Ravi Abuvala has spent over $4 million on Facebook ads and built more than 3,000 marketing systems for clients.
This video makes the case that Facebook lead form ads are quietly destroying the efficiency of most businesses’ marketing funnels.
The core metric Ravi uses to evaluate any marketing system is lead-to-close rate: the ratio of total leads to closed deals.
Lead forms produce artificially cheap leads because Facebook’s algorithm optimizes for people who are good at filling out forms, not people who are likely to buy.
The low friction of lead forms means most leads have minimal intent, forcing businesses into enormous manual outreach work for very few closes.
Ravi recommends switching from lead form ads to video sales letter funnels that take prospects off the Facebook platform entirely.
Rather than collecting leads through an opt-in page, traffic should go directly to a VSL page where prospects fill out a qualifying application.
Applications should include specific questions about revenue, marketing spend, and growth constraints, both to qualify prospects and to establish the sales team as the authority before the call.
Businesses should add a disqualification page that prevents low-probability prospects from booking, which improves cash conversion cycle speed.
Facebook should be told to optimize for downstream events like application submissions or booked calls, not raw lead volume.
Ravi’s clients run a 16% lead-to-close rate, 32 times higher than the 0.5% he commonly sees from lead form campaigns.
The goal is the shortest path from ad to closed deal, and anything that adds steps without adding qualification is friction working against you.
Transcript
RAVI ABUVALA: I’ve spent over $4 million on Facebook ads and built over 3,000 marketing systems for my clients. Facebook lead form ads, or instant form ads, are one of the most commonly used tactics in this space. However, what most people don’t know is that they are quietly ruining your business. Let me show you exactly what I mean.
If you’ve watched any of my videos before, you’re familiar with a number I track called the lead-to-close rate. Very simply, this is how many leads does it take for you to close a deal. For most people this follows a simple path. First they become a lead. Then that lead books a call. Then depending on their attributes they are a qualified booked call or not. Then they actually show up to the call, so you have a taken call. And finally you have a closed deal.
For easy numbers: if you have one closed deal for every 100 leads that you get, that’s one out of 100, so your lead-to-close rate is 1%.
It’s my opinion that the lead-to-close rate is the most important number when it comes to measuring how effective your sales team and your marketing system are, because it’s really the only number that can account for both of those different departments or processes. If you just looked at how many leads you generated or calls you generated, you’re not really paying attention to whether you’re closing any of those deals. And if you just look at your close rate, or your show rate, you’re not really looking at how qualified those leads are and whether they should even be in your pipeline in the first place. This number looks at the entire process.
So you’re able to say, if I get 100 leads and 30 of them book a call and only 10 of those are actually qualified and only five of them actually show up and I only close one of them, you can start to see where some of the gaps are in the process and pay closer attention to it. You might say, “Our close rate is only one out of five, that’s pretty low.” But the real question might be: why are we getting 30 booked calls but only one-third of them are actually qualified? Or even more important and relevant to this video: how are we only needing 30 booked calls out of 100 leads?
For context, in the current marketing campaign that we’re running right now, where I’m spending about $5 to $6,000 a day in ads, we have about 80% of people that we consider a lead actually booking a call to speak with us.
Now that you understand the importance of the lead-to-close rate, let’s talk about what I believe to be inherent challenges with the lead form funnel.
If you’re unfamiliar with Facebook lead form ads, they’re simple. There’s an ad that you run on Facebook. When somebody clicks that ad, a popup shows up and it asks them for their information, typically their name, email, and phone number, and you can add custom questions as well. Once they submit their information, they’re taken to a thank you page still on the Facebook platform where you can put a little bit of text and make a call to action. What a lot of people will do is say, “Hey, thanks for becoming a lead. You should check out our website or funnel right here in order to book your own call.”
As you can see, this is a very simple system, and it is that simplicity that really attracts a lot of people to it in the first place. Plus, because it’s so simple, it’s typically very low cost. It’s not uncommon to use a Facebook lead form and get a $3 lead, a $5 lead, a $10 lead.
