What it takes to sign 5-10 clients per month

About 10 months ago, I had just signed a deal to partner with a paid ads agency to help them get more clients and act as the acquisition side of the business.

They had a great track record (one of the best in their niche) and they were already doing over 100k per month in profit.

I was excited to get to work because I thought it would be easy to get them clients because they were already so established. 

I was wrong.

We were testing everything, and nothing seemed to be working:

• X ROAS guaranteed

• Guarantee X sales

• Free audits

• Free looms

• We’ll make you X money in Y days

• We’ll beat your current Cost Per Acquisition guaranteed

All the normal stuff didn’t even come close to working.

I started sweating a bit. I knew I could get them results, but the only bottleneck was leads.

No matter what we did, leads were just hard to come by.

For a second I thought:

“Well, this service must be saturated”

But then I reminded myself that nothing is really saturated, we just have to create a better offer. 

What does a better offer even mean though?

I knew the founder wouldn’t agree to guarantee more sales or more ROAS, because we’d already tried that. 

To make it worse, it wasn’t just that the guarantee didn’t work, it was horrible for branding.

People would DM him saying he’s scamming, we’d attract low quality leads, and typically it was only about ⅕ prospects that were actually good.

The prospects hated it when we over promised, and it just seemed scammy and untrue.

So I racked my brain and kept thinking.

I was thinking about why someone would say no to an offer like that. It’s objectively an outcome they would want.

More money, guaranteed. How could you turn it down?

They didn’t believe us.

It wasn’t that the market was saturated, it was that they’d been promised so much BS that their trust levels were low.

Kind of like when you get cheated on by your partner. 

When you eventually get into your next relationship, you have some trust issues.

So it makes sense they would say no - they’d been burnt before. 

But how do we sell to them if they don’t trust us?

Instead of making a big ‘no brainer’ offer and reversing the risk with a guarantee, we got more specific and made a lower risk offer.

So instead of:

“We’ll make you an extra 100k in 90 days or you don’t pay”

It’s more like:

“We’ll make you 10 ad creatives and if they don’t beat your current CPA in 14 days, we’ll give you a full refund and put it in writing”

Or

“We’ll run your ads for free for 30 days because we hate agencies pitching big retainers with no results”

Hint: Only do the free one if you aren’t getting many leads, and make sure to qualify them hard on the front end. AKA - don’t ever do free work for unqualified leads.

This type of offer can be called a few different names: 

‘Intro Offer’ 

‘One Time Offer’

‘Front End Offer’

The name matters less than the idea.

• Most offers present too much risk to a prospect who has been burned before and doesn’t trust you. 

• Instead of going bigger, go smaller and build trust first. This will improve your ‘take rate’ aka marketing efficiency, your close rate, and your lead flow at the same time. You will close about 5x more one time offers than you do recurring offers.

• It is not possible to reduce risk to the point where there is a huge gap between risk/potential reward on a recurring service. So you need to reduce the risk for a one time service. If you want to use a guarantee on a recurring service it might be months until they get a result, in which case it is already too costly for them, and you have spent too much money on fulfilling for them for it to be financially viable to give them the refund.

As soon as we did this, we were booking over 100 calls per month on paid ads to cold traffic.

Most agencies only use recurring offers, which makes it much harder to build trust with a large base of clients, and it kind of makes us look stupid when we say stuff like:

"I will get you (probably unrealistic result) in (probably unrealistic time frame) or you don't pay! How cool is that?"

Trying to convince a complete stranger of this was a hassle. 

So we used a One Time Service in the range of $2500-5000, and delivered it in less than 7 days.

The only problem with the ‘One Time Offer’ is that it is ‘One Time.’

Meaning:

If you just had your intro offer, you would need to find more and more clients each month because there is no recurring revenue. 

It is hard to build a business that way, and that is why most people focus on their recurring offer.

But, you can use the intro offer as a low friction entry point to get your foot in the door, then up-sell your clients to your recurring service offer.

Kind of like a 1-2 punch.

At Matt’s previous agency which scaled to $900k/mo, over 90% of the monthly recurring clients had already bought the One Time Offer.

So without having the One Time Offer there, who knows how many clients he would have had. I doubt that he would have gotten anywhere near as many.

Having an intro offer is one of the best things you can do to get more people to know who you are. 

This will make it 100x easier to sell your recurring service, because there are so many people who know you and trust you.

I made a video about this not too long ago.

You can check it out here (link)

Hopefully it’s not completely terrible.

Catch you tomorrow

Leo