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A
Hey, real quick, before we dive in, if you've got a brand or marketing tool that marketers need to know about, sponsor the show here at Perpetual Traffic. Perpetual Traffic puts you in front of thousands of seasoned marketers, CMOs and agency owners. So head on over to perpetualtraffic.com to apply to be a sponsor of this show. This is an area where most businesses fall off.
B
Here's the application of what works foundationally in marketing. How do we connect to the customer? From cold ad to upsell five figure product, you've just visually mapped what is at the core of many of the things in Alex's book.
A
If somebody can't buy, doesn't qualify, what do you do with them next? Number one, you're listening to Perpetual Traffic. All right, I get it. You're a small business, you're a startup, you're a lean team. Everyone's doing dozens of different things and you gotta move fast and be smart to compete with the big guys and the big gals. You've seen their endless resources. You know they are power. They have more money than you, but you can level the playing field and all their data scientists and their massive teams. Finally, the secret weapon that you have is Active Campaign AI. The ActiveCampaign AI suite is built exactly for you. The small business, the startup, the lean team. It's the secret weapon that saves the average user up to 13 hours a week. Just think of what you could do with 13 hours a week. It's not about saving time on writing, it's about getting predictive insights that used to be out of your reach. From predicting which deals are most likely to close to generating on brand content in seconds. From the AI brand kit, ActiveCampaign puts enterprise level capabilities in your hands. Compete smarter, not harder. Discover the power of autonomous marketing with ActiveCampaign. Go to activecampaign.com to get started today. Continuity is a great model. Obviously we've talked about continuity models here quite a bit. We did a show on memberships, the membership site case study, which is a tremendous, you know, subject matter expertise in an area where there's an irrational passion. Like membership models are amazing and they'll.
B
I think they're coming back. I think membership models are making a comeback because we've had this like, people just crave connectivity and I think they crave authenticity. A world of AI slop where people are just used to being tricked, being fooled, being told stuff like, again, for me, while I'm not progressing this book until I implement, because then I'll say Did the win your money back add any value? I see so many people that will talk but not walk their talk and I think people are just over it. They're over like AI can trick them, you can have deep fakes, all that type of stuff. So they're craving real authenticity, thought authenticity from the creators and community from the other people that are doing it alongside them. I think memberships are making a big comeback.
A
Yeah, I think they are too. Super, super good here. Well, let's, let's shift gears here a bit to this meeting that I had with a client on site and I'm actually going to share my screen. But so yeah, definitely check this out over on our YouTube channel over at perpetualtraffic.com YouTube but you knew that already. So some of this is going to be blurred out. Can't show everything here for obvious reasons. But this is in essence the sales funnel for this particular client. And you can see here in the upper left hand corner we're actually running the ads. So there's an ad. I reinforced trust here. It's like, how can we. There's so many different parts of this. But I'll go through the entire.
B
I was like, this looks like if you're not looking online, I'm sorry, just know that like this is a mind map of like Tri color, no 4 color mind map that takes you from the customer journey. So we're not talking about full funnel. Forget that it's the customer journey from ad to purchase with the upsell. So you've just visually mapped out what is at the core of many of the things in Alex's book which aren't new. Like no one's reading this book and being like, oh, I've never thought, I mean when your money back is not very commonly held. But a lot of the other pieces here is foundational and it's just a reminder of a lot of foundationals with some peppering of new. And you're saying, okay now, now here's the application of what works foundationally in marketing. How do we connect to the customer from cold ad into upselled five figure product.
