How to Create Predictable Revenue Without Wasting More Money.

Jeffro (00:01.027)
Welcome back to Digital Dominance. My guest today is Moses Tian. Moses is a growth marketer dedicated to helping local service-based businesses, coaches, and consultants develop a predictable growth system to scale their revenue and profit. That’s what we all want, right? He’s here to share his insights on why leads don’t always convert to sales, how to craft an ideal customer journey, and why tools like High Level are essential for business growth. Welcome to the show, Moses.

Moses Thien (00:27.901)
Hey Jeff, thanks for having me here. I’m really glad to be able to hop on.

Jeffro (00:32.118)
definitely. I mean, you’ve got a lot of experience. I’m excited for a conversation. You you’ve used high level a lot. You’ve created a lot of growth systems for businesses. And I even looked at one of your landing pages. It made me want to sign up. So I’m excited to dive into your expertise a little bit to learn more about how you got to that point. Now, one thing you emphasize is that leads don’t always translate to sales, right? On the surface, that’s obvious. But I think a lot of people take that truth for granted. So can you explain

What business owners might be overlooking here?

Moses Thien (01:02.915)
So thanks for that. So a lot of times, I guess I’ll just back up a little bit in terms of why I came to that conclusion. So I’ve worked with a lot of service-based business and coaches, consultants, as you know, and the initial start of my journey starts from serving these businesses from a paid acquisition perspective. So I run lots of paid debts for them. And a big part of where my struggle comes in after working for these businesses for over

say three, four months, is that they always ask me these ones questions like, so what is my return on investment for any perspective of things? And while I can always give that number to you and give you a positive return on investment, but a big part of that actually stems from how well a business owner actually understand their sales process. While a lot of people come to me time to time, hey, I want to run Pay That, it’s great, let’s get started, right? We talk about their offer, we talk about…

just putting stuff on Facebook and see all those Facebook ads out there. But what doesn’t often get discussed in terms of when a lead get actually acquired, what happens to that lead, right? People imagine, most businesses out there work on referrals, work on very warm traffic based type business. So they have a call in, they have somebody walking in, referring them. So when it comes to paid traffic, a big part of what happens is they just start forgetting that a

paid traffic lead is just somebody with an interest. And interest can be, I’m just slightly interested to someone who is very interested. And what happens more often than not is like, they don’t have that process really for them to nurture the lead to become a qualified lead to a sale. And there’s no process for that. A lead comes in, they immediately expect them to book an appointment and from that appointment immediately to a sale. They totally forget that this lead doesn’t know about them in any way or form.

that expectation becomes very unrealistic because most of the time paid leads are just a lead from Facebook scrolling through doing their stuff, doom scrolling and ultimately now they want to purchase your product that doesn’t sound realistic in any way or form

Jeffro (03:11.221)
Yeah. Okay. So let me recap to make sure I got it here. What you’re seeing is a lot of people just assume that the ads are enough, right? And as long as I’m getting leads from the ads, I should be getting business, right? And so when they’re asking you for the ROI number, you can give them the conversion of a cold person who saw your ad into an interested lead, but that’s not the same as the ROI on cold person to closed customer, right? And if they’re not tracking in their internal systems,

how many, you know, their close rate or anything like that, or the average order values and things like that, they’re not going to know what that more meaningful ROI number is. So obviously it’s good to know your ROI on your paid ads, but it’s probably even more helpful to know the ROI on the whole end-to-end funnel, right?

