SOP 219 — Find the right customers, screen for them and capture data

1. Ask for better leads, not cheaper ones

This belongs under better targeting, through list enrichment with AI. Many owners, in the view here, frame their problem as needing cheaper leads when what they need is better ones. The question underneath is a different one: how do you get a better return?

List enrichment is one of the outreach buckets named, in order, on SOP 209 — Pick a lead bucket, starting with the offer and lead magnet, section 1.3. Judging ads by return on ad spend rather than by the price of a lead is SOP 213 — Fix ad targeting and bid for return, not cheap leads, section 6.

2. Cut down to the valuable fifth

One method comes from an investor that buys companies. The investor's claim was that they know the customers of the businesses they buy better than those businesses do. They run a big analysis of the entire customer base to split it into the 80 percent and the valuable 20 percent. Then, in this order:

Drop every stream, message and channel that brings in the 80 percent.
Give the places that bring in the 20 percent 5x more attention.
Set prices and messaging to fit the better lead.
Double down on those channels.

Why it works, as pictured here. Split your customers into five fifths. The investor clears the base out and fills it back up from the top stream. The business is already built to serve that many customers. Keep the same number of customers, each worth five times as much, and you have five times the business.

On SOP 149, section 3, the same cut is run as an 80/20 analysis; the gain given there for replacing the 80 with more of the 20 is a different figure from the one here. Setting a price for the customer you want is SOP 213, section 9.

3. Learn who the customers you want are

What to learn about these people, in order:

3.1 Who they are

The first question is who they are: their demographics.

3.2 What they are doing: requirements you can measure

Next is what they are doing, called here quantifiable requirements. In one business (a finding that holds for that business), a look across all the customers showed that those meeting certain measurable conditions were much more likely to succeed with what was sold. Instead of simply noting that those people did better, they made the conditions a requirement up front. A prospect has to meet them.

Deciding what a customer must already have, and setting the bar before anyone can book, is SOP 208 — Set prerequisites, raise lead quality and add friction, sections 2 and 3.

3.3 What they did before buying

Then comes what they did, counted here as a really important one: the activation behaviors. Before purchase, in one business (a finding that holds for that business), a large share of customers had gone through at least two of its long-form pieces of content before buying. The owner then asked why not take cold prospects and have them consume two long-form pieces, so that they became like the people who buy. It worked pretty well, by the owner's account.

A video sales letter or a webinar counts as one of those pieces. The reckoning here: a lead magnet people are sure to get through, followed by a long-form piece adding like another hour. Given two or three hours of someone's time, you can usually sell them something very expensive. It is not nearly the time commitment most would expect.

Making a video sales letter is SOP 207 — Build a video sales letter. Onboarding sales prospects as well as customers is on SOP 139 — Onboard customers to the activation point, section 4.

3.4 What they do after buying

Next is post-purchase: which behaviors, once someone has bought, make them more likely to buy again, to stick, or to pay even more. In one business (a finding that holds for that business), it was that within their first seven days the customer had to land one high-ticket sale. For you it will be a different thing.

Deriving the activation point, the thing that marks the customers who stay longer, is SOP 129 — Derive the activation point; driving every new customer to it is SOP 139.

3.5 Put together

Taken together, this tells you:

who the right customer is and how they measure up, so that you can screen for them at the front end;
what those people did before they bought that made a purchase highly likely;
and the process, right after they buy, that gives them the best chance of success.

4. Double down on what brings them in

Last, ask whether some of the places your leads come from send far more of these good ones than the rest. If so, double down there. It could be a channel that brings better customers; it could also be a lead magnet or an offer. For a lot of people, in the view here, this one is really big, and they do not even realize it.

One case (a finding that holds for that business): a lead magnet, set against a direct offer to come to a workshop. The lead magnet earns the higher return on ad spend over a longer timeline; the workshop earns the higher return over a shorter one. So, and this applies to that business, pushing more people into the lead magnet is the better call: it brings in more money, though the money takes longer to arrive.

Put another way, and this is what that business reports doing: match the lead magnet with the best return to the right customer, the one who meets your measurable requirements; get them to go through the process that makes buying most likely; and once they buy, put them through the process that makes their success most likely.

The same comparison of a direct ask against a lead magnet is on SOP 209, section 4.1.

5. Start from the customers you already have

None of this needs new work to find out. Look at your existing customers: observation and surveys can answer it, and you can do it now.

6. Ask for more at intake

The view here is that requiring more information at intake is wildly undervalued. How to get the data:

The qualifying questions on every form. One practice here: budget, authority, need and timing go on all forms. The same questions on an application are SOP 208, section 7; SOP 98 — Qualify with the four-letter test uses a different test on a call.
Friction on the opt-in. Add friction without fear when that is what it takes to get the information: in the view here, it rarely costs you sales. Your leads may cost more, but your cost to acquire a customer will typically go down. The case for paying more for a better lead is SOP 208, section 8.
Calls and onboarding. Intake calls and onboarding are further chances to collect it.
Every touch. Each time you deal with a customer, give value and also take data. One business does it to build models that predict, very well by its account, what customers want and need and when their next purchase will come.

7. A screening question, and a checkbox that pre-frames

In one example, on the registration page for an owner's free event, every added field cost sign-ups, and at that owner's level of spend, a lot of them. The fields went in anyway: the aim was more business owners there, and the event was not meant for beginners, as such.

A leading indicator of ad quality. Registration asked whether the person was a business owner. The owner thinks part of the yes answers came from the topic itself, one that people who do not own a business never think about.

