Leon Perkins

Marketing agency for coaches. 2,900+ calls and 1.5M+ revenue generated. Scaled a client from 10-20K/mo to $110K/mo organically with less than 16K followers

[Leon Perkins @LeonLifeDesign]

Last week we booked 33 qualified calls and signed $37K in clients with one of our clients.

The main change was booking setting calls with our "worst" prospects, warming them up and then booking them closing calls.

$28K of our clients came from that.

We didn't exactly do our closing calls much better than usual...

The difference was how much nurturing the prospect had before they were asked to pay.

I've been talking a lot to our setter about the idea of "how many minutes" of our company we can put the prospect through.

How many minutes can they spend:

1. Going through our content/ads
2. Talking to us in the DMs
3. Going through content like case studies we send in the DMs
4. On calls with us whether that's a setting call AND a closing call or just a closing call.

You can work on making your marketing and sales higher *quality* - but the *quantity* the prospect goes through makes so much difference too.

[Leon Perkins @LeonLifeDesign]

Last week, we booked 35 qualified sales calls for our client from LinkedIn.

This was the most calls they’ve ever had in a week.

Our latest update to the funnel is having a setter who we book calls with people who answer our Typeform application in a way that shows that they have low-interest.

We used to just totally block these people from booking a call and leave them behind.

Now, the setter has the call and his job is to follow our script that nurtures them and makes them far more interested.

If in the end they're interested enough, we then book them in with a closer for a closing call.

Now, we're booking an additional 1-2 warm closing calls per day from leads we were getting zero out of.

The lesson is that when a lead is low "quality” because of low interest but their quality is fine in terms of occupation, demographic, finances etc...

Instead of just discarding and giving up with them, you should try to figure out how you can create a mechanism that can increase their interest enough to convert them to a highly qualified lead.

[Leon Perkins @LeonLifeDesign]

17 sales calls from LinkedIn in a day.

We booked our client 9 qualified closing calls and then 8 setting calls with less qualified leads yesterday.

They were largely from the outreach and ads we normally do and we got a lot of leads from one of our organic posts.

It was the most viral long-form organic post we’ve had in months.

I’ve been spending 20+ hours a week recently trying to improve this client’s content and ads and it’s paying off.

When it comes to the quality of your content and ads, the better they are, the exponentially better results they get.

There’s only diminishing marginal returns when the content and the ads genuinely can’t get much better.

The difference between an 8/10 piece of content or ad and a 9/10 one isn’t just 10-20% in performance. It’s more like double or triple.

The better a piece of content, the exponentially more viral it goes.

The better a sponsored content ad (the ones we run) the higher its relevancy score and the more potential leads LinkedIn will show it to WITHOUT paying more per impression/lead.

Your traffic and call booking volume is the start of everything for your business.

If you already have a good price and close rate, it’s unlikely you’ll double or triple it.

But you can very much double or triple your call booking volume as soon as you get much better at marketing.

[Leon Perkins @LeonLifeDesign]

Nothing happens and then it all happens at once.

Whenever you have a single, strong bottleneck in your funnel, you make significantly less revenue and it can look like your business is doing so much worse than it really is.

You see the low revenue and you think that this is just how your business is.

You think you’ll need to make a lot of big changes to significantly get revenue up.

But in reality, all you need to do is fix that one bottleneck and immediately, you’ll make so much more revenue.

With one of our clients, we’ve struggled with the sales performance.

That was our bottleneck.

We’re now booking more calls than we’ve booked in months, the leads are higher quality than they’ve ever been, the show rate is higher than it’s ever been…

But sales were still way down.

Then, this week we’ve signed $38K in clients.

As well, the founder has another 4 follow-up calls today so we’ll see how they go too.

Our new closer suddenly broke through and went from having signed 0 clients independently to signing 2 this week.

Our founder came back to do some follow up calls and he signed 2 clients from that so far.

What composes revenue in your business is really 3-10+ steps, depending on how much you want to break it down.

It’s:

1. Traffic source e.g. organic content or ads
2. Conversion mechanism e.g. DMs or VSL
3. Pre-call process to nurture and increase show rate
4. Sales call process
5. Price

Each of those 5 things has many factors to them too.

If any one is doing badly, it will bottleneck the output of every other factor no matter how good those are.

For example, if you’re getting a ton of leads from organic content or ads, but your DMs process is bad, you still won’t book enough sales calls.

