MBA2697 How to Know Why You’re Not Making Enough Money in Your Business

0:00Let me guess, you clicked on this episode because you're working hard, you've got traffic, You're posting on social media, you're emailing, and the money is still not matching your expectations or your effort. Today, I'm going to show you exactly where the problem is in your business, where the money is leaking. And I'm going to walk you through a simple funnel diagnostic so you can know exactly what is the problem. We're going to go through the key metrics for each step and show you how to fix these damn bottlenecks this week so you can start seeing more revenue immediately.

0:38Welcome back to the$100 MBA show. I'm your host, Omar Zinhome, where I deliver practical business lessons three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, to help you start, grow, and scale your business. Real quick, if these episodes help you in any way, hit the follow button on this podcast app. It helps us to keep bringing you practical Business Insights three times a week for free. Thanks. Let's start by just outlining what a business's funnel looks like in the digital marketing space. You want to think of your revenue, your business, like a river flowing through five gates. And each gate either is going to open, meaning it is clear, there's no problems, no issues, no bottlenecks, or it's going to be shut and it's going to stop you from making the revenue that you need.

1:25So let's go through those five gates. The first one is market and message. You can see this as marketing. Are you talking to the right people with the right promise, with the right message? Number two, lead capture. Do visitors of your content become leads? Do they join your email list? Number three, nurture. Once they're on your email list, do your leads actually engage with your emails? Do they open them? Do they click on them? Do they trust you is really what we're trying to find out. Gate number four, Four, conversion and sales. This is where the rubber meets the road. Do buyers say yes when you ask them to buy?

2:00This is something that we need to work on because this is often where the problem lies. And number five, retention and support. Do buyers stay and buy again and again and refer you to other people? This is actually very critical because without it, it's very hard to have a sustainable business. Here's a quick hot tip. you want to first fix the gate first fix the part of your funnel that's closest to the cash first this is called the theory of constraints i learned this the hard way don't pour more water more traffic into a leaky pipe right you want to make sure that you are actually pouring more water in a good well-oiled machine right meaning i like to go at the sales part of the business of the actual funnel to figure out, is there an issue with conversion?

2:48Because often what I find is nine out of 10 businesses have a conversion problem and not a traffic problem. They're just not converting at a higher rate, no matter how many customers they have or how many leads they get. And a lot of people don't understand that if you fix your conversion rate, it can mean doubling, tripling your revenue. Like if your conversion rate right now is 0.5 % and you take it to 1%, you just doubled your money easily. Hot tip over. Let's move on. I'm going to encourage you to create what's called a minimal viable scorecard. You can make this with a simple sheet like a Google sheet or an Excel sheet.

3:23Don't overdo this. You don't need some over-the-top tool for this. I'm going to give you the instructions and you're going to fill it out. Now, every business is going to be different, so you just fill out what works for you. By having this sheet, By having this scoreboard, you can easily see the facts, the numbers, and understand where the problem lies. Now, I'm going to give you some stats that you can put into the sheet as benchmarks so you understand where you should be and where the problem is. The first thing I want you to put on the sheet as a standard is your traffic to lead capture rate.

3:54What is this? That means when somebody hits a landing page where you're asking for their name and email address, whether it's a lead magnet or sign up for your newsletter, what is the opt-in rate, right? on average in your business, what's the opt-in rate? Meaning leads divided by unique visitors. How many leads do you get with X amount of visitors? Do you get three leads for every hundred visitors or do you get 30? A warm lead, a healthy range is 25 to 40 % conversion rate. Cold traffic, like from an ad or they've never seen you before, 15 to 25. So mind you, with the warm leads, 25 to 40%, 40 % is the top range.

4:27That is really aspirational, but 25 is pretty much minimal 25 % of the people that means for every 100 people that go to your site 25 people actually sign up and that's for warm leads for cold leads 15 to 25 % again 25 % is the aspirational range 15 is the minimum so keep this in mind because this is going to allow you know where you should be at and if it's below these ranges then you know you need to work on this now remind you as we go through each part of the funnel you might have to work on more than one place. You might have below average rates or below average performance in every part of your funnel.

5:06That's okay, especially when you're starting out because you don't know what you don't know. This is why we got to track it. This is why we have the spreadsheet that you're creating. So that way you can know what you need to work on and continue to improve. And then again, see, are you moving in the right direction, you know, month after month, year after year. Another piece of data that you really should look at when it comes to traffic and lead capture is CPL, cost per lead. If you're running ads, any kind of ads, whether they're banner ads, whether it's meta ads, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube ads, it doesn't really matter.

