The state of the market: how to sign clients in 2026
Daniel Fazio argues that case studies and testimonials have become saturated and less persuasive; buyers now prioritize understanding the mechanism (the concept) and expert execution. He recommends “deliverable stacking”—providing dense, itemized deliverables and deep, technical explanations (e.g., LLM-driven VSL scripting from 100–200 call transcripts, bucketed ads, ~30 nurture emails, pre/post-call assets, automations, continuous optimization)—as the key way to differentiate, raise prices, and increase close rates. He also suggests rapid upskilling via LLMs or focused study and promotes an AI-assisted agency program.
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A super interesting trend is happening in the market right now that has made having case studies and testimonials effectively not useful at all. Like, you do not need to have any case studies or any social proof at all to close people. Now this is like a whole broad shift that I'm seeing change in the market right now. It used to be that something like 80% of the equation of being able to successfully sign clients had to do with how much social proof you had. Now I'm going to explain the actual shift I'm seeing in this market right now. So I'm going to read a tweet to you here real quick. It says the importance of case studies has diminished over the past year or so. Everybody and their mother has made their clients millions of dollars. It doesn't mean anything anymore. It's all about mechanism right now. So what exactly do I mean by mechanism? It's this whole concept that there are two sales that need to occur in order for you to successfully sign a client. So the first sale is selling them on the concept of the thing you're doing, and then the second sale is on the concept of you being the person to do it. Okay, so now think about what case studies and social proof are. What even are these things? So it's the second sale, those are addressing the second sale. It's trying to sell them on the concept of you being the person to do it. It is not really addressing the first concept here. So I think what's important to note is that the whole idea of having quantifiable case studies right now is that is it, it's, it's. That in it of itself is saturated, I guess you could say literally every single person has made their clients millions of dollars. Like to sit here and be like, yeah, I made this client $13 million. You know what I mean? Like, I, I think, I think it's important to note that like a lot of you guys probably see this too. It used to be that 10k a month was considered a lot of money. Like, yo, like, that's a really successful business. Like 20k a month was a lot. Now it's like you're a fucking loser if you're not making a million dollars a month. Like legit. Like that's legit. Like legit. What happened? This is actually what occurred. So what does that mean? It means that if you don't have a case study that says that you made a client like $30 million in raw profit, it's like no one gives a. It's a It's a. Literally nobody gives a at all. It, it's not enough to garner and warrant attention from cold traffic anymore. So you need to completely, you need to do something completely different, right? Okay, so what do you do different? And I'm explaining this to you because this is super, super important that you do this. Let's walk through kind of an example right here. Let's say that you're getting pitched by some, all you guys, you go, you go open up your Instagram right now and you're getting pitched like 35 different video, like 35 different video editors or something like that. Or like maybe people who want to run ads for you or just do something. Why is it that you don't give a. To even respond to these people, even if they show like, yo, I had this testimonial, I have this case study. Because the reason why is because you're looking for a way for you to differentiate. Like, you know, there's profuse, absolutely insane levels of competition. And you know that this person that you need to work with needs to be doing something that is like profoundly different. And in terms of a filtering mechanism to not work with people. Like, if you have money, like if you're, if you're someone who has like a couple five figures like sitting in the bank, or you make a couple five figures of profit per month and like you're an active buyer of things, you know that like you're, you, like you're okay with spending money. You just want it to be an actual good product or service. Like, you just want it to like do its fucking job, right? Now the problem with most service providers, that they sell you something and they're literally just not good at the thing at all, right? So the way that you, the way that you exemplify to a client that you're not a complete bullshitter by going in a extremely deep and in depth explanation of exactly how you get them results, right? So let me just spew out a random example here. I'm just gonna like say I was running to cold traffic. Like I was running a cold traffic funnel myself and I was trying to sell the build out of a VSL funnel, right? What I would be doing inside of that is, is explaining all of the components associated with the VSL funnel and why each component is required in order to make the holistic system work at all. And I. And you do this by what I call deliverable stacking. Well, this is like a core concept of what I teach people inside all my shit. And it's Actually like one of the single most useful things, like useful concepts that you could ever employ in your life. This is like single handedly one of the top things where people actually implement it when I tell them to do it and they're like, holy fuck, this works really well. And you do it on sales calls and you do it on bsls. It's called deliverable stacking. So I'm going to give you an example of deliverable stacking. If I was selling a like a BSL funnel build out, I would basically be telling them, okay, here's everything that is associated with building this system out successfully. Okay, so first what we need to do is we need to actually script the VSL. So how are we going to script this VSL? We're going to start off by taking 100 sales call