The Complete Anatomy Of A High-Converting Agency Client Acquisition Funnel

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May 18 • Sales

A well-structured video sales letter funnel was honestly one of the most important components to scaling my agency to a 7-figure run rate.

I personally spent $30K-$50K over a few years working with some of the best people in the industry to perfect my own offer and funnel which was a huge reason I was able to make my agency so successful.

At this point I've iterated on my funnel 15 to 20 times, and I'm telling you, this stuff can genuinely make or break whether you can be profitable scaling client acquisition through paid ads.

There's an art and a science to all the little details that go into making a landing page work, and in this post I'm going to break down all of the most important things you need to implement on your opt-in page AND your thank you page to increase call volume, increase show rate, and increase the quality of leads coming through onto your calendar.

Knowing these strategies is what'll let you effectively compete in the marketplace, same way it let me scale my agency in one of the most competitive niches in the world: real estate.

I've proven these strategies work time and time again, evident in the hundreds of agency owners that have scaled after I've helped them install these exact same things into their business.

For example, my client James recently hit $50K a month in cash collected and used these strategies to land 15 new clients per month back-to-back for the first two months of this year.

My client Aaron had a single month where he brought in 22 new clients and added $50K in MRR in one month.

I used these strategies to add $60K in MRR to my own agency in 90 days...

Now obviously, your underlying offer and the creative execution of the ads you're running and sending traffic to this landing page are also a huge component of making this all work. But for the purpose of this post, I want to go deep into the VSL funnel strategy itself.

And, instead of just describing all of this in the abstract, I'm going to make this easier for you.

I just built a brand new funnel for the newest version of my mentorship offer, which applies all of these strategies to a T. So you can literally pull it apart and use it as a live reference point while you read through this post:

👉 https://www.onemanagency.io/application

Open it in a new tab. Funnel hack it as you go. (Yes, I'm fully aware I'm telling you to go look at my own application page, we'll come back to that at the end. For now just treat it as a working example.)

Alright, let's get into it.

THE OPT-IN PAGE:

A lot of people talk about how ugly funnels convert, but if you're trying to land premium clients, the aesthetic and branding of your marketing assets 100% matter.

Mine is built on Go High Level, but with some simple color schemes and design choices, you can make a GHL funnel look genuinely premium. I'd recommend going with a dark theme. The general color doesn't really matter, but having dark elements makes your copy, your application, and your video sales letter all pop a lot more.

You'll also notice that I've carried the branding colors throughout all the other embedded marketing assets on the page.

My VSL is embedded with Wistia, and I've edited the play button and the controls panel to blend in with the same green graphics. I have an embedded Typeform for the application (I'll touch on why I'm using Typeform instead of GHL's native form in a second), and I've matched that with the same green branding color as well so the whole thing looks cohesive and aligned across the funnel.

The next important principle is to have a simple, direct headline that speaks directly to your ideal client avatar and appeals to their dream outcome. You want to state the ideal client avatar in there. It's also good to have the headline pose a thought-provoking or counterintuitive question, and incorporate the dream outcome that your client avatar actually cares about. Then directly below it, there's an obvious call to action to play the video, because that is the only thing we want them to do on this page.

You'll notice that on this first landing page, there is no other content other than my logo, the headline, the video, and the application. We don't want to fill this landing page with too much busy content because every extra section distracts from the conversion path and gives a person a reason to click off. We simply want them to watch the video. The video carries the majority of the heavy lifting, and then a very obvious, direct CTA to fill out the application sits right below it.

If you view the video on the desktop version of the landing page, you'll notice that I've used a custom HTML embedded version of the video instead of a native URL embed. With Wistia, this allows you to have an animated thumbnail, and I specifically chose a section of the video where the green branding colors are dominant, which further improves the aesthetics and branding cohesion of the funnel AND improves the click-through rate of the video being watched, which helps overall conversions as well.

I've also used Wistia's native chapters feature, which creates highlights for the different talking points in the video. This allows someone to skim through the video and see what the different topics are, which further increases the watch time and the overall conversion rate of the funnel. All of these little details are conversion rate optimisations and hacks that go unnoticed and aren't thought about by most agency owners, but they all stack up into more dollars in your Stripe account at the end of the day.

The VSL Itself

I won't dive too deep into the strategy of the VSL here because that on its own is a topic you could write a whole course about.

But some important elements worth noting:

I invested in a decent quality camera to film in 4K
I invested in nice lighting to set up my home office and make the background look as aesthetic as possible
I bought Philips Hue light bulbs and placed lamps in the background, then changed them to a color to create depth and contrast

All of these things are nowhere near as expensive as you'd think, but the details go a long way to improve how you're perceived. First impressions matter, and a more premium backdrop dramatically impacts how you're perceived. Mine is by no means that premium, I'm literally just in my home office, which is a bedroom in my apartment. But those details still matter.

Next is the length of my VSL. It's only 5 minutes long.

There's a direct correlation between VSL length and how sophisticated your market is. The less sophisticated a market is, the longer your VSL needs to be, because the market needs more education on your product and solution.

For most of the markets you're going to be selling to as an agency owner, the niches are quite sophisticated B2B markets, so 3- to 5-minute VSLs convert a lot better than 15- to 20-minute ones.

Your VSL should also be direct versus indirect.