A
All right, so if you're watching over on YouTube, this is actually the entire sort of customer journey. Like Lauren said, first thing is upper left hand corner. They see an ad and then they go to a vsl basically right from the ad. VSL sort of explaining part of the offer and, and about 2 to 3 minute VSL which is a video sales letter about their service, about their coaching program, about the. They have a lead magnet as well, for one specific part of the entire program. And then after that, they're sent to a type form which has about 10 different questions. And some of those questions are what they refer to as knockout questions. And if you're familiar with this type of model, these questions are really important to be able to determine what's the likelihood of this person coming in from cold traffic watching your vsl? Are they your icp? Are they your ideal customer? If they answer, I think, 8 out of the 10 questions correctly? So we're sent to a HubSpot schedule, which is not my favorite. We use schedule once, but they're using HubSpot here. And then after that, scheduler, where they actually pick a time to talk with a salesperson or with a consultant, they have to actually wait 48 hours, which is interesting. So they get a text and an email, what we suggested and what they were just about to start implementing. As I said, this is your zero moment of truth. As soon as somebody fills out this scheduler here, it's not actually over on this side. After they fill in the type form, you should insert a phone call and get somebody on the phone literally within five minutes. Like, speed to lead, and this is something that Hormozi talks about in all of his books, is just so absolutely essential. The chart of how a lead decays over time is past five minutes. It basically goes basically down to zero, whether or not you're actually going to get anyone on the phone, whether or not they're going to be able to show up for the call. So speed to lead right here in this particular part of the funnel was absolutely essential. So we have a little thing that.
B
If you do not have speed to lead, you better sure have a lot of credentials, a lot of trust, and a lot of marketing. Because in an advertising standpoint, if you're not focusing on speed to lead, lead from a stranger, your competition that's going to do it more efficient will eat your lunch all day long. But if you're not doing that, if you're not getting in contact with them right away, you just are going to have to pay for. And more marketing investment.
A
Absolutely. So right there. So about 50% of people that go from the HubSpot scheduler to the actual sales call, 50% show rates, which I felt, if you look at this like, that's an area where you can at least increase by 50%, 50% with the addition of a phone call. This is what we've seen with a lot of our clients. If you insert a phone call. Yes. A Text message, an email is obviously is great here, you've got that information. But the actual phone, somebody picking up the phone and calling. Because we're talking about a $10,000 sale here. If you can't get somebody you know from, you know, there's plenty of outsourced companies that can do this for you. Very cheap.
B
AI Sort has already enabled you to be able to do that, worst case scenario.
A
Yep, absolutely. There's so many different tools that you can use there, but at the very least do that. So one of the big areas was this 50% show rate which I felt was really kind of low. You have a 48 hour, you know, window which I think can actually be severed in half. That was another area. 48 hours seemed way long to me. We used to do a 72 hour delay on our scheduler to the actual date in which they could sit down and talk to a salesperson. And since taking off that 72 hour, our show rates have tripled. They've gone from, you know, nearly 100%. So we're about 30.
B
You said no more three days.
A
You said no more three days dot book when you want to book, book when you want to book. And you know, sometimes, I mean if they're scheduling on a Friday, that means it's on a Monday. But the point is like we did not put this in here and you can do this with any scheduler softw schedule once. Does it calendly does it as well. HubSpot. Like I said, not great forms on HubSpot for this kind of thing. I would insert your own scheduler at this step. So speed to lead with a phone call. Number one, don't wait 48 hours. There were reasons why they wanted to wait 48 hours to get a little bit more information. But you're already asking 10 questions on your type form. So if you want to get that information, put it in the type form over here and disqualify people earlier. So that was sort of the two big things. Just on that part of the sales funnel makes sense so far, makes total sense. So the other part to this and we'll get to the sales call in just a second. Is that on this Typeform, if they answered two of the questions, that would disqualify them as being an ideal customer profile. They really didn't have anything to send them to. They didn't have a downsell here. What they did do is they were now on an email list and they were in a nurture sequence. Instead of, let's say you answer, you know, seven out of the 10 and you miss the eighth question, you would then be sent to a secondary offer which may or may not offer the same thing. They were thinking, all right, why don't we just offer this same product at a discount? I said, no, what you should really do is you should peel off parts of or individual components of your main offer and sell that as a discount. And that's another chapter in Hormozi's book, which is downselling and which you haven't gotten to yet. But it's, it's probably one of the best chapters because. And he's got live training and he's, he's got a couple of podcasts that he references to. I think this is an area where most businesses, in my opinion, this is where they fall off. It's like you've already got the lead, you've paid for the lead up here. Okay, They've come in, they filled in the type form and then if you don't downsell them or try to sell them, maybe not your core offer. You've already paid for that lead anyway. Why not monitor?
