How to Run a Call Funnel That Gets Qualified Prospects to Show Up and Buy
A whiteboard teardown from a members-only board meeting: one campaign, three ad sets, four conversion lines, and a no-CTA retargeting machine that warms up only the qualified.
Posted
2 days ago
Duration
Format
Tutorial
educational
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810
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57 · 43
Big Idea
The argument in one line.
A call funnel works when you run one linear machine optimized only for qualified bookings, measure the drop-off at every line, and warm the small qualified pool with no-CTA content instead of adding more funnels.
Who This Is For
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
A coach or consultant selling a $5K to $10K+ program who books sales calls from Meta ads and wants a simple structure to copy.
You already run a call funnel but bookings are low quality, no-shows are high, or you can't tell which stage is leaking.
You're running DM ads, organic, or webinars and are considering moving to a VSL plus application plus booked-call funnel.
You have a small list of past qualified applicants and want a cheap way to stay in front of them every day.
You keep adding webinars, second offers, or new funnels and your numbers got worse instead of better.
SKIP IF…
You sell low-ticket or ecommerce products with no sales call; the economics and kill rules here assume a high-ticket close.
You want a click-by-click Meta Ads Manager tutorial; this is a whiteboard strategy session, not a screen recording of the setup.
You don't have budget to let an ad set spend roughly your max cost per booked call before judging it.
TL;DR
The full version, fast.
The way to make a call funnel convert is to stop adding pieces and optimize one linear machine: ad, landing page, qualification, booked call, close. Run one lead campaign with three ABO ad sets (broad, a stacked 1% lookalike, an interest stack) sharing five to ten direct-response ads, and send Meta only the qualified-booking event. Track the drop at each line: aim for a 2% or higher unique outbound click-through rate and a 20 to 40% qualification rate. Separately, run a no-call-to-action content campaign only to qualified people so they rack up the roughly seven hours of consumption buyers need. Budget from LTV (up to 30% to acquire), kill at the ad set level at your max cost per booked call, and turn every sales-call objection into ads, VSL copy, and application questions.
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Promise of the full call-funnel setup, credentials, and the framing: this is a clip from a members-only board meeting, and you master selling on calls before you can drop them.
02:20 – 05:20
02 · One campaign, three ad sets
VSL page with scheduler, confirm page for qualified, DQ page for the rest. One lead campaign optimizing for the qualified event, three ABO ad sets (broad, lookalike stack, interest stack) sharing 5 to 10 ads, budget reverse-engineered at up to 30% of LTV.
05:20 – 06:44
03 · The main machine and its lines of conversion
A linear funnel lets you see fall-off at each stage: ad to landing page click rate, qualification rate, then show and close. Good match quality in Events Manager improves the first line.
06:44 – 11:27
04 · The propaganda machine
No-CTA content ads (belief shifts, testimonials, how the program works) served only to a small qualified pool, while the conversion ads keep hitting them too because only clients are excluded.
11:27 – 13:01
05 · Optimize one machine until $150K a month
Ad, lander, conversion, call, close is the only thing to optimize. Never feed the top of funnel with low-intent ThruPlay or click campaigns.
13:01 – 16:02
06 · KPIs at every line
2% or higher unique outbound CTR, 20 to 40% qualification rate, and booked-call-to-close as the bottom metric. Investigate every lead until each stage is fixed.
16:02 – 19:30
07 · Hot seat: the webinar that broke the numbers
A member added a webinar on top of two call funnels. The first webinar was a fence shaker on a warm audience; repeating it weekly to cold traffic did not behave the same. Recommendation: a once-a-month cadence.
19:30 – 21:46
08 · The seven-hour rule and funnel stages
Top of funnel gets the right people in, middle of funnel gets qualified people to consume, bottom of funnel converts. Buyers need roughly seven hours of consumption.
21:46 – 25:35
09 · Objections become ad angles
Find where people fall off, ask them why, learn to handle that objection live, then script it and push it into the VSL, application questions, propaganda content, and ads. Do less and optimize it hard.
25:35 – 30:03
10 · Budgets, kill rules and scaling an ad set
ABO over CBO, split daily budget across three ad sets, kill only at the ad set level at max cost per booked call, raise winning budgets in steps, fall back to the last stable level, and duplicate with fresh creative.
30:03 – 31:44
11 · Diagnosing high CTR, low intent
Kill at the KPI rather than double it. Low CTR means one ad is dragging or every angle needs a rework; high CTR with poor bookings means the angles aren't direct enough.
31:44 – 33:01
12 · Tracking lead-to-client days
A member shares that logging lead and client dates showed his best client took 52 days to buy, which made the case for the nurture machine.
Atomic Insights
Lines worth screenshotting.
Send Meta only the qualified-booking event, so the algorithm learns to find people who pass your application, not people who just click.
