Table of contents for this step:
Case Study: Scaling coffee shop walk-ins with $4 of enterprise-level Instagram Ads
In order to hit $300k/year, the key is simply to sell one thing to one customer avatar with one profitable sales channel. If you’re not at $300k yet, stop everything and just do these 3 things:
A. Test Many Offers With One Channel
B. Align your message: from ad to offer to website to fulfillment your customer’s advantage should be crystal clear.
C. Focus on dialing in effective outbound to potential customers.
Before you dive in, pick one channel, that’ll be important for being able to minimizing variables and helping you focus & test.
You may have heard Alex Hormozi & many others talk about the 6 ways of getting a customer. Pick a favorite:
Now it’s time to pick a channel within that method of customer acquisition.
Pick a platform to use, and one media type within it. Let’s say for example you picked cold outbound, now your options are:
etc. You get the idea. Make a list of ones you’re familiar with, and pick a favorite that feels easy and fun. Now:
When you’re at this revenue level, you’re a long way from perfect product market fit, even if you’ve been in business 100 years. But the good news is, you probably have amazing intuition for WHAT the product with best product market fit might be, especially if you have been in business for awhile OR if you’re the in your own target market like your customers.
The easiest way to find what your customers want is to talk to them directly, and test out offers each time you talk with them, but if you have the benefit of having historical numbers available, take a look back.
Find your most profitable customer. Find the one that costs the least to fulfill and you can fulfill them fastest, AND then compare those with the customers who pay you the most.
If you don’t know any of that yet, don’t worry about it, the next step is the same:
Whether you’re selling with ads, phone calls, or an in-person point of sale system, every customer interaction is a chance to get quick data on what offers will be more effective at getting customers in the door cheaply.
The key to really dialing in your scale is to change HOW you are offering the services you offer. You absolutely HAVE to make sure you’re making a grand-slam offer that makes it easy for your customers to pay you.
If you customers are balking at your prices, it’s not the prices, it’s how you’re framing it for them. The way you will find out is by testing variations of your offer until you start noticing one that works REALLY well. And then you’ll build on that. We’ll walk you through it.
When you have an offer that works, you’ll know because it will be 5-10x better than every other offer you’ve tested. Instead of 1 out of 20 prospective customers saying yes and paying you, you’ll start to see 5 or 10 out of 20 people you offer say yes.
There are two simple steps to finding a great offer:
$300k a year is ~$1k per business day. If you’re not hitting $1k days, just keep going back to the drawing board until you offer resonates and people who learn about your service start going through each level of your sales process at an expected rate and you see $1k days start happening.
Start with any offer. Any offer for anything. Offer it to at least 10 people. Or run an ad test for $5 a day for a few days.
You can either sell directly with your email and phone, or you can procrastinate by building an online store. This will waste 2-3 days but many insist, and it will help you reach a broader audience more easily, so it's not a complete loss.
In VERY broad terms, if someone completes one step of becoming your customer, they'll be twice as likely to complete the next step. Or put another way, you lose half your potential customers at every step, but if you have too few steps or too many steps you have no customers at all. I’ll talk through each step you SHOULD have in your sales process in just a second.
But first, a great way to start is to copy a rough approximation of what someone else is doing.
If you have a service business, try to “funnel-hack” a product that is similar to yours. This just means sign up for their ad, take notes, and then copy and paste the process & customize it with your own offer language. To work, the funnel you hack must have: a similar price point and a similar customer income level. Changes in price point result in changes in funnel structure to make the offer work, so it's important to pick something similar in cost & audience.
If you have a product business, use Gumroad (if you have one product), Shopify (if you want to eventually have many products), or Etsy (if you have no ad budget) and watch a lot of youtube tutorials to learn how to get your first customers.
As you test offers, work your way up the sales funnel / customer journey 1 step at a time. 5 steps. Very easy.