Moses Thien (04:00.009)
Exactly and like you hit the nail on that like nobody cares like a lot of business owners Don’t really put much time and attention into their process and to me that is a very big issue Because when they are trying to scale they’re trying to get more clients they’re trying to get more people into their business the thing is they don’t even understand what is their capacity at this point of time in terms of serving the current clients and a lot of questions that always ask these businesses I mean like if anybody were to ask themselves this right I’m thinking of

having a new paid acquisition strategy on, I’m thinking of doing some form of lead generation activities, but what are you currently doing that you’re acquiring customers? And based on that question itself, how many of these customers are you actually losing as well? Right, so if you have 100 leads coming in from a walk-in perspective, you get 70 of them coming in, what happens to the 30? Or worse, you have 20 clients coming in, 20 leads coming in, but out of, what happens to the rest of the 80 people that opt in and nothing happened to them? Where is the lead in your…

entire process and that’s something that most business owners don’t actually give a thought to because I know that they are struggling to the day to day and trying to be very involved in their business or doing the business themselves. They put a very, they take a very back seat in terms of looking at their business from a very high level perspective and that becomes a very big issue because now when they’re trying to scale they don’t even know where their gaps are so they’re just throwing money in and I can tell you after working with so many businesses managing like half a million dollar, over half a million dollar ad spend.

I can tell you that there are businesses out there that are just throwing money in and the money is just going nowhere. It’s scary. So that was when I’m like, okay, enough is enough. Let’s start teaching people marketing in the right way in terms of how they should properly scale their business, which is why when lead doesn’t turn into customer, it’s just because they’re not really focusing on their process, which is why I like to bring this up because this is what is going to make any businesses profitable at the end of the day.

Jeffro (05:54.496)
Right, so this is the customer journey, right? So we’ve talked about the ideal customer in other episodes before, that your target avatar, knowing who they are, what they care about, their pain points. But I think we should dive into this ideal customer journey. What happens when they first see your ad, and then what’s the next step? What’s the next step after that? What happens if they say yes on this survey, but no over here? So can you walk us through what a well-crafted journey looks like for a service-based business?

Moses Thien (06:22.247)
So for service-based business, I’m just going to use dental or financial advisors in general. When people come on in, they usually find you from your website. mean, most people, Google SEO, local SEO, big stuff, they go onto your website and ultimately they fill out the form. So that’s the warmest of warm leads that you can get. So once that form is being filled out, usually it would…

feedback in terms like, hey, like one of our staff will contact you shortly or they will just book a virtual appointment. So either one of these paths is totally possible. And then from the appointment being booked, somebody contact them, they get an appointment. And if they are candidate, they will go then walk into the office to actually become a patient or a customer. So typically, is the, in a very simplistic way of putting a customer journey together, that is how it is. But when you start looking deeper in terms of what an IU customer journey looks like.

Like, mean, you talk about ideal, a lot of people talk about ideal client, right? What is an ideal clientele and stuff like that. But the thing is, an ideal client needs an ideal customer journey. Because, or not, you’ll never get your ideal client because that’s totally impossible to reach. So when a person fills up the form, how fast do you expect like a welcome message to go up? What do you want your customer to see? What do you want them to read? What is that nurturing process going to be like? Because not everybody who fills up their form is going to show up for that or book, is going to book an appointment.

So how are you really going to bring them into that perspective of giving them more of who you are, how they can trust you so that they are more willing to book an appointment and what does that follow-up process look like? So there are so much intrinsic detail that we really have to be talking about that most people just don’t because when the lead comes in, what they expect is the front desk staff to call and book that appointment. But I mean, how many of us actually pick up a phone when a random number start calling us?

I’m pretty sure we are missing a lot of those calls just because we are not wanting to do that. So in that perspective of things, going really deep down into every specific stages and designing what you want for a customer experience. If I am a lead for my own business, what experience do I want to get out of it? So by answering that question, it will really help to detail out bits and pieces of the customer journey together. And the next thing is really understanding what to track. Because now you have people calling, you have

Jeffro (08:17.834)
Yeah, no.

Moses Thien (08:46.591)
Messages going out, emails being sent. Are these open rates or connection rates being monitored? If they are being monitored, great, we can optimize them, right? But if you don’t even understand what you’re tracking, even while designing this, then how do you actually make this whole process trackable or predictable over time? And then how are you ready for skill? So that’s kind of an idea in terms of how I start designing my customer journey for my clients in general, just so that they understand that it’s a bigger conversation. It’s not just I have this thing to sell.