5:38You want to make sure that you have this equation, ad spend divided by leads. How much does it cost you to buy a lead, basically? So if I spend$100 and I get 10 leads, I know it costs me$10 per lead. Now, there's no point in me giving you healthy ad spend cost per lead because every market's different. Every lead is different. There are leads that cost$5. There's leads that cost$500 in some markets, and that's a good price. Let's move on to the nurture category, email and content. The first thing I want to look at is your open rates with your emails through your email list. So we're looking at the first 72 hours.

6:15That's a good range. It's not too early, like 24 hours, and it's not like two weeks. first 72 hours warm, meaning that they've been on your email list for some time. Let's say three months, I would say is a warm lead, 35 to 50 % open rate for somebody that's been with you for six months. Now, if it's less than six months, or they've been on the list for a day or two, a week or two, a month, they're a little bit colder. And that's a 25 to 35 % open rate. Now, you got to look at the average, you might have some warm leads, you might have some cold leads on your on your list. So on average, you should try to aim for at least 30%.

6:5130 % is a good open rate. Click-through rate. This is the percentage of people that click on your links inside your email. Anything between 1 % and 3 % is really good. So you should aim for at least 1%. And if you're not there yet, don't worry, let's work up to it. 1 % to 3%. Now, if you have a hyper-targeted market, super niche, it might be even higher. Let's go into sales, conversion and sales. Now, you want to pick your lane. How are you doing sales? Is it sales page, send them to a sales page, you watch the sales page, maybe there's a video there, and they buy? Do you get them on a webinar and you sell on the webinar?

7:27Do you do sales calls one on one? These are different types of sales exercises. So depending on what you do, you know, most people do sales pages, some people do webinars, those are gonna be different benchmarks. So for sales page, conversion rate of one to 3 % for cold traffic and three to 8 % for warm is really what you're looking for. So look at how many people are visiting this page and how many customers you get in any given time. For a webinar, and I've done over 500 webinars in my career, registration to attendance. You wanna try to aim for 30 % minimum. 40 % is fantastic. We're talking about if this is a live webinar, they were attending live, 30 to 40%.

8:07Now, attendance to buy, 5 to 15%. You should always try to aim for at least 5%. That is the benchmark. I used to average around 10 to 15 on average. Some webinars, I was able to convert at 25 % because I had a very targeted buyer of a certain segment in my email list. Sales calls, one-on-one. Show-up rates, that means they actually show up to the appointment, 60 to 80%. And when it comes to closing that sale, 20 to 40%. You can see that sales calls, even though they're not scalable, they are great at conversions, super high conversions. Lastly, let's get to retention and support. Refund rate. How many people refund in the first 14 to 30 days?

8:52You want to make sure your refund rate is less than 3 % for informational products. 3 % should be really your minimum here. For SaaS products, less than 5%. Now, you'll see that SaaS products or software products are a little bit higher than info products. Why? Because if something is not right, if something is not working, it's really the software's fault, right? There's no way to get around that. But when it comes to info products, most people blame themselves that they're not getting the results because they mostly didn't consume the info product or didn't implement what the info product tells them to do.

9:29Let's talk about churn real quick. If you have a reoccurring business, whether it's software or memberships or whatever it might be, if you're in your first stage of your business, early stage, first year, 5 % to 8 % is acceptable when it comes to churn. That means the rate of customers that leave you. And beyond that first year, you want to improve towards less than 3%. Less than 3 % churn allows you to grow rapidly and not have to try to sell more to outpace churn. Now, what do you do with this spreadsheet? Well, you want to run a weekly 45-minute review, especially when you're trying to fix problems.

10:03After you have a well-oiled machine, maybe you can just review it once a week for five minutes. But you want to start by going to the sales transaction section, right? The conversion section. This is where the money is closest to. What else is close to the money? Well, retention and support. So you want to make sure that these areas are shored up first. So are refunds less than 3 %? Is your churn too high? You want to fix onboarding. You want to fix the expectations customers have when they're signing up. You want to make sure everything is on point. One of the easiest ways to fix retention and refund rates and churn is to create an email welcome series where you say, day one, do this.

10:44Day two, do this. Day three, do this. Give them step-by-step instructions. Encourage them. Let them know how to get help if they have questions. This gives them guidance, and you're not just like, okay, you bought, and you just ghost them. You want to make sure they know that you still have their back. For example, if you're looking at conversions, maybe you have a conversion problem in your sales strategy. Traffic and leads look fine, but sales are low. Okay, so the problem is check out your offer. Is it clear? Is there a social proof? Is there a risk reversal, like a money-back guarantee? Are your calls to action clear?