transcripts, maybe 150, 200, as many as you can get. And what I want to do is have a comparison. I want half of them to be people who closed and half of them to be people who didn't close. And the reason why I want to do this is because I want to throw them all into an LLM, into a model that can handle all this context. And I want to figure out the difference between the people who do close and don't close. And I want the people who don't close, I want them to be people who are in follow up nurturing because I know they're qualified. So I'm looking for qualified people who did not close and qualified people who did close. And I want to be able to compare these people and get all their presuppositions right. Okay, so that's the first thing. Once I analyze these people, what I'm going to do is extract the actual pain points, demographics and psychographics of the people who do close. And then I'm going to use an LLM to script out a video sales letter roughly around like 12 to 15 minutes long with production notes, with, with slide generation, if we're using slides, if that's the kind of target market that we're going after. And then when I have that fully scripted for you, and it's completely designed for people who are qualified and actually close and repellent to the people who do not close. So we're gonna start off with that, then we're gonna do the same practice with the scripting of the ads and the way by which we're going to go about this is to bucket this fundamental psychographic of people and bucket them into different life situations so this person might have this going on, this going on, this going on, this going on, this going on. And we're gonna make 10 buckets of these people. And then what we're going to do is script out ads with specific messaging for each 10 of these buckets and run them all at the same time and just test all of them. And then once that's done, we might want to be using an opt in VSL funnel. So then what we're going to do is we're going to script out 30 emails that sent to people who have not booked a call yet. Now interjected inside of those emails are going to be links to what we call sales assets. Now sales assets are going to be videos or documents or additional long form sales letters and they're going to be strategically placed inside of each of these opt in emails when it is deemed most necessary based on their their user behaviors inside the CRM. All of these are going to be created for you. All the if it's going to be a video, it's going to be full scripting for it. We can actually send you a camera and a teleprompter and have it scripted out for you. And then all you do is just read off the teleprompter and then we edit it for you and we remove any odds and pauses and buts and whatever the fuck. Then from there what we're going to do is we're going to set up all the automations. Once people book a call, we're going to make all of the pre call assets. So a lot of these assets, these sales assets that we were talking about before based off of the messaging of the ad or the funnel that people come in through, we're going to send them contextual pre call assets. Whether those be additional long form sales letters, additional FAQ docs or FAQ videos or YouTube videos that we produce for you. So we're gonna have all those pre call sales assets and then from there we're also going to make post call assets after people are coming in from the funnel. And we're gonna make roughly 10 to 15 of these and we're gonna make a whole bank of available sales assets that your salespeople can send to these prospects. And these are all gonna be created completely done for you by us. And the way we're going to make those is by one extracting them for what we think is necessary from your current calls. But also as more and more calls progress from the cold traffic ads that we're sending for you, we're also going to make them from there. And then all this, all these ads and all the BSLs, we're going to constantly make optimizations of this, right? So you get what I'm doing? I just went in and explain some like, in profuse levels of detail, like what the, you need to do in order to make this work, right? And you're sitting, and you're, you're sitting here like, holy, I didn't know like you could do that and that and that. Like, wow, that's actually like super smart. Like, I didn't even think to, to, to, to do that. And you know what I'm saying? Like, I, I. In this whole video, you could be watching this video cold traffic, right? Right now. You could not know who the I am. And you could have just watched me go on that tirade and you would now be like, yo, that's really smart. Like, how do I learn how to build that, Daniel? Like you're already saying this right now. You're like, I would really like you to show me how to build all of that. And I have shown you exactly zero client case studies. Zero at all. You get what I'm saying? This, this is what I'm trying to convey to you, that you need to go and be able to develop these little tirades I just went on in these deep, nuanced, like expert level explanations of what the fuck it is you actually do now. Okay, so now there's a category of you guys here where you're saying like, and you get what I'm saying, you get the concept of what I'm saying. But now your objection to me is that, well, Daniel, I get this, but I just am not an expert in what I do. I, I only know a surface level of stuff like how do I even become an expert in it? And the answer, there's, there's two answers here. The first is that you could like kind of just like big dick retard max it where you're like, well, just, just go ask AI say, like say, say you like a, you're a, you're a video editor right now. You could take the transcript of this video that you're watching right now. You can use like youtubetotranscript.com or some bullshit like that. Take the whole transcript of this video, upload that to ChatGPT or Claude or wherever the, and then tell it like, hey, this is a transcript of the video. Just watch. And I want your help with implementing what Daniel is actually saying inside of this, inside of this video. Here is my service Boom. I feel like I am not an expert and I can't deliverable stack because like I don't know like what to do. Can