How to Double Your Booked Sales Calls (3 Fixes)

Ladies and gentlemen, I am going to show you how to double the volume of your sales calls. If you're a business that books appointments or calls, I'm going to show you how to double it. The strategies you can apply to immediately get some results. And there's 3 key areas I'm going to cover in this video, and I'm going to give it all away to you. Okay. You see, my name is Elliott Botterill, and I am on a mission to share all of the wonderful things I've been learning around the world of marketing and sales throughout my career. I started off as a humble man inside a big advertising agency running Facebook ads for some of the biggest brands in the world. I then quit and started my very own little business out of my mum and dad's front room, grew that business into a 7-figure agency, which I then exited and joined Entrepreneur's Circle, where I reside now. And throughout that time, throughout the last 6, 7 years, I've been able to go and meet and learn from all of your favourite gurus and just have a blast. Look at this epic picture when I walked out on stage once. That was so cool. Anyway, needless to say, share that so you understand where this information is coming from. And one of the businesses that we have is a software company. It's called Genie AI. It's a sales and marketing system. And we sell Genie AI through demos. We run ads, people book demos, our sales team take them through the system to make sure it's the right fit, offer them a place, and boom, the deal is done. So we run lots of ads booking demos for this particular software. So if you're a SaaS company or you just get calls booked in, whether you're a coach, agency, consultant, whatever it might be, this is going to show you exactly how we do it. And this is very pertinent for me right now because as you'll discover, we have booked many thousands of demos. And in fact, here's a quick little screenshot from our tracking platform. Some of our stats so far this year, $153K spent on this particular funnel. 1300 sales calls booked in. So we book in a lot of calls. And so needless to say, it's not easy. And unfortunately, such is the world of marketing. I'm making this video now because we got off to an amazing January, record January in terms of our number of sales for Genie AI. And so we were buzzing because our number of calls was at all-time highs. We felt like we had really cracked it. Then February came along and all of a sudden We hit our target in February, but there was quite a steep decline in the number of calls booked. And in fact, our cost per booked call literally like doubled towards the end of February. And so this is not good because we were normally paying around £77 for a call and it shot up to like £150, whatever, can't spell. And so Why is this? Unfortunately, any of my seasoned marketers will know that this is down to a phenomenon known as creative fatigue. You see, our stuff just didn't stop working. It's not like the links broke, people couldn't book a demo. We didn't change the offer, we didn't change the landing page design. The thing that killed us is creative fatigue. And so creative fatigue occurs when The people in our market get sick of seeing our stuff because they've been shown it so many times. And so if we were to look at a chart that tracked the performance of ads over time, what we'd see is when we launch an ad, whoo, it starts working. Over time, it's going to slowly dwindle, okay, until it is no longer effective. That is because people get bored of seeing it and they eventually just stop giving a fuck about it and they don't respond. And therefore, no results. Lots of interesting stuff actually happens here from a Meta ads perspective, because what Meta does is it knows that you need to see ads multiple times before you actually take the purchase. So when you start running ads, it shows it to the same group of people over and over again. And that is why we contract something called frequency, which is the amount of time someone has seen an ad. And as the frequency increases, yes, you mop up conversions, but eventually it starts to die. And so that's why the name of the game is having a constant influx of new creative to maintain high-level performance. We want to constantly be launching new stuff. So as these ads eventually die, they are replaced by things that are better. And so that's the underlying thing. That has got us in February. And so here is what we're going to do about it. Creative fatigue, whilst it is mainly tied to the ads, there are actually other elements we look at when it comes to debugging exactly why we think a campaign has stopped performing. Because creative fatigue, we know that exists, fine. Kind of hard to like sit down and analyze and just be like, yes, it 100% is creative fatigue's fault. Okay. So instead, I'm going to walk you through the process that we go on when we want to generate more calls booked through this standard kind of book a call funnel. And so obviously we're going to look at the ads, we're going to look at the landing pages, and we're going to look at the scheduler. Okay, an underrated thing to look at. And so I'm going to dive in and show you the very specific tactics we have taken that is already on trajectory to double our sales calls. But the underlying thing