Getting Clients is Hard Without THIS

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]So, if you're a coach or expert, you probably think the hardest thing to do in your business is client attraction.

[00:00:05]But it's not. You don't have a client attraction problem. You have a trust problem. And if you're like most coaches or experts who struggle with this, you are leaking trust in three specific places in your funnel every day. Now, this is happening when the calls that should enroll don't or the people who should buy ghost you. So, if you see your cost to get a call booked climbing every month and nothing you try seems to fix it, then this is for you. Because today, we're going to find those three places where your funnel is leaking trust. We're going to name them. We're going to fix them one at a time. Because when you optimize your funnel to build maximum trust, the whole game gets really simple. And believe it or not, the second piece is the most important and it's the one that almost everybody overlooks. This one step is the thing that makes people show up to your calls already trusting you. And if you skip that step, you have to do so much more heavy lifting, and you're going to get ghosted a lot more, no matter how good your offer is. I'm Russ Rafino. This channel pulls back the curtain on what's actually working in high ticket coaching after $100 million in revenue. Quick disclaimer, all I'm doing is showing you what works for us. Your results are 100% up to you. None of this should be interpreted as any kind of income claim whatsoever. All right. The first thing you're doing that's probably killing your trust is talking to everybody, especially in your Facebook ads. Right now, when you write ads or social media posts that are for everyone, they're really for no one. So, here's the thing.

[00:01:30]With Facebook's new Andromeda update, you need to be way more specific than you think when you call out the exact target audience that you want. And here's what I mean. I want you to pull up or think about your last five Facebook ads right now and look at the first line of each one. So, if any of them sound like, you know, are you struggling to grow your business or are you a coach who wants more clients or is your marriage not working? That is the kiss of death. Okay? Now, yes, you're you're calling out the problem that you solve, right? That you should, but that's not enough. You have to go much much deeper in calling out the exact target audience that you want. You see, the way that Facebook used to work is that you used to put together like really dense targeting packages, right?

[00:02:12]So you'd stack all these different interests together and then and then Facebook would go out and find the person that you wanted. Now before everybody got all crazy about privacy, this was amazing because you could literally target a 40-year-old mother of three who lives in Beverly Hills and drives an Audi, right? Like literally those were all Facebook targeting options, right? So all that stuff is gone now. So what do we do? What we do is in the ad copy itself, you have to call out the exact target customer that you want. Okay? So instead of just saying, you know, is your marriage not working? You have to say something like this. Hey, if you're a guy who makes $150,000 a year or more and you're staring down the barrel of a six figure divorce, or if you're a mom with at least two kids and you're facing meltdowns every day. You see what I mean? You have to literally get that specific. Now, let me talk for just a second about why I'm calling out a specific income level in that one example that I gave you, right? That that $150,000 a year requirement. So, the way to think about the problem you solve is like this, right? Let's say you have a problem that affects a broad cross-section of society, like you fix marriages or or people who have parenting problems or fitness problems, right? That's the problem you solve.

[00:03:21]Now, by definition, there's going to be about like 20% of your audience that has money and probably 75 to 80% of your audience that doesn't. And so what you absolutely need to do in the age of Andromeda is tailor all of your ad copy to that top 20% of your audience that can actually afford what you've got.

[00:03:40]Now, if you don't, you're going to get interested people, committed people, and they're going to book discovery calls with you or whatever. But when you get them to the point where they're actually ready to enroll, you're going to pitch and they're just not going to be able to afford it. So, you've got to target and call out the most successful high functioning segment of people in your target audience. So, here's why this matters. When you stay vague, you attract vague prospects, right? People who kind of need help, people who might be ready in a few months and they just gobble up your time and they no show and they don't buy. But when you get specific, when you call out the exact person, the exact outcome, the exact mechanism that you use, something different happens, right? The wrong people scroll past, the right people stop, they lean in, they click. Okay, so being specific costs you less money. It brings you better prospects, and it actually pre-qualifies people before they ever reach your funnel. So, here's exactly what to do. Every ad you write has three jobs in the first three lines.

