In this video Eric Deeran, a founder of an 8‑figure business, explains why obsessing over the cheapest leads is detrimental to sales performance. He argues that low‑cost leads are usually low‑quality, attracting the wrong avatar and causing Meta’s ad algorithm to optimize for cheap, non‑buying traffic, which drags down close rates and inflates true customer acquisition cost. Deeran recommends deliberately adding friction to lead capture forms—such as revenue‑based disqualification, owner‑status questions, intent timelines, and other qualifying prompts—to filter out tire‑kickers. He outlines two viable funnel architectures: (A) a high‑friction form that yields fewer, more expensive, but higher‑quality leads, and (B) a low‑friction form that generates many cheap leads but requires aggressive, rapid follow‑up and a strong sales team to qualify on the phone. He stresses that ad creative must be highly specific to the target avatar, as the creative now drives Meta’s targeting. Finally, he provides a metric framework—cost per qualified call, qualified‑to‑unqualified ratio, and cash‑per‑call—to monitor lead quality and adjust friction levels. The video ends with a call to action to book a consulting call for high‑ticket businesses.
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I've built an 8-figure business, booked over 15,000 sales calls, and I've gotten over 70,000 leads for my own business. And in today's video, I wanna talk about why you don't want the cheapest lead possible. I talk to so many business owners where they're obsessing over how cheap their lead is and trying to get the cheapest lead possible. And that's the number one thing that's killing most business owners' funnels. They're obsessing over how to get a cheaper quality lead when what they need to be doing is obsessing over getting a better quality lead. And in today's video, we're gonna be talking about why cheap leads are actually killing your close rate and hurting your business and what the counterintuitive Fix to that is. Let's jump in. The main trap is that your cost per lead looks great, but your bank account doesn't. And what you actually want to do is make your leads more expensive. I can't tell you how many times we have done this where the cheaper the lead, the lower quality the lead, and then the worse your ads end up performing because you're just optimizing for the bottom of the barrel people who don't actually want what your service is. They don't want to buy, and they're just a complete waste of time most of the time for your sales team because everyone optimizes for these $27 leads and they feel like they're winning. But the truth is, is you get on calls with these people and they're tire kickers. They're the wrong avatar. They have no budget. They're just curious. They're not actual businesses because there is a floor to a qualified lead, right? And so if you're getting leads for $27, typically they're just not the right types of people. And then you're optimizing around this thing that is not your ideal avatar. And then Meta, the platform, starts to optimize around these people who are just curious and aren't really your avatar at the end of the day. A lot of times when people are doing this, they have no questions on their form. They have no conditional logic on their form. They have no sort of friction in their form, which is gating out the right types of people. And then their close rate ends up tanking and they blame their sales skills. And then they're trying to optimize around something that isn't the problem when the problem is just the lead quality. Meta optimizes for whoever is the cheapest, not whoever buys. And so if you allow people who are bad leads to come into your system, Meta is going to continue to find these people. and optimize around them because that's who's coming in, not the people who actually buy. And also low friction funnels are really easy to fill out. So then your algorithm kind of floods you with these people that are easy and easy to capture, and then they don't end up converting into anything. And that's why cheap leads aren't cheap. They're actually the most expensive thing that you're gonna get when you're running ads. And so you need to make your leads more expensive because you're gonna see higher show rate and higher close rates. I can't tell you how many clients I've talked to where most of the problem is not that they're bad at sales, it's just that they're betting they're getting bad leads and they're not getting the right people on the phone. And so the first thing you need to do is actually add friction to the lead form. It's different than everything you've been told and you have to do it anyways. And so what friction looks like is basically disqualifying below your revenue tier. So if they're, you know, you don't take on people under $10K a month or under $25K a month or whatever that revenue threshold is, then you just DQ those people and you don't even let them hit that pixel, your Facebook pixel, or optimize around those types of people. The next thing is just qualifying questions, right? So are you the owner? Are you this type of person to confirm you are a home service business, to confirm you are an XYZ type of business to confirm you are