If you’re getting a lot of qualified traffic to your VSL page but the headline is bad, very few people will even watch the VSL and then very few will book sales calls.

If your entire marketing is on-point but your sales team performance isn’t, you won’t make much revenue.

So break down how every single step in your funnel is going and make sure you’re laser-focused on improving the one step that’s performing the worst right now.

[Leon Perkins @LeonLifeDesign]

We booked a client 7 qualified calls yesterday from LinkedIn.

I made a post yesterday about how I had messed up with letting his lead magnet fatigue too much and that we now replaced it with a new and better one and now it got us 5X more leads than usual.

We've also been getting more leads than usual from our outreach and follow-ups to old leads.

Yesterday, we got 48 new qualified leads in total.

You really can increase your lead volume and call booking volume so fast when you introduce something new that works

[Leon Perkins @LeonLifeDesign]

Confession:

I let a client's lead magnet fatigue too much and we started booking less calls as a result.

I was so focused on the rest of the content and ads, I didn't focus enough on the actual part that converts them to an inbound lead at the end:

The CTA to DM us for a lead magnet.

Our content and ads are performing better than ever in terms of engagement and CPMs but we needed far higher conversion from the lead magnet at the end of them.

So I worked on a new lead magnet and on our first full day with all our ads being for it and with our normal level of ad spend...

We generated 5X more leads than normal.

We normally got about 2 leads per day from the old lead magnet but yesterday we got 11.

We historically convert 25% of inbound/lead magnet leads to qualified booked calls.

If we keep up at least 10/day Monday to Friday instead of 2/day...

That'll be an extra 10 qualified calls per week for us...

From just changing the lead magnet.

Even though this new lead magnet is crushing it, I've already made a new one we're going to test out as well and I've got another 4 new ones in the works too.

I never want us to get to the point ever again where our lead magnets have fatigued so much.

With your marketing, you've always got to have a fine balance between focusing on what's already proven to work and having enough variation so that when what's always worked stops working so well anymore...

You've got other high-performing marketing to immediately make up for it.

[Leon Perkins @LeonLifeDesign]

You have to persuade your prospects without them feeling like they’re being persuaded.

Everyone wants to feel like they’re making their own decisions logically based on the information they have.

That’s because that makes them feel in control of their decisions and because their decisions change their life, it makes them feel in more control of their life.

When they feel like someone is trying to persuade them, they feel like someone else is trying to change something about their life to suit them.

Nobody wants their life to be changed by someone else according to that person’s self-interest and not yours.

The odds are high that if someone is changing your life for their own self-interest, it won’t be what’s best for you.

So how do you persuade someone without them feeling persuaded?

Give them the information that they want to base their decision on.

Give them that information in a way that makes it sound like you’re just giving them the facts and genuinely telling them how it works.

Here’s an analogy:

Imagine you’re a CEO of a company and you asked your CMO to show you how the current ads strategy works.

The CMO gives you a presentation showing what the ads strategy is, how it works, and the good results it’s gotten so far.

The CMO gives the presentation in a very matter-of-fact way, in a normal tone of voice.

Does the CEO come away from the presentation thinking:

“Wow, he was trying really hard there to sell me on how well the ads were going”…

No, he probably doesn’t.

He instead thinks “Okay cool, so the ads are working well and that’s why”.

He feels like he got given the information to come to the conclusion that the ads are working well and they’re worth continuing.

That’s how your organic content, ads, VSLs and pitches should feel like to your prospect:

“Yeah this makes sense. I see how that works” - they shouldn’t feel like they’re trying to get convinced of something that’s beyond the information in front of them.

[Leon Perkins @LeonLifeDesign]

Here’s the most effective hook and lead tactic I’ve found:

Think about how you can use the word “you” and describe the problems and pains your lead is experiencing right now as deeply as possible.

Then describe how they get worse over time.

Then describe how the conventional path your prospect is on won’t work to fix it.

Write about 6-10 lines on that.

Say “you” and “your” over and over.

Here’s why it works so well:

Every single second someone is looking at your content, their mind is trying to figure out how relevant it is to them.

They’re trying to figure it out in terms of deciding if they should keep reading.

They’re trying to figure it out in terms of figuring out how to use this information to help them.

So when 100% of that hook and lead is about the problems and pains they’re experiencing right now, their mind understands easily and instantly that this is super relevant to them so they keep reading.

Plus, humans have a negativity bias so only talking about problems and pains grabs their attention better compared to talking about benefits and solutions.