[00:04:41]First, you have to call out the exact person you want, right? Like if you're a licensed therapist over 40 and you're charging by the hour or if you're a real estate attorney doing $200,000 a year or more, but you want to get out of billable hours. All right, the second job is you have to name the exact outcome, right? How to get a million views on your content in the next 90 days. Now, look, you want to stay away from direct income claims if you're a business coach, but you want to be as specific and compelling as you can. And the third job is to call out your exact mechanism. not I'm going to teach you marketing, but I'm going to show you how to do this using a single 30 minute consultation funnel or something like that. So, the exact person, the exact outcome, the exact mechanism. That's the architecture of an ad that earns the click. So, it's kind of like this.

[00:05:24]You're standing in a crowded restaurant.

[00:05:25]You're trying to get your friend's attention. You go, "Hey, buddy. Hey, dude. Hey, man." He doesn't listen. You go, "Hey, Dave." Then he turns around.

[00:05:31]All right? So, that's what I'm talking about. You want to be ultra specific.

[00:05:36]call out the exact target audience you want because that stops the scroll. Now, look, this is really interesting because the guys that I know that are killing it on social media, they're creating content and ads that are specifically tailored for their exact target customer. They're actually not trying to go viral. They're not trying to create videos that get like millions and millions of views. They're trying to reach the exact target customer that they want. Okay, so now your ads are calling out the target audience directly. They're they're reading the ad. They're full of curiosity. They're clicking through. And now what? Now what do we do? Do you send them straight to a calendar to book a call? Do you send them to like a five or six minute VSSL?

[00:06:18]That's a video sales letter, by the way.

[00:06:20]No, you send them to the best trust building vehicle on the planet, an authority master class. All right, so here's the bottom line. You have to earn the call. Do not send people from an ad straight to a calendar. Don't send them straight to an application page. Don't send them to like a sales letter or a short VSSL. Send them to a 25 to 35 minute master class where you can actually shift their beliefs. This is the killer step and this is what everybody does wrong. I mean, if you look at like a hundred different funnels from coaches or therapists or experts, there's maybe going to be like one or two people who do this right and they're usually my clients. Okay, so here's what I mean. Right now in 2026, there's two things that are working against you.

[00:07:01]First, we are absolutely in a trust recession. Your ideal clients, they've been pitched over and over again by all these people claiming they can help them with their biggest problems. And you know, more often than not, they've watched a lot of webinars that have sucked or they've signed up for breakthrough calls that were just terrible. And maybe they've even dropped five grand or 50 grand on different programs and masterminds and they've been let down again and again, right?

[00:07:25]So, that's the environment that you are selling into. Okay? That's the baggage that some of your best customers are carrying before they even get on the phone with you. Now, the second thing working against you is information overload, right? People are spending all day doom scrolling on their phones nowadays. You know, they're watching like video after video. They're they're hearing pitch after pitch after pitch.

[00:07:46]So, we have to have something that cuts through the noise and establishes you as the number one authority and expert that they've been looking for. So, the gap between, hey, this ad looks interesting.

[00:07:58]Let me click it and I'm actually going to give this person an hour of my life on a call and then sign up to work with them. That's a pretty big gap. You cannot bridge that gap with just a landing page and like a Calendarly link.

[00:08:11]You have to give them a piece of content where the prospect actually experiences who you are. Without this step, you're just trying to close cold prospects on the phone. It doesn't matter how good your script is. Doesn't matter how talented of a salesperson you are, your close rate is going to be like 10% or less and you're going to get burnt out.

[00:08:29]So, when you when you integrate this step and do it right, then prospects are going to show up to the call already pre-sold. They've already chosen you, right? It's not persuasion, it's just logistics. Are they the right fit for what you've got? Can you help them? Can they, you know, find a way to pay for it? That's it. So, here's what the authority master class has to do. A great authority video is not a teaching video, right? So, there was this whole idea when I first got started of reciprocity, right? If you give and you give and you give, eventually your audience is going to feel so grateful to you that they're going to give you money. They're going to want to work with you. But here's the problem. When you give away all your best stuff, it creates a false sense of security in the mind of your customer. So, they tend not to say, "Hey, great man. Let me hire you to help me out." If you give them too much information, what they say is, "Great, dude. Thanks for the tips. Peace out. I'm going to go put this into practice." and then they disappear and they fail because we know it's like if someone's going to save their marriage, watching a video or listening to a podcast is not going to do it. So, a great master class is not a teaching video. It is a belief shifting machine.