this person. That's what we're trying to ask like first, essentially. So we typically ask to confirm you're this type of person and then what's your revenue? And then some sort of other commitment question like how soon are you looking to invest in XYZ or how soon are you looking to work with XYZ or work on XYZ solution? And then yes, your lead cost does go up, but that is the point, right? You're paying more per lead, but you're paying less. Your CAC is going to be lower because you have more of the right types of people entering the funnel. And so a $60 lead beats 10 $27 leads that ghost you at the end of the day. And the only number that matters is the cash collected per booked call, not the CPL, not the CPM, and not any sort of vanity metric that Meta shows you. All you care about is essentially how many leads am I getting at what cost? And then what is my qualified to unqualified ratio? And so if my qualified ratio is like, I'm looking for 80% qualified and then 80 and then 20% unqualified, because you're never going to have 100%. But a lot of times if your leads are $27, you're going to have like 10% of that are qualified and then 90% are going to be not qualified. And then you have to pick a model, right? So you have to either do high friction or high pressure and then never either one of them. And so the only 2 kind of valid systems that we found is like Model A is a high friction form, which means you get fewer, more expensive leads and you have more of a normal sales process and the form does most of that qualifying. Model B is that you have a low friction form, tons of cheap leads, and you have to be super aggressive on the phone. And this is fine if you're like, you have a really good sales team. If you have less friction on the form, You just have to have speed to lead. You have to double dial people, you have to relentlessly follow up, and the phone does the qualifying, right? And so it's like you're either doing model A or model B. And so most agencies run both versions. They have cheap, low-intent leads and they have no follow-up systems, right? So if you're gonna have cheap leads, you have to have a good follow-up system. They do one dial, right? They leave one voicemail, and then people say they circle back next week and they don't get in touch with them. That's how you burn a ton of money on ads is if you have really weak follow-up and you have really cheap leads. that have no intent, right? Number 4 is your creative also qualifies too. And so the ad should do most of your selling. This is a big, big issue I see with a lot of people is they have very generic ads that attract very generic leads. And so if your ad could be for anyone, your leads could be for anyone, right? So you have to make sure it's very specific. Who is the target market? Hey, if you're a home service company doing over $25,000 a month and you want XYZ, you have to call out the audience in the creative. If you run a medical aesthetics clinic, not just like attention business owners where it's very broad. And you have to have very direct messaging because Meta's going to use that to target the right types of people when they come into your system. So they're going to actually transcribe your video ad and then use that to target the right types of people. And so what you say matters a lot, matters way more than you think it does. And then if your leads are the right avatar, but they're low intent, it's a creative problem, not a targeting problem, because the targeting is the creative. Creative does the targeting now. And then here's what I would look at this week inside of your funnel if you want to see if this is happening to you. So look at the last 30 days. And then take the total ad spend divided by qualified book calls, and then that's your real cost per qualified call. A lot of people are like, oh, I'm getting $100 cost per call, but then 1 out of every 5 is qualified. It's like, no, you're getting a $500 cost per qualified call, not $100 cost per qualified call. And then I'd look at, of all the leads I've gotten, what percentage is qualified versus not qualified? And then you can basically take both of those things and say, okay, am I 80% qualified, 20% unqualified, or am I, uh, You know, much lower than that. And that can tell you how much friction you need on that form. And then if your cash per call is under 2x your cost per qualified call, you're too loose. So like cash per call, we talked about this in a different video, but cash per call is essentially, you know, how much revenue did you make? How many calls did you book? That's your cash per call. And then I would add one disqualifying question to your form this week if you're too light on that friction. And then you can kind of get those people, these tire kickers out, they'll self-select out, and then your CPL will rise a little bit, but your close rate should go up as well. So hope that helps. This is why you don't want to have cheaper leads. This is some of the things we go through with our clients. Obviously, if you want to learn more about how we can help, there's a link down below to book a call with our team to see if we can possibly help your high-ticket business scale. That being said, we'll see you in the next one.
