figure out what are the topics that bring in the most cash?
What are the topics that bring in the most followers? and which ones are like a bunch of time wasters. And so to me, if I figure out that certain topics have a high DQ rate, I start pushing that.
Vice versa, if one has a really high opt -in rate and a really high cash rate, that's probably something I double down on. A good example of such an insight was the following. We had two specific keywords for a client, one which got like 5 ,000 inbound leads, one which got like 1 ,000.
It sounds very simple, but... The 5 ,000 inbound DMs, they were for like a lead magnet, right? So naturally speaking, the intent's a bit lower.
But the crazy thing is that the 1 ,000 DM CTAs, as opposed to the 5 ,000 comment CTAs, actually had inverse effects. The thousand DM CTAs generated five or six times more cash than the comment CTAs just because the intent was so much higher. So we understood that, hey, if we want to get unaware people into the funnel, we might do a comment CTA.
Whereas if we actually want to do quick and maximize liquidation of someone who's already following us, we use a DM CTA. And so again, we can now use that data to make specific decisions on the type of CTA as well as the type of intent we want. Because sometimes we just need quantity so we can obviously scale the overall calls if calendars are dry.
or sometimes when calendars are already full, we just want the height of intent leads, at which point we obviously do a DM CTA. Now to give you a negative example, which is like one of the biggest learning lessons, right? Is if you can get huge views in a video, but weak calls in cash, I know it's better for reach than sales.
So for example, client of ours, you get a video that's basically blew up big time. It got like 30 million views, right? Incredible.
One of our best performing videos to date. I think he made less than like 20 grand off of it because the topic of the video was not related to his actual business, which means we've really got a bunch of followers, but they spoke about like how to move a company or a person to Dubai as opposed to how to start an Airbnb business.
You know, talk about a shiny object right there. And so to me, generally speaking, what you can do if you want to figure out right now, hey, which... which content is actually working for me what you want to do you want to take out your phone you want to go into your settings and then inside of insights you can filter your content of the last 30 days you want to filter it by new followers that will show you immediately which posts bring in the most amount of new followers which means those might be the ones that you want to run as a follower app on the background what you can then track is like hey which content actually brings the most amount of leads That might be your retargeting ad that you want to run potentially to go maximize lead flow from your organic audience because it's proven to turn viewers into customers or inbound leads in of itself.
Now, the last thing I want to do is I want to give you a quick math exercise because once you understand this metric, you understand the basis, but now this is where scaling a personal brand comes in and nobody else really talks about actually scaling, right? Which is what I call personal brand math. So once you actually collect data, you're able to work backwards for the new month to figure out which department needs to go and improve and what inputs you actually need to be able to hit potential outputs this is one of our clients right now he's on 183k on the month which is pretty good month for him he's probably gonna finish up at like 300k maybe 400k plus long story short you know his stats are highlighted as above he's booked 322 calls he basically collected cash collected 184k that means that right now roughly there's an error in the calculation here we book five percent of leads and after that we collect 570 right now very simply put with those numbers in mind okay there's two math rules one if next month we want to do 500k which that's a very selfish target we have we if we divide
five 500k divided by his current collected dollar per book call then we need 878 sales calls which by the way we always round up not down which makes it a lot easier right rather do too much than too little that's 887 calls and now with the current booking rate that means we need 17 560 leads The one error I've actually made here is that's just the amount of opt -ins, right?
Because we right now have a opt -in rate. I think I screenshotted this over here of 89%. So now what I can do is I can go and calculate this and divide it by 90%.
That will give me the actual leads. Generally speaking, if I look at that, I understand that getting 20 ,000 leads purely organically is extremely difficult to go and achieve. And I understand that I will need to spend some money on it.
But if I run the metrics and let's say this month we've gotten, if I look at the rate here, I look at like 6 ,000 leads, right? We'll probably finish up at 10 ,000. I'm like, fuck.
That means I need to spend 10 ,000 leads. Average cost per lead right now that we're getting on DM ads might be like $5, $4. That means I need to essentially spend $40 ,000 on ads, which I might not want to go and do.
