10 Things Every Business Owner Needs Before Running Paid Ads on Meta

Alex Evans (00:00): Welcome to the podcast. Today I'm joined with a close friend of mine, Gray Twombly, located here in Miami as well. He is a former chef on a mega yacht who's now turned to a marketing agency and one of the most brilliant advertisers I know. Gray, welcome to the show.

Gray Twombly (00:14): Thanks so much for having me, Alex. It's good to be here.

Alex Evans (00:17): Yeah, well I'm happy to have you here as well too. Obviously I know that you're the founder and CEO of Whole Founder. Can you just tell us a little bit about what you're doing over at Whole Founder today?

Gray Twombly (00:25): Yeah, sure. So we run Meta Ads and build funnels for high ticket service businesses, usually spending anywhere from $20,000 up to $250,000 a month in ad spend. And yeah, we help them drive more revenue and solve lead gen challenges.

Alex Evans (00:42): Yeah, and from what I know, and based on our previous conversations, you pretty much know everything about the funnels, about advertising, and you could really give a lot of people some really great insights into ads, which is exactly what we're gonna be talking about today too. I felt like you were the perfect person to have on for this particular podcast. So for today's episode, we're gonna be talking about the ten things every business owner absolutely, without a doubt, needs to know before they're gonna be putting even a single dollar into paid advertisements. You really are the perfect guy to talk about this because you've worked with how many clients at this point in time? And how much ad spend do you think you've actually spent cumulative across all the accounts?

Gray Twombly (01:21): Well over $10 million.

Alex Evans (01:23): That's a sweet, sweet number. And when you start working with some of these brands, or maybe when you were a little bit earlier on into your advertising agency career, were you working with brands that were still new to advertising or were most of your clients already spending money on ads?

Gray Twombly (01:37): Yeah, when we started, we were taking people from zero to one. So a lot of big personal brands that had already had, or even just businesses that already had traction, they had a proven offer, and they wanted to get more clients and paid advertising seemed like the next logical step. So we were able to take them from zero to one, getting them set up from a Meta Ads account being built out, pixel, all of that stuff, all the way to spending tens of thousands of dollars a month on ads.

Alex Evans (02:03): That's awesome, man. You're definitely a couple steps ahead of me. We're still working with a few brands over at my agency, Raging Agency. We work primarily with wellness brands right now, but we're doing mostly lead generation campaigns for them as well. And we are still setting up a lot of the pixels, audience segmentations, maybe some first time new campaigns that are being built out and whatnot. But still, I still think that this could apply to people who are already running ads on Meta especially, even if they're like one year in or a couple months in.

If they don't have these ten things dialed in, I don't think that they could be super successful. I think you would agree with most of them as well too. So that's what the entire episode's gonna be about today. And if you wanna skip the entire episode, you have no patience, then you can always go down to the description. I'll actually leave a free resource that you can download. It's going to be the top ten things that you need to know before you're spending a single dollar on ad spend. You'll be able to find it down there. But without further ado, I'm ready to hop into it. Are you?

Gray Twombly (02:58): Let's rip it.

1. A Defined ICP

Alex Evans (02:59): All right, cool. We have to start with number one, which is a defined ICP. Obviously, you cannot run profitable ads without knowing exactly who you're selling to. I feel like we had to start here. My question for you is how do you stress test whether someone has a real ICP or target audience versus a vague one? And what's the single best question for you to ask an owner to find out if they really know who they're marketing to?

Gray Twombly (03:20): Yeah, so the way that we usually start this is I wanna know — particularly for people that don't understand this, so when Alex says ICP, he's talking about ideal customer profile, which is usually in the B2B world, it's like what type of business are we going after? In the direct-to-consumer world, it might be called an ICA or an ideal customer avatar. And in the B2B world, that would be like the specific person inside of the company that's the decision maker. In the direct-to-consumer world, that is the actual buyer, the person that is going to be buying your product.

And what I like to do in the beginning is I always ask, of all of the clients that you've had, who is the one that has been your best customer? They're your raving fan, they've spent the most money with you, they were the easiest to close, and they refer a friend. And those five things are what I look for. It's like if you can name that person, then — as long as they weren't a complete outlier and you never found them again — particularly if this has been a repeat customer, I like to put that person literally on a document. That is the person that we are speaking to in our advertising.

Alex Evans (04:24): I think that's really great, and Alex Hormozi even says too — I think you brought up a really good point just about how they refer a friend — but Alex Hormozi always says the fastest way to scale your company is to not lose customers. So if there's somebody who you've already sold to that's gonna stick with you for the long haul and bring friends, I mean, you really can't beat that to be honest.

Gray Twombly (04:44): Yeah, 100%. I like to make this as real as possible. I like to use this sort of mental model of I wanna print this person out and put them in a picture frame on my desk. And so every time that we are writing marketing messaging, we're speaking to that person. You're obviously gonna bring in other people, but I think one of the biggest traps that business owners fall into is thinking that by speaking to one person, we're actually alienating others. And it's the other way around. By speaking to one person, we are going to bring in more of that person because they are going to feel seen, heard, and feel like the marketing is actually built around them, that the service is designed for them.

