The #1 Constraint Keeping You From Scaling Your Ads

One of the number one things that business owners that we talk to do not do is they don't actually map what their funnel looks like and what their number one constraint is. I've built an 8-figure business and booked over 15,000 sales calls, and I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt, there's usually 1 to 2 main things that cap your growth and keep you from scaling your business and your funnel. And in today's video, we're going to walk through what that thing could be, what you should be looking for so you can unlock that constraint and allow more people to come through your funnel, allow you to grow your business, get more clients, and ultimately scale your business. So let's go ahead and jump right in. So there's usually one main constraint, and these are the main things that I'm looking at when I'm looking at someone's constraints. So number one, we have the ad and the offer, and these kind of go hand in hand because what you're saying in the ad is the thing that is the highest in the funnel. So if you look at your funnel, right, you have ad, you have calls, and you have clients. If I just broke it down in like a simple form, the ad is gonna have the biggest impact because it's reaching the most people at the top of this funnel. And so if your ad is bad your offer is bad, everything else doesn't really matter in the funnel because they all have to flow through this ad. And so if the ad is bad or the offer is bad or the offer is something that somebody doesn't want, then you're gonna have problems there because no one's gonna book a call, no one's gonna show, no one's gonna close, and you're gonna have a low AOV, right? So number one, I'd look at what is my offer? Is this something that people actually want? Is it something that people wake up and think about every single day if you're running paid ads? If it's something where it's like it takes a long time to explain it or it's not something that people truly want or they're not really excited about it, you're going to have a really bad time on ads because you're trying to capture demand. Cole Gordon says this, but you're trying to capture demand. You're not trying to create it, right? And so I'm not trying to create a demand in the marketplace. I'm trying to capture a demand that people already have and channel it into my business. And so when you look at your offer, is it something that somebody wants, right? And this is typically 3 main things. So there's health, there's wealth, and there's relationships. Now, does your offer fall into helping people improve their health, helping them make more money, or helping them improve their relationships? And if it doesn't fall into one of these buckets, then maybe you need to rework your offer, and that could be the constraint. The common thing you're going to see here, if your offer is the problem, is you have super high cost per lead, or you have super high cost per call, you have a really low show rate, you have a really low close rate, and you have a very low AOV, and it feels like you're having to pull teeth to get anyone to do anything in your funnel. That's what it feels like. And so if you're experiencing that, then look at your offer and say, how can I make my offer better? So could I make it more around what people actually want? Could I make it aligned more with what people actually want? And look at those things. We have other videos on this channel talking about how to improve your offer, but that would be what you're looking at there. So moving on, if your offer isn't the problem, then typically you're gonna look at, wait, what is your cost per lead? Because that's your next choke point. And so your cost per lead is made up by obviously how much it costs to get someone's contact info. If you're running an opt-in funnel, you're running a lead form funnel, you're gonna have a cost per lead right here. Next, you're gonna have your cost per call. And so your cost per call, obviously exactly what it sounds like. What is the cost to get someone on a Zoom call with you? Not your cost per show, but your cost per call. And let me just explain the rest of these and then we're gonna go through what could limit each one of these. Your show rate is obviously what percentage of people who book that call show up to the call. Your close rate is what percentage of people who show up to the call close. Your AOV is how much are you cash collecting on every single sale? So I'm going to go through a calculator later in this video as well. And I'll show you how to get access to the calculator on your own end. So you can look and run your own numbers. But when I look at cost per lead, my cost per lead, if my offer is good, my cost per lead is high, right? If it's too high still, then I would look at what my actual ad creative looks like. So am I running enough formats of ads? And so we have a breakdown as well on the 9 different buckets of formats, but we have things like sketchbooks, green screen, talking head. Statics, carousels. And so if your cost per lead is high, it might just be that you need to refresh the format that you're using to run these ads. If your offer is good, you might have to test a different face as well. These are ways that we can decrease our cost per lead because your cost, if your cost per lead is too high, then your cost per call is naturally going to be high. It's going to affect everything else down this funnel. You're going to, you're starting to see the trend there. Now, if your cost per lead is good, but your cost per call is too high, there might be a problem with your messaging between the cost per lead Uh, when they become a lead and when they're booking a call. This commonly happens in VSL call funnels where you're basically advertising this free training thing, and then you're trying to get them to book a call. You're gonna have a very high drop-off rate there because people are coming in expecting something different than what it is that they actually got. And so if your cost per call is too high, it's typically a misalignment from what you said in the ad. So go back and look at your ad and say, did I talk about asking them to book a call? Or is it more of me trying to get them to do a free resource? Because if it's a free resource, then what's gonna happen there is they're gonna come in wanting the free resource, but they're not going to want to book the call. So I'd look at that. I'd look at your cost per call if that's too high. I'd also look at how are you doing your scheduler, right? We like to use things like iClosed. If you haven't seen that, I'll put a link down in the description if you want to check that out. But iClosed is great because it has the lead form and the calendar all in one system to where once they fill out their details, they go straight to the calendar. This drop-off can also be caused by if you have your lead event or capture on one page and then it— you have— they have to click and go to a separate page to actually book the call. That can increase your cost per call simply because there's too much friction of me having to put in my info. Then I go to another calendar and I got to put my info again in, and then it puts me in a place where I'm like, okay, I got to do this and then I do that again. And then I got to keep going through this, all these steps. And you have a lot of drop-off there. And so you should be ideally getting at least 60% of people who become a lead to then go and book that call. That's what we like to see. That is if you're using some sort of eye-closed scheduler like this, or there's, uh, there's other ones