And now right now, Jeremy Haynes' voice is mad, saying to me, don't be a bitch, put your balls on the table. So, you know, maybe some people would do that. But.
What I can do is I understand that right now from our metrics, which is, you know, six to eight calls, booked calls, and then $1 ,000 per booked calls, this metric is probably the one that's the biggest lagging indicator, right? Call bookings isn't necessarily bad. You know, inbound lead flow is not too shabby either, but this is the biggest indicator, right?
This needs to do almost a 2X. And so look what happens very quickly if I say, hey, I'll focus on the sales team and get them to 850, not even 1 ,000, 850. It means we go from...
you know almost 900 calls to 625 calls and then with the same booking rate we are stuck at 12 000 leads that now is way more doable because now according to my math i only need to go and for a lack of better terms only go and spend ten thousand dollars on ads which again that sounds way better it's potentially thirty thousand dollars in savings because I understand the math and I understand the data so I can work back and figure out what I need to actually go and improve.
And again, improving the sales team might mean making small tweaks in the setting flow. It means sending more nurture content, doubling down on the best performing content. But by working backwards, right?
I know exactly what each department needs to do every single day. I know. For the sales team to go and work, they need to do this.
For the selling team to succeed, they need to book this many calls. Marketing on a weekly basis needs to deliver this many leads. And that is the exact power of understanding personal brand math.
Now, to kind of finish up on this example here, right? In this very real estate case scenario, I understand we would roughly finish on around 9 ,000, 10 ,000 leads. The jump up to, you know, the 12 ,000 isn't too big.
So it's just a small marketing push, whereas sales is obviously a big push. So my focus here would be... pushing the sales potentially even seeing if we can get the five percent raised to six and then that would eradicate the issue of marketing having to do a crazy big job so it's like one micro problem and one macro problem now your focus for the next month becomes extremely simple now Let's say hypothetically speaking that my conclusion shows that the problem we have is a big quality problem.
If I have a quality problem of like, we book a bunch of leads, but the leads are shit. I then would say, hey, I can tweak the content strategy. I can post more middle of the funnel content, right?
I can, you know, push more client testimonials. I can show more social proof from my own business. You know, those are all ways that I can then tactically go and fix because I understand the root cause of my leading and lagging indicators.
Or if I say I have a lead volume problem, I then just push more content posts. and create content that's a lot more top of funnel content pieces now you don't need to go and build a full -blown like essentially like tracking software where you integrate everything you can literally start with a very simple setup like this you can take many chat which gives you an api key that allows you to zap stuff through or you can just generally zap many chat leads into a spreadsheet and you can take your call booking data on your call booking links from your setters and you can zap call bookings inside of here you can zap your money chat data inside of here and you can mix the two up right now what i will do for you as a bit of special because you stuck for almost 50 minutes with me what we're literally going to go and do i'm going to go leave a second link below and you're going to get this exact setter tracker and you can get it for completely free it's literally going to be a little bit of an opt -in right so we can make sure you actually get through we'll give you the installation video alongside the actual link so you can install this thing and use the tool for free and then from there all you need to go and do is understand what to track and what to look out for again you can look for your sales reps
You know, you're going to look at all closers and now I can go and see what is cash collected. What is their cash per lead? You know, what are the batteries?
You can set your own KPIs even, right? We set the target here, you know, like 5%. I want to go and say, cool, 10 % lead to a response.
I'm still on point. Good. That's awesome.
right you want to realistically be able to go and set those targets set your own kpis and then now you're able to start managing your entire team now from here the last thing you might be needing is the actual funnel that you can use to flood your dms with highly qualified leads i actually made another youtube video which if you click here you can get to that where i broke down the exact instagram funnel including the offer the content the stories as well as the lead magnet and the dm setting process as well as how to actually get your setters to perform so again click here and you can watch the next video i meant this video very selfishly if you've watched this video gotten value out of it one super pump but also two if you might think dude what else could happen if i installed this entire system into my business right click the link below you know obviously grab your free setup tracker but on top of that make sure to go click the link apply to work with us, we will literally create an audit call where we actually rip apart your entire business, figure out your constraints and show you if and how we could potentially help you.