2. Qualifying Questions

Alex Evans (05:21): That's a beautiful point to be honest. And it goes into point number two that I think is extremely important. I think all ten are very important, but the first couple on this list are just non-negotiables, right? And the second one is really just talking about qualifying questions and how are we gonna pre-qualify people to begin with that are coming through. So my question is, what are qualifying questions for somebody who has maybe not set them up before? And how do you write ad copy that actually pre-qualifies them before they even click on your ad in the first place?

Gray Twombly (05:50): Yeah, so okay, two parts of this question. I like to start out with — there's a floor and a ceiling. So my question is, what is the minimum requirement for someone to work with you in your business? And that's where I sort of put the floor. And so when we're building a funnel, we're usually building out an application form process, whether that's on Meta or whether that's after the landing page. But we like to design as few questions as possible in order to sort of eliminate anybody that does not meet our floor.

And the easiest way of remembering this is BANT, B-A-N-T. So budget, do they have the budget? Authority, do they have the authority to actually make the decision? Need, is this an actual problem that they need solved right now? And then timing, is this something that they need solved this year or is this something that they need solved this week? And so those are the sort of minimums of, hey, if we were to drop four questions in an application form, we should be able to by the end of them answer those questions and have a really good idea of whether or not they meet our floor.

Alex Evans (06:55): That's awesome. I've never actually heard of the BANT framework before. I think that's really great. We might have to include that in the resource here. But do you think that four is the optimal number? Are there any times that you go less, any times that you go more?

Gray Twombly (07:06): Yeah, so I always like to start, particularly if we're going from zero to one. So I think in this use case we're talking about more people who are in the beginning and they're trying to get off the ground, not optimize. I like to go as minimal as possible because we don't want to create friction. Now, once we get lead flow going, layering in additional questions usually helps us to sort of pull levers to eliminate anyone that does not meet our criteria, or if we're bringing in people, training the pixel, training this AI brain that is the advertising brain, we want to make sure that we're bringing in more of the right people.

So as we start to increase volume, as we start to get more leads, we can layer in additional questions. We usually find that the max number of questions that we want to ask in an application form is somewhere between six to seven. If we're going to really — we call it cold traffic, which means people that don't know, like, and trust you — if you ask someone 20 questions, they're unlikely, if they're just meeting you for the first time or don't even really know about your service yet, to answer 20 questions. So we find that around five to seven questions is sort of that sweet spot. And you could have two questions about budget, right? If it's a real estate investing program, you could ask how much available capital do you have and what's your current income? So that's how you adjust.

3. A Clear Offer and Hook

Alex Evans (08:18): Yeah, that's great. I think you're totally right. In some instances, we've even gone up to like eight questions for super competitive things that already have high volume. But you're right. And this brings me into point three, which is the clear offer and the hook, right? If you don't really even have a clear offer and you don't have anything to hook somebody in, you won't get any lead volume, which is so, so common, especially for a brand that's starting brand new. Maybe they had too many qualifying questions, maybe they didn't have a landing page. But on top of all of that, they didn't really have a clear offer. They weren't really speaking to somebody.

What is your advice to them? What separates an offer that converts cold traffic from one that actually works on warm referrals? And walk us through what would a Meta ready offer actually look like?

Gray Twombly (08:55): Yeah. This is a great question, one I could probably spend the rest of our time talking about. I actually built a tool which I'm happy to share. It's called the offer gap score, and it'll actually create a rubric. So we create a scoring system to break out what I consider the 10 most important parts of what an offer is, which in layman's terms is what you the client or the customer is getting in exchange for money, right? They're paying you, and in exchange, they're getting a series of things. So this helps us actually list out and sort of pull the juice out of what it is that you're actually offering people.

A lot of the times an offer is just better communicating what you're already doing for someone that they might not know that you're doing. Like there might be an additional bonus that you actually have that you're offering that you're not communicating to them on the front end. And when people don't already know, like, and trust you, which is the challenge with going to cold traffic, right? Like even if it's Google Ads and there's higher search intent — there's higher intent than Meta where people are sort of just doom scrolling and stumbling on you. This is like the most important thing that you could possibly get right before you get to be ready for cold advertising, cold traffic.

So there's 10 different attributes. The most important thing, I think, in all of this — put your offer through this tool. It is one of the most valuable things that I've ever created and will bring you so much insight whether you decide to run cold ads or not. But it'll show you where the biggest room for opportunity is. And it's usually, from what I'm seeing, around risk reversal. So other than the other nine components, risk reversal, meaning like guarantees or something along those lines, helps to build confidence with this person before they come in the door.

It's like, hey, I don't know you, I don't fully trust you yet, but at least I know that if this doesn't go the way that I want it to, that there is some way of me recouping my investment, or that I'm safe, right? And people want to feel safe before they make decisions. So one, they need to be clear. Two, they need to feel like they're making an informed decision and that they're gonna have a net positive outcome. So risk reversal is one of the biggest levers that you can pull in order to do that.

And then the other thing that I'll say is just, you got to understand what the rest of the marketplace is saying. So a great offer in a vacuum, disregarding what all the other people on the internet are yelling, does not stand up. So you could have a 10 out of 10 offer, but if 20 other people are saying the exact same thing, it is no longer a really valuable offer. And so differentiation is super important, and it's overwhelming for business owners because you don't wanna have to go listen to every single ad from every single one of your competitors, which is why I created a tool that actually does that for you.

