Why Client Acquisition Got Harder And What To Do About It

Patrick Thorpe how are you buddy very good mate yeah how are you yeah nice to see you man yeah I'm all good all good oh good afternoon everyone how you doing Graham I am so good if it was any better I would be arrested exceptional glad to hear it I wanted to thank Jacob and Katie for their help with our session set up and flow today i'm travis jones and i lead our enablement team and today i'm here with adam boggs and we'll be sharing details about this quarter's enablement program we also have archer with this who will be helping answer we got what have we got a reminder to have your questions at any time using the q a function we'll have some time to answer that how do we how do we kill that that's good everybody hear me absolutely I see some familiar faces in there and some not so familiar. We've got Mr. Brady and we've got Mr. Watson, Mr. Keane. How are you all doing, guys? Howdy. Good to see you. Doing well. Yeah, good, good. So thanks for showing up. There's more than I expected, which is always good. So I kind of wanted to run this one in an ideal world. I'd maybe just open the floor a little bit and talk about some of the things I'm seeing, some of the things clients are seeing and so on. And maybe we exchange notes. Maybe there's some guys in here who want to ask some questions. We'll open the floor, maybe look at some case studies, see what you guys are seeing. So don't be shy in that sense. But I'll just jump in and share my screen, if that's all right. everybody see that yeah let me say so i don't know you know people are in in the room here today for a reason so typically we're all hearing the same stuff you know client acquisitions got harder um across the board it's got harder across industries it's got harder and it kind of if you've seen the same pattern as us we've kind of gone from 2024 started to slowed down and kind of plateaued. 2025 started off strong, plateaued, and we kind of hit this point around November, October, November last year where it just kind of fell off a cliff and everybody said the same thing. Responses have just dropped off a cliff. Response rates to things like email obviously was already massively, massively reduced. so then we've had linkedin do the same thing other social platforms do the same thing so that's content message responses across the board it just appeared to drop off a cliff and everybody was you know running around like headless chickens what's happened so there's obviously a seismic shift and some of this we can we can make assumptions oh you know in another sense we've got we've got data to back it up so There's a little bit about me there. For those of you who don't know me, built and sold a company to a Berkshire Hathaway group. It was the Marmon Group in my late 20s. I've been in selling as long as I can remember, really. I think all business is selling ultimately, and that's kind of what I've done for a lifetime. Built and sold a few other companies. My last one was an international expansion agency. I've always kind of just dug outbound out of the ground and dug sales out of the ground and so on. So I advised a ton of guys from various places. I'll talk about this later on, but I'm not here to sell my stuff. That's not the purpose of today. But for those of you interested, we've got a book that did really well that I co-authored with Justin Michael. And more or less, my time now is spent working with experts or expertise driven firms i.e people who um you know rely on knowledge ip and those types of things versus products and sas um as steve saying the frames are great read thanks buddy um so looking at this i mean there's i'm sure steve steve's a guy who's probably got a great bunch of intel into this stuff but let's just kind of dig in and if anyone wants to stop me and jump in Please do. But so why has client acquisition kind of dropped off a cliff? So first off, you know, it's the it's the dirty word right now of AI. So AI is massively industrialized outbound. So we're all using the same tools. Many people are just using the same sequences. The issue with AI is that, you know, it's a hallucinating. model so it churns out things that it's seen and heard elsewhere but that's usually slop so we've got no way of of kind of measuring the efficacy of what it spits out so it's good for ideation but if we rely on it for sequences and templates and so on it's just the same language so you know you're seeing everywhere you're seeing the m dash appear you're seeing the staccato sentencing appear so you can just see ai a mile off And, you know, that's just made everything worse. It's made it a redder ocean. So even if you sat there as a human being, you reach out to someone, they can come back at you and say, is this a bot? You know, they're so suspicious that it's a bot and that it's automated that you can't actually even be human. So it's created a lot of mistrust, first off. And the other side of that coin is that our prospects are going to AI first. So, you know, a lot of people are still in that period where they think AI can solve the problem. So, but they're not actually getting real expertise from people who've been in the trenches. It's like, would you rather, you know, a downhill, black, black downhill ski runner teach you how to ski or would you let ChatGPT do it? you know, you'd take the ski coach any day of the week. So it's a similar thing. So they're in that holding pattern where the prospects are looking for, looking to AI first to solve the problem. So they think they don't need people like us or they don't need a product solution for it. And you've got, you know, the industrialization of outbound and