B
Yeah.
A
So what we brainstormed is this right here is a group coaching product that is not, doesn't offer their one on one. Okay. Which is part of the sort of their main product and offer it for incredible. Like they wanted to sell it, I believe at $2,000. I said, no, this should be either 497 or 997 to this down sell here. So they're actually doing this this weekend. This is like real time. They're actually taking this and doing this. So they're implementing like immediately. They started promoting it I think on Tuesday. I left there on Monday, started promoting on Tuesday. Here it is on a Friday and then we'll check in with them over the weekend, see how this thing did. So anyway, so there's your first opportunity for your money model. Exactly like Hormozi said. And it's just, I'm like, I'm reading this book. I'm like, oh my God. Like this is the exact same stuff I gotta be talking to these guys about on Monday, which is just crazy. And he gave me a whole lot of other great ideas that we'll talk about here in just a second. So that's sort of the first thing. If somebody can't buy or can't, doesn't qualify, what do you do with them next? A lot of people just say, hey, you know, look at these resources. You know, listen to our podcast, here's our blog. Join Our Facebook group, all of that, that's good too. But why not try to monetize it? So that was the first opportunity to increase the effectiveness of this money model. Make sense so far?
B
Makes total sense. It's just like the way that Hermosa's book empowered you is just organizing it into a way that you're collecting. You're collating 15 years of funnel building and growth and scale and all the components of your offer suite of how you can connect a customer from being a stranger to being an evangelist because you've helped them grow and scale their businesses.
A
Right, exactly. So they were sort of sorting out what this is going to be as far as deliverables, but we'll get to that in just a second. So anyway, so let's get back to the sales call. Okay, so just we start with the ad. We go to a VSL landing page. They fill out a type form. There's 10 questions that they fill. Eight out of the 10. Right. They go to the scheduler, which is a HubSpot scheduler. As soon as they schedule a time, we immediately insert a phone call to try and increase their show rates from 50%, hopefully to 75%. I was like, your goal should be 75%, which will immediately impact everything you're doing downstream. Now close rates on this, close rates on the 50% that show are about 15%. And the question that you asked, hey, you know, when I was first a consultant actually doing the stuff that we're doing right now in Tier 11, one of the first tools that I learned how to use was from a company called Unbounce. And they are now a sponsor of perpetual traffic. And the reason is, is that their landing pages and how quickly you can create those landing pages without having to consult your designer, your developer. With drag and drop builders now built in AI copywriting, it's even better than when it was 10 years ago when I first started using it on my own to create my very first landing pages. These guys are absolutely amazing. They've got conversion optimized templates giving you everything you need to your pages on your own without developers. In fact, Unbounce is the leading landing page platform for building, testing and optimizing high converting pages. Powered by data from over 2 billion conversions. That is 2 billion conversions with a B. That means they know what converts. So if you want to Convert more customers one platform and launch pages fast, Unbounce is offering PT listeners a special offer. They are giving you the PT listeners 10% off when you enter coupon code. PT 10 off over@unbounce.com forward/pt so head on over to unbounce.com forward/pt Enter code PT10OFF and cash in today. Convert more customers with one platform. Launch pages fast. You shouldn't have to wait for your designers and your developers to build and test your landing pages. Get started with unbounce today. When we were going through this is what is the biggest reason why people say no and they couldn't really give me a great answer on that. So the point is, is that that's the operative question. If people don't buy or going back to interview your salespeople interview like your customer service people, what is the reason that they don't buy? Is it because of the price? Is it because of the value that they think that they're getting with regard to the price? Like what is the issue? That's sort of the operative question that's we sort of hammered on a while because they have what Hormozi refers to as downsell financial options and they really have this dialed in. So they, they, they do. One of the other parts of the book obviously is, is downsells as well as valuing the full priced offer and giving a discount on the full priced offer if you pay in full. So this is a $10,000 program. You get 20% off if you pay in full. Now you can pay in full either by writing a check for 8K or if you go through financing they actually use a third party company to do a 36 month financing which averages out to be about 384 per month or if they put it on their card. And one of the owners actually mentioned, they said hey, you know a lot of these guys, we, we advise them to get a brand new American Express blue card which has I believe no annual fee but you can pay it off over 36 months or you can pay it off over like three payments on your own. The point is you would still get the full pay discount of 8k even if you put it on the card. And then they also had a three pay option which they did not discount which was three pay for over three months which is $3,333. So you are giving the discount only in the event that they pay entirely pay and it's in entirety. So don't discount just a discount. And her Moses says this, he's like I don't discount just to discount. Those people are. What did he say? It was like discount terrorists. Like you'll read about it later on in the book. He's like don't just lower the price just to lower the price.