So we go scrape the internet, we scrape all your competitors, leveraging AI to do that, which is something that would have previously cost thousands of dollars, I can now do for ten dollars worth of tokens. So I highly encourage anyone who's watching this to go through the offer gap scan. You're gonna learn so much about your offer, and it will immediately tell you where the biggest levers are to get some advancements and be cold ready.

Alex Evans (12:03): Yeah, and just like having one direct ICP, do you think it's important when you're testing out different offers that you're still keeping that ICP in mind and you still are really only just talking to one person?

Gray Twombly (12:12): Yeah, I call it — we actually coined the term the one funnel method, which is sort of a ripoff of Russell Brunson's stuff. It's like one funnel to rule them all, one funnel can change your life. But the reason why I'm so adamant on this is that when you're coming into advertising for the first time, you're so used to referrals, which is like you got ten different people coming in all the time. And so when we're like, hey, no, you need to speak to one person, you're like, hold on a second, that means I'm gonna say no to nine other people.

What happens is when you're going out there into the marketplace with a message, you have to speak directly to some person. You have to make one person feel really heard. And so we would always prioritize really speaking to and thinking deeply around that one person before going to a second one. So you should be able to get advertising messaging that brings that person in. You should be able to get them to apply to work with you. You should be able to get them on the phone and then actually make them an offer and eventually close them before you say, yeah, we're ready to go to the next one. Or you decide during that process that, hey, you know what, maybe this isn't the ideal customer.

But if you followed what we said in the beginning, which is make sure that you actually are going and looking at your actual client roster — this is not fictitious people that you've never sold to. Go find the people that are your best customer. You will win. You will be able to unlock that as long as you speak really deeply to what their needs are, what their pains and desires are. You will win eventually. But do your best to not get shiny object and start speaking to a second avatar before you unlock one. And to put numbers to this, we've gotten to $150,000, $250,000 a month speaking to one person with one clear message in one funnel. And we've proven this. We do not need to go and speak to ten different avatars to get to a quarter million a month, as long as you have a large enough addressable market. Now service businesses that are local, you might need to change it up a little bit more, but if you have a nationwide audience, you can 100% get to six figures with only one avatar and one message.

Alex Evans (14:03): Yeah, 100%. That's always been a difficult conversation I've had with some clients too. They have a really limiting mindset on how many people are actually in their TAM, or their total addressable market, especially if they're nationwide. There's just so many people. And at the end of the day, people don't really buy from strangers. They buy from brands and people that they trust. And the best way to get them to trust you is to make them feel like they are understood. So if that can be woven throughout all the ads, all of the copy, then you're in a really good looking spot. Very difficult to do though. That's typically why people are hiring people like you and me.

4. Speed-to-Lead

Alex Evans (15:09): All right, so the ball has actually gotten rolling. You now have lead volume, leads are starting to flow into your pipeline. This brings me to point number four, which is a lead response process. It is so important to respond back to your leads. Gray, can you just tell me what does that first twenty four hours really need to look like when a lead is coming into your CRM or into your pipeline?

Gray Twombly (15:09): So the most important number to remember here is that they did a study on speed-to-lead, and they found that if someone was contacted within five to ten minutes of opting in, they were 80% more likely to close and become a paying customer. So keep that number in mind as you are operating here and as you're developing your process. Speed-to-lead really makes a significant difference in the lead's likelihood of actually becoming a paying customer.

And I think in general, there's a good sort of concept here to think through, which is what is the highest touch point, wave a magic wand, best experience a customer could have, and then work backwards from that. So in my mental model here, I would say that on the spectrum of best to worst, it would be that you, the founder of the company, calls in within 30 seconds of them actually submitting the form, right? And you are personally going to see them through their entire journey from end to end. And I realize that for most business owners, that's not sustainable and not achievable, but then we want to try to create that experience as much as we can, even if they're going to a secondary person.

So if it is your appointment setter or your executive assistant, really take the time to train this person up on how to make the absolute greatest customer experience. I actually had a call with a company the other day. I was looking at carpet cleaning services, and the assistant literally said, hold on one second, the owner of the company is sitting right next to me. And he goes, hey Gray, this is Mark from So-and-So Cleaning Company. I just so happened to have some time available, I wanted to make sure you got the best service available. I was like, my God, this guy went out of his way. And I don't know if this was actually designed or just pure happenstance, but the experience of that process being so dialed made me feel like I was their number one customer. And keep in mind I had called three companies simultaneously. One didn't answer, which immediately got removed from my list. The next one, the woman was almost combative on the phone, and then the third one, I get like this white glove service.

So if you think about that, you're like, wow, of course, obviously the one where I got to speak with the owner of the company was the best. But it should be that you set the standard for how someone is going to be spoken to. Remember, this is the first touch point a lot of the times that someone has with the business where they're actually speaking to somebody. So this is the front door or the facade of your retail store in a digital place. That experience really matters. So just keep that in mind as you go through this, and then remember that speed-to-lead is super important.

Now I realize that not everybody is going to have someone on the end of a phone for 24 hours a day, or you might not have someone on your team. And so another option that you have available to you is a digital answering service. So you can actually hire digital answering services who are trained up and who are really good at this to answer around the clock, sometimes 24 hours around the day. So you've heard of call centers. A lot of small business owners don't realize that this is an option for them, and that there are great folks out there that actually have incredible businesses. These people are trained up, this is all they do. They're better than whatever option that you have available if you're getting someone from your team to just be like, yeah, handle the phones, right? Particularly if you're gonna scale up, this is something that you need to take seriously. And ideally, a blend of speed-to-lead and quality of contact — you're trying to maximize both of those together.