Now once you’ve talked about their problems, pains, how it gets worse over time and why the conventional path they’re on won’t fix it…

They’re primed to be open to considering and even caring about your solution.

That’s when you pivot the post to talk about your solution.

They’ll now perceive your solution is much more important so they’ll pay much more attention to it.

Another reason why this works so well is because it allows you to grab the attention of leads who are only “problem-aware” which is a far, far bigger segment of the market than leads who are solution-aware.

If you only appeal to solution-aware leads with your content, you will get far fewer leads.

[Leon Perkins @LeonLifeDesign]

If your coaching or consulting offer requires the client to do a lot of repetitive work, think about how you can use AI to help do that work for them.

Make your Done-With-You offer far more Done-For-You.

Before AI, if you had a lot of Done-For-You elements, it would cost a lot in labor costs for your employees doing the work and you would therefore have to increase your price a lot and then that would make it too unaffordable for your market.

But now with AI, you add those Done-For-You elements for a fraction of the cost.

Now you can charge a bit more, your offer is perceived as much more valuable and now you have a higher close rate without much additional cost.

It’s always worth it.

This is especially the case when one of the main things that stops prospects from buying your offer is that repetitive work that you could get AI to mostly do for them.

Here’s an example.

For one of our clients, the part his prospects hate the most about the idea of doing his offer is the outreach that’s required.

But now with VAs, AI, automation and some light work from a skilled CSM, they now do totally Done-For-You outreach for their clients.

We have a higher close rate and we even have higher client success as now, there are no clients slacking on the outreach and failing for that reason.

[Leon Perkins @LeonLifeDesign]

What if the harder you tried to work, the less your business would grow?

The harder you work, the more you do, so you think the more your business would grow.

But there’s only 24 hours in the day and there’s a point you run out of energy so the volume you can achieve by yourself will always be limited.

The more you rely on that and the less you put other things to work for you like AI, employees and agencies, the less you’ll grow.

[Leon Perkins @LeonLifeDesign]

Skill acquisition, becoming more competent, is the real meta-skill of business.

Whenever you think about how to improve your business and make more money, unless you’re just not putting in enough time and effort, it’s all about how you can do something “better”.

Whether that’s market better, sell better, deliver better for your clients, or do any of those things more time/cost efficiently (which is doing it better in terms of time/cost-efficiency).

That’s all there is and there’s no excuses about it.

There’s no external factor you can blame.

Because if you simply did those things better, you’d make more money.

When I first started in online business, I knew absolutely nothing about social media or marketing or sales.

Now I’ve booked over 3,100 sales calls that made over $1.7M for our clients.

You acquire skill three ways:

1. You talk to or consume content from people who are better than you at something and then apply to your own business what you learned
2. You see certain things in your business do better than others, like some posts getting more views than others, and you analyze the differences between them and then learn why some did better than others
3. You don’t get better at the skill yourself. You hire someone who’s better and then they apply that skill to your business and you make more money that way. You aren’t acquiring the skill - but your business is.

The third way is the fastest way by far but it’s the one with the most initial upfront investment so it’s the one a lot of beginner ($10-30K/month) coaches and consultants avoid.

But if you choose the right person, you’ll make far more money back than what they cost. That’s why it’s called an (investment).

If a marketing agency that costs $5K/month increases your net profit, after their cost, by $10K/month, that’s effectively a free $10K/month for you that you didn’t have to do anything better to achieve.

They might achieve that within 3 months for you but it might have taken you a year to learn how to get good enough at marketing to achieve that.

They already did their years of learning.

Plus, they do the work week-in, week-out instead of you so that saves you even more time.

So if you’re stuck right now, identify what’s holding you back the most, then ask yourself:

1. What content can I consume (can include courses of coaching) to get better at this?
2. When does it go better and when does it go worse and can I notice the reasons why?
3. Who can I hire who would already know how to do this well enough in my business who can implement it for me?

[Leon Perkins @LeonLifeDesign]

Everyone knows that their offer should have a risk-reversal but they take that to mean guarantees and giving people their money back.

But if you’re selling to prospects who are doing well financially, the cost of your offer might only be a small part of the perceived risk of buying it.

When they think, what happens if this doesn’t work, they don’t just think about the money, they think about all the wasted time, effort, opportunity cost and even them feeling bad about themselves for having failed…

So you need to reduce the perceived risk of those things too.

it’s simple to reduce the perceived risk of wasting time and effort.