everybody using the same tools. So add to that, that we know that platforms are throttling hard. The big drop off in November, December is this new LinkedIn algorithm. There's a few names circulating, people talking about what it is and what it's called, but which nobody can really prove because LinkedIn don't really tell us this information. But we do know that the algorithm has changed. So we know that it's taken its social selling index to a much harsher level. We know that it's much more behavioral, almost how they treat society in China now. It's kind of it's it's reading the profile. It's watching what we post, who we message, how many, what types of messages. And it's comparing that to the content that we put out and our profiles and measuring, you know, whether we're actually whether we're actually providing niche expertise or we're just cranking out slop. So that's doing two things. Obviously, it's not just choking the content, which people are talking about. You know, people who previously clients who would previously get 50,000 impressions on a post, they're now saying they can get 800, 1000. So it's massively throttled. But it's not just the content. It's also the outbound. So a lot of people don't know that LinkedIn has a spam box too. called the other the other inbox and we've seen many instances where clients have been you know receiving infinitely lower response rates or seeing infinitely lower response rates and we've unearthed the fact that it's landing in the spam box basically so um we have to the the way to kind of overcome that is to switch back to native or sales navigator because they've both got their own inbox interfaces so but it's doing that too so if it senses irrelevance to the prospect if it senses automation ai con you know consistent robotic sounding messaging it's sporadically placing placing messages in the spam box so we know that's happening and that's fairly new And of course, because of that, content goes nowhere anymore unless it's paid. LinkedIn is a monetized platform. So ultimately, they want us to spend money. They like sales nav users. So they do favor stuff coming out of sales nav versus native. But also they want us to boost. So you'll see now anytime you run a post, it says boost for visibility. So, you know, they want us to spend money. further proof of it we obviously knew what google did to us and and the whole um shutting down of mass called email and so we'd kind of come out of the the air and ross um predictable revenue model and into this you know what let's just send mass volume and we'll just scrape up the the chet homes one three percent which i'll come back to in a minute um but So people looked to places like LinkedIn where you could get 1,200 in-mails out a month when you utilize the open profiles and so on. But that's another thing that was cracked down on in November. So that reduced to from 800 open in-mails down to, for some users, it's 50. For others, we're seeing 150. So, you know, across the board. They've kind of said, look, we've had enough of, you know, spam. We've had enough of AI. We've had enough of automation. We've got to do something because we're going to lose users effectively. So the same issue we've seen happening to LinkedIn as we've seen with Google. So LinkedIn connection request limits. We're seeing clients that have those cut. the in-mail we've talked about the algorithm stuff we've talked about so there's a bunch of evidence you can get on that but you can go google that you kind of don't need me to explain all of that stuff so and it's kind of you know the same thing is channels open early adopters early movers win mass adoption platform closes a loop which is what we're seeing so um i don't know about everybody in this in this room today but but typically clients and peers who were seeing 10 to 15 discovery calls a week with some level of ease are now looking at two to three, you know, and it feels like a lot harder work to get that up. And it's obviously because when you, for those of you familiar with the Chet Holmes pyramid, which I'm sure a lot of you are, you know, the top 3% typically are in market and ready to buy. So when you've got volume, you can go at mass volume and just pick up that top three percent and it's fine because you can go out to spray and pray you can go pick the volume up but where where we lose all of that volume and there's more stringency and so on then we we have to do something different so we have to look at again which i always have thought about sales but you have to look again at open to buying not thinking about buying And possibly even think they're not interested. So you have to start to utilize people who are not necessarily immediately in that cycle. So obviously it creates a wider net. So how do you do it? We've all got the same tools available to us. There is no kind of undiscovered as yet, you know, new frontier. We've got social media, we've got emails and we've got the telephone. And to me, in that order, it's like the Kevin Casey ick factor. You know, for me, the bottom, the bottom cold is telephone. The next one's email. Then we've got social. So there's nowhere else we can go do it at this point. So, you know, if we've all got the same tools available to us, bear in mind, sorry, bear with me. It's bad practice. Yeah. So if we've all got the same tools available to us, the only advantage we can possibly have is skill, nuance and expertise. So you can't beat shit by, you know, just putting out more shit. You've kind of you've got to do something different. So what can we do? Well, the first thing to say is outbound isn't dead. I know there's been tons of stuff out there on social media about people who