Be willing to spend up to 30% of client lifetime value to acquire a client: on a $10K LTV that is $3,000 per closed deal.
At a 50% booked-call-to-close rate and a $3,000 max acquisition cost, your max cost per booked call is $1,500.
A unique outbound click-through rate under 2% means the ads are not working, at any level you measure it.
A healthy call funnel qualifies 20 to 40% of the people who fill out the application questions.
Ads that promise a free training get high click-through and low intent, because Meta optimizes for free-training seekers, not buyers.
Retargeting content with no call to action, served only to a pre-qualified pool, makes qualified people say 'I see you everywhere' for a fraction of the cost.
You don't need a separate middle-of-funnel book-a-call campaign if you only exclude clients, because your conversion ads already reach warm leads.
On average a buyer needs about seven hours of consumption before purchasing, and sales calls and emails count toward those hours.
Running a webinar to an audience that hasn't seen it in a long time is a fence shaker: it converts the fence-sitters once and won't repeat on cold traffic.
Kill ads only at the ad set level; killing individual ads inside a working ad set tends to break it.
Doubling your KPI before killing an ad set rarely produces a turnaround, so kill at the KPI or earlier.
Every objection you learn to handle live on a sales call is a ready-made ad angle, VSL line, and application question.
You have to get very good at selling on calls before selling without calls becomes viable.
Tracking the date each person became a lead and became a client shows how long your best buyers actually marinate before purchasing.
Takeaway
Run one funnel and warm only the qualified
WHAT TO LEARN
Call funnels improve when you optimize a single linear machine stage by stage and spend your nurture budget only on people who already qualified.
02One campaign, three ad sets
Send Meta only the qualified-booking event from your confirm page, so the campaign optimizes for people who pass your application rather than anyone who clicks.
Start with one lead campaign and three ABO ad sets (broad, a 1% lookalike stack, an interest stack) running the same five to ten direct ads.
Set your maximum acquisition cost at up to 30% of client lifetime value, which is $3,000 on a $10,000 LTV client.
03The main machine and its lines of conversion
Keep the funnel linear so you can see exactly where people drop: ad to landing page, landing page to qualified booking, booking to close.
Improve the first line by sending Meta every identifier you can (click ID, name, email, phone) to raise event match quality.
04The propaganda machine
Run a separate content campaign with no call to action, aimed only at a qualified pool such as landing page visitors or an uploaded list of past applicants.
Exclude only existing clients so your direct conversion ads keep reaching warm leads; that removes the need for a separate middle-of-funnel booking campaign.
05Optimize one machine until $150K a month
Optimize only ad, lander, conversion, call and close until the business runs consistently around $150K a month; a second funnel dilutes your attention.
Never feed the top of funnel with ThruPlay or click-optimized campaigns, because Meta then finds low-intent people.
06KPIs at every line
Target a unique outbound click-through rate of 2% or higher; anything lower means the ads themselves are failing.
Expect a 20 to 40% qualification rate on application responses, and cut or simplify questions if people abandon the form partway.
Review every lead by hand until you can explain each stage's conversion rate and what changed it.
07Hot seat: the webinar that broke the numbers
A webinar to a warm audience that hasn't seen it in a long time converts the fence-sitters once; don't expect the same result weekly on cold traffic.
If you add webinars, run them about once a month on top of the main call funnel instead of weekly, which also avoids burnout.
08The seven-hour rule and funnel stages
Judge top of funnel on getting the right people in, not on conversions; buyers need roughly seven hours of consumption first.
Middle of funnel exists to get qualified people consuming, and bottom of funnel handles objections and details that close the sale.
09Objections become ad angles
Ask people who drop off why, practice handling that objection live on calls, then write down the version that works.
Reuse each proven objection handler in the VSL, the application questions, the retargeting content, and new ad angles.
10Budgets, kill rules and scaling an ad set
Use ABO over CBO, split the daily budget evenly across ad sets at launch, and kill only at the ad set level, never individual ads.
Let an ad set spend up to your max cost per booked call (max CAC times close rate, e.g. $1,500) before killing it.
Scale a winning ad set by raising its budget in steps, drop back to the last stable level if it stays weak, then clone it with fresh creative at the starting budget.
11Diagnosing high CTR, low intent
Kill at your KPI rather than spending double, and treat high click-through with weak bookings as a sign the angles need to be more direct.
12Tracking lead-to-client days
Log the date each person became a lead and became a client; seeing that a best client took 52 days makes the case for patient nurturing.
Glossary
Terms worth knowing.
VSL
Video sales letter. A landing page built around a single persuasive video, here with a call scheduler embedded under it.
DQ page
Disqualification page. Where applicants who don't meet your criteria land after the form, so they never reach the booking calendar or count as a conversion.
ABO
Ad set budget optimization in Meta Ads. Each ad set gets its own fixed daily budget, giving you manual control over spend per audience.