You just make your offer take as little time and effort as possible to get results with.

Trying to make them feel less bad about failing is going to be some very deep, emotional and identity-level work so we’ll leave that out for this post…

And then the opportunity cost is the area with the biggest room for improvement normally.

Here’s an example with one of our clients to show you how this works:

He helps corporate executives sign fractional consulting engagements.

When our prospects think signing fractional consulting engagements means they have to stop having the full-time roles they’ve had their whole career and made millions of dollars of income out of in their lifetime…

It’s very, very hard to get them to buy.

Their perceived opportunity cost of buying is their entire current income + all the money they think they’d earn from full-time roles in the future (which is millions of dollars).

How can we make fractional sound like a better opportunity than one they perceive as almost guaranteed to make them millions of dollars and that they’ve already made millions of dollars with?

We almost never can.

So how do we solve this?

Now in a huge part of our marketing, we emphasise that this is NOT “fractional” OR “full-time” roles.

Fractional is an additional option.

You can start doing it on the side of your full-time role.

If you don't have a full-time role currently, how we teach you to get fractional roles will also be more effective in getting full-time roles anyway.

So you have nothing to lose by doing this.

All you have is learning how to more effectively get executive work.

When we can get the prospect to believe that, it becomes a much easier sale.

So ask yourself, what are my prospects perceiving is the opportunity cost of buying my offer?

Then, how can I reduce that?

[Leon Perkins @LeonLifeDesign]

I was watching a video with Mark Ford, the chief growth officer at Agora which is the biggest info company ever - a billion dollar company.

He's one of the greatest copywriters ever who's launched dozens of other successful businesses - he doesn't just write copy.

And he said the big issue with AI copy is that LLMs are foundationally trained to write the most predictable content possible.

They're trained to write next the word that is most likely to go next in a text.

So all the copy it produces sounds predictable and boring.

In my experience, the way to get around this is to give it absolutely huge swipe files of content you want it to produce content like and extremely in-depth instructions about how to make it.

I've also found it's best to only allow is to use words and phrases you've already used in past content.

That way, the wording always sounds like you no matter what.

So ultimately, "AI content" is only good when it's actually based as much as possible on things that aren't AI...

Ironic.

It's only as good as your inputs you give it and what determines how good those inputs are?

How good you are.

It exposes that you can't use AI as a cheat code to produce content, ads or copy that's better than what you could produce yourself.

All you can do is use it to produce faster and more time efficiently what you were capable of producing yourself manually anyway.

So no matter what, you need to get better at, or hire someone who's better at, content and marketing if you want to grow.

AI can't do that for you.

[Leon Perkins @LeonLifeDesign]

Your content isn't repetitive enough.

You need to repeat the same winning hooks and angles over and over and over.

It will look repetitive to you but most of the people who see it will never even have seen a single post of yours in the past - let alone a post that had that same hook or angle.

Even if they had seen it before, the odds are that they'll barely remember.

Your post is just one of hundreds they would have seen that day.

If someone sees 100 posts a day and they saw your one 2 weeks ago, they've seen 1,400 posts since then.

Do you think they'll remember yours?

They won't.

We've been "scaling" the content and ads of one of our clients recently.

We're spending more on ads and trying to generate more leads as our closers now have more capacity.

We're currently booking about 18-24 qualified calls a week and we want to reach 25-30 qualified calls a week.

I went very deep into trying to make the content and ads far more varied thinking that's what we need.

But no matter how hard I tried, I could just not get the varied content to be as good as our proven winners.

Meanwhile as I was doing this, I was reposting old winners to buy me some time...

And guess what?

Those old winners performed far better than the more recent varied content I was trying to do.

Now if I needed to do more varied content to get higher performing content, how did the old "repetitive" content perform so well?

Because I was wrong.

People aren't tired of those winners yet. They don't want variety yet. They want more of the content they find the most interesting.

So now I've updated our content strategy to double down on those winners and be less varied.

I'll only start introducing more variation once the proven winners stop performing above average.

Try this out for yourself:

Start reposting way more of your old winning posts and see how well they do.

Repost them and post very similar versions of them until they don't anymore.

[Leon Perkins @LeonLifeDesign]

Yesterday, all 4 of the new, first sales calls we booked for one of our clients put that they’ve reached $400K/year+ in income in their career.

A higher percentage than ever of the leads who fill out our application are qualified and book a call.

What changed?