If you’re selling in person, aim for more like 20% at the first step, people should be more interested & trusting in-person for many reasons. 1. As you test, you probably don’t need to change what you’re offering yet, just change HOW you offer it. Make a discount, do a sale, limit the time period or number of units you’ll be selling. This is the only metric you need to improve on your own, the rest you can ask mentors, coaches, OR YOUR CUSTOMERS. (customers are the cheapest/fastest place to get effective feedback btw). 2. Step 2 is “adding to cart” or more generally expressing interest in buying your solution — 5-10% of those people should add it to their cart or try to learn more. If its more, great, if it’s less, make a better product page, lead magnet, or offer page. 1. Before you change anything else, make sure your ad/offer matches your product page and checkout process. Do the discount codes work? Does the customer experience make sense? If you were the customer, would you do it? Make sure you're texting/emailing leads to follow up with them 5 and 45 minutes later just as a small reminder. Make sure your offer is identical all the way down the funnel. 2. Still not at 5%? ASK YOUR CUSTOMERS WHAT TO CHANGE TO IMPROVE THIS. 3. Step 3 is “initiate checkout” or beginning the purchase process — 25-50% of the people at this next stage should convert into customers. Initiating checkout, booking a sales call, or checking out. 1. If this step is below 25%, ASK YOUR CUSTOMERS WHAT TO CHANGE TO IMPROVE THIS. They’ll say some absolutely idiotic polite nonsense like “oh I wanted it but I just want to think about it first” - then you just say “oh, okay, thank you” and go google how to fix that common sales objection. 2. If we add up the worst case scenarios here we get: 2% CTR, 5% ATC, 25% PUR, which means 2 out of every hundred people who see your offer will click out of curiosity. 1 out of every 20 visitors to your site will start the purchase process, and 1 out of 4 people trying to buy will actually buy. That means 1000 people need to see your ad or offer online (or ~100 people in person) before you'll get an add-to-cart, and likely 5000 people or more need to see your offer before you get a purchase. In my experience that can be as high as hundreds of thousands, so focus more on page views: If you've gotten 1000 clicks and website views but no purchases, something is definitely broken. Talk to your customers and find out why they weren't interested or thought they'd wait until later. And then add a workaround so they have a good reason to buy right now. Keep tweaking until you hit your goal. 4. If you have another step in your checkout process after this, expect another 50% or so to fall off, and if you’re hitting all these metrics but still not getting purchases, you need to change your approach or reduce the number of steps needed for people to pay you. Simple as that. 5. Expect that ~10% of your customers should return/refund. 1. And if refunds are over 10%, you guessed it: ASK YOUR CUSTOMERS WHAT TO CHANGE.
If you follow this, you should be able to evaluate how you are doing at each step and make adjustments until you get enough customers to hit $1k days. Just don’t give up.
Even if you’ve been doing this for 10 years and you do millions in revenue, and you’re like “my numbers aren’t that good!” well, you got lazy my friend. Make some new offers, and better define your target audience! And stop reading the wrong section lol
There is a simple formula for structuring offers for any business. I’m going to give you the template, and then your homework is to go look for examples of it. It’s literally everywhere once you start looking.
[Customer benefit/result] [Timeframe] [Address Objections/Guarantee Result]
You may recognize that formula from our ad! It works at any level of business. Go find a few in your daily life this week. Look out for it on instagram ads, in businesses you drive by, on billboards, etc.
You can find people writing about these types of offers all over the internet. They work because they start the process of answering some of the most important questions in the buying journey in a way that seems easy and approachable and helps drive curiosity.
You may also get good results from offers that brand & express a single benefit, some markets are less open to very salesy-type offers, so experiment with a few different types.
For example:
“Get X result in Y days” could be turned into:
“Our Lander Liftoff Media Bootcamp customers love how they learn X RESULT” — less salesy, but might be just as effective.
Many business owners often:
or
What you will find, especially if you run ads, is that if your offer changes (even just a little bit!) from your ad to your landing page, to checkout, to your fulfillment materials, you will see HUGE falloffs in people moving through the process.
People click on your ad because of your offer. You need to make sure they can access & pay you for that offer as quickly as reasonable once they’re through the first step.
The faster the followup, the more conversions you will see.
Review your customer journey (put yourself through it) every once in a while to make sure what you’re offering is what they’re getting and that processes happens as smoothly as possible.
The key to great conversion rates once you have a great offer and fully aligned messaging at every step in the customer journey is to make it feel HUMAN, and reduce your cycle time.
Part of the frustration of all the spammy emails & texts we get is that we know they’re not from anyone.
Make your customers feel like you’re paying close, personal attention to them as much as possible. You don’t actually have to sacrifice any time to do this, you just need to be thoughtful about your approach.
Great copywriting can go a long way.
You know because you’ve felt it.
Once an offer feels dumb and obvious and plainly manipulative, whereas the other maybe actually made you laugh, it’s natural to choose the offer where there’s a human with some shared experience on the other end writing that.
An experienced copywriter can help every email & text your company sends feel like this, and making sure you have several touch points that make it easy for customers to start again if they get distracted during their purchase is very important. People have lives!
But an even better way to do this at first is to ensure the problem you are solving is one you yourself have. That way it will be easier to speak to your audience because you could just as easily be in that audience!
Again, all you have to do in this phase of your business journey is get 1 type of customer avatar to buy 1 product from you, with 1 sales channel to acquire them. The quicker you test, the quicker you’ll get here.
The rate at which you learn is going to be limited by the rate at which you get new customers and try new things. If you’re trying to grow fast or change your income fast or start a business fast, REDUCE THE AMOUNT OF TIME between when you get a new potential customer and when you sell to them. That is THE MOST important cycle time to reduce. The faster your feedback loop, the faster you will grow.
Case Study: Scaling coffee shop walk-ins with $4 of enterprise-level Instagram Ads
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