You don’t have “bad leads", you have cr*p follow up. Here's how to fix it…

Hi, I'm Elliot, and last year I spent £9 million on advertising through my agency and we generated close to 74 million pounds in revenue for our portfolio of clients. Of course this is big money, but today I want to share four of the ways in which we convert more of the leads that are generated across our portfolio of clients. Because for me, I always see one of the biggest issues businesses have when I speak to them is their conversion of leads. They have bunch of leads, but they're not getting as many sales. And this really came to light for me the other day when I had a call with a brand new client and they just ran a test campaign on one of their new funnels. And on this campaign they ran Facebook ads to it and it was like a quiz funnel using scoreup. And so what they did was they spent £2,000 on meta and for that they generated 416ish leads, which gives them roughly like a just below a five pound cost per lead, which is pretty good. But unfortunately of all those leads they only got one single sale. And this guy's offer was priced at £400. So you spent 2,000 to get 400. Not very good. No bueno. So he asked me to dive in and have a look and see if I could figure out why. And so the fact that we're getting a five pound cost per lead through through a quiz funnel, which asked loads of very specific questions, told me that the issue probably wasn't with the ads, because that is probably pretty good. And so the challenge with the conversion was likely, therefore, not an issue with the quality of the leads, but instead with the actual follow up. So I looked at what follow up they had and lo and behold, they had basically no follow up, no automated email, SMS follow up in place. They had very limited manual follow up that they were sending out as well, and they certainly didn't have anyone ringing up the leads. And so this was a classic case of a leaky bucket with a bunch of leads coming in. But there was just not follow up in place to actually convert them and converse with them to turn them into sales. And this is the biggest bottleneck most businesses have. And so here's exactly how I suggested I fixed it. Number one is that we send a simple confirmation email with a loom from the founder slash CEO. So the second the lead comes in, we want to immediately fire off a email that kind of confirms their subscription as a lead, but also we want to include a loom from the founder, because in this loom we want to introduce them to the founder, we want to thank them for signing up and then we want to explain to them what is coming next and how we can provide more free value to them. There's no selling in this loom. It's all about building the relationship. And the loom is important because we want them to see and hear you and begin to build that relationship because then they're going to be way more likely to actually purchase further down the line in our future communications. So that's step number one, takes like 10 minutes to get that set up. Step number two then was to send out what I call a plain text hand raiser email. So we would send this out 30 minutes after the confirmation email and this would come very much as a plain text email because we want this to appear as if the founder, the CEO, the person in charge, has just sent this, you know, almost on their phone just as they're leaving the office. We want this to appear not automated. And we do that by making it strictly plain text. So no banners, headers, graphics, nothing. We want it to look like a regular Outlook Gmail email with literally just plain text. And so the language we use in this is very casual and, and it is very short because again, we want to simulate someone has really sent a message. And so it will normally be something along the lines of, hey Elliot, I was just heading out for lunch and saw that you signed up, really appreciate it. Then we ask a leading question because the goal of this is to get people to raise their hand. That is why it's called a hand raiser. We want to get them in conversation. We don't want to jump down their throats and try and pitch and get the sale, or we simply want to ask a question and get them conversing. Because if we get them conversing and replying to us once, then they're going to be significantly more likely to continue to do that and then ultimately buy as well. So we might say something along the lines of, well, how long has this been an issue for you? Or on a scale of 1 to 10, how much of a priority is solving this for you right now? Or what kind of project are you working on right now? Okay, you get the drift. It's a soft leading question that promotes a very short, simple reply. You know, typically the reply from them can be one word because we want them to just be like, yep, super high or not at all, or yeah, new kind of project or yeah, this is really urgent. We trying to get a super short reply, make it really easy, reduce some friction and get us in conversation. That in and of itself can change the game if you get that email right? And we do some very fancy stuff where we use AI now to personalize every single one of these hand raiser emails. Separate video on that coming soon. The third thing we do then is create four to five weekly high value nurture emails, okay? Because again, we have to get as many touch points with our new leads as possible and we want them to all be valuable, okay? You win in the game of business at the moment by being more valuable than other people