[00:09:34]And there's five specific things that you have to shift before they ever book a call with you. So, I call this the five shifts. And your master class has like one job to just engineer these five shifts in this exact order. Now, the first shift is a values shift. So every transformation has a counterintuitive value at the foundation of it. Right? So for coaching, right, you want to tell people to operate with total integrity.

[00:09:58]For weight loss, it's about not letting food rule your life, right? So whatever your niche, there's a value that your prospect has been operating without. And until they make peace with that value, nothing else lands. So right out of the gate, you call out that value and you make them want to embody it. The second shift is the reframe. So, this is a massive reframe of how they see the problem. Right? It's not about this.

[00:10:20]It's about this. Right? Whatever problems they think they have are just symptoms of a bigger problem, they're not even thinking about. And that's the one we're going to fix right here. The third shift is the secret weapon. So, this is where you contrast the old way of doing things, right? Everything else they've tried to fix this, and you tell them why they haven't worked and why they can't work. Now, this actually lets your audience off the hook a little bit because if they've been doing it the old way and failing, it's not their fault.

[00:10:48]They just didn't have your way of doing it. And the fourth shift is thinking past the sale. So, you in shift three, you show them how to get the outcome they want. In shift four, you show them how that unlocks the door to an even better outcome that they can't even imagine right now. So, it's not just about making more money. It's also about having freedom. It's not just about not getting divorced. It's also about having an incredible marriage. And then the fifth shift is to invest in mentoring.

[00:11:14]You don't want to leave them with this false sense of security where they feel like they can go it alone, you know, where they feel like they don't need your help because they're going to fall flat on their face. You've got to tell them that if they really want to fix this problem, they have to work with a real mentor. So, you want to engineer all five of those beliefs in that order.

[00:11:32]And when you do that, people show up to the sales call or the breakthrough call already pre-sold every single time. Now, you host the master class on a single page with nothing but the video and a headline and the application. That's it.

[00:11:46]No menus, no place to click. The only thing to do on that page is to watch the master class. And then you track how much each person watched because the people who watch more of it, those are your buyers. You can retarget them. You can send them more stuff. You can you can do all kinds of cool stuff. But that's the thing you want to track is how much of your video, how much of your master class did they actually consume.

[00:12:08]Okay? So understand the difference.

[00:12:10]We're not teaching. We are shifting their beliefs about what they believe is possible for them. Because when they believe their problem is solvable, like hiring you to fix it is just the logical next step. So here's the takeaway. The ad gets the click. The master class earns the call. If you skip the master class, if you do it wrong, like almost everybody does, then you're basically really going to be fighting on the phone to build trust that you really should have built before they even booked that call. All right. Now, quick note before we get to the third piece. If anything in this video is landing, if you're like sitting there realizing that the the master class like this is the thing that's missing from your funnel and you're tired of talking to people who aren't ready to buy, then there's a link in the description of this video. Click the link, book a call with my team. No pitch, no pressure, just like a real strategic conversation about how we can help you implement this right away.

[00:13:01]Okay. All right, back to it. Because even with a great ad that calls out exactly who you want and a great master class, the call itself can blow up the trust, right? And that's where people really lose things. So, the third piece that you have to fix is the call itself.

[00:13:17]And here's the takeaway. You want to be a doctor, not a salesperson. Here's what I mean. Think about the last time you bought something a high ticket. Maybe it was a house. Maybe it was a car, maybe it was college, therapy, coaching, big financial decision, whatever it was. Was it because somebody pitched you? Or was it because a real person on the other end actually understood your situation better than you did and they asked you better questions than anybody else had and they made you see something that you've been avoiding looking at? You see, that's not selling. That's diagnosing. And that's the right way to do high ticket sales. So pitching works for something that's $47 or maybe like 2K, but diagnosing is what works for those five or 10 or $15,000 price points. So the industry average close rate on the phone is like 15 to 20%. And the people who do buy a lot of the time they cancel, they refund, okay, because they felt sold and not seen. But if you diagnose on your sales calls, right, if you really uncover what it's going to cost them not to fix this problem and where things are going to go if they don't get the help they need, that's when you start to see those 30, 40, 50% close rates, right? Could be the same script, more or less, could be the same offer, but the framing is different. All right? So, what we use is something called the doctor frame. So, just like going to the doctor, you're going to start out by asking great questions, right? What are you experiencing every day? How is this problem showing up in your life? How many times are you and your wife having these fights? When's the last time she told you she loved you? Right? Getting to the basics, to the root of what's really going on. Now, once you have that information, then you're going to diagnose the real problem, not the surface problem that they walked in with, the real one, right? a real problem underneath everything that they brought to you. And maybe they haven't even admitted this to themselves yet. Once you do that, you're going to ask them to future pace the cost. What is it going to cost them in the next six months if they don't fix this problem? Where are things going?