This is the customer. Let’s just put them into a flow and somebody will just call them and I hope that they come into my business.

Jeffro (09:22.43)
Yeah. Well, I mean, you made a couple of good points there. So number one is that it’s, it’s, you are crafting the experience for this potential customer. So they are now judging you based on that. And this is what they’re coming to expect from you as a business. So if you, let’s say you did a bad job of this, you didn’t really follow up, but they, showed up cause they needed a solution and then they decided to hire you anyways. And now that you’re hired, you’re, you’re talking to them, you’re, you know, communicative, you’re on top of it. And they’re like, wow, that was, that was a pleasant surprise. Right? Cause

They were expecting based on what happened before, like there was not much communication. And the reverse is also true. If you do a great job upfront, hey, don’t forget, we got our appointment. Here, let me send you this guide before we, you know, watch this video before our meeting. And then they hire you. And it’s like silence, right? Crickets. And you follow up like a week later or something. And they’re like, what the heck? You know, you were all over me before. And now that I’m paying you, you’re just going to leave me hanging. So you obviously want to make sure that’s consistent.

and let them know, especially if you’re good at doing your job, let them know up front, this is how we work with our customers. This is how we make our customers feel, and that way you can be intentional about all those things and think of it through their perspective, right?

Moses Thien (10:36.571)
I think you brought up a good point, right? And this ties in a lot of pre-framing as well. And to me, a lot of people, mean, like people buy from people they know, they care, they trust, right? And ultimately the thing is, filling up a form doesn’t mean they know you, but having all these touch points essentially elevate your brand presence, your personal presence to them. And it seems that you are creating a rapport just by all these bits and pieces. I mean, there’s a very fine line between spamming them and giving them the right thing. So…

Like just be authentic in terms of like telling them why they should be considering your service, why you are there to really help. Like if you can just give so much value upfront, ultimately it just seems that like at the end of the day, whether they become a customer or not, yes, there’s going to be some selling involved. But along that journey, if you can help to build more education, give them more knowledge, anybody will know and be thankful for it because these are things that not a lot of businesses out there are doing anyway, right? So it’s not that.

If I lose one customer just by giving this information, it means I’m going to lose 10,000 others. No, because the thing is, will in itself would help to amplify the results that you’re going to get at the end of the day. So to me, that is how I like to design the customer journey in general. And people should really be thinking about that.

Jeffro (11:50.164)
Yeah, and I want to highlight one other point that you made before is knowing what to track and what to measure. Because without that, you’re just going to be guessing. And you’re like, man, we’re paying for these ads, but we’re not getting new customers. I bet we need to change the color of the call to action buttons on our landing page. Where did that come from? You just pull it out of the air and start randomly making changes? That’s not going to help. You got to go step by step. And you need to have numbers that are measuring the progress through this journey, right?

If people sign up and then only 2 % of them actually show up for the appointment, okay, there’s the problem to fix right now, right? Do the reminders, make sure your emails are going out, not going to spam or something. Okay, we got that up to 80%. Great, what’s next in this step? And you just break it down bit by bit, but you have to have information and data to actually look at if you’re ever going to make intelligent decisions.

Moses Thien (12:41.611)
So I mean, mean, like I know you help people design badass website, like you help people create such good websites, right? And like a lot of time when people come to you, they don’t even understand like fundamentals in terms of how people are going through that process of using a website. And like there’s so many things like heat tracking tools, like Hotjar, Crazy Egg, those things that you can just put on simply to just track all these metrics. like you see, like even a call to action button, like some people just change because they feel like changing it and it looks nice, but

does it really, how badly does it affect your conversion rate? Like it can be night and day difference just by just making one change and some people don’t actually consider that and they think that it could just be because I like it and therefore I change it and it’s because I think that it looks better but it’s not really a data-driven approach at the end of the day and people could be screwing themselves up for even worse, worse outcome just because of this subtle change right?