that does affect all of these is messaging. The messaging is really so important. I cannot understate the importance of messaging, the art of communicating your offer to the right people in the right way so that they're willing to take action. Now, Back in the day, there was a great prize to be had for those that studied marketing, read books on copywriting, had their swipe files, and really meticulously poured their heart and soul into crafting copy, precise words that would resonate and move with their market. And whilst that is still true, we obviously live in an AI age. And so if you're anything like me, you use AI to create stuff, to create ad copy, to create landing pages, video scripts, you name it. Well, my friends, let's talk about the challenge of AI slop for a second, especially as it relates to performance marketing. Because if you are just quickly iterating and creating scripts and landing pages using AI, you are at high risk of suffering from immense amounts of creative fatigue. Because AI slop is what occurs when we use AI to generate simple copy and don't really tweak it, or don't even give it much context to create the thing with. And as a result, we get a very generic output which is very similar to what other people are doing. Because the principle is, you got to understand, people that get genuinely extraordinary results can only do so because they do things differently to everybody else. And in a world where everybody's using ChatGPT to write me some Facebook ads, That is what everyone's ads are looking like. And Meta has AI built in now, and all the ads are just very super generic. And that is fine, they will get you average results, but they will not get you the extraordinary results, which is what this channel is all about. So it's why I preach to all of my close clients inside my secret vault the 10/80/10 principle. The first 10% of anything with AI, we give it deep context on the idea, our ICP, our business, our tonality. It then does the 80%, but then, and this is the bit that everybody skips, the final 10%, we humanise it. And so we've had a bit of a shift in our business where we got very excited with AI, used AI immensely to create lots of things, and now we are now injecting more human time. So we're actually even moving to like 10, 7 to 20, because we're spending a lot more time on the end. And I'm finding myself locking myself in my room, getting my binaural beats on and actually writing copy again. Because when we do that, when we put in that additional effort, what we are producing stands out in the market, stands out in this AI-driven landscape. So power to the writers. And this is just my warning because a lot of people will make a funnel or use some kind of AI funnel builder, it will work a little bit and then it will die. And it's because your AI slop is good enough to capture a few people, but it's not good enough to capture a lot of people. Okay. So with that in mind, step number 1, okay, calls are dying. Cost per booked call has gone through the roof. We observe that our cost per click and click-through rates were going down a little bit as well. And so that tells us we have a classic case of creative fatigue. And again, it's always important to diagnose the constraint that we want to focus on. And in that case, when our ads are dying, we need to make new ads. So yesterday I rolled up my sleeves and I got in the studio and like the little dancing and singing monkey I am, spent about 4 hours scripting and recording these ads. Now, this is a job that I paid the price here. Because I should have been doing this every single week regardless of how our ads were performing. But I, like a lot of people, I was busy and ads were performing well. And so we skipped a couple of weeks and then boom, Meta slapped us in the face and I paid the price. So I broke my own rule here, but so I had to make up for it and get in there and record a whole bunch of videos. A few things you will notice about these and a few key things you should factor in when you're making new ads. Number 1, nearly all of these are selfie style because I'm finding that authentic human angle is working really well for us at the moment. I put a big emphasis on visual hooks because again, if you are scripting out an ad and then recording it selfie style, that's fine, but there is massive gains to be had by understanding the psychology behind visual hooks. What do I mean by that? How the video starts has a massive impact on where people staying. You have the audible hook, what we say. You have the visual, what people see. So this one here, the phone's on the floor, my foot's over it, and so I'm like, it's like I've stamped on it, then I pick it up. Sounds kind of shit when I talk about it, but trust me, that was a great visual hook. Um, I got really locked onto this recently because I've observed it in some of our videos where I've experimented with this before, but then I saw on Instagram this girl who starts every reel— she wears a vest and she starts every reel tying her hair like this. So her bare armpits are always shown. Thankfully, she has them nicely shaved. But she discovered when she did that, it was a visual hook, and a lot of people— we can kind of guess the type of people— would view those videos. And she got millions of views and millions of