CBO
Campaign budget optimization in Meta Ads. One budget at the campaign level that Meta distributes across ad sets automatically.
Lookalike stack
An ad set that combines several 1% lookalike audiences, ideally built from your highest-value customers, into one targeting group.
Unique outbound CTR
The share of unique people reached by an ad who clicked through to a destination off the platform. A cleaner read on ad pull than total click-through rate.
Match quality score
Meta's rating of how well the customer data you send with a conversion event (click ID, email, phone, name) matches its users. Higher scores improve optimization.
Propaganda machine
The creator's name for a retargeting campaign of many no-call-to-action content ads (belief shifts, testimonials, how the program works) shown only to a qualified audience.
Fence shaker
A promotion such as a webinar or price raise that converts the people who were already on the edge of buying. It works once, then the pool of fence-sitters is empty.
ROAS
Return on ad spend. Revenue divided by ad spend; 0.87 front-end ROAS means each dollar of ads returned 87 cents in immediate sales.
LTV
Lifetime value. The total revenue a client is expected to generate over the whole relationship, used here to set the maximum acquisition cost.
Resources
Things they pointed at.
03:24tooliClosed
03:50productFive direct-response ad frameworks (Circle community template)
“The goal of top of funnel is to get the right people in your ecosystem. It is not to convert them.”
Clear rule, repeated for emphasis in the video→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
20:03
“Are we all going to light up and assume that we have lungs of steel? Or are we going to operate accordingly like we're not goddamn George Burns?”
Funny analogy about not assuming you're the exception→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
25:35
“Everybody's default is add more stuff. And it's just do less, but optimize the piss out of it.”
The thesis in one sentence→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
30:03
“I've never spent double and then it magically did better. So I just kill it right at the KPI.”
Pushes back on common media-buying advice→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
The Script
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Well, you've done it. You've clicked on the right video. And by the end of this video, you're going to know exactly how to run a call funnel that actually gets qualified prospects to show up and give you money.
We're going to simplify the heck out of it for you. And I'm going to share with you exactly how to set up your ads, how to reverse engineer your KPIs, the conversion rates that actually matter, what pages you need, what emails and text messages you need to have written, how to make sure that meta only sends back qualified conversions so that your account optimizes for only qualified people what to put on your landing page your confirmation page your dq page pretty much everything you need to run a call funnel so if you've been running dm ads or relying on organic or webinars or maybe you've already been running a call funnel but it's not converting as well as you want this video probably helped quite a bit now if you're new to the channel my name is john whiting i've scaled three online businesses past seven figures i sold one of them in 2019 i've worked with well over a thousand online business owners including some of the biggest names in the space and my entire goal is to get you to 50 to 100k a month in take -home profit then take that profit turn it into actual wealth in the bank account so that one day coaching becomes optional and if you want more videos to help you scale your online business in a way that does not completely suck you can check out the rest of the channel now just for a little bit more context the rest of this video is going to be a direct clip from one of my monday board meetings that i host with my bulletproof boardroom members and even though
our average boardroom member is bringing in about 100k a month, we all decided to revisit the basic fundamentals of running a call funnel. And I think this is probably the simplest rendition that I've got. And just a quick disclaimer, we don't run calls anymore for our company.
And a lot of my clients are transitioning to the sales call list model. But as I tell all of them, in order to sell without calls in a way that's actually viable, you need to get really, really, really good at selling with calls. And then you have the option to transition to no sales calls like we have.
And if you have any questions along the way, happy to answer them in the comments. Without further ado, let's simplify call funnels, shall we? So structure of ads.
Let's start from the bare basics because as soon as you start adding complexity and multiple this and multiple of that and try this and pile on that, even if it does well, you're not going to really know what affected what and then you're going to be sitting there guessing. And so if you set yourself up to guess, it's going to be really challenging.
All I'm trying to do is I have my main VSL page with the little scheduler thing on it. Okay, great. I get qualified people that go to a confirm page that I send back to meta and I get disqualified people on a DQ page.
Great. I'm optimizing obviously for the event that gets sent back to meta from the qualified. So in order to do that, I'm literally setting up my ad.
And we'll just reverse this back out. So here's the ad. And when I say ad, there's going to be many of them.
I'm just going to just keep this very simple. At the ad set level, we're optimizing for whatever the title of this conversion is. It's the same conversion, right?
I realize this is really kindergarten, but just to make sure that we're on the same page. So then we have the campaign level. So what I'm doing is I'm creating a basically a lead campaign.
just keep it really simple, optimizing for the schedule event or whatever I can send back through iClosed, whatever one you choose. And I'm having, I'm starting with the five main ads that are like in that, the little template that I've given you, the direct ad, the feature search circle for 2024 ad frameworks. There's the shame ad, the direct ad, there's five main ad frameworks.
So I'm going with those five and I might create, some static image variations of each of these, but I'm certainly going to film video versions of them. So let's assume there's maybe 10 ads in here, minimum five to 10.