Alex Evans (18:32): Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And unfortunately, so many people are relying on AI these days, right? So I'm really curious, how do you feel about an SMS sequence or an AI prompted SMS sequence? Do you think that SMS really cuts it, or is a phone call pretty much always required?

Gray Twombly (18:47): I think we'll go back to our spectrum. Let's use our spectrum of highest quality touch point is that you, the owner of the company, call them personally. And then the other end of the spectrum is gonna be likely there's no contact from the company. There's no one that's actually calling them to reach out to them to ask them how we can help you. And that would be some version of AI. Now, some version of AI forty eight hours later would probably be the worst. But if you are setting up at least basic SMS flows, that's good, but I wouldn't say it's enough, right?

If you're expecting someone to close on a high-ticket service from purely SMS, particularly if it's inhuman, then you're setting yourself up for failure. And I would say, if you want to test that, great. But the gold standard is that we have the highest quality touch point as fast as humanly possible, and then we work backwards to see, do we have a loss of lead quality, or does our close rate suffer as a result of us trying out AI?

And I'll give you an anecdote. We've actually tested AI setters. We work directly with some very large sales teams. And they tested it across 40 different accounts. They're doing $100 million in closes per year. And in the beginning it looked like we were getting so many more leads that we were actually significantly improving overall, but we found out that because it was an impersonal first touch point, ultimately they shut it down and went back to human setters overall. And that was faster response rate and all of these things. By the metrics it looked good, but by the close rate we didn't actually get the result.

Alex Evans (20:23): Yeah, I think that's amazing. And if you're a local business especially too, maybe somebody who's not national, I think that it makes the most sense to probably put in a team who might be a little bit more trained up than what you currently have on your own team. Put that into place while you can kind of figure it out by yourself, take a little bit of time, see how they're handling the calls. So that way you don't have to always just rely on AI and all these SMS sequences. Because the rates of saving people in, let's say, an email campaign that's set up, it's just not there. It's not gonna transform your business the way that you think it is. So treat every single lead as the most valuable potential customer that's coming in the door today.

So I wanna clarify too, because there are gonna be some people who are gonna say, this is great advice, but it's still unrealistic. Maybe the owner has an assistant, but they're not particularly trained up in being a setter or even taking these introductory calls. What do you think the next best step is? Does that look like having an automated SMS sequence go out? Does that look like you potentially hiring a team that will answer the calls and set for you? What would your advice be in that particular instance if they're just not capable to get a call within, let's say even the first twenty four hours?

Gray Twombly (21:33): Great question. Yeah, so there's dedicated office solutions, and basically these are call centers, right? These are businesses that you contract in order to do that work for you. It's like if you don't want to manage a team, you don't want to have another person on salary, on payroll, you can actually contract a call center to take those calls and they'll usually go way outside of business hours so that in certain cases, in some industries, it's better than having your own in-house person cost-wise.

Now that's a little bit less intimate, a little less touch point, but again, you're getting the job done here. It's better than no follow-up whatsoever. And of course, like you mentioned, follow-up outside of this — I'm going straight to the phone stuff. But yes, SMS, having an initial touch point that's welcoming, that isn't just writing them an email. You gotta remember that an SMS is meant to be personal. The more personal this experience is — like we talked about the founder being the most personal — the better the response and the customer experience is.

So yes, SMS, particularly if you just can't get to the phone that quickly, and maybe you have a process in place but it's a little bit delayed, communicate that. Let them know on the thank you page of whatever your application form is. Let them know in that SMS, hey, we got your application. We're so excited for the opportunity to work with you. We'll be reaching out within the next couple hours. And if this is after business hours, we'll reach out to you tomorrow morning first thing.

Alex Evans (23:01): Yeah, great point. Honestly, mandatory for all of our clients. We always will tell them what the timeline is on the thank you page. So that means that after somebody submits their information on a form, then we will redirect them to a page that just gives them next steps because we always want to be setting proper expectations. We'll tell them, hey, somebody's going to physically call you within 48 hours. However, you're also going to receive an email and a text message within the same hour. You can actually book in a call if you want a dedicated time. Otherwise somebody's going to be calling you. Just those clear expectations actually help keep the brand stuck in that person's mind.

Because you're right, Gray. People get pulled in a million different directions. Once we're off this podcast, we have our own lives too, right? We're gonna be busy. We might forget things, things get lost. So the clearer the expectations, the faster the response time is great. However, I wanna be super clear here because we do have clients that say, hey, I'm just gonna run an automated SMS sequence, and if they start to respond to that, then I'm gonna hop in. And I'm just here to say that that's actually not gonna cut it because your competitors are doing much, much more.

5. A CRM in Place

But earlier in the conversation, Gray, you had actually mentioned to me that once the ball gets kind of rolling and the lead volume starts increasing — I think you used the number 50, right? Let's say you have 50 new leads that just came in over the last two or three days. That's a considerable amount of leads, right? You're growing your pipeline. However, what happens when you don't even have a pipeline in place? What is a pipeline? What is the minimum viable CRM setup that you should actually have in place if you're going to be running ads? And would you ever advise a client to be running advertisements if they didn't have a CRM set up?