followers, and every single video on her feed starts her with her bloody armpits out. And that is a type of visual hook. Do not for one second go and do that. I'm not suggesting that. But we try all sorts of things. I'm spinning around in a chair. Got things on a whiteboard, I'm stamping on it, I'm going for this like low angle, uh, all sorts of different stuff. The next thing you'll observe is these are all different. You know, back in the day we would be proprietors of hooks and bodies and then calls to action, and we film a bunch of each and stitch them together. Still kind of works now, but the algorithm tends to prefer stuff that is more diverse, and as a result we just make and film a bunch of different ads. So these are all individual ad scripts. So we film a bunch of ads. Next, we want to make sure we address the landing page as well, because when you do need a quick turnaround, we never want to leave, uh, any stone unturned. So we make changes to the landing page as well. What do we focus on? 3 parts specifically. Firstly, the VSL. So the VSL, the video sells— that's the main video that sits on our landing page because we know if we get that video right, it's going to convert a lot of people into the calls. But also those calls will then convert to sales more because the video sales letter has done its job. It's already sold them on it quite a lot. And so our current video sales letter wasn't performing that well. We could track that people were landing on the page and they were playing it, but it was expensive. Okay? It just wasn't doing its job. So I scripted out two VSLs centered around two different angles that I could then pit against each other. Now, I love a good VSL. Many ways to write a VSL. In my opinion, the VSL starts with an absolute killer hook. We then highlight the pain that the prospect is dealing with. We then name the enemy, the common enemy that we are fighting off against. We then explain the epiphany that we had that gave us the tools to slay this enemy, which means we talk about the mechanism, i.e., our thing that is now the solution to this problem. And then we give them the pitch with the call to action, and then we effectively pre-tackle objections at the end as well. Honestly, don't need to overcomplicate it. Take these areas, go for a walk, dictate your answers, and you will have the basis of pretty solid VSL. You then just need to hone it, use AI to hone it, and then sit down and edit it, and you will get some great stuff out. The headline. So the headline on the page is the biggest thing that impacts the volume of people that go through. And so we test 2 headlines for each of these different VSLs. And then I was keen to do a design change. 'Cause truthfully, our landing page had been working for a very long time, like 2 years. And we basically had made very minor updates to it. And so it's not best practice to just do a whole new design because if something does work and has a history of working, you should make a little tweak. However, I want to test a brand new design to see if we can get the massive increase in the conversion rate. Because tweaking is good and makes sense,. But if you want genuine, very significant potential changes, you got to go with bigger changes. And so we're doing a big design. But as you'll see, we're not getting rid of our current landing page. We are going to test it alongside it because with big changes, yes, there's big upside, also very big risk. And so we want to mitigate that. But the landing page is a key, key area. So once we've got our landing pages sorted and we've got our ads sorted, I wanted to actually tell you a little bit more about what we do in Meta, our advertising platform of choice. So we effectively speed launch both sets of new ads, of which I put the native Instagram captions on because again, I want my ads to look like a native piece of content. And we run the new ads firstly to the old page to see, well, if we just send new ads there, are we going to get results from this old page that was proven to work over the last 2 years? Chances are yes, we should get some. So that is the quickest route to reinvigoration, but not the quickest route to massive results because new ads, yes, that is a good lever there, but we've done nil there. So the only uplift can come from the ads. Now, if we have new ads, we then launch another campaign going to the new landing page that is drastically different in design. Because what this can now give us is the double lever effect, where if we make a 10% increase here and a 10% increase here, that actually is a 50% increase overall, which massively can influence our cost of book call and give us very, very good results. Now, of course, this could totally flop and could totally decrease, and in truth, so could that as well. But we diminish the chances of that going wrong by having a large volume So I filmed 25 ads and I'll do 25 tomorrow to make sure we're feeding the machine because every additional ad we create increases the probability that 1 or 2 of them are going to work. And again, we diminish our risk here by also running the old page. And this is how we're able to make big shifts while not risking too much during any given period. Now, specifically, the campaigns inside Meta are actually so simple right now. We run one campaign