in your market. And so you want to create a series of emails that continue to provide really specific and relevant value to the prospect. Because we want them to know that we are the dog's bollocks, we are the bees knees. We know what we are talking about. Not because we say all these fancy promises, but because we show you. Because we literally, you know, let you in and give you all this value for free so you can experience and understand how good we are before even having to give us any money. Because by front loading the relationship with value, by the time then it comes to actually hitting them with an offer, then they're going to be significantly more likely to take it because they've already received so much good free stuff. Therefore the pay stuff just must be amazing. So four to five weekly high value nurture emails get a lot of objections from people who aren't used to doing this because they're scared of being spammy. I don't want to irritate people, I don't want to be in the inbox. And I totally agree with that. And that's why the emphasis here is on high value, okay? We're not in the business of sending out loads of annoying reminders and just spamming people with notifications. No, these emails should be very high quality and be valuable to these people and therefore it should not be annoying. And if it is, they can unsubscribe. And unsubscribes are a great thing because they cleanse your list. They remove the people who aren't interested and aren't going to buy anyway and leave you with the people who are really engaged. So never fear and unsubscribe. But also as long as your stuff is good, then people should have no problem receiving it frequently. And it's important we build up those touch points. Finally then, this is actually the most high impact thing. But I put it last because this is the number one thing most people struggle with because they can't wrap their head around actually Employing someone to do this, but it's called the leads within 10 minutes of them coming in. So if you were to do none of this stuff that I spoke about with the automotive follow up and instead just do this, you would get significantly more results. That is because at the point of becoming a lead, the person's interest in your thing is at its all time highest and every second that passes it begins to decay. And so the quicker we can get in touch with them, the higher the chances of them converting. And there's all sorts of studies on this. Harvard did a very famous one which showed if you contact them within five to ten minutes, conversion increases. It's like 350%, which is insane. But many people, especially smaller businesses, don't have the capacity to do this. Or if you're the founder, you're like, how the hell am I going to be able to pull this off? And this is where actually you probably can just hire someone. And most people think they can't do this because they don't run the numbers. So let me run the numbers for you in this example. So in this example again, we're getting roughly 400 leads from this campaign and we are selling something that is £400. Okay? So let's say I go and hire like an appointment setter, slash sales rep, and we pay them 30k a year, right, which is very findable. What we then do is divide that by 12 because that is their monthly salary therefore of around £2,500. So that's our cost of getting this person on our team. But let's look at what that person can then do. Because from 400 leads, currently in the current situation, we got one sale, right, which is a 0.25% conversion rate, which is extremely low. Now we pay our £2,500, we hire our appointment setter and they ring up every single lead as it comes in within 10 minutes. Because it is their sole purpose, this person does nothing else, their sole responsibility is to ring these leads. Then if we are doing that, what is extremely reasonable, and this is probably quite conservative, is we actually get them to convert 5% of our leads. So we go from 0.25% where we basically have no follow up, to all of a sudden 5%. So that means from the same 400 leads we are now getting 20 sales. We've 20x the sales just from having this person. And, and so how this plays through because we're selling something for £400. 20 times 400 equals £8,000. So we have just made £8,000. Now, getting 400 leads and making 20 sales, that is extremely achievable within one single week. So this person, because we're paying them £2,500amonth, can do this every single week. So now we're actually going to get 8,000 times four, which means we're going to be putting in roughly £32,000 per month just from making this higher, assuming we're spending the two grand to get the 400 leads every single week. So therefore, that becomes a completely logical hire. And in fact, if you are able to generate more leads, the name of the game is probably, okay, well, should I hire two or three or four or five appointment setters and scale this all up? So that is what happens when you run the numbers and you get real clarity on the opportunity that lies in front of you. Because again, I always see the number one thing is follow up. And generating leads in this day and age honestly, is actually really straightforward and the skill is in converting them. So I hope you found this useful. There are not many things you can do in your business that can literally two or three or 20 times the conversion rate rate of your leads and as a result, 20 times your profitability. So let me know what you think. Peace and love. Thank you for tuning in.