If you’re working with an agency or this is the first time you’re running ads, you might be jumping up and down. You might be thinking, “Yippee, I’m getting $3 leads. I’m getting so many leads I don’t even know what to do with it. I’m overwhelmed with the amount of leads that I’m generating.” But the issue is you’re not looking at your lead-to-close rate. You’re just getting all excited about the leads that are coming in and maybe the couple that book calls on your calendar.
There’s a little bit of irony in here because the main thing that draws people to lead forms, its simplicity and low cost per lead, is also the lead form’s downfall when you’re actually trying to scale. Because there’s one thing that you’re missing in the lead form, and that is friction. It’s way too easy for somebody to become a lead inside of your company. Whenever somebody clicks an ad and they go to that popup, Facebook automatically enters in all of their information for them. They can literally see an ad, not even review what the ad says, click on it, then click one more button, and all of their information is sent over to you as a lead.
That level of friction is so low that when you’re calling these leads, a lot of them say, “I never filled out a form. I don’t even know who you are. I didn’t do this.” Which of course you’re always like, “Well, then how the hell did I get your information in the first place?” But people don’t want to hear that, because it’s literally so easy to do that people have such low intent that you’re having to sift through hundreds of leads to get one close.
The other major drawback of instant forms is that when someone goes from the popup to the thank you page, they’re staying on the actual platform itself. They’re never going to a separate funnel. So when you’re saying, “Hey, thanks for becoming a lead, you should now go to my website and book a call to speak with me,” 95 to 98% of the time those people are not self-booking. What’s happening is you or your setting team or your sales team is having to then manually reach out to all these people and try to get them set on a sales call. And you fall into that same scenario I was talking about earlier where if you are somehow able to get a hold of this person, a lot of times they’re going to say, “I didn’t fill out this form in the first place.”
There’s a lot of manual work going on here versus what I’m going to talk about in a second, where you can actually wake up every single morning and have qualified booked calls on your calendar without you or a setting team really being involved.
To really get why lead forms will be your downfall, I need you to understand how Facebook ads work on a first principles basis. Facebook ads are what I like to call a matching machine. You’re going to tell it, I want you to get this type of person for me, and it is going to find exactly that person for you. That’s why in the early days, it was very common for people to say, “Don’t run traffic campaigns because all you’re going to get is a bunch of people that like to click.” And today what’s happening is a lot of people are running lead form campaigns. So Facebook’s finding people who are the absolute best at being leads. Their definition of a lead is literally just name, email, and phone number. That’s a big problem because that’s not really a valuable lead. You could just find anybody’s name, email, and phone number in two seconds, especially when they’re filling out the form with one click of a button.
What you should be looking at is optimizing for events further down the funnel. Maybe applications, maybe qualified applications, or even booked calls. By telling Facebook you want people that are going to submit an application, you’re going to get people that want to submit applications. By telling Facebook you want people that are booking calls, you’re going to get people that are booking calls. But with Facebook instant form ads, you’re literally telling Facebook you want people that are really good at filling out these forms. And you’re getting people that are going to be really good at filling out those forms, but not a whole lot else.
When we go back to the actual lead form structure, there are a few hacks you can do. For example, you can add more qualifying questions into the actual popup, asking things like, “Are you this type of person? Do you have this type of money?” But ultimately, even if you add all of the filtration steps in the world, you’re still going to end up with somebody who’s great at being a lead but not necessarily great at actually becoming a booked call, not somebody that’s actually going to show up on your sales call and become a client.
So what should you be running instead? I’m a very big fan of what are known as video sales letter funnels. I have spent over $4 million in ads, built 3,000 marketing systems, and I have tried it all. I have done call funnels or video sales letter funnels. I have done webinar funnels. I have done challenge funnels. I have done low-ticket funnels. I have done straight-to-calendar funnels. I have done almost every type of funnel that you can imagine. And they all have a bunch of pros and cons.
I see a lot of people today trying to push the next new thing: the Skool group funnel, the Facebook group funnel, the low-ticket funnel. But the issue with a lot of that stuff is it’s inherently complex. There are a lot of drawbacks. And if you can get the simplest version of something to work, why would you not at least try that first? I’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on each of those individual funnels, and nothing beats a video sales letter funnel.