So now we have this ad set. Good news is we're going to have probably three of them to start. And so one campaign, three ad sets.
This is going to be broad, meaning open, targeting, advantage plus, and we're just going to exclude. clients. And then we're basically going to duplicate that thing out.
Cool. And then one more time. Great.
Realize that just got a little small, but don't worry. It gets bigger. Okay.
That was a joke. That was a joke. So then I'm going to have a lookalike stack and I'm going to stack my best lookalike 1 % audiences in that one.
Ideally the highest value customers and clients you've got. And then I'm going to do an interest stack. all with the same ads.
Great. So I'm going to do ad set budget optimization. So I have more control over everything and we're going to reverse engineer it.
We're going to reverse engineer our budget based on what our client LTV is. So if we have a 10 K LTV, we've got to be willing to spend up to $3 ,000 to acquire client on back end of this. So call and close deal.
So we've got to be willing to spend up to 30 % of the LTV to acquire that client. Great. This should be, I call this the main machine.
We need a main funnel that's linear, that allows us to segment each of these stages that occur. And then we get to see where is the fall off at each stage. So the first line of conversion we have is from the add to the landing page.
That is the click rate. That is improved by having good ads that very specifically target your people, having good data that's sent back to Meta. That's very important to have good match quality scores in your events manager.
How you do that is you just set it up according to how it's the instructions that Meta gives you. You want to send back the Facebook click ID, the name, email, the phone, everything that you can. And all of that, I believe, is in the pixel setup.
SOP. The next line we have is the qualification rate line. So if we're getting people, we're not getting a high volume of qualified people coming through, that means we need to first look at are the ads calling out the qualified people?
Are the VSL, is that calling out the qualified people? And as our application questions, calling out and segmenting the qualified people. Don't worry, I promise I'm going places with this.
Then they show up for the call, they may or may not buy. That's the next line. of conversion.
So at each one of these lines of conversion, we have an opportunity to take the people who landed here but didn't move forward or booked a call but didn't close. We have an opportunity to hammer the piss out of them with content that gets them to go to the next stage. This is where propaganda content comes in.
Propaganda content is not conversion content or not conversion ads. There are no calls to action. on propaganda content you can choose to put calls to action on whatever it is that you want i'm just saying if you're asking me how should i set up a propaganda machine it is not by putting calls to action on propaganda content calls to action go on your what we're looking at here right this is what this is our main machine okay the propaganda machine all that does is feeds follow -up content basically we'll put it up here specifically For people who are qualified, because I only want to send, I only want to have a small pool of qualified people that I can be in front of fuck loads in their feed.
So the reason that Mav started this call by saying, yeah, we've been looking at your face for months is because Mav was already pre -qualified based on my segmentation, my retargeting audience for my content campaigns, my. through play campaigns that have no calls to action on them. And my YouTube outbound link clicks to go watch my YouTube videos.
That's a call to action, obviously, but it's not a book call to action. It's a unique outbound link click. Both are very low intent activities, optimization things.
So I don't want to put those top of funnel. But if I put them in an audience that's already been pre -qualified, like this pool right here, then it's really cheap. to reach those people with whatever frequency and messaging I want, as long as it's compliant.
And so what I do is I have, I don't know, like 200 some odd plus ads that are constantly circulating in my equivalent of this audience. And they're just hammering these people with belief shifts, with here's why we're awesome. Here's how the program works.
Here's testimonials. So they're like, I see you everywhere. But when I say they are saying I see you everywhere, it's qualified people that are seeing you everywhere.
If you take, that's very important. Was that a big, was that a little aha moment? Did I just hear that, Matt?
The top of funnel brand awareness. Like for what I'm seeing for this, the top of funnel is really just the VSL ads and the property that only retargets people who made it to the landing page at least. Yeah, because guess who's also, guess these ads right here.
Let me do a highlight here. These right here, guess what? They also get served to these people here because we're only excluding clients.
So you don't have to do a dedicated middle of funnel book a call campaign. It's already there. What you're doing with your content then is basically, let's say somebody is in, they're already qualified.
right based on your segmentation of some kind there's lots of different ways to get people in this green qualified bucket you could go pages that only qualified people would hit on or uh qualified you can upload a i told mav i'm like upload your leads list of past qualified people who filled out applications and run ads to them and it's a small list of what was yours like three or four hundred people something like that so i want to create that pool and then i just want to be omnipresent as fuck to that really small pool while still simultaneously letting my top of funnel conversion ads hit them too.
Because what Meta is really good at is combining the ad combinations to where it might hit them with the classic Gary Vee jab right hook on its own, which is probably what it will do. And it'll jab with propaganda content. It'll jab with more top of funnel content.
It'll jab with both. And you let it jab with both. So all I'm trying to do, all of you people, is get this small, get the right people into the ecosystem and then hammer the piss out of them with me, okay?