have literally. just quit you know they've quit their roles as vp cro's they've they've quit coaching and consulting they're closing the business down going back to corporate because because of these changes um but it's not dead it will you know never die it will all these will always be uh effective channels but it's the it's the robotic stuff that's dead so what can we do what's in our control Well, in a world where everybody zigs, we can only zag. So we can look at how to be more human than human. So how do we make messaging, how do we slow down and make our messaging look more human? You know, what would a human do that a machine wouldn't do? Grammatically, from a pattern interrupt point of view, there are ways to do that. you know some of you in here are exceptionally good at that already um but you have to look obviously human so that's the first thing you got to actually care and that seems obvious but so many people are just look people are just numbers these are just prospects so i'm just going at burning through as many as i can but it's not that at all if you slow down and actually care and take the time to to um put the spotlight on other people other orientation machines bots ai and people looking to get rich quick don't do that so you have an advantage um converse don't sell so you don't come out of the gate and pitch people it didn't work five years ago it definitely doesn't work now so we've got to slow down and have conversations and be willing to do that particularly if we're selling higher ticket um We've got to be creative in that. So, you know, what can we do? And this applies not just to LinkedIn, but email, phone, social selling, all of that stuff. So how can we get creative? What can we do in the messaging? Is it, you know, is it voice drop? Is it an asset? Can we do events like this one that people are actually interested in rather than just pushing product on them? And crucially, I think now more than ever, we've got to have a long term mentality. So we've got to think it's not a case of a prospect has entered our funnel. Let's go pitch them. Let's go sell to them. Let's have two messages at it and burn them because we've just got a much smaller pool to go at. So we have to think long term in terms of I tend to visualize it as. people connect with us or people enter our network in a different way and they're now in our room so I've got two options I can either go and sell to them and then discard them because I don't get what I want or I can understand that you know a jar takes some opening you know sometimes it takes a little longer and it takes time so how can I nurture people that are now in my space that are seeing my content that are reading my books that are reading my um the stuff that we put out that are talking to people that know us they're seeing an invite to an event like this one they're in the room so you know it becomes pipeline and pipeline is not um a one and done it's a long time thing and you know i have clients who who come to me two years later you know and so for me it's not one and done and i think it's about that it's long term in the room and how do you then nurture them and take them on a journey so it's crucial more so than ever and people who are performing the best right now are the ones that are prepared to take a step back even if it's temporary to to generate efficacy and manually do the things that they're trying to get clawed to do or they're trying to get an ai tool to do or they're trying to get a you know a mass outreach tool um so you know i'm seeing that so you know it might not be forever but it can be i've got to slow down see what works i've got to vary the messaging because as soon as things start to look like a pattern then it looks like a machine it looks like a tool again even if you're doing it manually so To slow down and do that, you know, is really important. So that's kind of opening. Closing, you know, I hate that word, but it's how most of us recognize it. And it happens long before we enter a conversation with somebody, you know, gone are the days of, you know, that kind of high pressure Grant Cardone, Jeremy Miner selling, in my opinion. Selling is way more nuanced and the best salespeople I've ever met understand, you know, how to hold a higher frame. They understand authority, they understand consultative selling and they understand that it starts to take place long before a deal closes. So, you know, what are they exposed to when they're booking on your link or they're filling out your form? what are they seeing where does it land them afterwards is all of that engineered so that they know you're coming into the call um there's tons of stuff you can do around that and it's crucial to improve these conversion rates which are necessary when you've got less discoveries so um and the best engineer it deliberately you know and i'm not talking about funnels and those cheesy types of things i'm talking about subtlety um and having people take a journey that you want them to take and obviously in terms of of the selling process itself i literally wrote the book on it with justin michael um but you know it's all about we don't chase we don't pitch we we're not performative um you know we're fairly indifferent to the outcome um so That type of selling throughout the process is vital so that we don't come off as vendors and we attract people versus repel. And obviously, for those of you in it for the long haul versus a quick buck, the most successful people typically in a higher ticket environment, you've got to engineer all of these pieces. You've got to know, I won't go through all of these, you know, I'm happy to chat to anybody afterwards about it if they