I was catching up with a buddy of mine yesterday. He was working with a client that had a 25% show-up rate on their sales calls.
Three out of four people were booking and then ghosting.
So I asked him to walk me through the math.
Turns out that 75% no-show rate was costing them roughly $125,000 per month in opportunity cost. And that’s being conservative, assuming they could only get to a 50% show-up rate, not even close to where it should be.
That’s $125K per month or about $1.5 million per year. Assuming that business sold for a 4x multiple…
That’s a $6 million problem.
Yet when he walked me through what they were doing about it, I realized they were taking a very surface-level approach of “more.”
More emails. More SMS messages. More reminders. More more more.
I had to stop him there.
Fixing Root Causes > Symptoms
The brute force approach is almost everyone’s default. When a problem appears, throw resources at it. Money, people, more marketing, more automation, more everything. And look, I’m not anti-marketing whatsoever. I’ve done $200 million in the physical product space. I know how to sell. But throwing more at a symptom while ignoring the actual cause is one of the most expensive habits a business owner can have.
So I asked one question: WHY are only 25% of people showing up?
Think about the psychology for a second. Someone books a call. They have some interest. And then they just. Don’t show up. What does that tell you?
It tells you they don’t feel the problem badly enough yet. They haven’t been sold on why this is urgent. They have objections sitting in the back of their head that haven’t been addressed. So when the call reminder hits, it’s easy to ignore because nothing has made it feel non-negotiable.
The Two Filters I Put On Every Problem
Whenever I’m diagnosing a constraint in a business, I run it through two lenses: psychology and economics.
Economics first. You have to put real numbers on the problem before you can prioritize it properly. Most founders are walking around with a vague sense that something is costing them money. But vagueness doesn’t create urgency. Specificity does.
$125,000 a month in VERY real opportunity cost is specific. $6 million in enterprise value is specific. When my buddy saw those numbers laid out, the conversation changed immediately. This wasn’t a thing to get around to. This was THE thing to fix immediately.
Next we have psychology. Once you know what the problem is actually costing, you can start asking the right question: what’s causing it upstream? In this case, the service required travel. They had five locations across the country, so anyone booking that call was already sitting on objections like cost, time, and the hassle of getting on a plane for something they’re not totally sure about yet.
If your marketing doesn’t overcome those objections before the call, you’re relying on a salesperson to overcome all of them in real time, cold.
That’s a brutal position to put your team in.
Not to mention the fact that most of them aren’t even showing up in the first place!
Amplify the Pain, Then Flip It
This particular service was primarily for men dealing with something they’d been struggling with for years. They’d probably tried supplements, other treatments, all of it. They were exhausted and skeptical. And they weren’t excited about the idea of traveling and spending five times what they’d paid for anything else that hadn’t worked.
My suggestion was to stop trying to patch the no-show rate with more touchpoints and start fixing what’s happening in their head between when they book and when the call happens.
That means your marketing has to do two things really well.
First, amplify the pain. Not in a manipulative way. In a real way. Get them to feel what this problem is costing them, what they’re missing out on because they haven’t solved it, why everything else they’ve tried didn’t work and what was actually wrong with those approaches. You’re turning up the dial. Short version: move them from a 5 out of 10 urgency to a 9 out of 10. Then flip it.
Second, once they’re feeling the weight of the problem, show them why this is the thing that solves it. What changes when it’s fixed. How their life looks different. Make it real and specific, not generic benefit statements, but the actual emotional payoff they’re after.
When you do both of those things well, people don’t just show up to the call. They can’t wait for the call. There’s a difference between someone who shows up obligated and someone who shows up ready to buy. Marketing is what creates that difference.
This Applies to Everything You’re Selling
I used a call show-up rate as the example, but this framework applies to your ads, your landing pages, your email sequences, your SMS, your product pages, and everything else you’re doing.
Every touchpoint in your business is either making the problem feel more real and your solution feel more inevitable, or it’s not. Most of them aren’t.
Most copy is feature-first. Your ads are leading with what the product does instead of what the customer is living without it. Most landing pages are structured around the brand’s logic, not the customer’s psychology.
The result is marketing that generates interest, but not urgency.
The fix is always the same… go upstream. Find out what objections are sitting in their head. Make the problem undeniable. Make the solution feel like the only logical next step.
Do that, and the metrics start moving on their own.
Start With the Math
If you have a constraint in your business right now, the first step is to run the actual numbers on what it’s costing you.
Take the gap between where you are and where you should be. Multiply it out monthly, annually, then apply your exit multiple. Most founders who do this exercise for the first time are shocked. The thing they’ve been deferring for six months is often a seven-figure problem.
Once you see the number, the priority becomes obvious. And once the priority is obvious, what to do next is usually clearer than you expected.
If you want help running that math on your business, my book The Scalable Profit Model walks through the full framework. And if you’re past the book stage and want to work through it directly, reach out.