Solve a leads, sales or profit-per-customer problem

1. Where this page picks up

Once you know where your constraint sits, four possibilities are named: leads, sales, profit and cash flow. Profit here means lifetime value. It is given that name because the trouble is that you do not make enough from each customer.

This page takes leads, sales and profit, in that order. It does not diagnose them. The test that sorts one from another starts from your acquisition cost and lives on SOP 196.

2. Leads cost too much

The case. Your sales are fine. You close the leads you get, but you cannot get enough of them, so the cost of winning a customer runs high because of leads.

Many routes, one summit. The fixes below are offered as an exact example of the many paths up the mountain: several routes, any of which can clear the same constraint. That picture, and how to weigh one route against another, is worked through on SOP 186 — Pick the path up the mountain that fits your skills.

2.1 The fixes, in the order given

1. Better ads. The first route named. Frameworks for a new ad are on SOP 114 to SOP 117; turning one winning ad into many is SOP 113 — Remix and remake a proven ad.
2. Hooks. Better hooks would bring the cost down as well. What a hook is and the forms it takes: SOP 121 — Write a hook.
3. Better content, made with hooks and branding. That would make your leads cheaper. If you make no content now and you start, your leads would cost less, especially if ads are already running.
4. Better messaging. This is the branding: what your advertising contains, and which associations and pairings you want it to make. Pairing a brand with what the ideal customer likes, and how a pairing turns into a higher price, is SOP 94.
5. A better offer. Improve the offer itself. Rating an offer against the four value drivers is SOP 3 — Diagnose an offer on its value drivers; the offer pages run from SOP 1 to SOP 10.
6. A money-model mechanism on the offer you already sell. Take what you sell now and turn it into a giveaway, a win-your-money-back offer, a decoy, or a pay-less-now-or-pay-more-later offer. Built on the thing you already have, any one of them would bring you more leads. Each has a page of its own: SOP 61, SOP 60, SOP 62 and SOP 64, in the order named here.
7. A better avatar. Called a bit of a strategy, and placed somewhere between sales and lifetime value. Maybe the leads are short because the people you are chasing are the wrong ones. If you were clearer about the customer you are aiming for, your leads would be of higher quality, and in turn you would earn more.

2.2 A campaign built for buyers, not for leads

At one recent launch, the ad campaigns were given different objectives. Some were optimized for leads. Others were optimized for return on ad spend, which meant finding the people who would buy. A campaign built for buyers brings in leads too, and on those campaigns each lead cost several times what the lead-optimized ones paid. That, it is said, kind of makes sense: one kind was aimed at the largest number of leads, the other at the largest number of sales.

The part called really interesting: with leads costing that much more, the buyer-seeking campaigns still returned several times as much as the lead-generating campaign.

2.3 Going up market

The campaigns are raised because sometimes the choice in front of you looks like this.

Customer base	Cost to win one	What one brings in	Return
The one you already sell to	$100	$500	5x
Another avatar	$500	$10,000	20x

The second customer costs five times as much to win. But one return is 5x and the other 20x, a 4x difference in relative return. The arithmetic holds as stated here: $500 over $100 is five, $10,000 over $500 is twenty, and twenty over five is four.

So sometimes the most valuable move open to you is to stop selling to one group of customers and go up market, to better avatars. Up market as one of the directions a brand can take, and how to move by changing what you pair with, is SOP 93 — Choose a market direction.

2.4 Which fix to try first

The answer: the one you believe you are most likely to succeed with, given the resources and the skills you already have. Some examples:

• You have run ads but never made content. Then the advice would probably be to stay with ads.
• You are really good at content. Then ads would not necessarily be the first bet. The question becomes whether you can make more content, or better content.
• The offer. Here the question is whether, without changing your services, you can recombine them into something more appetizing. The money-model mechanisms fit here: they take whatever you already do and make it better, or more appealing.

Picking a route by the skills and resources a person already has, and the method-you-know table behind it, are set out in sections 4 and 5 of SOP 186.

3. You close too few

The case. Leads now come in, and the new complaint is junk: plenty of leads arrive, and you cannot close them. The ways to work on it, in the order given, follow.

3.1 Conversion on the page

Optimize the page for conversion. Check its flows, its headlines and subheadlines, and the lead magnet as well.

If you have no lead magnet. Probably 10 percent of the time, by one estimate, a page teardown finds a page whose whole ask is to request an invoice, request a quote, or book a strategy call. Typically, that is not much of a draw. It will raise the quality of your leads, but leaving the step in front of it unimproved costs you a lot of sales.

A broader lead magnet also qualifies. The point behind it: a lead magnet on a broader subject will probably draw the people who care about that subject, and someone who wants it is likely to want the offer it leads to. They also pick a level, so you can grade them by the one they pick, and the magnet sorts your leads while it collects them.