on the market as well that you can look at. But I'm I'm looking for that. I'm looking for at least a 60%, because if not, there's a lot of free money I could be getting there by just reducing the friction between the cost per lead and the cost per call. Okay, cool. Now moving on to show rate. Show rate is indicated by a couple things. It's indicated— your show rate can be low if your lead quality is bad. So look at number one. That's the number one thing I look at. So many people are like, oh, you could do this to improve your show rate and do this. It's like most of the time the leads are just shit. Like they're just bad leads. From what I've seen, at least. So number 1, look at your quality. So is your quality of lead good? If the quality of lead is good, but they're still not showing up, do you have reminders, right? The basic reminder texts and emails that go out. Number 3, are you nurturing them with actual value-based emails? So are you sending out emails that are answering common questions? Something we like to do is we take our last sales calls, like our last 2 weeks of sales calls, and then we'll basically have Claude transcribe those and go into like making an FAQ, like what are all the commonly asked questions, and then we'll make an email on each FAQ and send that out to them up to 3 to 4 times a day to nurture them prior to that call to get them excited to get them to show up. Number 4, is your salesperson actually dropping them value prior to that call? So our salespeople, they will go in, look at the person's business, say, hey, I saw you're this type of business, here's a case study that would align with what you're doing, here's a client that we helped out. Here's some resources. Here's some of Eric's YouTube videos that you can check out that might help you as well. And so they're trying to drop value prior to that call, um, so they can warm that person up and get them nurtured and pre-sold. Um, and then finally, again, if your show rate is bad, you could just have a really bad offer. We talked about this, but it's like, if your offer is bad or people do not want the offer, then they're not going to show up. I heard a good take. It was like, if you scheduled a private dinner with Gordon Ramsay to cook for you, are you going to no-show that meeting? No, because you actually value it. And so there's 2 main reasons why people don't show. They either don't show because they don't care or it's not important to them, or they just forgot. And if you have all this stuff I talked about, then they didn't forget. It's because they didn't value the meeting enough to actually show up to the appointment. So that's a show rate. And then finally, close rate. Typically with close rate, this is going to come down to your closer's ability. So closer's ability to sell. And there's 2 different types of calls. There's education calls and then there are sales calls. And if you're doing all the things I talked about with value-based emails, you're nurturing them prior, you're having good quality leads, then most of your calls will be sales calls. If they are education calls, then you're going to have to teach your closers on how to nurture that person, do a 2-call close, you know, get them kind of acclimated to your process and what it is that you do, and then book the follow-up call and then close from there. And that's— that requires a specific type of salesperson. So if you don't have that type of person, then I would look at, okay, what is my closer? You know, what is their ability? Have they sold an offer like this before? Have I trained them? Am I meeting with my closers every day to go over training and make sure that they are trained up on what they need to do? And then AOV finally is going to be how much money am I collecting per sale? A lot of things can impact this. Are you using financing options? Are you using— are you making people only pay one month down? Are you, you know, are you giving them a PIF discount, a pay-in-full discount if they pay all upfront? All of these things massively increase your AOV. And if you're doing too many payment plans or you don't have financing or you're not incentivizing people to pay in full with a discount, then it's gonna reduce your ROI on your ads because you're simply just not collecting as much cash upfront, which is gonna hurt everything overall. And again, like I would also look at AOV is kind of a symptom of your close rate and your closer's ability. And so if your closer kind of sucks, they're always gonna be trying to collect, you know, a dollar down or like the first month only, or like they have some, they have to whip out some crazy refund guarantee or crazy guarantee. That, you know, just kind of they use as a crutch because they don't actually— they can't actually close the person. I had a salesperson a long time ago who would only collect these deposits, but none of the deposits would ever close into actual clients. And it was simply because he was using it as a crutch to close these people to get like some form of commitment. But he wasn't really attacking the root problem, which is what they didn't really believe it could work for them yet. And so he was like getting a deposit and the follow-up would go nowhere. And then we had like, you know, 10 to 15 deposits a month. that literally never went anywhere. So that'd be a good example of that. So these are kind of the constraints I look at when I'm looking at a funnel. And then when I'm looking at how to financially model this out, this is on ericdeeran.co if you want to check this out. This is a free calculator anybody can use. We can play around with these metrics to figure out what the problem is. And then at the bottom of this, it'll tell you what the suggestions are we have to actually improve these metrics based on your constraints. So you can check that out. I'll put a link down in the description as well. So when I look at this, let's say my cost per lead is $65, cost per call is $200. My show rate is 70%, which is good. My close rate is 25%, which is great. My average cash collected, my AOV, is $10,000. My average contract value is $15,000, and my ad spend per month is $10,000. You can see all the metrics. I'm at an 8.75% return on ad spend with cash collected, and then on contract value, I'm at a 13%. Now, let's say that— let's look at the numbers here and how they change. Let's say that my show rate Or let's just say that my cost per lead went up, which actually won't affect this in this. Let's say my cost per call went up, right? Say my cost per call went from $200 to $600. Well, then I just went from an 8x ROI to a 2.92x ROI, which hurts me a lot. Now, if I go back to $200 here, let's say my show rate went from 70% all the way down to 15%. Well, you can see that I'm almost not profitable on this funnel. And then same thing when I look at my close rate, my close rate increases, metrics increase, close rate decreases, metrics decrease. And then let's say that I'm closing well, but my average cash collected is just so low in this funnel to where it's not profitable. So you can see how all these things change the system and all the things affect one another within the system. Now, if you want our help looking at your high-ticket business, seeing if we can possibly help, there's a link down in the description to book a call with our team. And me and my team will personally look at your high-ticket business to see if we can install the system for you. Or fix the current system that you already have. Hopefully this video is helpful. If you want to learn more about how I can help, click that link below and we'll see you in the next one.