Jeffro (13:35.784)
So what about, I mean, obviously the more stuff you start tracking, that’s a lot to keep track of. And, you know, it’s easy to get overwhelmed with all this information. So how do you approach that where it is maintainable and, you know, clear and understand instead of just like a mess of numbers everywhere.

Moses Thien (13:54.849)
So, great question. So a lot of things comes in, I mean, we are going to talk about GoHi level later as well, a lot of things comes in from a CRM perspective, right? So when you think about tracking, once, so what I do is I process map their business, really understanding their customer journey in terms of how people are going through the entire process. Once that is done, I identify in terms of where are the key areas to be tracked and what are the metrics that needs to be pulled out. Because a lot of times where the…

Firstly, where the lack of tracking comes from or where the lack of clarity of tracking comes from is not knowing what data to pull out or knowing what data to actually capture. But now since you have a map in place in terms of understanding how people are going through what end results are you trying to track in at the end of the day, you have a document listed out for your business in terms of what you want to track, how you should be tracking it. And then the next thing is how are you going to capture it and put it into your customer relationship manager, a CRM system. And then from there,

If you have all those really tied up into that system, you can then visualize it. And visualization is the next step that we do for our clients where we use things like Google Lucas Studio or things like Metabase where they can actually visually see in terms of what is happening in their business. it’s not just $1 in and how many dollars out. But now, OK, if I’m putting in $1, this is the number of leads I acquire based on this how many appointments are converting. Is there a gap in terms of

this whole process like my email rate. So it shows a very big data picture set based on what I have already identified on what I know I want to measure. And a lot of times, the problem with data is when people want to measure data, then they find the data. But now, if I work it backwards, becomes I identify the data set that is needed before I go and visualize the data. it’s really well planned out instead of, OK, now my CRM is tracking all this data. What can I get out of it? How can I?

understand in terms of how my marketing is returning. So it is kind of a very backwards way of tracking because now you don’t actually have a good fundamental understanding in terms of what you’re tracking in the first place. And to me, it becomes a very fatal mistake because then you go into the rabbit hole of like data after data after data and it’s not painting a complete picture because you don’t have the picture detailed out in the first place.

Jeffro (16:14.544)
So you got to kind of work backwards and make sure you understand what you’re looking at and how it all connects together. And you mentioned high level. This is a powerful tool for companies to keep track of things. We use our own version of it at Frobro as well. But you also mentioned Looker Studio, which I know can be useful for ads. But can you do the same thing within high level or is it more limited?

Moses Thien (16:38.371)
So it’s more limited, so we use really Go High Level to collect lots of data. Go High Level, mean, because of the unlimited custom view, it’s such a powerful system because it’s such a powerful and affordable system. It’s not something that if you pay HubSpot to do the same thing, you’re going to spend thousands and thousands of dollars just on it alone, right? So when we have High Level being a base of a multi-functional tool and with the rapid development that they have.

I think there’s a lot of data that can actually be set up right in high level from the get-go. It’s pulling lots of data from Facebook ads platform, Google ads platform that is already pulling in. The only limitation is the visualization part of it, which is why just getting a $10 API, there’s many APIs out there that you can just buy, and you connect Go High Level into a Lucas Studio database platform. Now you can pull in and visualize it into a better platform in itself.

But the thing is with high level because of like it is really it is just giving you a blank piece of paper and you can build whatever you want right. So as long as you are able to design and carefully craft out in terms of what that’s going to be the process of them mapping it out into into Lucas Studio would be very easy because you already have the data capture and because high level has just so much functionality there’s so many things you can track in a greater perspective of things.