want to. But, you know, when you look at positioning, it's not just picking a niche and going at that. It's, you know, what do those people see in me that they don't see in somebody else? What is it that I'm known for that makes me way more valuable and hard to compare? Why do people pay me more money than they would? the next guy that they'd pay half my fee. And it's looking at engineering that and looking at who we're relevant to and building all of that out. And it takes some engineering. It takes time. Obviously packaging, you know, if it's harder to acquire clients, then we want them to stay longer. We want them to pay us more. So why would they? How can we make that valuable and compelling enough? How do we increase perceived value and how do we maximize revenue economics? How do we get them to stick around so that we're not all sizzle and no stake and people start working with us and they want to continue working with us is crucial. Demand generation, which we've talked about, which I think is hugely about slowing down, bringing a human element back into it. Things like proof layering. You know, once we've done that, what evidence do we have? what are the touch points that prove that we're the right person for the job um and right into the conversion things that we've talked about so controlling the dynamic of the deal um challenging assumptions raising the standards so all of these things can be engineered so you know people like david c baker blair ends they've probably spent 20 years building that reputation but it can be done faster you know you can you can um ethically game the system. And I think it's more important because it just speeds up the velocity of the sale and the willingness to speak to you. So I think the polarity shift is stop trying to reach everyone. Start being impossible to ignore by the right people. Who do I stand out like a sore thumb to? Is there enough of them to go and have enough conversations? If so, then it's mission-based targeting, and that's what we all should do, in my opinion. But the point being that most people won't do all this stuff because everybody wants to get rich quick. They want to watch an Alex Almosi video or buy a Russell Bronson ClickFunnels book, and they want to find a shortcut, which is, I don't know, content or some kind of pay-to-play. some other way of doing it i've been doing this nearly 25 years and i'm yet to find a get rich quick scheme that isn't just in the interest of the people that sell it so if everybody wants easy that's exactly why we're here in the first place we've been choked because we want to do everything overnight we want to spam everybody we want the instant sale we want the one percent in cycle So we find ourselves here. Platforms have had to adapt and stop us doing it. So in a nutshell, I mean, we've not really got much time. If anybody wants to grab a quick question, happy to take it. No, no takers. So, I mean, you can always drop me a line afterwards. I'm happy, you know, LinkedIn, email, WhatsApp, wherever. Happy to answer any particular questions about your case. But it was obviously today a bit of a whistle stop, quick rattle through it, my view of the world as we see it now. And I'm happy to have a conversation if you would like that outside of this. Frank, you go. Thank you, Johnny, for pulling us together. There's something I noticed amongst the attendees. There's a lot of gray hair or no hair. And I think the absence of the younger crowd is quite telling, to your point earlier, about the energy and the enthusiasm for AI is just a shiny object, and people are rabbit-holing down that so fast that my age cohort might say I've been doing this 40 years, like you, in different categories. But thank you for... Leaning in, especially with the frame, I'm going to make a shameless plug for the book because I'm fond of what you've done. It's quite compelling. It's worth a second read. I encourage everybody here to pick that up if you haven't. I'm looking forward to the audio version. Johnny, I think you'd be a great. You need to get on that. But the one that I've tried to help clients think through is being in the minute we have left is being an authority. And belief in themselves is the most difficult thing for someone to, in many instances, to hold that frame like you've talked about, to be present in a negotiation. And the one that does all the talking is usually has no advantage. And I've talked too much. But anyway, I'll give it back to you in a short way of saying thank you for today. That's great, Frank. I really appreciate it. Always. do you mind if i ask a question quick yeah who is who where am i looking hey how are you doing awesome love your book i'm giving you a plug too um i haven't mentioned the meeting but this is phenomenal love it love what you're doing on whatsapp so thank you for that um are you sharing this doc or not and the only reason why is you had some really killer points in here and i didn't want to be disrespectful on screenshot stuff so i didn't know if you're going to share it but there's some key points here that i can use with some of the i just I wasn't taking notes, so I don't know if you're going to share it or not, but thank you. Yeah, pleasure. Appreciate you. Pleasure. So, yeah, drop me a line. I know we've all got a drop, but drop me a line if I can help you. We've got this Vanquish Collective if you'd like to be in it. It's a private, closed group. Welcoming, you know, welcoming anyone into there. Drop me a line or do nothing. It's all good. But thanks for showing up. Really appreciate you. Thank you, Johnny. Appreciate it. See you guys. Thank you, Johnny, for your time. Thanks, Johnny. Appreciate it. Cheers.