That is whether having a content will help you convert higher on your VSL funnel, whether that could be your DM setters are fucking you over currently, whether your current strategy is trash or whether we have some scaling strategies can help you take your content from good to great and your leap from good to fucking exceptional so you can actually scale without needing to spend a shit ton of money on ads.
Now, if that sounds interesting to you, again, click below. book a call and i hope this was valuable to you and i'll see you in the next one
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
The opening line is the title, and the next twenty seconds are a dare: a million views is easy, and if it does not turn into sales it was pointless. The promise that follows is specific, which metrics to track, leading versus lagging, and which content fills the bank account versus the follower count.
Frameworks
Named ideas worth stealing.
01:04model
Three-layer funnel readout
Lead generation (quantity and quality of leads)
Call booking (how leads become sales calls)
Liquidation (how calls become customers)
Follow the exact path a lead takes from post to purchase and read the brand at each layer, the way a direct-response marketer would.
Steal fordiagnosing any content-to-call funnel
02:08list
Marketing, setting, or sales
Marketing problem: bad or too few leads
Setting problem: setters losing leads
Sales problem: closers not converting
Every weak number is one of three problems with three different fixes, so the first job is naming which one it is.
Steal forteam accountability rules
03:10model
Leading and lagging indicators
Inbound leads → audience growth, cost per lead, impressions, view-to-lead ratio
Percent of leads booked → reply rate, DQ rate, speed to lead
Collected dollars per booked call → show rate, close rate, average order value
One leading indicator per layer shows where to look; the lagging indicators under it show why the number moved.
Steal fora one-page KPI dashboard
09:52list
Content metric benchmarks
Skip rate below 30% (aim under 25% or 20%)
Average duration and the second drop-off in the retention graph
Saves for tactical posts
Shares for formats that get sent to someone else
Skip rate and average duration show where the audience is lost; saves and shares show whether the content did its job.
Steal forpost-by-post review
27:11concept
Unique keyword per CTA
Attach a unique ManyChat keyword to every CTA, or rotate seven to ten days of keywords, so leads, calls, and cash can be traced to a single post after a roughly seven-day delay.
Steal forattributing revenue to individual posts
29:30list
How to analyse a content piece
Views: good skip rate or retention, over 10,000 views
Leads: how many within 24 hours versus the usual
Backend over 10 days: response rate, lead-to-call ratio, cash
Views and lead flow judge resonance; backend conversion judges monetization.
Work backwards from next month's cash target to the calls and leads required, then see which lever cuts the lead target most.
Steal formonthly planning and ad budgeting
CTA Breakdown
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
38:18link
“Grab your free setter tracker, but on top of that make sure to click the link, apply to work with us, we will literally create an audit call where we rip apart your entire business.”
Two-part close: a free spreadsheet tracker as an opt-in, then the agency audit call. The free tool is positioned as a reward for staying nearly 40 minutes, and the next-video card points at the Instagram funnel video.
Add Modern Creator as a preferred source and Google shows you more of our breakdowns in Search, Top Stories, and AI Overviews. It only changes what you see, and you can undo it in your Google settings anytime.
Add to Preferred SourcesOpens your Google source preferences with us pre-loaded. Tick the box and you're done.
A marketing agency owner walks through the nine-part content system his team runs for eight-figure coaching and info brands, from offer design through DM sales to the metrics that show which stage is actually broken.
Jeremy Moser interviews Jeremy Haynes on turning a personal brand into a paid-ads amplifier, why the closer-skill war is unwinnable, and how to actually get richer.
A marketer, not a creative director, walks a live Whop training through the exact content, DM, and shoutout system his agency uses to turn no-name business owners into eight-figure personal brands, then opens the floor for 35 minutes of hot-seat Q&A.