you help me come up with stuff that would make me sound like an expert and things that I actually can implement into my offer that would be like super dense and would make me differentiated from all the other people selling the same thing as me. And then what, what this is going to do, it's going to spit out an actually relevant answer because you just gave it like a pretty long fucking training context of this transcript of this video. You understand like this is single handedly one of the most important things you can do. Like this is how you make sales right now. It literally doesn't even fucking matter how many case studies you have. When we first launched, I have some offer running right now. I have an ad account that spent like 2.6 or $7 million on this one offer. And we don't even have case studies on the funnel. There aren't even case studies in the vsl, just none at all. It's literally just, it's just a deep nuanced like schizophrenic level of explanation of like what we do for them and like why it has to be like that. You know what I'm saying? Like you just, you just like what you sell. Like the product of what you sell needs to be so fucking deep and dense and just, just so much in it, right? So that's the first way to get over that. And the second way is obviously just go learn shit. Like when I started I would look up a topic and I would just look up a topic on YouTube and I'd watch the first three pages of a whole topic. And that was like what I did for that day. Like I clocked into work and I just watched three pages of YouTube. That was literally what I did. So. And then I also bought a bunch of courses and like I sell some too and it's like, like you can buy it if you want. Like that's great. But it's like you can watch all my YouTube too and try to make money with that first like I, I like do whatever, you know what I'm saying? But if you're gonna do anything, make sure that you do the deliverable stacking. It's, it's, it's actually very frustrating to me because a lot of people will buy my stuff. Like I'm selling an AI assisted agency program right now and like I've had literally thousands of people come through client attention and there's a. There's a very substantial amount of people who will pay me money and pay us money to join our stuff and learn from me. And they literally don't fucking do what I'm telling them to do. Like, it's. It's completely fucking insane. This deliverable stacking thing is the thing that is working right now. It's. It's like. It's like the concept. It's like, this is how you position yourself as an expert. It's. It's also like, when you sit here on a tirade explaining all the deep, intricate nuance of what the it is you're selling, you're able to charge so much more money because the client feels like, wow, this guy does, like, a lot of. If he just, like, told me that he charges twice what a normal person charges, it would feel justifiable. You know what I'm saying? Like, I think what's important to know is. Let me give you an analogy, because probably like 98% of you watching this are a male between the ages of 25 and 34. Maybe like 80% of you. But, like, I'll put it to you like this. If there's like some girl, right? And I'm assuming you're a heterosexual male when I make this analogy, but if there's some girl who's like a five or like a six or something, she's just like, you're not really into her. And she's like. She goes, can you drive me like, an hour over here? You'd be like, go yourself. You know? You know what I mean? Like, even if you're piping, you'd be. You'd be like, no, I don't want to do that. Like that. But if there were some like, 9 out of 10, 10 out of 10, like, just fucking batty, and she's like, hey, can you do this, like, profoundly inconvenient thing for me? And, like, you're probably get, like, your inclination to be able to do that is so much higher than if the fucking six said it. Now, what is the analogy I'm trying to make here is that by doing this deliverable stacking thing, you make yourself so much more attractive. Like, so much more attractive. So what does that mean? It means that more prospects will buy from you and they'll invest more with you, right? It's literally the same thing. Like, you could take the same person the same request. Like, if they're hot, then you would do more for them. You would invest more for them, you would tolerate more of their like, this is just, this is just like basic science. Like there's basic biology. Like this is, this is what occurs. What I'm trying to explain to you is that it's also basic economics. Like if you just make yourself more attractive then you can get paid so much more money. And it's not even like, oh, doing this thing will just book you. It's going to book you more calls, it's going to be able to increase your prices and it's going to increase your close rate all at the same time. So like it's just, you're just operating a fundamentally different kind of business here when you actually execute this properly. So do this. Don't fucking be that dickhead who watches my shit. And it's like, well, you know, I don't fucking feel like maybe I'll do it next week. Stop being a fucking pussy. Like, don't go watch the next video, open a Google Doc and open the chat GPT and do what the I just told you to do. Like, it's like stop, stop being stop around. You get what I'm saying? Like it's really that simple. Stop doing that. And if you want to go buy my. The link is in the description. It's a AI assisted agency. It's for both people who want to start an agency and have. We basically show you like what offer to sell, who to sell it to and how to fulfill the maximally with. With AI Right. Complete beginners can come into that, that's fine. But we also sell to people who actively run a business because it's still a client's engine at its core. So either you can come in but regardless, like this is one of the elements of what I teach inside is deliverable stacking and I fully expect you to do it because this works profoundly well. So go do it right now. Like literally don't watch the next video, just open the Google Doc and like do what I'm telling you to do or click the first link in the description. You go buy my. All right, peace. I love you, bye.