Laying out the page a visitor lands on after an ad is SOP 37 — Lay out a landing page. Choosing a lead magnet and building it is SOP 13 — Choose and build a lead magnet.

3.2 A better sales process

The parts named:

• Nurturing leads. How many times and when to reach a lead who has not answered is SOP 89 — Run the seven-day follow-up cadence.
• Proof, which you can work in throughout the process. Finding the claims your data supports is SOP 110; making each piece of proof land harder is SOP 109.
• A video sales letter. Many of you probably need to put one in place. Building it is SOP 207 — Build a video sales letter.

3.3 Better sales training

Can you train the people on your team to use the words they need, said the right way? One team's drill, obstacle by obstacle, is on SOP 108 — Drill a team on closing.

3.4 Better reputation

Maybe people hold back from buying because the reviews of you they find online are terrible. This is where the marketing comes back round to the product. Whatever you do on the marketing and branding side, you still have the product, so ask whether you are keeping your customers, and whether you are picking the right ones.

The illustration: teaching Spanish to people with no English. That is probably not going to work. Maybe your Spanish program is excellent, but if they have no English, these are the wrong people to sell to, and the fault is yours, because you are the one taking their money.

3.5 Other levers in this branch

Prerequisites, the quality of the leads, friction, and the test of budget, authority, need and timing are named as further ways to fix a sales problem. How to run each is on SOP 208 — Set prerequisites, raise lead quality and add friction.

3.6 Payment options

If you do not offer them yet, add payment options. Payment-plan downsells are called a great way to do it. If payment plans are not in place, the advice given is to install that system outright. The rungs of the ladder, in order, and when to stop offering terms: SOP 70 — Work the payment plan downsell ladder.

4. You make too little per customer

The case. You have enough leads, they cost the right amount, and you close enough of them. You still cannot do more, because each customer earns you too little. This is called a back-end issue.

4.1 The fixes, in the order given

1. Raise the price, or run a price raise. Raising prices on the customers you have, with the letter and the rollout, is SOP 83. Smaller pricing changes that add profit now are gathered on SOP 77.
2. Cut your costs. How could you spend less to deliver to each customer? The levers for it, in order, are on SOP 127.
3. Raise frequency. Can you get customers to buy more often? At the most basic level, can you get them to buy again?
4. Ascend them. Upsells and cross-sells. What to sell next, and the ways an upsell goes wrong, are on SOP 66 — Run the classic upsell and choose the moment.

A tree to walk yourself. Some of you, it is said, need this walked through with you, one to one. The logic tree stands in for that: walk it until you can say this is where you are, and the fix for that spot is what you do.

4.2 When to offer the upsell

Picture a customer relationship that starts at one point and runs for a set length, say a program of twelve weeks. There are specific points in it at which you can ascend a customer and sell them more.

Point	What is said about it
Immediately	The earliest of the points
24 to 48 hours in	The one usually preferred here: by then they kind of see there is something they need at once
A milestone	Not established on this page.
Halfway	Not established on this page.
Last chance	The one at the end

Four of these chances are counted in the first half, and one at the end.

Waiting to the end costs you. Many owners wait for the last point. If you do, what you lose on those sales is usually two to three times. Given as an industry average: upsell only at the end and you collect 10 to 30 percent of the amount you could get.

If customers are not moving into your continuity or taking your ascensions, the reason given is timing. You are offering at the wrong moment. Offer earlier.

The same moments, in the same order and with more said about each, are in section 6 of SOP 57 — Compute the payback period and shorten it, and in section 2 of SOP 162, the ascension-path page. The second moment here is SOP 162's 24 to 48 hours; SOP 57, section 6, lets it run, usually, into a third day. Held to this page, a third-day ask comes after the second moment; held to SOP 57, it is still inside it. This page does not settle which reading is right.

5. What this page does not decide for you

• Two to three times, or 10 to 30 percent. Collecting 10 to 30 percent of what you could get puts the full amount at about three and a third to ten times what you collect. Both figures are carried as stated here. This page does not settle which reading is right.

6. The checklist

Step	What to do
1	Take the problem SOP 196 found; profit that comes in too slowly goes to SOP 198
2	Leads cost too much: work through ads, hooks, content, messaging, the offer, a money-model mechanism and the avatar
3	Start with the fix you are most likely to succeed with, given your skills and resources
4	Sometimes a customer who costs more to win returns more: compare returns, not only acquisition costs
5	Too few closes: the page, the sales process, sales training, reputation, payment options
6	Too little per customer: price, delivery cost, frequency, upsells and cross-sells
7	Offer the upsell early, at the points in section 4.2, not only at the end

7. What this page does not cover

Building a video sales letter is SOP 207's subject; prerequisites, lead quality, friction and the budget, authority, need and timing test are set out on SOP 208.