Gray Twombly (24:29): So it depends on volume, right? I think when you're a zero to one and getting off the ground and just testing things, it's okay to sort of have a more manual process, and it depends on what your existing workflow is in the business. So I will put that asterisk, but what you're alluding to here is having at least a basic CRM, customer relationship management system, to keep track of all of these leads.

And one of the biggest things when you start to go cold, or you start running ads, is that you are going to have a lot of people building — what Alex used the word — a pipeline of value sitting there that you can then continue to work on. Now there are going to be conversations, notes, all of these things that happen as you go through and build these relationships with people. And keeping track of that somewhere is really important. Otherwise, you will lose people and you will be leaving tons of money on the table that you have already paid for, right? Because now it's not just people falling in your lap. You're actually paying the advertising platform to bring people to you so that you can then sell to them.

And so you want to maximize that. And in order to do that, you have to keep track of the communication and the relationship that you've built with this person digitally. So having some version of a CRM setup, for us, is an absolutely mandatory thing. We will not work with a company that does not have a CRM because it's going to fall apart, right? You are going to get overwhelmed with your spreadsheets or whatever it is, unless you are a spreadsheet wizard and you have it dialed. But again, most people that we work with here are operators. They are in the field, they are working on the operations of their business, not worrying about keeping track of customers.

So it's a mandatory, non-negotiable for us, particularly if you want to scale. If you want to grow your business and you want to add setters and closers to the team, it is absolutely mandatory that you get this started from the get-go and take the time to make the organizational change to adapt and build processes that are simple but effective for maximizing your pipeline and your close rate, essentially how many deals you're closing from the leads that you're generating.

6. Lead Quality Tracking

Alex Evans (26:40): Yeah, that's really great insight. And honestly, funny enough, on my end, it's actually not mandatory that you would have a CRM in place because we can direct those leads to the owner or the assistant's cell phone number and their email and ping them on Slack. And there's so many ways that we can notify people about incoming leads. So it's not necessarily mandatory. It's definitely nice to have. And the funny thing is we license the CRM in our agency right now. So we actually build out a pipeline for our clients.

Whether they know it or not — we'd obviously tell them — but whether they're gonna use it or not, that's kind of up to them at first. But I would agree with you, Gray. If you're just gonna scale a brand, they're already doing a couple million in annual revenue and they want to double their size, that's a necessity. But even though it's not necessarily a necessity on my side of things, what is a necessity is to get a report back on the lead quality. So we like a lead quality tracking system. I'm really curious to hear how you guys are tracking and lead scoring on your end as well too.

But obviously Meta is gonna be getting you leads, but because that's cold traffic, the leads can definitely vary. Obviously, we want to send them through a pre-qualifying form, but sometimes those leads can just not be super favorable. So how are you tracking the quality of those leads and how are you looping that all the way back to Meta to ensure that you are improving that quality?

Gray Twombly (27:55): Yeah. This is another topic that we could go into a lot of depth on. It requires a lot of communication. So there's two buckets. There's marketing qualified leads and there's sales qualified leads. And marketing qualified leads — like we talked about BANT. So they come through an application form, they click on an ad, they go to a landing page or website, they then fill in their information. That information gets stored in a CRM or in spreadsheets or wherever you store it. And based on people's responses, you can calculate a lead score. You can do this with AI, you can come up with your own custom formulas, but most simply, like binary, they are qualified, they meet our floor, right? Or they aren't qualified.

And so it's important to understand what the ratio of qualified to unqualified is so that we can continue to optimize for qualified. Sometimes you can even see that one ad brings you more qualified people than another ad. And so what we do is, using attribution software, we're able to actually feed that data back into Meta so that we have a tag where it says, yes, this person is qualified, or no, it isn't. And so we can see not only how many leads did we generate, but how many qualified leads do we generate inside of the actual ads platform, telling us are we improving or are things getting worse? And so cost per qualified lead is really the metric that great advertisers are trying to optimize off of as much as possible.

Then we get into the sales qualified, where it starts to get a little bit more blurry because this really requires creating a feedback loop with the sales team and either having automation set up or a system set up inside of your customer relationship management tool, and feeding that information back to the marketing team. So your sales team communicates with your marketing team, right? And whether that's you as a founder, whether that's your assistant, whatever that looks like, that information gets fed back saying, hey, yes, this person is actually who they said they were on the application form, and they are a great lead, or no.

There's a couple ways of doing this. One of the simplest ways that we've come back to, and sort of rudimentary in some ways, but it's sort of our floor, right — our minimum of, hey, we need this information — is that there is a sales end-of-day report. They go through all the conversations they had and they say this was a great lead or this wasn't a great lead, and of the great leads and the bad leads, what made them a great lead. Yes, they were financially qualified. Now's not the right time, they're traveling for the summer and they'll come back in August, and they are 100% down to become a client. So if we purely just went off of did they close as our qualified lead, it wouldn't have been a great metric because that was actually a great person. So, hey, marketing, you're doing a good job. Or, this person was really underqualified, they are living under a bridge, but they said they had $50,000 in liquid capital, right?