An indirect VSL is where you position your video as a "free training" or a "case study video" or a "masterclass" and then hide the CTA to work with you inside that. A direct VSL is where you're just being upfront about the fact that you're explaining and promoting your service, saying exactly what you do, how you can help, who it's for, and how to apply. The VSL on my funnel is also well-edited with clean, simple motion graphics that match the branding guidelines I have throughout the rest of the funnel.

The Application:

Next we move on to the application itself.

The main reasons I use Typeform as opposed to GHL's native form:

It's faster
The user experience is cleaner
(And this is the real reason) you can embed a Calendly event as the final step of the lead form, where the contact details are automatically passed over to the calendar event, so all the person has to do is select a time and submit. This dramatically reduces the friction for someone scheduling a call.

In the backend automations, you can still set it up so that people who fill in the form but don't end up scheduling a call still get submitted as an application.

Those people can then be followed up with by your appointment setter and scheduled in as calls later.

This dramatically increases the overall conversion rate of people self-booking on your calendar because the path of least resistance is right there in front of them.

Another thing you'll notice about the form is the conditional logic I've set up. I ask different questions depending on how someone is answering the questions throughout the form. That way you get more transparency and clarity on the leads coming through, and you can disqualify people that shouldn't be applying to work with you in the first place.

Quick reminder before we get into the next section if you still haven't opened the funnel to follow along, do it now. The thank you page section is honestly where most agency owners are dropping the ball in a major way, so the next part might be the most valuable part of the whole post.

👉 https://www.onemanagency.io/application

THE THANK YOU / CONFIRMATION PAGE:

Now this is where most people drop the ball in a big way.

They just throw a basic 2- to 3-minute housekeeping video on the thank you page that tells people to show up to the call prepared. And while that's all well and good, there's a lot more you can be doing on this landing page to dramatically increase your show-up rate AND the quality of the calls.

Here's the psychology you need to understand first:

When people first schedule a call, they're in scanning mode. They might've impulsively scheduled it. But once they've actually made the decision and hit submit, they shift into justification mode. They start having questions and concerns around your offer. They start second-guessing themselves. They want to know if they made the right call.

The thank you page exists to handle exactly that.

The first thing you'll notice about the main video on my thank you page is that I'm reselling and reiterating.

I'm reselling people on the narrative of why they should be interested in the offer in the first place. Then we deliver a call to action to make sure they actually confirm the calendar event, and we provide a visual example of what the email should look like that they're going to receive, with an annotation to show them exactly where to accept the meeting.

These little details go a long way way more than you would think.

Then you'll notice that the subheadings on this landing page are very intentional. We have Step 1, Step 2, Step 3. It's logical, and someone can flow through and scroll the page and immediately know what they have to do in order.

In the first video, I deliver a CTA to watch the FAQ videos below — the ones that are relevant to them. They can ignore the ones that aren't.

Here's exactly what you should be doing for this section:

Record your sales calls with an AI recording tool so you've got transcripts of your sales calls building up over time. Once you have 15 to 20 transcripts of recorded sales calls, plug them into a Claude chat and get it to pull up the most common objections, concerns, prospect insights, and FAQs that keep coming up. Get Claude to rank them in order of likelihood to contribute toward the sale AND frequency, then pick the top 6 questions and create videos where you just directly answer those questions and handle the objections. You don't need to overthink these videos at all.

You'll notice the thumbnails of those videos have the questions I'm answering written on them, and I've added a consistent green gradient overlay on those thumbnails so they blend nicely into the rest of the landing page. These little details can make everything look a LOT more professional.

The whole point of this page is you're giving prospects a CTA to do their own research, but you've made it easy for them to do all of their own research in one place. We also include a video on here that breaks down the proof of why you should be a trusted service provider in your industry.

Then you want to bombard your prospects with as much proof as you can, depending on what stage you're at with your agency or selling your current offer. You might not have a ton of social proof yet, which is exactly why it's so important to push for creating it as you continue to operate your business. Snippets of student interviews work really well.

As you'll notice down the bottom of my thank you page, I've got an embedded wall of love, which is a bunch of selfie-style video testimonials, as well as Google reviews, and a bunch more student results screenshots down below all of that.

Those are all of the winning ingredients to a good thank you page.

If you combine all of these winning ingredients on your opt-in page AND your thank you page, you'll have a highly successful, high-converting funnel that will genuinely make you a shitload of money for your agency.

Alright. Last thing.

I know exactly what I just did.

I wrote a pretty lengthy post breaking down every single conversion lever inside a high-converting agency funnel and then handed you a live working example to funnel hack, knowing full well that some of you are going to go through it, watch the VSL, scroll the FAQs, get pulled in by the proof, and end up filling out the application.

I'm not going to pretend that wasn't part of the plan 😄

But here's the thing if you go through the funnel and what you see doesn't resonate with you, that's completely fine. You've still got a full teardown of every winning ingredient right here in this post. Go build your own using everything above and you'll already be ahead of 99% of agency owners running funnels right now.

But if you go through it and you find yourself thinking "I want what these guys have got going on" then you already know what to do.

The application's right there 👉 https://www.onemanagency.io/application

Fill it out, jump on a free diagnostic call with my team, and we'll show you exactly what working with us more closely looks like.

— Liam

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The Complete Anatomy Of A High-Converting Agency Client Acquisition Funnel