Now, I say that so that we're all talking the same language to now address what you're doing. Actually, you know what? One more thing before I do that.
So all of your focus until you're doing a real consistent 150 a month. real consistent to where you can do it in your sleep because it's so well optimized. It's hard enough to optimize what we're looking at right now.
It's impossible to optimize more than one thing. So if you try to do that and it gets a little fucky, it's because you're trying to do something that you probably shouldn't be trying to do. My philosophy that I've seen work, that has worked for me, regardless of whether it's a call funnel or whatever you want to call the funnel that I run right now, I don't even have a name for it.
I'm trying to optimize the one streamlined machine, and that is add, lander, conversion, call, close. That's it. And in the stages in between, I'm trying to supplement my...
sales team or manual follow -up efforts whether it's me or a closer or setter whoever is doing it i'm trying to supplement that by being everywhere in these people's feeds so that when they hear from the setter again or the closer again or you again or they see an email they've already seen you in their feed like seven times that day like you just become top of mind and you have frequency bias and that all that starts to build trust and so on and so forth what you don't do And I'm not saying you're doing this, but what you don't do is run really broad, like through play campaigns to top of funnel dumb or clicks or any low intent thing.
We want the highest intent top of funnel. Therefore meta will show our ads to the people who have the highest intent. Yeah.
So cannot stress that enough. Once we have this machine basically going, then at each one of these yellow lines, there's going to be a percentage fall off, right? So in this example, from ad to landing page view, it's going to be unique outbound click -through rate, right?
How many unique individuals did I reach with my ad and how many unique individuals saw landing page? Divide those by each other and you should get anything 2 % or higher. It is good at either the ad set level, the ad level, whatever.
Anything lower than that, it sucks. And if you have a high unique outbound click -through rate, but a low booking percent, your ads are probably like last time I laid into Ian about his, they were very discovery -based. They were like, hey, click this thing to watch this free training on how to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Meta will optimize for free training people, not people to convert. Great. Next, qualification percentage is what that will be.
This varies relatively widely, but I've seen an average of if you're doing decent here, you're somewhere between 20 and 40 % qualification rate on people who fill out your little form questions on your little thing, whether you have a two -step. application to book a call or it's all in the iClosed thing. If you're getting people that are filling out that, let's say you're using the iClosed thing, you're getting people fill out their name, email, phone, but they're not completing any of the application questions.
We need to look at what are your application questions saying? We probably need to remove the friction or remove the number of the application questions so that we can start to get some flow through. And so we're just looking for where are things getting bottled up.
And each of these yellow stages here that we're looking at, all of those should be very thoroughly investigated until you're like, I don't see how, based on the changes that we just made, we shouldn't get an incredibly large increase in percentage conversion rate based on these changes. Now, if you're not... thoroughly investigating that and you're not looking at every single lead that comes through and what did they do and why did they do it?
And you're not very hands -on with it. It's really hard to optimize it. And finally, we have the conversion rate from, I grouped a few of these into one, but we have obviously the show rate, the do rate, the show rate, the close rate, but we can just call this one just booked call to close client percentage, which is a decent metric to track.
shorthanded this a little bit right here. But anyway, I say that to say is all we're trying to do is get these yellow metrics up with the right people. And that's the main job until you're cruising with consistent high lead quality that's within your cost KPIs.
And at that point, you're probably doing 100 to 200 a month with the one offer that you're selling. This alone is a full -time job. Like to really do this well, you have to pay attention to all of these stages.
The good news is there's not a lot of them, but the more you add, the harder it is to pay attention to the things. Therefore, the harder it is to optimize. Therefore, the harder it is to do everything.
So for you, you were basically, back to you, Matt, you were basically running something like this with two different funnels, one for the rev share thing and one for the coaching program. And then you decided to add a webinar funnel on top of it for one of them. And you wonder why things got a little fucky.
That's why. It's just because your focus and attention is diluted and diverted from the things that are working to let's add more. So you launched earlier this month, if I'm not mistaken, with just the call funnel and you were booking calls and they were within KPI and you were closing them, correct?
No, I did the live webinar too on top of that from the beginning. Okay, cool. And so the live webinar then, I don't mind by the way, I'm just saying as a general rule, the more you add, the more fucked up it gets.
And so I'm just hearing we added this and we added that and we added this and we added that and then we changed this and changed that. So I'm like, that's red flag one. Not to say that you can't do webinars.
It's just, if you do it back to back weeks to basically the same audience, if like the first time you did it. earlier this month, when was the previous webinar that you did of that subject matter to that audience? So we did two this month and they were...
Yeah, the first one that you did, what date was that? Two Sundays ago. Great.
So two Sundays ago. Prior to that, when was the previous time that you had done that same webinar to that audience? A long time ago.
A long time ago. And so we call that a fence shaker. You shook the people off the fence that were on the fence that you were already in your audience.
