In this candid monologue, Jeff Miller reflects on a recent wave of client churn at his marketing/ads agency and extracts lessons to differentiate his top‑performing clients (the "top 1%") from the rest (the "bottom 99%"). He walks through a detailed case study of a tax‑planning client whose ads generated $100 cost‑per‑application and $300 cost‑per‑schedule, yet the engagement fell apart due to operational breakdowns: a handoff from the offer owner to a new marketing manager, missing sales‑call recordings, absent show‑rate data, and broken HubSpot automations. Jeff hypothesizes that the funnel was effectively a black‑hole because the sales‑ops feedback loop was never established. He proposes concrete fixes—regular one‑on‑one reviews, AI‑driven secret‑shop testing of the lead‑to‑call process, and systematic audits of HubSpot tagging and automations. Jeff then pivots to contrast the practices of his top‑tier clients with those of the majority. The high‑performers: 1. Deploy "soap‑opera" or value‑dense email sequences that nurture leads and build KLT (Know‑Like‑Trust) before the call. 2. Execute ultra‑rapid follow‑up: text confirmations and setter callbacks within 1‑3 minutes of a form submission. 3. Run continuous secret‑shopping audits (one per salesperson per day) to surface friction in the marketing‑setting‑selling pipeline. 4. Produce medium‑length YouTube or Instagram videos and maintain rich web assets (case‑study libraries, searchable proof points) that give prospects easy research paths. 5. Incentivize setters and salespeople with weekly bonuses or revenue‑share structures tied to pickup rates, response times, and qualified hand‑offs. The bottom‑99% typically lack these email nurture flows, rapid response KPIs, systematic secret‑shop checks, robust content assets, and performance‑based incentives. Jeff concludes with a plan to institutionalize the missing feedback loops, leverage AI for secret‑shopping, and schedule regular performance reviews, aiming to lift conversion rates and retain high‑value clients. Key takeaways: operational handoffs and missing data cripple otherwise solid ad spend; systematic, data‑driven feedback loops, rapid follow‑up, rich content, and incentive alignment are hallmarks of top‑performing client funnels.
Chapters
Crazy. The highs are high and the lows are low. We had a client every week for the past 3 weeks decide to offboard on our services, only to then have a new client replace them within 48 hours. And those new clients either have lower cost of service or have a higher high end through a performance conversation. So I'm gonna do 2 things. One, I'm gonna self-offboard what I imagine the conversation will be like with one of these clients and communicate verbally what we could have done to save them if they they were worth saving. And 2, I'm gonna go over what my top 1% of clients are doing that my bottom 99% are not. So this client, client number 1 as an example, they're in the tax space, they do a high-end tax planning program. We turn on ads, we were getting about $100 cost per application, and it's about 8 questions deep, not including name, number, and email. And of that, typically 1 out of 3 were scheduling. So about $300 cost per schedule with this well-defined KPI. We ran their campaign for 4 months, and I remember pretty clearly when I had the conversation with the offer owner saying one of the feedback loops is you send the sales calls, from that we create objection handling advertising, that becomes a feedback loop which kind of spins up into your ideal client. As soon as they came on board, we immediately got handed over to somebody else, which has been a theme for the other 2 clients that have left. the handoff or the offboarding or the new person that I'm reporting to kind of thing. So it's not the offer owner who signed, paid, and bought or got the sales call, but instead they're, I guess, marketing manager or something like that, right? And so we ran the program for 4 months, getting $100 cost per application. The applications were pretty good. Talking to people that have $500,000 a year in income or a tax bill of $200,000, or I'm experiencing significant tax event, like I'm selling shares of a company or something like that, or they have extreme interest in tax reduction, that kind of stuff. And again, these applications are about 8 questions, not including name, number, email. So they fill it out, and all of our KPIs are green because we're getting $100 cost per application, and their HubSpot is, uh, Zapiering back to Slack so we can see who's scheduled. And at any time of the day, we're getting 4 or 5 schedules per Which is good, but I would prefer higher volume. The client said $10,000 a month, so what am I gonna do, right? So we set that up, and I remember specifically going to my contact saying, hey, we need those sales call recordings. And we kind of were flying blind because we got nothing on show rates, nothing on sales call recordings, and I must have pinged this person twice a month, 3 times a month, if not 4 times a month. Between me and my admin saying, "Hey, we need responses about show rates. We need responses about sales call processes. We need recordings, close rates, objections, some type of asset like a recording