B
That's aggressive. I mean there's people that will always ask. I mean if you don't ask, you never know. So like I'll ask. Like my dad was a Vietnam vet. My mom has a military card. Be like, hey, do you offer a military discount? My mom's like, I don't want to. If you don't ask, you don't know. Right. And so in that capacity, but if you discount just to discount, then people will take advantage of it and they were going to pay you full price anyways and you just lost money that you would have collected. And the people that are just like discount tire kickers, pitas are not maybe people you want in your community.
A
It's true. Yeah, like give me a discount just because I am who I am. Like that doesn't really matter. So on this area and hopefully you're watching this over on perpetual traffic.com forward/YouTube. I asked them about the guarantee and this is going back to sort of our initial part of our conversation here is like, can you give a guarantee if they do set criteria and they guarantee results? Like in this particular case, I'm not going to say what the business is. You will get X in Y amount of time if you do these seven things. And if you get a successful outcome, so the outcome is getting something career wise, getting, you know, a particular position in your career if you can get that within a set period of time. And you also do all of our eight steps, which is in the lower left hand corner of the graphic here, which is eight steps, eight parts to the program. If they complete all of those things, plus they comment in the group just like what you were talking about, they post on social, all these things. Can you offer a guarantee to get their money back if they, you know, if they don't get the result that they want, even if they've done all of the eight to 10 steps. And this is where we really sort of stalled because they really didn't. This is where a lot of businesses probably stall too because this is a large, this is a large scale product, it's a 10k product and they didn't feel comfortable with a guarantee. So one of the parts to it is like in Hormozy's book, he says, well if you have a guarantee and let's say it's a 10k product and if they opt to not take the guarantee then you can discount. And that's one of your first and best downsells so think about that for a second. You have a guarantee with your product, you have to figure out what that is. They didn't want to do that. That's fine. However, if you do have a guarantee, you can give them the same $10,000 product for $8,000. And so now you're putting a money, you're putting a money model or a, a, a monetary quantity on a feature of the product that otherwise would not be explained or would not be magnified. He said that is. This is the part of the book that kind of blew my mind. I was like I never thought of using guarantee taking it away as your first down sell. So that was one of the first things that I actually mentioned. So that's definitely Alex Hormozi. When I was doing this there was no doubt about it. We just couldn't agree on the actual guarantee. Does that make sense?
B
It does and it's going to be the guarantee. Usually when I find that someone doesn't agree on the guarantee it's because they don't have enough confidence in delivering on the product where they're like, oh, I know I can make this happen. So once these goes through four or five more customers it's going to be like yes, I can 100% feel more confident in the guarantee. You just know him and his business from an outside lend where he's like how do I increase my 15 close rates? He's, he's more narrow minded and scared. Where you're coming from a marketing growth perspective so it makes sense why that's not aligned yet. But that's something you can always add to it. It's not saying that like you have to figure out and solve, figure out everything and solve for world peace right away. It's incrementality that matters and progression, not perfection.