So, important information that the application form would not tell us in that circumstance, and that we can just do in a message that can be done in Slack. We use Slack all the time with our clients. It could be done through whatever communication channel, but just feeding that information back, even if it's just a couple bullet points, is so impactful to marketing continuing to get better over time, and ultimately you as a business owner making more money.

Alex Evans (31:10): I think that tracking your lead quality, especially from the sales side of things, is what separates the boys from the men, honestly, because if you're not having these kind of conversations with your marketing team, then nothing will ever change, nothing will ever improve. It could be going down the wrong route. And what we've really trained our clients up to do is to fill out a manual form, actually. I think it gives it a nice touch.

And they'll actually score their own leads inside of there and give us some feedback. And I've actually made that document available in public online for free download as well too. So if you head to ragingagency.com, go to free resources underneath the resource tab. You can actually download it as well too. It's called the weekly lead quality report. But typically the assistant to the sales rep, or the founder, or maybe one of the setters, will fill that out every single week. They'll send it back to us and then that's how our team is actually able to make really incredible optimizations.

But that was a great amount of knowledge. Honestly, we could talk about scoring pretty much all day long. I just think it's really important. If you are seriously going to take Meta as a primary acquisition channel, you have to be tracking it. It's so incredibly important.

7. A Dedicated Landing Page

And that brings me to point number seven actually, which is having a dedicated landing page. You know, funny enough, it's 2026, and people still don't actually know what a landing page is. Can you just walk me through the basics, right?

Alex Evans (32:29): What is a landing page? Why would we send people to a landing page instead of just sending them to the homepage or to the contact page on our website that we already have?

Gray Twombly (32:36): Yeah, great question. This is one of those marketing lingo jargon words that we throw around all day, every day, but is not common language to everybody else. It is very simply a website page that has a very explicit intention. So it's like we're removing all of the variables of a website. You go to someone's website, you can go to their homepage, their free resources tab, like Alex just said, right? There's so many different rabbit holes that someone can go down on a website — testimonials. And so when we're running paid traffic, we're really trying to speak to — remember the one funnel method — one avatar, one person going to one pain or one desire that they have, to position your product as the next step of their journey on this page.

So if that's, let's use an example of in lead gen, we're usually trying to get people to apply to work with our business. And so the call to action on that page would be apply to work with Raging Agency, right? And so what a landing page allows us to do is isolate variables so that we're speaking to one person with one specific pain in one stage of their journey and drive them to one very specific next step in their journey without all of the variables of a website where they can go get lost clicking on all these different pages and then start reading testimonials and then bounce eventually, right?

So we want them to take a very explicit action. We have designed this page to do that, and then if they don't do it, we have a really clear understanding of why, because we can actually see on the back end how far they made it down the page, whether they clicked or whether they didn't, and we have our benchmarks of what a great landing page performance looks like. And we can do iterations now faster than ever before.

Alex Evans (34:22): Yeah, great point, especially with some of the compliance related clients that we're working with as well too. If we sent some of that paid traffic to the website and for whatever reason something's not compliant on the website, that could go south really quickly. There could be all types of different problems, including your ad manager getting shut down, right? However, if we have multiple different iterations of a landing page, it's very isolated. It's almost like a shell, right? So it's a lot easier to manipulate and to record.

And yeah, just like you mentioned, Gray, you're just removing all of the variables. It's so clear. And once again, I would say that that's a mandatory. Some people can still get some good results if they're running traffic to their website. But for those brands in particular, what I say is you can't even imagine what kind of results you're gonna get once you switch over to a landing page. Because clearly the marketing messaging is going well. However, they're probably getting on the site, bouncing off, getting confused, going to the photo gallery, going to Instagram, doing all the things you kind of don't really want them to do. So yeah, landing pages are just so important.

8. A Budget to Learn

Alex Evans (34:22): So point number eight is actually the budget to learn. And this is more about the timeline, right? We typically will enforce at least a ninety day minimum. Some agencies will even go as far as to say that they need to run the campaign for six months. On my end, it's ninety days. I want to hear your take on that. Do you agree with me that ninety days is pretty much the floor? And I'm also curious what happens when clients are expecting to get results in thirty days, sixty days, or in some cases sub thirty days?

Gray Twombly (35:48): I think it's like everything in business. Your first try at something isn't always gonna just knock it out of the park, and there's experimentation. We are starting to call ourselves more a growth lab than a marketing agency because we run continuous testing. We develop hypotheses, we test them, we get yes this worked or no it didn't, and we go to the next iteration. And you gotta remember that every ad is a new test. So every time that you're launching a new set of ads, every time that you're launching a new landing page, you're running a new test.

And so particularly — we talked about the feedback loop of lead goes to sales team, sales team picks up the phone, speaks to them, determines yes this is a great lead or no, and then tells the marketing team about it. That also is a whole feedback loop of experimentation, right? We tested messaging on the front end, we tested some messaging on the landing page, yes or no great leads. Can you go get us more of those, or hey, can we adjust accordingly?

And I'll give you an anecdote of a client of ours who we started working with about 90 days ago. They were actually told — they went to a Hormozi conference, they had run paid advertising before, it didn't work for them. I think they ran it for two months, and they went to a Hormozi conference and he's like, you guys just need to do more, right? And they were like, why aren't you running paid ads? They're like, well, we tried it and it didn't work. What happened when they came to us? They said, we're gonna commit to six months of doing this, and by month two and a half, we were now at something like a 10x return on ad spend. And we've added $600,000 in total lifetime value, plus maybe even a million dollars in total lifetime value to their business, and that's only in the first two and a half months.