The checkbox. The form also carried an optional box reading "I want a VIP ticket". Ticking it changed nothing anywhere in the funnel, and it was not mandatory. The idea came from persuasion: is there a way to bias someone psychologically so they are more likely to buy? The answer was yes. Several versions of the box were split-tested. The result, in direction:

Measure	What the checkbox did
Leads	Fewer
Upsell take rate, next page	Higher
Earnings per view	A net increase

The view here is that earnings per view is the measure to care about: the extra money made per person who landed on the page. The reason given for the rise: the box had pre-framed them as buyers, and commitment and consistency came after. The next page opened on how to get a VIP ticket. How much more the VIP buyers were worth is said to be a lot.

Some of you already have things like this in your funnels.

8. Why a lead with no information is worth less

After the event, the owner knew which registrants owned businesses and what they earned, since they had said so themselves. That made those leads far more valuable to the rest of the business: even if someone did nothing at the event, at least there was good data on them. If leads can be made valuable to the whole business rather than to one event, the owner will do it.

For you, in the view here: a lead you hold no information on is just not that valuable. A lead who gives more information is the better one to have, since that lead is more likely to buy.

9. Data comes before AI

Asked how to make a business more AI-enabled, the answer splits the question into two paths, AI tools and AI at the core, and then, simplifying heavily, into levels:

Level one. You use tools that exist, made by software companies that use AI.
Level two, AI-enabled. Core parts of how the business runs now produce data unique to you, which no one else holds.
The third. Your entire business is AI: you are the tool you sell, or you sell that tool.

Some people, in the view here, think they are further along than they actually are. If you want AI as the core of the business, what has to come before it is data. You need a business that puts data and documentation first, because AI cannot exist without data. In one example, an owner once did one-on-one consultations for that reason: to capture data. When someone tells you their business is built on AI, the suggestion here is to ask what their data infrastructure looks like.

Where documentation starts. One practice here, a starting list rather than a full data system:

Write the whole customer process down, step by step, from the ad to the review, and mark where it gets stuck.
Gather what you already hold, often years of it: sales presentations, recorded calls, follow-up emails and texts, and technical material such as manuals and textbooks.
File it under plain heads, such as brand and ideal customer, sales process, qualification rules, follow-ups, presentations, proof, technical knowledge, and a log of outputs and corrections.
Keep one clean source of truth; archive the rest, which may still help marketing, and drop the junk.
Write down how the business runs, its processes, metrics and definitions, not only the raw data: the data is just one input a tool needs to recommend improvements.

For many who ask, the view here is that using AI tools is a great idea. To go further, start with the data itself.

On whether AI will replace your business, the view here sets two cases side by side: people armed with tools competing against people, and tools competing against people. In the second, everyone is in trouble. So, the conclusion goes, it does not really matter.

10. Past a certain size, build small tools at the edges

Asked whether to use HubSpot or Salesforce, the answer does not pick one. In a world of AI, one business is, it is thought, doing far more custom-built work. Beyond a certain size, it becomes sensible to develop solutions at the edges, specific to your own use, instead of building yourself an ERP or some other massive system; for that business, by its account, those small solutions bring far higher returns on time and large gains in efficiency.

Custom developers building specialized tools, and a caution against turning one into a software company, are on SOP 170 — Decentralize technology into the departments, section 5.

11. What this page does not decide for you

Where AI comes into list enrichment. The subject is introduced as list enrichment with AI, and the method that follows studies your own customers with no AI step named. Not established on this page.
Which fifths are cleared. Only the refill from the top stream is described. Not established on this page.
How much more a customer in the valuable fifth is worth. The five times given above is a picture, not a measure of your base. This page gives no figure for your own customers.
How long a long-form piece is. Not established on this page.
Why it does not matter whether AI replaces your business. The conclusion that it does not comes with no further reason. Not established on this page.

12. The checklist

Step	What to do
1	Ask how to get better leads and a better return, not cheaper leads
2	Sort the customer base into the valuable 20 percent and the other 80, and find the streams each comes from
3	Cut the channels that bring the 80 percent and put 5x more attention on those that bring the 20, as the investor cited does
4	Match price and messaging to the better lead, and double down on its channels
5	Record who the customers you want are: their demographics
6	Find measurable conditions they meet, and make them a requirement up front
7	Find what buyers did before buying, and get cold prospects to do the same; a video sales letter or webinar counts as a long-form piece
8	Find the after-purchase behaviors that make a repeat purchase, staying on, or paying more more likely
9	Double down on the channels, lead magnets and offers that bring far more of the good leads
10	Answer all of it from your existing customers, by observation and surveys
11	Put budget, authority, need and timing on every form; friction rarely drops sales, in the view here
12	Gather data on intake calls, in onboarding and at every touch
13	Weigh a funnel change by earnings per view, as in the checkbox example
14	Before building AI into the core of the business, build the data: write the customer process down, file what you hold, keep one source of truth, and record your metrics and definitions
15	Past a certain size, in the view here, build small custom tools at the edges rather than one massive system

13. Where this sits

The outreach stages that come before this page: SOP 217.
Where testing goes next, a cadence of concept tests: SOP 220 — Run two-round concept testing and promote to control.
Rating inbound leads and routing them to closers: SOP 84 — Score and route inbound leads.

14. What this page does not cover

A full data infrastructure for AI, beyond the starting list in section 9, and choosing between customer-relationship platforms, are not covered on this page.