A
Right? Right, absolutely. So I think with the, the idea of a downsell is that first off you want to sell your main offer as much as you possibly can. The funny part of this was that only about 15% of calls close on the actual call itself which is about their close ratio. So they were reluctant to have a downsell because they still wanted to be able to sell the main product because there were some buyers that happened two, three, four weeks later, but a very small portion. So the idea of having any kind of downsell or any kind of like option. And I sort of think about it this way. When I my first sales job after college was selling memberships at Bally's Fitness and we had the gold, silver and the bronze, well Nobody knew about the silver and the bronze. We would only sell the gold. It was only until the closer, like one of like my manager would come in that he would actually offer the silver as the downsell and it was actually a sort of a better offer. And then we would never even get like to the bronze or to the thrift. That company I don't think operates the same way, but it's the same principle. It's like on the call really sell your main offer as hard as you can. But if they're not going to buy or they have to think about it, that's where I said okay, if you don't want to do the guarantee, let's offer maybe a section of, or components of the core offer that you know will get them a good result, but you can offer it at a, at a, at a lower price. And so what we agreed on is that there were, there's eight components in their product. We agreed that they would offer two of them plus they would give them the group calls. So the downsell on, you know, the disqualifier on the type form was just group calls. But the downsell when they actually get on a call is group calls plus two or three. I don't think we decided on the third component. They're gonna, they were gonna figure that out. Two components of the core offer for.
B
So they get a sample, they don't get the fullest. So here too. But they still get to see is this gonna be something I want to invest in further. So I'm getting a piece of the pie but not the whole enchilada.
A
Correct, Correct. And a key component to this is that at 30 days it said if you're going to sell this, have a 30 day follow up already set with an advisor. And that could either be in the, in this particular case it was probably going to be the owner because he's, he's the one who does most of the coaching as a team of coaches. So I said set that reminder for you and him for you and the prospect at 30 days as a check in. And then that's when you can actually upsell back to the main offer. It's a check in, it's a, you know, I need to have my ducks in a row. We're going to make sure that you've done all of these components, these two or three components. But also you're going to be attending the group calls. We'll know exactly how many group calls you've been on. And plus you've got a 30, 30 minute or a 30 day, 30 minute check in with our top coach to make sure that you're on the right track. And then that's how you, that's another opportunity for you to upsell back to the main product. Does that make sense?
B
It does because it's again, it's just this whole cycle, it's all this like product suite elevation. The end of the day is you have a lot of offers and you're just going to keep making offers. It's just sometimes we make offers when someone's not ready for it because they're not ready financially because they don't or they don't have the time, the resource available for them to implement it. But they can eat an elephant one step at a time. It's just. You're going to charge your credit card each time.
A
Yeah. And so as a part of this downsell sequence here, I asked them the question repeatedly. What is the number one thing that will predict? Most AI tools are like a helpful assistant that just waits for your command. You have no idea. You type it in, you just give it a piece of content and that's a start. And it's all about the prompt, right. If you don't get the prompt right, then pretty much everything falls apart. Or you spend more time with prompts than you do actively doing the work. But at ActiveCampaign, we believe AI should be more than a passive tool. It should be a proactive partner. Imagine that. We call it autonomous marketing. It's a full AI agent that works in the background to help you imagine, activate and validate. You don't just ask it to write, you give it a goal and it helps build the entire campaign. It suggests high value segments you didn't even know you had. It predicts your deal's win probability before you even make the call. Our AI handles the busy work so you can focus on the big ideas. It's the difference between a tool and a true teammate. ActiveCampaign is the autonomous marketing platform. Find out for free over@activecampaign.com success for any of these students. And without hesitation you said one on one career advising. So if you get the main offer, you get a one on one career advisor like every single week during the entirety of the program. And so I said, well, if can you sort of position that call 30 days later as a one on one career advisor call and deliver a tremendous amount of value, then say, hey, you know, you've gotten this far. So far you've done, you know the course number two, you've done course number five. You know, obviously in our main product we have course 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8. Plus you'll get a one on one coaching call with me or one of my career advisors moving forward. So on that call as an opportunity for check in but also to show at the same time what the highest value part of the program is. And it's an opportunity to upsell. So you're, you're really doing two things together here. So we didn't quite settle on the downsell pricing but what we did think is that because it's about half of the value that you'd normally get for the full price product. So the offer is $5,000 but if you pay in full you get $4,000. So that is basically the entire thing. I, I recommend you all to to head on over to perpetualtraffic.com forward/YouTube. Take a look at that graph. Read this book. I mean it's tremendous. Like it was just so fortuitous that I was reading at the same time going to this business meeting, understanding, like getting even more insights through a lot of the stuff that he's done. It's one of the best books I've read this year, that's for damn sure. So Money Models, we'll leave it in the show notes over@perpetualtraffic.com and of course where you listen to podcasts, please leave us a rating and review. Helps us get out to a larger audience and teach people how to do this stuff the right way. So on behalf of my amazing co host, Lord Petrullo, ciao till next show. See ya. You've been listening to Perpetual Traffic.