And then you launched the same thing to cold traffic thinking it would behave the same way. And it did not, which makes sense. If I do a big old sale and get a lot of people off, like when I did the price raise back in February or whatever, got a lot of people off the fence.
I'm not going to do another price raise the following month because I basically just exhausted the people that were on the edge and I tipped them over. There's nobody else on the edge now. Very few people on the edge now.
And so now I got to wait to pull that lever again until it makes sense. So if you're going to do a weekly webinar. You got to really gear it towards cold traffic.
I would, if I was you, what I've found to be a cadence that works quite well is run your main jam for the whole month. And then once a month, you do a webinar and see what happens at that once a month cadence. If once a month live, it's kind of like doing a live workshop once a month.
It's the same idea. Doing a live workshop once a week is... a recipe for burnout.
So I would just say in general for you, keep it really simple and optimize your call funnel per what we just discussed here until you get, because if you have good people coming through the call funnel, which is priority one, even if they don't buy on the first call, guess what they're likely to do next month when you do a webinar.
Shake them off the fence. Show up at least and close if it's good. So you're just feeding.
Remember the goal of top of funnel per the propaganda machine verbatim. I know I said this because I've gone back to check because the amount of times I've gotten questions and confusions on how this should be set up is concerning with my communication level. Apparently, I'm sorry, but here I am trying to do it again.
The goal of top of funnel is to get the right people in your ecosystem. It is not to convert them. It's nice if they convert.
It is not to convert them. Everybody with me on that? You guys got that?
It's very important because on average, people will, it takes seven hours of consumption for somebody to buy from you on average. Sure, are there exceptions? Yeah, none of us are those exceptions though.
So let's throw that out. Let's assume we're not. Let's assume we're bad.
That means we have to focus on getting good, not assuming we're the best. It's like George Burns smoked cigarettes until he was 110. It's like, cool.
Are we all going to light up and assume that we have lungs of steel? Or are we going to operate accordingly like we're not goddamn George Burns? Exactly.
So the goal of Top of Funnel, get the right people in, understanding that it's going to take them seven hours of consumption to buy our shit. Ideally, that happens fast, which is why we have this. This is the propaganda machine where we force them to consume or at least invite them very aggressively on a repeated 24 -7 basis to consume out of us, right?
That's where the consumption happens. That plus what you talk about on the sales call and any other communication in between all counts towards those seven hours. So the goal of middle of funnel is to get them to consume.
get qualified people to consume specifically right and then the goal of bottom of funnel activity not even just ads but activity is that's designed to get them to convert okay so this is objection handling details all those little things so if i get the right people and i get the right people to watch a bunch of my stuff and then I let them cook in my little propaganda machine, and I know that money is being spent towards consumption from the best qualified leads I can get into my ecosystem, that dramatically stacks the deck in my favor in terms of bottom of funnel conversions.
You with me on that, Matt? Yes. So this is the structure.
This is what I'm running. If I'm all of you, and if you're having fall off points, like if your click -through rate's good, Your ads are very direct.
Hey, book a call if you want the thing and the stuff. And you just look at where are they falling off and ask yourself why. And if you can talk to the person, okay, what is your objection?
This. Cool. Now you get good at handling that on the phone, right?
This is why taking calls is very important. If you want to have any chance in hell at selling without calls is if somebody gives you an objection on the call and you don't know how to handle it, that's place one to start. You can easily say, Hey, Victor, re -script this.
So it makes it impossible for them to even, for these words to be said to them and them not go, Oh yeah, you're right. Here's my card. And that's how you want every single thing that you could possibly encounter on a call to be fully scripted, dialed in, SOP'd because you figured it out.
And the best way to figure it out is to have calls, fuck it up, and then re -explain something a different way in live time and try again and figure it out until they go, oh, and then they repeatedly go, oh, got it. And it's all handled. Now you take that handler that you just did.
Not only do you SOP it for yourself slash closer or whatever to use it to get more people from here to here, but you also take that and you put that. in some propaganda content. You put that in your VSL.
You put that as a qualification question in your application. You put that as an ad angle, top of funnel. That's how you come up with the good arguments to use in ads.
So you're like, how do you create all these belief shifting good things? It's because I talk to you guys and then I say stuff and you go, I don't get it. And then I keep repeating myself in different ways until you go, oh, I got it.
And then if you got it. And I tried 12 times to get it to you and you finally got it. I'm going to take that 12th time, package it up, throw it out front.
And then you do that again and again until all of those situations are packaged up nicely. And that's what our objection handling and sales script and all that stuff I got in circle is that's after thousands of calls, the best handlers to all of the common objections that we got. that literally if you said those words, they would close.
Now, you can't guarantee that the closers are going to say the words, but this is the structure. This is already a lot. So to add another offer, another funnel, another mechanism, another this, another that, I consider myself a relatively capable, high ability level person.