A higher percentage of our leads are from inbound messaging us first, whether it’s a general enquiry or for a lead magnet, compared to being from outreach.

The inbound leads are higher intent and more likely to buy.

7 out of 10 of our last clients were from inbound leads.

We’re getting more inbound leads through better messaging in our content and our ads.

We’re articulating better the problems our ICP has so when they see the posts, they’re more captivated and they’re more likely to read onto the part of the posts about how we solve those problems.

Then they message us for our solution.

To get leads more interested in your solution, you should first more effectively grab their attention with how you talk about their problems.

You must never forget that the perceived value of your solution is entirely based on the perceived significance of the problems it solves.

Plus, you’ll always grab leads’ attention more talking about their problems than you do by talking about your solution.

[Leon Perkins @LeonLifeDesign]

@AbrisGains Congrats to you both! Looking forward to seeing you again in Paraguay

[Leon Perkins @LeonLifeDesign]

Here's the biggest misconception about how to book sales calls in the DMs:

You book them by making your leads interested in your paid offer.

If you try to do this, it will have the complete opposite effect.

Think of it like this:

How many DM conversations do you get into every week where the other person starts describing their offer in the first two messages?

A ton.

How many of those people do you book a call with?

0 or very, very few.

Why?

Because at the point where a lead first replies to you, they haven't decided that they want to buy anything, they've only decided that there's something about their situation or their goals they'd like to change, so an offer put in front of them that early just reads as one more person selling to them.

Then the DM conversation stops being a conversation and starts being a pitch they didn't ask for.

Here's what to do instead:

Do NOT focus your DM conversation on your paid offer.

Focus the DM conversation on what they're looking to learn about or achieve relating to the "opportunity" or end-outcome of your offer - not your offer itself.

Then you propose the call around that exact thing.

That way you're proposing a conversation they already wanted to have, because it's about the thing they're already wanting to talk about and learn about…

Whereas if you propose a call about your offer, you're asking someone who barely knows you and your offer to want to be pitched it… when they don’t want to.

Propose the call around what they want to achieve - not around the offer you're selling.

[Leon Perkins @LeonLifeDesign]

$0, $0, $38,900.

Last week with one of our clients, we signed $38,900 in clients but before that, we made $0 for 2 weeks.

Same volume of calls, same content, same ads, same pre-call nurturing, same everything except…

The closers taking the sales calls.

We hired new closers and they immediately started doing so much better than our previous one.

The solution to scale your revenue isn't always YOU doing better or even improving your "processes" like your process to make content, do DMs or your sales calls (e.g. the sales script).

It's simply to hire someone who’s far more competent than the current person you have in that function.

In our case, it was new closers.

In your case, it could be someone new to do your content or to do your DMs to book calls (or both).

So if you've been stuck at your current revenue for a while, for a second stop looking at "what" you're doing in your business and instead look at "who" you can get in your business.

[Leon Perkins @LeonLifeDesign]

There's an exact threshold of information your prospect needs to buy from you.

Most coaches and consultants try to get them over that threshold on the sales call itself.

So the call turns into a long round of discovery, pitch, objection handling and answering every question they have about the offer.

Then at the end, they say they want time to "think about it"...

And you assume you have a closing problem but that's not the problem.

They showed up to the call without knowing or believing enough about the opportunity/end-outcome of your offer to want it yet, so the whole call gets spent building belief that should have already been built before it started.

Here's what to do instead:

Use the window between booking the call and having the call properly.

Think about all the key information your prospects need to know (and believe in) in order to buy.

Then think about how you can make a VSL based on that and have client case studies based on that that you send the prospect before the call.

50-minutes of content that's carefully designed word by word to make the viewer as interested as possible in what you do is going to be much more compelling than a 5-minute pitch on a sales call.

You control every single word of that content and you can improve it over and over too.

Whereas on the call, you're improvising to deal with their doubts, their attention span and whatever mood they showed up in.

Your nurturing content before the call is the most underrated aspect of a call funnel.

Focus on it more.

[Leon Perkins @LeonLifeDesign]

Client results aren't the only form of credibility.

How you articulate the situation your ICP is in makes them feel more understood than any testimonial about another person that's not them.

If they feel like you fully understand their problems, they'll feel much more like you understand how to solve them.

In your content marketing, focus as much as possible on the situation your ICP is in. Make it the same with your sales calls.

They won't care to listen to or believe in your solution until they feel understood enough