If you don’t know what a video sales letter funnel is, it’s very simple. You run the same ad, very similar to what you would run on the instant form, except instead of sending them to the popup that stays on Facebook, you’re actually taking them off the Facebook platform. Because you’re taking them off the Facebook platform and onto your own website, it is going to be more expensive. The clicks are going to be more expensive. Your CPM, or the cost to advertise to 1,000 impressions, is going to be more expensive. But that’s okay because you’ve reached a level inside your business where you’re okay spending 20%, 30%, even 50% more money to do 200 to 500% less work. Because you’re not having to chase all these people. These aren’t just leads that are going to tell you they didn’t fill out the form in the first place.
So we’re going to run an ad. And right now, what’s working incredibly well for us and for our clients is going directly to the video sales letter page. What we used to do previously is have an opt-in page and collect their information. Even recently, this past Monday, I was speaking with one of my clients who was running an opt-in page. And I asked her, “Why are we doing the opt-in page? We build out these funnels for you and we say go directly to a video sales letter page.” The client was saying, “I really love generating leads because these people might buy in the future.” But the issue with her funnel was that she was getting all of these leads and none of them were really qualified, none of them were booking calls, showing up, or closing. So I said, “Your problem is not getting leads right now. It’s getting qualified booked calls. So why are we going to put an additional step in the way preventing us from getting those qualified booked calls?”
And then she said, “I really want to get leads so that they can book calls in the future, because that’s what everybody says: build your email list, build your email list.” This is the part that’s going to really blow you guys away. Her husband was also on the call. And her husband said, “Baby, we have been doing this for two years and we have never once booked a call from the leads coming in on the opt-in page. They’re always people that applied to speak with us.”
So for two years they had been generating all these leads and not one of them had turned into a booked call. You have to ask yourself: a lot of people get all excited about email lists and stuff like that, and I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, but what’s the simplest version of this? The simplest version is not “let me build this email list and send all these emails every single day.” It’s “let me get somebody from an ad to a closed deal as quickly as possible.” And in order to do that, you really want to send them directly to a video sales letter page.
On the video sales letter page, we’re going to drop them down into an application. I’m going to do a separate video on the art and science of applications because this is something that we do for clients where we are very particular with what questions we ask in the application, what order we ask them, and we pull these from their sales call transcripts. So we know who should be on calls, who shouldn’t be on calls, who are dream clients, who are not dream clients, who’s that borderline case where yes, we could get on the call with this person and close them, and who’s on the other side of that borderline where if we got on the call with them we only close 2% or 3%, because we’re really trying to increase the efficiency of the overall funnel. From the application page, we go to a booking page, and from the booking page, we go to a thank you page, which eventually leads to a sales call.
Obviously this is more complex than the original lead form ad, which is why a lot of people never graduate from lead forms into actual funnels. That’s why we do it done for you for our clients. A lot of our clients come to us having done lead forms, hitting a certain level, 10, 20, 30, 40, $50,000 a month, but unable to break past that because they keep dumping more and more money into it and it’s not being as effective as they want at scale.
If you want my help installing any of these systems in your business done for you, be sure to book a call with my team down below.
Before I show you what our funnel looks like, I just want to show you the difference in these lead-to-close rates. Yesterday, I was on a call with a gentleman and they had closed two out of 400 leads in the last two weeks from their lead forms. Two out of 400 is a 0.5% lead-to-close rate. They are doing an unbelievable amount of work just to get two closes. 0.5% of leads are actually turning into sales. For us, we have a 16% lead-to-close rate, 32 times higher than what the lead forms would be getting us. The reason is because we’re only getting leads when people are filling out an application to book a call to speak with us. So instead of chasing around people that are doing the minimum amount of input, name, email, phone number, I’m going after people that are saying, “Hey, I want to speak with you.” They’re applying to book a call to speak with us. The only people that ever drop off after they apply are typically those with no availability on the calendar or those in a time zone like Australia or New Zealand where the calendar times don’t work. So that’s how we have literally a 75 to 85% lead-to-booking rate, which means I just get to wake up in the morning with sales calls on my calendar and on my sales team’s calendar.