And I don't. I couldn't even fathom running two offers with two funnels with three conversion mechanisms and optimize anything. So I say all that to say what I would do if I'm you is go back to what was working from a top of funnel call funnel thing standpoint.
When you first launched this fully understanding that, yeah, you got some good low hanging fruit out of your existing audience from that. Plus the webinar. Awesome.
There's nothing broken. It's just, you shook people off the fence and now it's time to actually dial your shit in like really good and make it. convert well on cold traffic without webinars and so that if it does well on cold traffic without webinars when you do a webinar or a workshop it's going to crush and you're going to know that it's going to crush because you've talked to all these motherfucking people And you know what it takes to optimize each one of those stages of conversion.
And you know that there's only like a handful of things that any of these people say that equal no slash objections. And if you know exactly what to say to handle all of those, then you're basically cooking with gas no matter what. You're cooking with gas on your main funnel.
And that's how you optimize a funnel. But everybody's default is add more stuff. And it's just do less, but optimize the piss out of it.
And one thing I didn't mention here is all the email sequences and SMS that goes on in here as well. Like all of that is basically the same idea is just taking these and putting them in that medium as well. I got a question on this before you move off this.
Yeah. With the campaign level, are we doing a CBO or are we doing - ABO. ABO?
Okay. I would. You can test whatever you want.
I've never - CBO sucks for me. The only people I know who use CBO and it works well is e -com dudes spending 20 grand a day.
Okay. So let's see if we break the asset down. Let's just say my budget a day is $500.
How do I break it down? If I'm first launching, then I'm just going to divide that by three. And then I'm going to let each ad set spend.
I'm never going to kill something at the ad level. I'm only going to kill at the ad set level. As soon as you kill at the ad level, the ad set's just going to break.
I'm going to spend, let's just say for round numbers here, my call booking to close rate is 50 % just to use easy numbers and my target acquisition cost. or my max acquisition cost on a $10 ,000 thing is $3 ,000. That means my max allowed cost per booked call is $1 ,500.
You're going to want to let an ad set spend if it, let's just say you used, let's just say each ad set was $500 a day. I know that's not what you said, but just to use round numbers that I can do in my head. I want to let each ad set spend at least $1 ,500 and produce no booked calls before I kill it.
With me, my target cost per propaganda machine SLO purchase is basically 280, which is about the AOV. And so anytime I'll let it spend up to 300 before I kill an ad set. And the rule is, and this is all in the 2026 ad SOP.
The rule is, let's just say the interest stack starts crushing it and you're getting $500 booked calls or whatever. All you do is you take the $500 budget. and you raise it to maybe 700 or 750 and then it's probably going to suck a little bit for a day and then it's going to probably start to normalize or if it keeps sucking for another couple days you lower the budget back down to 500 because that's where it was last stable and then what you do is you duplicate that ad set And then you take out the ads that were getting the most spend, basically, because there was probably these three or seven or whatever that weren't getting any.
You leave those in the new clone and then you add in three to five additional creatives and you set it at $500 a day and you repeat the process. If you're able to scale an ad set, like right now I have an ad set. I start every ad set at 500 a day.
I'm up to 2 ,500 a day and it's basically, it's not fully breakeven, but it's 0 .87 front end ROAS, which for me is like, I'm fine. That's great. Anything above 80%, I will scale it, even though it's not.
perfectly self -liquidating, that's fine enough for me. And that's a kind of a rare thing for me is to have one be able to scale an individual ad set. So right now I have cut the other ad sets I had running and I just have one campaign, one ad set with 15 ads in it.
And I'm just keep increasing the budget every few days. Today's have been a little, today and yesterday were a little shaky. So if it's another, if it's still for the last three days, been at a 0 .5 ROAS, I'm probably going to lower it back to the 2000.
a day level that was its previous really stable point for a few days. And that becomes the ceiling of that ad set. And then I will duplicate that, take out the things that have gotten the most spend, load in some fresh creative, same targeting, relaunch at $500 a day and start the process over again.
This is one way. of spending on ads. This is what I've found for me personally to be the most effective and relatively simple way of doing this.
You just have to know what your target cost is. So I'm optimizing for qualified bookings if I'm you, and you just have to decide whatever your number is of what you're willing to spend for a qualified call. And that's the only event that gets sent back to Meta.
you, some people will say you should spend double your KPI before you kill it. I've never spent double and then it magically did better. So I just kill it right at the KPI sometimes earlier.
If let's just say my unique outbound click -through rate is 1 % and it's spent, you know, in this case, targeting a $1 ,500 cost per result. If I've spent $1 ,200, but it only has a 1%. Up on click -through rate, I'm looking at, is there an ad that's getting a lot of spend that's dragging the whole thing down or is everything sucking and I need to completely revisit my ad angles?
