[00:00:03] Speaker A: Welcome to Big Ticket Pros, the podcast for agencies, coaches and high end service providers who know what it takes to thrive in competitive markets. I'm your host, Josh Thomas. You can find me on all social media t literally. Our guests share insider tips, strategies and sometimes cautionary tales to help you close bigger deals and scale your business faster. Big Ticket Pros is sponsored by Conversational Funnels, the new way to close deals in 2025 that doesn't rely on any of the old traditional methods everyone hates. We use this method to book 121 qualified sales calls in 10 days without any ad spend. Sorry, Ashley. Any cold outreach or any so endless social posting. So you can download the free step by step blueprint that shows exactly how we did
[email protected] Once again, that's conversational funnel funnels.com Today's guest is Ashley Rodriguez and she is a f Facebook ads expert and creator of Ads Academy. Helping fellow marketing professionals transform $1,000 clients into $5,000 plus retainers.
With a BSBA and proven funnel strategies, she teaches ad managers how to deliver consistent results while maintaining 90% plus client retention rates. Ashley, welcome to Big Ticket Pros. What is the best piece of advice you would give to someone just starting out in your industry?
[00:01:33] Speaker B: Probably it would be don't boost your posts, just build them an ads manager. And if you have to hire a coach to do so, it's well worth it.
[00:01:44] Speaker A: Tell me more because it's so easy to hit that boost button. Facebook wants, wants to help me, right?
[00:01:50] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah, they want your money.
Yeah. So to some level they, they obviously want you to have success, but whenever you boost a post, you just don't get the, what would you call the, the options. Right. So when you boost a post, like you said, it's so easy. But when you build an ads manager, you can kind of, you can segment your audience better, you can find higher intent audience that you, you just don't have that option with boosted posts.
[00:02:20] Speaker A: Yeah, makes sense. And you know, a lot of times I've, I've found if you, if you take the shortcut or if you, if you take the easy button, you're usually going to overpay and you may not get what you want anyway.
[00:02:35] Speaker B: Right. And I think what a lot of people don't realize is Facebook tracks that data. So whenever you, you boost a post, it.
Facebook is just finding people that are going to click.
And while that's, that's fine if you're into essentially vanity metrics. Right. But if you're really looking for people that are going to book those appointments and fill out your applications, those people that are going to pay high ticket prices.
You go inside ads manager and you can actually optimize to find buyers or optimize to find people that will actually book appointments, not just click. And that does make a really, really big difference when it comes to conversion rates.
[00:03:21] Speaker A: So let's talk about one of my favorite topics of all time is prospecting and finding high ticket clients. And so you're like my spirit animal.
And so let's talk about one of the, One of the best ways that I've found to do that is through Facebook ads.
There are many other ways. There are people that are like, I'm not going to spend any money on ads. I want to do something else. Great, we've got ways to do that. But ads are also very effective. And everything has its pros and cons. And so could you talk through.
So just for anybody in the audience that's like, I've never done ads. I'm scared of them, which is a lot of people.
What are some of the pros and cons of running Facebook ads specifically?
[00:04:08] Speaker B: So the con, the biggest con I see is obviously it costs money and usually you want to spend 20, 30, $50 a day at a minimum to get the results you want.
So. But to me, that's, that's the only con the pros are. It's automated.
You know, it's, you can, once you figure out your audience, you can set it and forget it, and you just have leads coming through automatically. And whenever you have that kind of freedom, flexibility, you can spend that time doing other things. So you're not spending hours inside of Facebook groups nurturing and, you know, all this stuff, you can put that into something else.
Ideally you would do both, right? But if you're like me and you just don't like nurturing inside Facebook groups, ads are, they solve that problem because they just do it for you.
[00:05:04] Speaker A: And so I've, I've been an advocate of ads for a long time. And so I have some visibility on, you know, what a lead cost right now, what a sale cost. And it varies widely in different industries. Right?
So, so let's say that somebody who's listening to this right now is an entrepreneur and they're selling some sort of intangible service of some sort. We'll get into like home services and professional services in a minute. But let's say coaching, consulting, you know, that sort of thing where they're selling information or they're selling courses on how to do stuff, education.
What are you seeing right now for a lead? Like how much does it cost for a lead? Like let's break down kind of the economics of running ads and, and what it has to look like these days.
[00:05:59] Speaker B: So I mean that varies based on, you know, your average order value, your lifetime value.
I'm seeing leads as low as $10 right now. And then I've seen leads of over 200 cpl cost per lead.
But again that just that, that just varies. It varies based on, you know, is the audience warm, is the audience cold? How's your offer? Do they like your offer? Is your targeting rate? So I don't have a straightforward answer for that.
I would say look at the overall metrics. So instead of focusing so much on a cost per lead, we focus more on our people clicking, you know, what are they doing when they view the landing page? Are they viewing the application page and not completing it? Or you know, we look at all of that and then we focus on getting those metrics up and then that's when you can kind of calculate your cost per lead.
[00:06:57] Speaker A: Yeah, makes sense. And you know, the way that it's been presented to me is you, you really need to think about, well, when you make your back end sale.
[00:07:10] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:07:11] Speaker A: That produces X amount of revenue and how many leads did you have to bring in to make that sale and how much did those leads cost and is that less than what you made?
And if it is, you win.
Right? If it's not, back to the drawing.
[00:07:27] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I mean that, that really breaks it down and makes it easy to understand. So yeah, I mean that's the name of the name of the game. Right. To be profitable.