And so a lot of the times it's like you just need to commit to this thing, allocate enough budget where you're not going to starve yourself, and you're gonna give the marketing team enough leeway to actually do some experimentation. And it's not a question of does Meta advertising work or not. I mean, people are making billions of dollars on this advertising platform.

Gray Twombly (37:48): Some people have businesses that have grown to $100 million plus as a result of paid advertising being the primary lever. So it's not does paid advertising work — it will work. You just have to actually take the actions and take it seriously, and listen to what Alex is saying here from the beginning, starting with offer, right? You will be successful if you buy yourself enough time and don't starve yourself. Give yourself enough budget to say, hey, this is experimentation.

Gray Twombly (38:17): I'm okay with parting with $10,000, $15,000 in ad budget to test this out and validate what messaging works so that we can then fight for the next 12 months together to build a significantly larger business than we would have if we didn't unlock this.

9. Attribution Clarity

Alex Evans (38:32): Yeah, you're so right. It's totally not a question, right, if Meta advertising is working. Same with Google, right? These are some of the largest companies in the entire world who have built pretty much their entire business off of advertising. Pretty much it's gonna work as long as you are following the data, right? So following the data is so important. We can't just follow our gut. If we follow our gut, we could be all over the place. We could take down the campaign one day, we could relaunch a new one the next day. We could be all over the place following our emotions.

Which brings me to point number nine, which is attribution clarity, right? How do we actually know that we are getting a lead from Meta, especially if we're running ads on TikTok, Meta, Google, doing organic SEO? How do we make sure that the leads that are coming in are really coming from where we think that they're coming from? What do we need to know? What are some of the basics that we kind of need to know about attribution and just general clarity from that data, Gray?

Gray Twombly (39:24): Yeah. This is a non-negotiable again. We will not work with a client unless we're able to go in there and get access to what we need to get access to to set up accurate tracking. Like this is foundational one-on-one stuff. This is like the foundation. This is before you even — this is stretching before you go run. It sounds complicated, but it's relatively simple.

Gray Twombly (39:51): We set up a series of tracking snippets, a little bit of code on the page that allows us to see exactly where people are coming from. If this is not done correctly, you will have false signals as to what the source of the lead is, and therefore you will be set up for failure. We find that rarely do we open up an ad account and someone has a nine out of 10 or 10 out of 10 tracking setup. And the worst part of that is you could be being told by your marketing agency that everything is going great, and in all reality they don't know where the source of the leads are.

So one is getting your tracking setup correctly from the beginning and working with an agency that really takes this seriously. Ask them, what is your tracking setup? How do I know definitively that these leads are coming from where they say they're coming from? And then two is making sure that you have — it depends on the size of your business and where you're going — but a secondary attribution software is very helpful, or just having at least a basic system of tagging leads as they come in, whether you're isolating them from individual landing pages, or whether you have a really great tracking attribution software like Google Analytics or Hyros. There's a lot of different softwares out there, and each agency is going to have their own setup, but I would just really make sure that if you're taking a look at an agency to work with that they explain to you in detail how their tracking setup works and that you take this seriously from the get-go.

Alex Evans (41:18): Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And I think once again, you brought up a really good point. You do need to be asking your agency or whoever is running your ads what type of tracking that they are utilizing, and ask them to physically show you what's going on, because almost ten out of ten times, but certainly nine out of ten times, if you're paying somebody five hundred bucks, a thousand bucks, maybe even two thousand bucks, they don't know tracking. They don't know attribution, it's not on their radar, and the only thing that they really care about is just trying to get you as many leads at the cheapest amount as possible.

So that way they can feel good and feel like they're doing a really good job for you. But we all know as business owners watching this video, we don't care how many leads we're getting. We care if they're closing and if they're making us money. That's the only thing. And we don't know that if we're not tracking the data. So that was point number nine.

10. Sales and Marketing Alignment

Alex Evans (41:18): We really have one more point, probably one of the most important ones. This is especially important if you're hiring an agency or a third party contractor or somebody to run the ads for you, which is the business and marketing alignment. What should good alignment look like, Gray? If I'm gonna start spending thousands of dollars on the ads themselves and another couple thousand dollars on the agency, what do I need to keep in mind? Who am I really looking for? What are the red flags that you've seen that we need to stay clear from?

Gray Twombly (42:36): The first question is what are your business metrics, right? Our agency is really a growth marketing agency, which is sort of more than just, we run ads. We get involved and sort of sit at the table with you as a decision maker, as almost a business partner, to help you make informed decisions. But there's really a few core metrics that we align ourselves towards. So one is what can your business afford to spend to get a new customer? If you cannot articulate that, do not pass go, right? Do not collect $200.

You need to ensure that you understand the metrics of your business so that you can accurately communicate that to your team so that they can measure against that. Is your target customer acquisition cost $500? Is it $5,000? Can you afford to spend two times your ad spend? So if you put $1,000 in, you get $2,000 out of the machine? Or do you need $5,000 out if you put $1,000 in? You need to understand that as a business leader and hash that out with your marketing team before they go start spending a bunch of money on advertising.