or something like whether it's a setting process or the closing process." Of course, you know, got nothing, right? What I should have done earlier is I should have come back to the offer owner and say, "Hey, it's been like six or seven or eight weeks. We need to have a one-on-one." and see what's missing here, right? So looking back, I should've done something like that. And I should've made it very clear in our messaging that like, hey, we have not received any sales call information whatsoever. Fine. And then last Friday, they sent an email around like 4:00 PM, which I guess is when you fire somebody, saying, hey, we just got notifications saying that the ads are rejected. We need to close this out 'cause there's been no conversions. And I said, well, if it's about ads getting rejected, that's really no big deal. That happens all the time. I have 3 other accounts in the tax space that got their ads rejected this week. We simply appeal, it's a manual process, they get turned back on, no big deal. Then she replies back with, I don't understand, I thought it was bad for the ad account. I go, it's no big deal, ads get rejected all the time, it's fine. But again, no conversations, or sorry, no conversions is another conversation. We back and forth over the weekend. Money come around saying, no, we're gonna offboard. I said, fine. And around that time, as I said, all right, I'm going to test my hypothesis. I'm gonna assume that they've had zero conversations, zero setters, zero conversions. Like effectively, our marketing is going to a black hole. So I filled out the form and I got no reply, no automations, no email, no text message, no nothing. All I got was a phone call that didn't even show up as the client's name about 2 hours later. So that makes me think that there's definitely something on the sales operations side that we should have checked consistently. We should have reinstituted secret shoppers, saying, "Hey, we just filled up the form. We're going to test your response rates and your sales conversations." If this client was aware that we were secret shopping, which you should have, we probably would have been able to solve this more consistently. Probably would have gotten to a point where they have been sending text messages saying, "Hey, it looks like you just filled out this form. Is that so? Reply yes." Or setters calling people back within five, six minutes, preferably less than two, three minutes. But we didn't, right? So that's a learning lesson. And I think what's going to happen is moving forward, I'm going to have an AI do secret shopping and say, "All right, this is how it's going to go." And then I'm going to pre-schedule a one-on-one call six to eight weeks later, saying, "Hey, here's the numbers." And here's the bottlenecks and here's what we're not getting. So I should have been doing that and we'll do that in the future. Overall, my interaction with this client was, I would say, B- to a B+ in communications in Slack. But again, the missing piece was that feedback loop. What's also interesting is there's a few common denominators between this client who offboarded and the other client who offboarded, the second one out of 3. They both did a handoff between the people who bought and then, you know, the new marketing manager. And they both did not have the sales calls feedback loop, right? They were both on HubSpot, which is honestly totally fine, but the feeling I got was that the automations and the callback processes, aka sales operations or marketing operations, were not as great as they could have been. The counterpoint that they're gonna say is, but Jeff, with our other marketing, we're getting results, and I was like, okay. What's the common theme, right? Is it me? Is it the marketing messaging? Is it HubSpot? Is it the team? And what's the different themes? I'll bet you if I go back to all the leads that filled out the form and send a secret shopper, I will find that the lead quality is the same, but the difference is how they got tagged in the system and the automations running on that system. So again, if I decide to deep dive, which I probably will, into their HubSpot, I'll bet you that leads that were tagged Jeff were not getting the automations that the leads tagged somewhere else were getting. So we'll see, right? I'm not necessarily sour about this, but I did not like the fact that it was Friday at like 4 PM, and I did not like the fact that it didn't come from the person who bought. Or the offer owner. Instead, it came from like 3 people deep that I've never talked to before, and that our requests for sales recordings were just never getting it at all, right? But that's just how it works sometimes, and they're gonna make a boatload of money without me, and I'm gonna make a boatload of money without them, so that's cool, no big deal. So that ties into the second part of this video, which is what my top 1% of clients are doing that my bottom 99% are not. First things first is that my bottom 99% of clients are not sending soap opera sequence emails, or emails that make people want to purchase, or present KLT, authority, those types of things. So you can call them value-dense emails if you want, but there's gotta be something between when they