[00:07:38] Speaker A: So and, and one thing that I think a lot of people are kind of like that, that don't spend money on ads, are kind of freaked out by is you can, you can run ads to like a front end product and not get a return on your ad spend, not a full return on your ad spend.
But some people are happy to get like 0.5x because they know they can make it on the back end. But that's like terrifying to somebody. It's like I'm spending a hundred dollars to get a $50 sale. How does that work?
[00:08:09] Speaker B: Right. And so yeah, and that's if you're really top of funnel and you're selling something that's low ticket just for the purpose of audience building, it's worth it to take the loss on the ad spend because what you've done now is you've generated a list of buyers. Not just leads, not just people looking for free stuff, you know, and that's something that we would consider like I guess, a self liquidating offer that you launch it for the sole purpose of building your audience and usually it funnels them into a high ticket service that you offer.
[00:08:42] Speaker A: You know, the craziest thing is I ran ads for a long time and I was getting, you know, same deal, like 8 to $12 for a lead and this is for like a free lead magnet or something.
And, and then I sent out a low ticket offer and I was getting sales for like, like $30.
It was like not that much more.
[00:09:06] Speaker B: Right.
[00:09:06] Speaker A: And, and this is somebody that's already whipped out their credit card and said, okay, I'll give you money.
[00:09:11] Speaker B: Right. And it's a different level of trust and intent at that point. Right. So it's worth paying a little bit more to if, if the chances are they're gonna hire you down the road.
[00:09:23] Speaker A: So if, if somebody is just starting and, and they did want to do it themselves.
Um, what are some of the, let's say the top three tips that, that you would, that you would recommend? Aside from hiring you, of course. But what are some of the top three tips that you would recommend for somebody that wanted to start running ads for the very first time? Like what are the things that they really gotta focus on and what are the things that they need to probably ignore?
[00:09:50] Speaker B: So the first thing I would go through is I would go through Facebook Blueprint. It's actually Facebook's own course about setting up ads and pay close attention to make sure that you set up the Facebook pixel properly. That's, that's how you get all that data and feed it back to Facebook, basically.
The second thing is you have to kind of take into consideration your budget. If you have a higher budget, then you're going to want to optimize for the deeper point in the funnel. Right. So that's your booked appointments, that's your sales, things like that. If you have a lower budget, then you're going to want to do some more warming up through say a reach or an engagement campaign.
And I don't know if that's like too vague, so just let me know if you need me to elaborate on that.
And then third, I would say, I would say test.
You know, you want to make sure you're testing different audiences, different copy, different creative. Because just because something's working doesn't mean it's working well. And you might be able to get those costs down.
[00:10:54] Speaker A: And there's lurking variables also because you can, you can launch a campaign and the, it looks like it's doing well, but if you start tracking the results through that one that you almost turned off because it was, the leads were like three times more expensive. That's all the buyers.
[00:11:16] Speaker B: Right.
[00:11:16] Speaker A: You know, it's, it's, it's, it's like constant spinning plates and half the time the, the platform doesn't work and for no reason.
[00:11:27] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, don't even get me started on that.
[00:11:29] Speaker A: But yeah, and, and, and so I'm setting all of this up because like, you could do this yourself. Right, right. If you really like losing your hair, you can definitely do this yourself. But what I do is I outsource this and I highly recommend that anybody who's thinking about getting into ads who's not great at it, outsource it to someone like Ashley. And so Ashley, tell us a little bit about what you do, who you help, and how people can connect with you.
[00:11:59] Speaker B: Yeah, so we focus specifically on lead generation.
We have some knowledge in E. Com and core sales, but I really like lead generation. I like to get qualified leads for high ticket coaches.
We also have another program that teaches people how to launch their own marketing agency specializing in Facebook ads.
But really I think the best part about Facebook ads is that they're so inexpensive compared to say LinkedIn, Google.
And we can teach you how to generate those high ticket leads to take you to those, you know, to hit your income goals or even surpass them, you know, depending on what those are.
So I would say that if anybody wants to learn how to do it, if you want to just like tag me on Facebook or I don't know where you plan on posting this at, but I can send some contact information your way to, to add to it.
[00:13:00] Speaker A: Okay, very well. And so is, is this design, you said focusing on lead generation for high ticket and so is it designed for any specific industry? Coaches, consultants, that sort of thing? Is that what it's really for?
[00:13:14] Speaker B: It's really, it can apply to any lead generation business that, that needs that extra level of qualification.
But my personal favorite are coaches and consultants.
[00:13:28] Speaker A: Excellent. And so we can find you on social media then?
[00:13:33] Speaker B: Yeah, Facebook, LinkedIn are the two I'm on the most.
[00:13:38] Speaker A: Okay, very good. Hey, we're going to wrap up from here. Thank you so much to our guest Ashley Rodriguez for joining us, sharing a little bit of wisdom about thriving in a competitive industry and the complicated landscape of paid ads. You can learn more about what she does by finding her on Facebook and potentially. Was it LinkedIn then?
[00:14:01] Speaker B: LinkedIn. Yeah.
[00:14:02] Speaker A: Excellent. So if you're an agency coach, professional services provider, or otherwise sell expensive stuff, we'd love to have you on a future episode. You can
[email protected] and once again, if you want to learn about the new way, we're booking dozens of qualified calls per week with no ad spend. Ironically, even though we just talked about ads the whole time, I forgive you. The irony's not lost on me. Okay, but you can download our free
[email protected] that's all for now. Go get that big ticket punch.
