Recap: 

In the first post, you learned the 3 Rules Of Paid Traffic and why you need to become a master at lowering your CPAs to create "room in the math" to scale.

In the second post, you learned how to break down your math to figure out WHERE your greatest problems / opportunities lie and how to build useful priority lists for your team.

Before we talk about HOW to improve these breaks, we need to understand WHY they exist where they do.

And that's what we'll cover in this post.

Sales Psychology 101: Why Asking WHY Has Been So Important To Our Success

Normally, I try to have all of our posts speak to you about your problems...

But for just a minute, I need to talk about us (it'll help you understand why this process is so important).

Sammy Afran, our head of creative strategy, and I are former sales people.

Sammy sold retail and I sold advertising and medical device equipment.

Our sales experience is important because it helps us look at our client's campaigns and spot disconnects they didn't realize were there.

Here's an example:

When working on our podcast, The Scaling Game, we noticed back-to-back episodes demonstrated the importance of our WHY process so clearly:

Both client's math was broken in the EXACT SAME spot (poor checkout-to-purchase rate).

An average marketer would take this information and go "shopping" for solutions on the market aimed at figuring out how to fix a poor checkout-to-purchase rate.

They might get lucky and find the right one...

But more likely than not, they are going to be applying marketing, technology, or media buying solutions to a sales problem.

This would result in tons of wasted time, effort, and money.

We want to help you avoid that.

That's why we're going to introduce you to the process we created using our sales background to ask WHY that we were able to develop hypotheses (and subsequently experiments) that address the REAL problems in the sales process.

The 3 Step Process To Develop Hypotheses As To WHY Your Math Is Breaking Where It Is

Step 1: Review All Steps In The Sales  Process Up To The Break

You already know WHERE your math is breaking so what you need to do is review all of the steps in your sales process leading up to the point of "breakage."

This means reviewing every little detail:

The most important part of this step is to do everything you can to remove yourself from "business you" and try to make yourself a consumer.

Point out spelling mistakes, slow load times, poorly formatted mobile experience, and anything else that you wouldn't tolerate if you were on the other side of the screen.

Step 2: Source Feedback From People Outside Your Team / Company

The next thing you want to do is enlist the help of other people who aren't stuck in "advertising world" to see what every day consumers see in the process.

Sammy discusses here how she enlisted the help of her grandmother to point out a glaring issue in a client funnel targeted at elderly people.

Granny helped us see that the problem in this sales funnel wasn't the actual sales message, it was the fact that there was a clear disconnect in what people were buying after watching the VSL.

You can source feedback from actual people as well as mining comments on ads to help you piece together why your math is breaking down where it is.

One note:

DO NOT tell people where the issue is in your funnel.

Let them offer up their experience on their own and see if the answers line up.

Step 3: Develop Hypotheses About What Needs To Be Addressed

Now that you have your own observations and the observations of non-marketers, it's time to develop hypotheses about what solutions can help you improve performance.

Your hypotheses should look something like this (sorry for my chicken scratch):

Your goal should be to walk away from this process with 2-3 hypotheses about things that could address the mathematical constraint.

Ideally, you do like I did, and add some context to the hypotheses that lays out some sort of preference from a BUSINESS perspective to help you and your team set priorities for what to work on.

This is the best way to find a solution that addresses issues from the prospect side AND the business side.

Why We Recommend Including Your ENTIRE Team In The Hypotheses Creation Step

We HIGHLY recommend doing this process with your entire team.

Bring together your media buyers, creative people, analytical people, customer service people, and anyone else on your team that can offer a unique perspective.

This collaborative approach is important for three reasons:

If you're familiar with Ray Dalio and his philosophy about creating an idea driven culture, this is where this concept stemmed from.

But you don't have to include everyone, every time.

Just like Ray, we keep track of the people who deliver great insights in the hypothesis creation process and trim our list to only the best performers / most relevant personnel over time.

Example Of This Process At Work:

In the video below, we've stitched together the two case studies that share the same problem (poor checkout-to-purchase rate) but showed how our WHY process created two very different hypotheses for each client:

Key Takeaway:

The main lesson you should takeaway from this post is that before you go shopping for answers for your mathematical "breaks" you need to develop hypotheses about WHY these breaks exist where they do.

Just because you have the same mathematical issue as another business DOES NOT mean the solution that worked for them will work for you.

You need to remove yourself from the "business side" of your issue and better understand from a prospect / customer perspective what the resistance is to moving through your sales process.

Phase 3: Figuring Out HOW To Fix Your Issues By Developing Sound Experiments

Now you know WHERE your math is breaking down and you've used sales psychology to develop hypotheses to attempt to answer the question as to WHY it's breaking there .

Here's where it comes down to execution.

But the way you execute is extremely important to ensuring you get clean data that shows you've found the right answers to your problems (and not a solution that makes one metric look great and the ones that really matter look terrible).

And that's what we'll cover in the next post.