Client acquisition has changed.

Response rates are down. Content reach has dropped. LinkedIn is throttling harder. Cold email has been squeezed. AI has flooded outbound with generic messaging. Prospects are more suspicious, more distracted, and more likely to assume everything is automated.

In this session, Jonny Staker breaks down what’s really happening across client acquisition, outbound, LinkedIn, expert-led selling, and high-ticket advisory — and what to do now.

This session covers:

Why client acquisition got harder in late 2024 and 2025
How AI industrialized outbound
Why prospects now assume everything is a bot
What changed with LinkedIn reach, InMail, and messaging
Why content impressions have collapsed
Why old mass-volume outbound no longer works
The Chet Holmes 3% in-market problem
Why outbound is not dead — but robotic outbound is
How to make messaging more human than human
Why conversation beats pitching
How to build long-term pipeline instead of burning prospects
Why manual, nuanced outreach is working again
How positioning, packaging, proof, demand generation, and conversion all connect
Why the future belongs to skill, nuance, expertise, and authority

If you sell consulting, coaching, advisory, expertise, professional services, or high-ticket work, this is a practical breakdown of what’s changed — and how to adapt.

0:00 Opening Banter & Welcome
1:30 Setting The Topic: What’s Happening In Client Acquisition
2:25 Why Client Acquisition Has Got Harder
2:50 The Late-2024 Drop-Off In Response Rates
3:42 Jonny’s Background In Sales, Outbound & Expert-Led Firms
5:19 Why AI Has Industrialized Outbound
6:17 Why Prospects Now Assume Everything Is A Bot
6:41 Why Buyers Are Going To AI First
7:33 LinkedIn Throttling, Algorithms & Lower Reach
8:46 Why Content Impressions Have Collapsed
9:04 LinkedIn’s “Other Inbox” Problem
9:50 How LinkedIn Detects Irrelevant Or Automated Messaging
10:40 The Cold Email Crackdown & The End Of Mass Volume
11:23 LinkedIn InMail Limits Getting Reduced
12:35 Why Discovery Calls Have Dropped From 10–15 To 2–3 Per Week
12:55 The Chet Holmes Pyramid & The 3% In-Market Problem
13:51 The Only Channels Left: Social, Email & Phone
14:39 Why Skill, Nuance & Expertise Are The Only Advantage
14:55 Outbound Isn’t Dead — Robotic Outbound Is
15:34 How To Zag When Everyone Else Zigs
15:48 How To Make Messaging More Human Than Human
16:17 Why You Have To Actually Care
16:49 Converse, Don’t Sell
17:03 Getting Creative With Modern Demand Generation
17:34 Why A Long-Term Mentality Wins Now
18:26 Turning Your Network Into A Room, Not A Funnel
19:15 Why Manual Work Is Beating Automation Again
20:06 Why Closing Starts Before The Sales Conversation
20:33 Authority, Consultative Selling & Higher Frame
21:09 Engineering The Buyer Journey Without Cheesy Funnels
21:27 How To Sell Without Chasing Or Pitching
22:07 Engineering High-Ticket Client Acquisition
22:23 Positioning: Becoming Hard To Compare
22:58 Packaging: Increasing Value, Stickiness & Revenue
23:32 Demand Generation, Proof Layering & Conversion
24:07 Building Reputation Faster Than The Old Experts Did
24:29 Stop Trying To Reach Everyone
25:01 Why Get-Rich-Quick Client Acquisition Created The Problem
26:40 Frank’s Reflection On Authority, AI & The Frame
28:28 Final Question & Closing Remarks
28:59 The Vanquish Collective & Wrap-Up

#ClientAcquisition #Outbound #LinkedIn #Sales #Consulting #Coaching #DemandGeneration #TheFrame #HighTicket #Vanquish