[00:15:17]How is that going to show up in their marriage? Who else is this costing?

[00:15:21]Right? What how is this interfering with the person that they want to be? And you don't manufacture it. You just ask. You just shine a light on it. And that makes it more expensive for them not to fix this problem. And then finally, you just prescribe just like a good doctor does, right? Like somebody comes in with a sore throat and a cough. You know, you go to the doctor's office, he asks you questions. What's going on? How long have you had this? He does some tests.

[00:15:44]Then he just tells you, "Cool. Here's what's going on. Here's how he fix this.

[00:15:47]Just go ahead and take this." Right?

[00:15:49]That's it. The doctor doesn't have to beg you to to take the medicine. He just tells you the truth. He writes down the prescription. He hands it to you and he walks out. Because you don't need to be convinced. You just need to feel seen.

[00:15:59]And when you feel seen, you buy. You follow the advice. So here's the takeaway. Stop selling and start diagnosing. The doctor closes more than a salesperson ever will and with zero resistance and he sleeps better at night because it's the right thing to do. So remember, you know, if you're watching this, you are probably a therapist or transformational coach or or something like that. And what you have is something that your audience desperately needs. You're the one who saves businesses, right? You're the one who saves marriages. You're the one who who who helps people, you know, drop 30 pounds. You're the one who helps people solve some of the biggest challenges in their lives that they can't possibly fix on their own. And so, you have every right to have a real conversation to diagnose what's not working and then give them the solution and then tell them what it costs and that's it. So, those are the three. Let me put this together for you. Right? There's three trust killers that are probably at work right now in your business and there's three things to fix it. Right? The first one, talking to everybody. You fix that by being ultra specific about who you're talking to, especially if you're advertising on Facebook. Um, the second one is trying to close cold prospects.

[00:17:03]You fix that by putting an authority masterass into your business. And the third one is pitching instead of diagnosing. And you fix that by using the doctor frame on the call, right?

[00:17:13]Three pieces all happening in one funnel. That's the whole architecture.

[00:17:17]So, here's what I want you to walk away with. Trust is the new currency. And I'm assuming that you are trustworthy, right? I'm assuming that you're a coach or expert, a therapist, you know, and you actually believe in doing the right thing and you're not out to make a fast buck. All right? That is the prerequisite for for everything I'm telling you here. But you know what?

[00:17:35]Here's the thing. Being trustworthy, just being a good person in reality is not enough. You also have to sell and market your services in a way that creates and builds that trust every step of the way. And that's what's available to you if you build this kind of system.

[00:17:50]So, if you know that you need to create more trust with your audience, again, click the link right under this video.

[00:17:54]book a call with my team, tell them what you're working on, and we will walk you through exactly how this kind of trust funnel works for your specific industry, for your specific offer. Again, no pressure, just a real conversation. And before you go, drop a comment under this video. Where do you think your sales process is leaking trust now that I've kind of pointed out some of these things, right? Where's the biggest trust gap in your business right now? And just tell me because I read these comments and I'm happy to reply. I'm happy to give you some advice. Now look, some coaches are going to spend 2026, 2027, 2028 biting tooth and nail for every client. Other people are just going to have a system that builds trust and then they're going to watch their cost to acquire a client drop and their close rate climb even in the same market. It's the architecture that's the difference.

[00:18:39]Is your sales process building trust at every step or are you leaking trust at every step? Again, if we can help, click link under this video and book that call. I'm Russ Rafino and I'll catch you on the next