Jeffro (17:57.22)
Yeah. And I think a lot of the reason that owners don’t track more is because they’re doing it manually, right? And they’re like, Hey, remember to enter your calls details into our spreadsheet or something. But the more you could get into one platform like high level, if you’re making your calls through high level, then it’s automatically tracked and that sort of thing. So that’s probably, you know, the way to make sure it’s actually getting tracked is to make it all together in one place.

Moses Thien (18:26.499)
And I think the thing that I like to bring up as well, right, a lot of business are thinking to scale, right, but they are very afraid on investing in tools because tools cost a lot of money, right, and that’s generally for most service-based local businesses, people who are just starting out, coaches, consultants, doesn’t matter. When they start out, they’re not… Firstly, tech is going to be a scare to them, right, in terms of like, doesn’t matter what CRM you’re using, you’re going to learn something new, and to them it’s like, I have never dealt with this before, where should I get started?

And that fear put them on the backseat almost immediately, which is why they default back into manual. Because if I can call my customer, I can track it down manually, it seems easy. But that skill perspective that people would have is something that they would have to take the next step forward in terms of challenging themselves to use platform. And I think that based of many tools out there, mean, like high level is one that because they consolidate everything to one platform, once you get it set it up, right? I mean, the key is to get it set up, right? The thing is using it is not going to be a…

Jeffro (19:21.712)
Yeah.

Moses Thien (19:24.675)
a big issue. mean, like for yourself, your personal experience, right, once you get it set up, like everything just becomes a repeat of system. So just getting that into one place. And I mean, it’s a very low, if people are even thinking of like scaling their business and they don’t know where to start, like, I mean, a $97 per month investment is not going to be crazy. It’s going to be something that they would, they would need to try instead of like a $1,000 a month or $500 a month software. So that perspective of the risk taking element and being able to use something

more affordable to try and see how they can grow their business to probably a million, two million dollar mark. Like to me, that is a very useful tool that can help a lot of businesses out there.

Jeffro (20:03.258)
Yeah. And I want to interject here that I think a lot of entrepreneurs start a business and then they immediately look to scaling and they skip the growth step. Because if you take what you have right now, where it’s just you doing most of the stuff that doesn’t scale, because there’s just one of you, there’s no system, there’s no team. So in that growth step, that’s when you have to build out these systems and teams and processes so that if you scale it up, add more money into the ad campaign, everything else still works.

Moses Thien (20:11.832)
Yep.

Jeffro (20:31.928)
If you try to scale yourself and someone gave you 100 clients tomorrow, you’d lose almost all of those in a very short period of time because you couldn’t do it. You don’t have the capability to handle that. So I just wanted to remind people, don’t skip growth. Scaling is attractive and we all want it, but you can’t just jump to the top of the staircase. You got to go up all the stairs to get there.

Moses Thien (20:55.223)
That’s a very great point.

Jeffro (20:57.786)
Yeah, ask me how I know that, right? Learn by experience, yeah? You gotta crawl before you can walk, before you can run. So before, yeah, go ahead.

Moses Thien (21:05.793)
Yeah, I mean, yes. Yeah, so sorry. Like just to add on, I like I think a big part, which is why when people start thinking about marketing, which is why I stopped branding myself as a marketing agency, I’m really a growth partner because when you talk about growth and you brought a very big point, people think about scaling, people think about how can I get more revenue in the shortest amount of time? And that’s their mindset in terms of growth, right? I mean, in terms of like skill. But then the thing is,

because of the lack of system in place, it just becomes a bad mindset to have that, if I just invest in my marketing, everything’s gonna work. But the thing is, like you said, there’s no system, there’s no processes in itself. You’re gonna waste tons and tons of your hard earned dollars at the end of the day. I mean, if people want to waste their money, I’ll just give you my bank account, can just transfer it to me. I’m more than happy for that. Then instead of wasting money, I’m just marketing alone.

Jeffro (21:52.102)
Yeah.