11:16Some quick wins is to rewrite a headline with like a verb plus outcome plus time frame promise. So let me give you an example of this verb. Sign up for this course plus outcome so you can learn how to snowboard plus time frame in two days. That's a nice promise. Easy to understand what they're buying. Make sure you add a risk reversal like a money back guarantee. Make sure that there's a way for them to ask questions. Could they email support or chat with somebody? If you have a problem with the nurture part where they're on your email list and they're not really building trust with you, you have low open rates, a great quick win is to send shorter story-led emails with one call to action on the email, not multiple calls to action.

11:57So anytime you send a welcome series email or whatever, start with a short story, have that story, connect with your message, and then have a call to action. Feel free to shoot a video that they can watch that might explain things faster. This is called show, don't tell, right? It might be a quick loom video, a checklist, a before and after type of thing you want to show on video that might be easier for you to communicate and earn trust. One of the easiest ways to engage your list and to get them clicking and opening and replying is to do what's called a reactivation campaign, where you just send a simple short email, one sentence that says, what's your current roadblock?

12:35Reply and let me know. This just gets them to reply and to engage with you. Yes, you'll have to go back and forth with some emails, but you'll have more engaged subscribers and people that are actually starting to earn trust with you and what you can do for them. If you have a problem with the lead capture, right? Opt-in rates are under the benchmark. Then you want to maybe improve your lead magnet, improve what you're offering in exchange for their email address. Maybe add some more value. Maybe if you have an email course, turn into a video course. Maybe if the video course is not good enough, add some AI elements.

13:05Make sure that your call to action in the lead magnet page or the landing page is above the fold, meaning that they can put their name and email address without scrolling on their phone or on their desktop. Add social proof, add testimonials, add any kind of mentions you've had in any publications. If you have a problem with market and messaging, marketing, that top part, right? Everything downstreams from that. So if there's something wrong here, you might have a problem that you need fixing immediately, right? Because if there's no water flowing in the beginning, you're going to have a very hard time getting sales.

13:36The first thing I would do is clarify who you're serving, what industry, what market, who they are, what their pain points are. By knowing exactly who you're talking to, you can really craft a better message. Kill any weak channels. Double down on the ones that are giving you the most results. So if you're spreading yourself in, being everywhere on LinkedIn and Facebook and Instagram and TikTok and everything else, then just look at the ones that are actually getting you the most engagement, the most traffic to your website. You can look at Google Analytics and find that out and just double down on one or two and just focus on that.

14:08Now, before we wrap up, I want to give you some quick examples of if I was diagnosing some business or product and trying to find out where the problem is, where's the bottleneck? Say, for example, there's a course creator selling a course for$497 and they get 5 ,000 page visits to their opt-in, right? And that opt-in converts at 10%, right? That's 500 leads. That's pretty low on average, okay? So I would tell them to really work on that page to get a better conversion on that opt-in or improve the opt-in itself or whatever they're giving in exchange for the name and email address. But once they're on their email address, their nurture emails open at 48 % and the click-through rate is 5%.

14:44Very good, okay? So there's no issue here. Double down on that. Just keep that going. You got to work on your conversion from the actual landing page to the opt-in so that they get more people coming through and converting. So to wrap up, if you're not making enough money, it's not a mystery. It's science, right? It's a mechanical problem in your business. Something is blocking the money. You want to trace the flow from market to capture, to nurture, to convert, to retain. Fix the tightest gate nearest the cash, which I believe is convert or retain, which is where you make the sales or where you keep the sales with retention.

15:23You want to do one focus change per week so that you could see what works and test and then move on. So you know that, okay, that was a problem. That was a solution that worked. You want to create your metric dashboard based on the numbers I gave you. And you want to look at that every single week. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Sometimes in business, success is just all about knowing your numbers, knowing the math and looking at the numbers and seeing what's not working and fixing what's not working. It's a little bit boring sometimes, but it results in more money. And that's not boring, right?

15:57You want to make sure that you're optimizing your business as much as possible so that you can maximize the success and revenue that you can make. Just understand that whatever pain you're going through as you're going through these numbers and fixing these problems, it's well worth it. If you found today's episode helpful and you want more practical business lessons to help you start, grow, and scale your business, the best thing you could do is subscribe to this podcast. Hit subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app, the one that you're using right now, whether it's Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.

16:31By hitting subscribe, you get our next episode automatically and it's the best way to support the show. It's absolutely free and it's a way for you to commit to growing your business. And now that you've subscribed, I'll check you in the next episode.

16:47Thank you.