The worst thing that you could do is the agency thinks that they're doing a really good job because they're bringing you a ton of leads, and then you find out six months in from your financial officer or your accounting team that you've been losing money this whole time because you didn't understand your numbers. So setting clear expectations of what your target cost per acquisition is, or how much you can afford to spend to get a new customer, is the foundation.

And then also understanding what are your upstream metrics of that? So what can you afford to pay to get a booked call if your close rate is 20%? How many calls can you afford to get before you hit that target acquisition cost, right? So all of those little things, and keeping it simple, is important. Target customer acquisition cost is probably the most important thing. And then what are the upstream metrics, whether that's applications, whether that's calls, or whether that's an actual just lead on the front end. If you have really dialed in numbers, you should be able to articulate that to your marketing team and hold them accountable to that so that they can hold themselves accountable to that as well.

And then make sure that you have a really clear dashboard and visibility into what those numbers look like. And if anything is off or you have questions, push the pause button, go take a look at the numbers, and don't stop until you get to the bottom of what our actual numbers are, so that you feel confident moving forward again.

Alex Evans (45:08): Yeah, I think that's awesome, Gray. And you articulated that very well. I think you do need to know your numbers. I would love to see you publish a free resource on your website, wholefounder.com, as well too, to help other people learn more about their numbers so that way they can make the best decisions in their brand as well too. I'll keep an eye out on there because I think you are so wise in terms of working with so many different businesses, spending over ten million dollars in ad spend. You have so much knowledge to share.

And I think if anybody's watching this podcast, they're already gonna step away feeling so much more confident and having a really clear understanding. So once again, if you are feeling a little bit lost or you wanna go back and remember which all ten are, I'll drop that free resource actually down in the description below this video, as well as our weekly lead quality check report as well too. That's completely free. All you gotta do is put in your email and then you'll get that delivered within just a couple of minutes.

But to recap the 10 most important things that every business owner really needs to know before they start spending even a dollar into the Meta machine: number one, right, you got to define your target audience. Remember that you are speaking to just one person, not a whole collective. And in fact, a good tip here is a tip I actually heard, if you're gonna record social media videos, which is to pretend that you're on FaceTime. You're not gonna be on a group call, you are FaceTiming that one person. Speak directly to them. The second one is qualifying questions, right?

Set that floor, set that minimum, and set that ceiling so you know exactly who is gonna fall within that range. So that way you're not wasting time and you're not burdening your sales team with unqualified people who never really even had any money and maybe they even live under a bridge. The third one is gonna be to have that clear offer and that clear hook, right? Remember, Meta is a cold platform. People do not know what your business is, they do not know who you are, and they most likely are gonna forget about you, which brings me into point four, which is that lead response process.

You need to have some type of process put in place. And unfortunately, an automated SMS sequence is not going to cut it. We need to get them on the phone. Best case scenario, it's the founder. Worst case scenario, the founder is still calling them, but maybe a day late. I think you can find some middle ground here and potentially work with a company who will call for you. And or you can train somebody up on your team as well too. With just a few calls and reviewing those calls, you can get somebody on your team to a really good place where they can represent your brand.

Now, five is to have some type of CRM in place, or at least a pipeline or an understanding of that pipeline. You gotta make sure that when you're generating these leads, you're actually receiving them in some type of format. And point number six was the lead quality tracking system, right? How are you scoring these leads? How do you know that these leads are actually even producing revenue? Point number seven was to utilize a dedicated landing page. Right now, I want to challenge you, if you're running ads to a website homepage or to a contact page, just pause the campaign. You're burning money already. Best case scenario, you create a dedicated landing page without all the different buttons on the navigation. We don't want people to get confused here.

Point number eight was a budget to learn, right? You need to set a dedicated amount of time. I always recommend at least 90 days for paid advertising. Month one, it's not gonna be pretty. Month two, things are gonna start to get better and you kind of really want to be able to see it through. Number nine is to have attribution clarity, which is especially important if you're hiring an agency. You want to see that they're actually tracking everything. And if you are utilizing a CRM, all those leads should be coming in with UTMs and tagged properly. So you always know exactly which lead is coming from where, whether it's from paid, organic, social media, et cetera. And number 10 is to have a relationship with the people who are running your ads. Ask them questions. If they can't answer the questions, maybe they're not the right team for you. But I know that if you hired either myself, Raging Agency, or Gray, Whole Founder, you would never have to worry about all 10 of these because we would guide you along the way. So those were the 10 points.

How would you like people to reach out to you if they have any questions? Are you on LinkedIn, website, social media?

Gray Twombly (48:56): I'm on LinkedIn, Gray Twombly. You can find us at wholefounder.com and my Instagram handle is Chef Gray from my past life as a private chef, but it stuck with it. So yep, that's where you can find me on the internet. It's been an absolute pleasure, Alex. Thanks so much for having me. And yeah, if anyone has lead gen questions, you've got two professionals that can help you answer.

Alex Evans (49:18): Yeah, we'll look forward to seeing your comments down below. And if you're on social media, we will make sure that we tag Gray in the comments down below as well too. Thank you so much for your time, Gray. I really appreciate it. And I'll see you around Miami.

Gray Twombly (49:28): My pleasure, man. Thanks for having me on.