Jeffro (21:56.76)
Yeah, well, and there’s a lot of testing that happens in that growth phase because you might not know where the weak points are yet. You might not know what the bottlenecks are. So you can create a system and then try to expand it a little bit, see where it fails. Okay, now you can fix it and do that here for operations, do that here for fulfillment, do that here for sales. And the more systems you have in place and the more like they’re standing up to the tests, okay, maybe now we’re ready to kind of speed things up.

And yeah, that’s an iterative process. It doesn’t happen overnight.

Jeffro (22:30.298)
All right, well, I think if someone wants to move beyond just generating leads and really drive sales, this is at the core of what we’re talking about, right? What are the first steps? Is it to start tracking stuff or is there something else that happens before that?

Moses Thien (22:46.029)
So like I said, process map. So first thing is process map, really understand your ideal customer journey. Then I will go into system trackings. mean, like ultimately, I assume that most businesses at this point would have made at least $20,000 in sales, money recurring. They have a good offer in place. They know what they’re selling. It’s repeatable. It’s not something that they are just quoting, pulling out from thin air to just sell to somebody, right? So as long as they have the offer, they are process mapping. They understand in terms of what a baseline of a desired

ideal customer journey looks like, it goes into tracking building up your CRM. Once you have that dial-in, I mean, things that can give you immediately your email list, right? Emailing the people in your email list in terms of like, hey, like, is this something that you are, is this something that people are looking for, past leads are looking for, you can run a promo, you can stress test your system in terms of like, is the system running fine? If you don’t have that, spend 100, 200 bucks on pay that, see what, how lead flow is going through.

making sure that people are actually understanding the processes that they need to do, the system is working right. And then from there, if you know the vote of confidence, you got the vote of confidence, now it’s time to start turning on the tab in terms of collaborative partnerships, paid ads, spend more money on paid ads, do more stuff to just get more people into your funnel. the thing is, because now you have such a good tracking platform in place and you have good system, you kind of know in terms of if something breaks or if there’s a leak in your system, you kind of know.

Okay, great. I’m implementing a strategy to fix that step. I’m not just looking at the next strategy out there like, I need an AI appointment setter or I need this AI, this AI, that, right? Like, I don’t have to do that. I can just fix in terms of that step which is broken and I’m implementing strategies to actually create a bigger scale for my business.

Jeffro (24:32.396)
That was a really good overview and breakdown. I think that’s probably a good spot for us to kind of wrap up and lead people with. So thank you for doing that. Thank you for being here today, Moses. I love all these ideas and insights. I’m definitely going to be revisiting these for my own business. And really, you should be doing this on a regular basis anyways, right? Because stuff is constantly changing. So hopefully our listeners will be doing the same. And speaking of listeners, guys, go connect with Moses on LinkedIn or Instagram. Check out his free course that he has. The links will all be in the show notes.

And one more question for you, Moses. How long does it typically take for you to help someone implement their ideal customer journey from start to finish?

Moses Thien (25:11.871)
start to finish is usually a 90-day process. mean usually the first month we are really deep diving. Like if there’s an existing business, we need to understand what is ultimately happening in the existing business. It’s not something that we can just go in and hey like let’s fix it overnight right. So understanding the business and then process mapping usually take the first 30 days. It takes around two weeks to 30 days to get things set up and then the last 30 days is really testing, stress testing the system, making sure that everything plays, putting SOPs.

very modern SOPs in place just so that people can understand in terms of like who should be responsible for what and ultimately that if nobody, if everybody is responsible, nobody’s responsible.

Jeffro (25:49.088)
Yeah, exactly. Someone’s got to own it. Awesome. Well, thanks again for being here, Moses. Thanks to all you guys for listening. This stuff is worth its weight in gold. So rewind and listen to the episode again if you need to until you’ve wrapped your head around everything. Take care and I’ll see everybody for the next episode.

Moses Thien (25:52.301)
Yes, correct.

Moses Thien (26:06.819)
Thanks, Jeff.