For my marketing nerds out there, if you really want to get good at this process: when you’re asking questions in the application, you actually want to have what we call a disqualification page. If people answer the questions and we know based on data that they have the lowest lead-to-close rate possible, meaning it’s not really worth our sales team’s time to get on a call with them, we actually want to send them to a separate page where they’re not allowed to book. I know, shocker. Many of you listening right now are thinking, “People want to speak with you and you’re not getting on calls with them?”
Well, once you understand the importance of the velocity of money, or what’s known in the enterprise world as cash conversion cycles, meaning: if I’m deploying this capital into ad spend, how quickly am I getting that return on capital back? If I allow everybody to get on the call with me, it might take me four or five days to get a 2x or 3x return on ad spend and maybe 7 to 30 days to get a 5x or 6x. Where if I disqualify all the unqualified people or even just the borderline people, I might be getting a 2x return on my ad spend the same day I’m launching the ads, or the next day, and then maybe a 4 or 5x within seven to fourteen days, because I’m not clogging my sales team’s calendar with all of these unqualified people.
Now let me wrap this video up by showing you what this looks like in action. This is the funnel that we’re running at about $5 to $6,000 a day in ad spend. You can see we have about 27 different ads running currently. I’m not going to go through all of these. This isn’t a video about Facebook ads. If you want me to show you our ad testing system and framework after the Andromeda update, let me know. But as you can see, we have a bunch of different types of ads: direct to camera ads, B-roll ads, testimonial ads, walking ads, image ads. The important thing for this video is that all these ads are driving to one single page, that video sales letter page I talked about before.
“Get more revenue from the leads you already generate. We install a done-for-you pre-call system built from your recorded sales calls. The result is higher show rates, higher close rates, and shorter sales cycles.”
They come down here, they click “See if you qualify,” and here’s that application I talked about before. Name, email, phone number. What do you sell and who do you sell it to? What was your last month in revenue? How much did you spend on marketing? What’s your approximate lifetime value? What’s the primary constraint limiting your growth? And if we determine you’re a strong fit, how soon would you realistically like to begin?
A lot of people will see this and think, “Oh my god, this is so much friction.” I was on a call yesterday where a guy said, “This was some invasive stuff. You were really asking me things that I felt uncomfortable answering in this application.” And the truth is, I know that these questions are not put here randomly. All of this is incredibly specific. I’ve spent hundreds of hours optimizing this one page. So I’ll give you a few things that I did here.
Number one, a lot of people say “Book a free discovery call, learn more,” or something like that. The issue with that is the prospect is the one who has the frame. You’re essentially telling them, “Get on a free coaching call with me. I’ll show you how things go.” You don’t have the frame of the expert or the authority when they show up to the call. Instead, if you look at all of our marketing messaging, we say stuff even in the ads: “See if you qualify. See if you qualify. See if you qualify.” I’m saying, “We don’t let anybody in here. This is for a very specific avatar and you have to tell me if you’re qualified to speak with us.” So immediately, I have, or my sales team has, the frame on the sales call.
Number two, yes, these are invasive questions. “What’s your revenue? How much do you spend on marketing?” But if somebody’s not willing to tell me these numbers, there’s absolutely no way I can know if we can help them or not. On the sales call, one of the things we do is go through their entire marketing and sales process. We look at their numbers, we find the biggest bottleneck, and then we show them what we would do to solve it. So if I can’t get them to tell me that in the application, they’re very likely not going to tell me that on a sales call. There might be the occasional person that didn’t feel comfortable putting it in the application but would be willing to share on a sales call. But once again, the data shows us that those people have such a low lead-to-close rate that they’re not worth taking the call in the first place.
And yes, I could have fewer questions on here, but all of these are incredibly specific. For example, “What’s the primary constraint limiting your growth right now?” This will determine what pre-call content we send them. This will determine how we’ve positioned the sales call, what offer we make on the sales call, all based on the answers they’re giving us here.
Lead forms are a great way to mistake activity with progress. Because you’re doing a lot, getting a lot of leads, making a lot of calls and texts, and maybe even speaking to a couple of people, you think the funnel is actually working. But when you take a step back and look at the overall efficiency of your marketing and sales system, typically through the lead-to-close rate metric I talked about earlier, you’ll see that you’re putting a lot of work in for very little output.