Podcast: Perpetual Traffic
Episode: $100M Money Model Case Study: How to Squeeze Money Out of Your Non-Ideal Customers - Part 2
Hosts: Ralph Burns & Lauren Petrullo
Date: October 14, 2025
This episode dives deep into actionable strategies for increasing revenue from non-ideal customers by optimizing your sales funnels and offers. Inspired by Alex Hormozi’s “$100M Offers” book, Ralph breaks down a recent real-world client case study, focusing on practical ways to monetize leads who don’t qualify for or purchase your main offer. The discussion centers on funnel optimization, the power of speed to lead, effective downsells, and incorporating guarantees — essential tactics for marketing leaders and agencies aiming for higher ROI from their paid traffic.
“People just crave connectivity and I think they crave authenticity. … They’re craving real authenticity — thought authenticity from creators and community from the other people that are doing it alongside them. I think memberships are making a big comeback.”
“You’ve just visually mapped out what is at the core of many of the things in Alex’s book... it’s just a reminder of a lot of foundationals with some peppering of new.” [03:46]
“Speed to lead, and this is something that Hormozi talks about in all his books, is just so absolutely essential. The chart of how a lead decays over time is past five minutes... it basically goes down to zero.”
[04:33]
“If you do not have speed to lead, you better sure have a lot of credentials, a lot of trust, and a lot of marketing.”
[06:33]
“Why not try to monetize it? So that was the first opportunity to increase the effectiveness of this money model.”
[10:49]
“If you discount just to discount, then people will take advantage of it and they were gonna pay you full price anyways and you just lost money.”
[17:07]
“This is the part of the book that kind of blew my mind. I was like I never thought of using guarantee taking it away as your first down sell.”
[19:49]
“Usually when I find that someone doesn’t agree on the guarantee it’s because they don’t have enough confidence in delivering on the product.”
[20:14]
“So they get a sample, they don’t get the fullest. … But they still get to see, is this gonna be something I want to invest in further. So I’m getting a piece of the pie but not the whole enchilada.”
[23:07]
“On that call as an opportunity for check in but also to show at the same time what the highest value part of the program is. And it’s an opportunity to upsell.”
[24:13]
Lauren, Membership Model Revival:
“In a world of AI slop… people are just over it. They’re craving real authenticity.” [02:18]
Ralph, Speed to Lead:
“As soon as somebody fills out this scheduler here… insert a phone call and get somebody on the phone literally within five minutes.” [04:33]
Lauren, On Discounts:
“If you discount just to discount, then people will take advantage of it…” [17:07]
Ralph, Using Guarantees as a Downsell:
“I never thought of using guarantee taking it away as your first down sell…” [19:49]
Lauren, On Not Needing Perfection:
“It’s incrementality that matters and progression, not perfection.” [20:58]
Lauren, On Sampling the Offer:
“So I’m getting a piece of the pie but not the whole enchilada.” [23:07]
Further resources and the referenced book can be found in the show notes at perpetualtraffic.com.