Which Ian, like in your case, we were just like, nope, we need to completely revisit all your ad angles because none of them are direct enough. And so you had high. unique outbound click -through rate, but very low intent clicks.
So I'm like, we need to completely start from scratch here and start with some high intent. So anyway, I'm not expecting all of you to get this perfectly. I'm still, there's probably media buyers around the world that would watch this and go, you're a retard probably.
So do whatever you want with this information, but this is how I've been doing it. And this is right now what I would have you guys do. And anything else is.
the distraction unless it's creating the content to go here on YouTube, right? And on Instagram and whatever. So I can keep nurturing.
That's it. I'm creating ads. I'm creating content and I'm optimizing for the conversions based on what the hell happens at each stage.
And I'm doing that until I'm at 150 or 200 ,000 a month. And at that point, you'll know exactly. You'll either know exactly what to do because it's obvious because you've been doing this or that's something that we have a discussion about and see what makes the most sense.
But John, if I may, bro, I think one of the big things that made a difference for me was when you shared with us during one of the calls on how you use your client tracker, where you put the dates on when we become leads and when we clients, I actually did that for. everyone. And moving forward, that's what I do now.
So just having the numbers of seeing my best clients, like my ICP, my best ICP took 52 days from the time he became a lead to the time he became a client. And just having those numbers really put an emphasis on this is how I'm such a machine because you now see what it really takes to get your best clients to really marinate in your content so that they can end up doing business with you.
I think once somebody has that relationship with their numbers, specifically from lead to clients, I think this is going to be more sticky for them. Yeah. Yeah.
You're probably right. It's not easy. That's why there's not a whole lot of people that make a ton of money doing this.
What are you going to do except get better?
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Most call funnels fail from addition, not neglect: one more webinar, one more offer, one more audience test until nobody can tell what moved the numbers. This board-meeting whiteboard strips it back to a single machine, four lines of conversion to watch, and a quiet retargeting layer that only the qualified ever see.
Frameworks
Named ideas worth stealing.
04:23model
One campaign, three ad sets
Broad (Advantage+, exclude clients)
Lookalike stack (best 1% lookalikes)
Interest stack
A single lead campaign optimizing for the qualified-booking event, with three ABO ad sets that all run the same 5 to 10 ads built from five direct-response ad frameworks.
Steal forlaunching any high-ticket booked-call offer on Meta
11:47list
The main machine
Ad
Lander
Conversion
Call
Close
The one linear funnel to optimize until it runs consistently at $150K to $200K a month.
Steal forauditing any funnel by stage
13:01list
Lines of conversion and their KPIs
Unique outbound CTR: 2%+
Qualification rate: 20 to 40%
Booked call to close
Each yellow line on the whiteboard is a drop-off point to measure and investigate before changing anything else.
Steal fora call-funnel KPI dashboard
07:12concept
The propaganda machine
A retargeting campaign of 200+ no-CTA content ads shown only to a pre-qualified pool (page visitors, uploaded applicant lists), building frequency and trust so setters, closers and emails land warm.
Steal fornurturing a small list of past qualified applicants
19:45model
Funnel stage goals
Top: get the right people into the ecosystem
Middle: get qualified people to consume
Bottom: convert with objection handling and details
Paired with the seven-hours-of-consumption rule: top of funnel is not judged on conversions.
Steal fordeciding what each piece of content is for
26:30list
Ad set budget and kill rules
Max CAC = 30% of LTV
Max cost per booked call = max CAC x close rate
Let each ad set spend up to that cost before killing
Kill only at the ad set level
Scale winners by stepping budget up, fall back to last stable level
Duplicate the capped ad set, remove top-spend ads, add 3 to 5 new creatives, restart at $500 a day
The full spending loop from launch to ceiling to clone.
Steal fora written media-buying SOP
CTA Breakdown
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
01:20subscribe
“If you want more videos to help you scale your online business in a way that does not completely suck you can check out the rest of the channel.”
Soft channel plug over a scroll of the channel's video grid early in the intro; the paid offers (Bulletproof Boardroom, Propaganda Machine, Viktor affiliate) live only in the description. The video ends abruptly on a member's comment with no closing ask.
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A coaching-business owner walks through the exact commission structure, click-through numbers, and embedding tactics behind an AI-agent affiliate deal that's paid him $58K and counting.
A 70-minute three-way debate where a low-ticket funnel builder and a high-ticket call-funnel CMO argue five questions, and the real fight turns out to be about math versus simplicity.
An 83-minute live whiteboard session on how one coaching company sold a $30K program for three months with no calls and no closers, and outsold its own nine-person sales team every month.
A live 52-minute Instagram audit of a consultant doing about a million a month, with a page that has value content and no strategy, ending in a linked-reels funnel that walks strangers to a mini VSL.
A coaching founder fired six of his nine salespeople, locked the other three out of the inbox for 90 days, and found that a written offer doc outsold the whole team.
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