for each. The underlying piece behind this is the data that the campaign is being fed, i.e., our Meta Pixel events that all run server-side, either through our system Genie AI or through HiROS, our tracking system, which just means we're sending in the best data that's not getting blocked by all the ad blockers that affect us now. Each campaign is going after cold traffic because that is the primary focus of this particular funnel, and we target 3 audiences. An open audience, which is just complete demographics and geography but nothing else. An interest stack and a lookalike stack where we just have tons of interest and tons of lookalikes that we know have worked for us in the past. And I use ABO, which means ad budget optimization. So I control the budgets on which ones are spending here because I generally find that we actually get better results doing that. And in these, there are videos only. So all the ads I filmed were videos. And the videos go in these cold campaigns. That honestly is like meta ads, media buying life right now. Has been for a while, to be fair. We then take it to the next step with our retargeting. And what we do here is I set up the retargeting because we obviously want to retarget people. But we have found when we are running lots of videos in the cold campaign, using images only in the retargeting is very effective because they already have recognition of the name, the software, or the face.. And so I shot loads of images of myself, landing page, the software that they then get retargeted with once they've watched one of the videos. Because you'll see here, I only retarget the video viewers. Now, best practice would be to be all your website visitors and leads and no-shows and whatever. Right now, for reasons I'll explain in another video, we had a pretty crazy spike in website traffic and it threw off a bit of our tracking.. And so for the time being, we only want to track the video views of this campaign because we know they should be a warm audience and not affected by this big spike that we had, which is a story for another day. And that is the basic setup. So it's really not too crazy, not too comprehensive. And what we'll normally do is once we have got a bunch of assets that are working from those campaigns is then launch another version that has dynamic creative and scale it from that. Okay, the final piece of the puzzle is the scheduler. And so this is the mechanism by which people actually book the calls. And when your call volume decreases quite a lot, we do want to look at the scheduler, okay? Because what we implement on our scheduler, which is a best practice for high lead quality, is email and phone verification. So on our schedule, when you book a call and you put in your email and your phone, you get this little button that says verify phone. It then sends a one-time password to your phone you have to put in. So we get good details. This deters all the spammy bots and it enables you to get high-quality appointments booked in. Now we normally would have the same for email as well, but sometimes, sometimes there can be little issues with this. So Hotmail have been a real pain in the ass recently. As an ESP and have rolled out a bunch of changes, and some of them were affecting some people receiving the email code. So they were trying to book an appointment, they physically couldn't. Now sometimes, to be honest, that is just people being dumb and like having ancient technology that doesn't enable them to use modern-day websites. But sometimes there are external factors. So we, for example, we took that off, and so we removed a step of friction, which should always increase the volume. But we did leave it on the phone number to mitigate potential large amounts of spam and still give us an element to control the quality. Now, the other thing when your call volume dies is your availability. Okay, sometimes your availability is messed up or blocked out. There's just not much time in the diary. How it works for us, we work a 4-day week, so we work Monday to Thursday. And so as we— on a Monday, we let people book on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, of course. But then as we get to Wednesday, we open it up so they can now book for the Monday and Tuesday the next week. Because what we've observed before is sometimes the diary gets full, and so people are opening it and trying to book, and there's like one time slot left at like 6 PM in the day, which not many people are going to like to take. So you always want to make sure you've got capacity. You want to make sure your scheduler is working, and you want to make sure you've got appropriate measures for lead qualification. But sometimes if you're not getting enough, you want to loosen the reins a little bit, get the volume throwing through, and then you can increase friction to boost the quality back up. Boom. So those are the key levers you want to pull if you want to increase the call volume through your call booking funnels. I'll report back on the results from this very, very soon. If you like this video, please subscribe, drop a comment, let me know what types of videos you like to see. I really enjoy making these and I really appreciate you for tuning in. My name's been Elliott. I hope you found this useful. Boom. God bless, peace, and love.