opt in and when they get on the call, and something after the fact. You can get pretty fun with automations and have a countdown between the opt-in time and the scheduled setting or closing time. And you can send emails according to that time interval. Text messages also. So when you send a text message to a lead that followed up, or sorry, a lead that filled out the form, your follow-up needs to be something like, hey, this is Jeff. I think you just filled out a form about blank. Is that so? Reply yes. Cool. Then the setting team should be calling people back in less than 2, 3, 4, 5 minutes, ideally less than 1 minute, but Sometimes less than 1 minute's a little bit too fast, right? So that's another KPI. Number 1 is, do you have value-dense emails that solve problems, make people want to pick up the phone, move forward, that kind of stuff? And the second is having some type of secret— no, it's not secret shopper or secret survey, but having some type of immediacy between filling out the form and the next step. Third is that my best clients are consistently doing secret shopping. With the marketing and setting and selling process, sometimes to me and sometimes it's me doing it to them. But that provides some type of check or audit, and the ones that are in the top 1% have that, welcome it, and go, when there's a problem, cool, we'll work on it and solve it as well. And so I have clients that again are doing $250,000 a month, $300,000 a month, and now they're scaling to $1 million a month, and that secret shopper process just expands. Talking like one per salesperson per day, right? And they don't know which one it is. And they have an automation that automatically purchases a number, waits 3 or 4 days, and just sends one text message— or sorry, fills out the form with that phone number and waits to receive a text message and a phone call. And when that setter calls, it's like, hey, this has been a secret shopper, thank you, your time has been noted. Like that kind of stuff, and then that feeds into a report. Those types of things are Substantial and meaningful. The other thing that my top 1% clients are doing that my bottom 99% of clients are not doing is this right here. So 10 to 20 minute medium form or medium term, medium length YouTube videos, whether they are song and dance or not, but having something like this enables somebody to research you and double-check that they should be picking up the phone and buying your stuff. The clients that have wild success have a great Not a sparse front end where they only do like one thing. I'm not talking about their Facebook page, I mean their website, that kind of stuff. And if you Google them and look them up, they have an answer to that question of who the hell are you and why should I care? The easiest way to do that, by the way, is with YouTube and Instagram. The other way of doing that, depending upon your demographic, is with your website. So having some type of article, blog, proof, testimonials, case studies. I have a client, by the way, that had their AI scrape through their entire asset and all their communications, all their Slack, all their case studies, and build out a dropdown form where you can see all their case studies and then sort, you know, your industry type, your asset— attribute 1, 2, and 3. I'm trying to be generic. And then it'll pop out those case studies. And that kind of stuff severely lifts response rates and numbers. Not only in addition to the YouTube, which does a lot of KLT, but also when people wanna do research on you, there should be something there. Otherwise, 2 things will happen. One, it's much easier to not pick up the phone, and it's much easier to not buy without regard to your quote-unquote offer. The other thing that our best clients are doing is that they give incentives or weekly bonuses to their setter and their salespeople. So if the setter has a 90% pickup rate in less than 2 or 3 minutes, as in they pick up the phone and they dial, I'm probably using the wrong term, but they dial that lead within 2 or 3 minutes, they get a bonus every week. If the salesperson hits their numbers, they get a bonus every week. Not necessarily just paying some person in the Philippines or South Africa or Eastern Europe to call everybody back, but instead having somebody on the team sit in that setter position and then give them a bonus for calling everybody back on time. There's other people that will layer that with another bonus with the number of people that are qualified and then transferred to sales. Some people will also just flat out give a cut off the top of any cash collected by their salesperson. Depending upon how you want your relationship, sometimes one is better than the other, but typically if your setter can Call 90% of the people back within 3 or 4 minutes. You're gonna have a much better show-up rate, right? Much better pickup rate. So those are just a handful of things that my bottom 99% of my clients that are not doing versus the top 1% of my clients that are doing. I've got a big list of like 15 of them, but those are the ones that pop up in my head. But overall, business is business. The highs are highs and lows are low, and just damn fucking crazy. Peace out, bye. Peace out, bye.
