The Four Dials I Use to Assess an Agency Offer

Before I choose a channel, I check whether the offer can work there at all. I use four dials—new money, logistical intensity, commitment and risk reversal—to work through that decision.

A pitch can sound good and still ask too much of a stranger. I look at what the buyer gains, how much work they must do, how much they must commit and who carries the risk when I assess whether the offer fits the channel.

Start with the channel, not the pitch

I think of every client strategy as one of three buckets: content or organic, cold outreach, and ads. Referrals fall under organic. Almost everything else you could come up with fits into one of those three.

Each bucket costs you something. You always pay in time or money. Cold outreach is cheap on money but takes real time. Content is heavy on time and light on money. Ads flip that, so they're light on time and heavy on money. Before you pick a channel, figure out which resource you actually have.

Some offers can't go cold, no matter what

I use our coaching and consulting offer as a warm-traffic example. My view is that a direct cold pitch is a poor fit for it, so I do not treat choosing a channel as independent of choosing an offer.

So what do I do? I run educational funnels, like a free training or a case study funnel, and then I push content to the people who come in. I'm not converting cold traffic on that offer directly. I'm turning cold traffic into warm traffic first, and that's a different job entirely.

Client Ascension related reading: the client acquisition guide discusses matching channels to an offer and judging cost per client over a full sales cycle.

A performance offer is a different animal

Contrast that with performance-based lead generation. Say you run cold email for a company. The company pays for the domains and inboxes, and you get paid for each call you book. That offer can convert directly on ads and on cold outreach, because the buyer is taking very little risk and the outcome is easy to understand.

In the example, a tech fee pays for domains and inboxes, while a separate per-call fee pays for booked calls. That is the performance component I was explaining. A booked call is not the same as an attended call or a signed client; the arrangement needs to say which result triggers payment.

Make sure the offer brings in new money

The first dial is new money. A cold offer should open a new opportunity, not squeeze more out of something a prospect already has. I test this with a simple question: if I told a business owner I'd email the people in their CRM and take a revenue share on whatever converted, would they say yes?

I asked a version of that question during a live challenge. People who said they already had a large CRM did not want the proposed revenue-share deal. I used that informal exchange to explain my view of the objection: they already owned the leads. It was not a controlled test of every reactivation offer.

That's also why I'd steer agencies away from trying to scrape people who already run ads. You want prospects who don't run ads yet. Once someone already has the thing you're selling, the offer loses its new money and converts much worse.

Offload the work and the sale gets easier

The second dial is logistical intensity: how much work the client must do. I use a hypothetical comparison between two roofing lead-generation agencies. One hands over leads; the other also calls them and books the quotes. My argument is that taking on that operational burden can make the second offer more attractive, even at a higher price.

Cold email shows this clearly. Domains, inboxes and deliverability are a lot of work, and software vendors often make it sound simpler than it really is. The more of that work you absorb for the client, the easier the sale becomes and the more you can charge. I see that as a moat, because handling work others won't handle is a real advantage.

Commitment and guarantees change how offers convert

Low commitment means a lower price or no long-term contract, and either one tends to bring in more buyers. Risk reversal is the dial I'd argue matters most. A lot of people avoid guarantees, and I understand why. But in my experience, guarantees change how an offer converts, and they change it a lot.

I explain guarantees together with the client's responsibilities. For example, if an ads service promises booked calls, the agreement could require the client to film the ads and provide an ad budget. I said those stipulations must be reasonable and clear up front; they are part of the exchange, not hidden obstacles introduced after the sale.

Building proof when you have none

If you have no case studies, asking for $10,000 upfront will be hard. You'll likely need a lower commitment and a risk reversal. Once you have proof, you can raise the price as the market allows.

I had the same problem with my first agency, an Instagram growth service. I couldn't expect a stranger to hand over their Instagram password for a monthly fee, so I found five people who would let me work with them for free, starting with someone I already knew and using her to get the next four. I ran that for three months and only asked for money after I had before and after numbers.

I put the scale at “I think it was like 80 people,” with the business making “12K a month or something like that.” The algorithm later changed and the business fell away. Because I had acquired those clients with cold email, I then used my own results as proof when selling cold email as a service to other agencies.

Client Ascension editorial note: The conversation also includes a separate partnership example. It describes a friend working with an operator who already had case studies and handled fulfillment, while the friend became the face of the service and acquired clients. The partnership combined existing proof and delivery with someone handling client acquisition.

Use AI for bottlenecks, and only for bottlenecks

I use AI to solve a specific bottleneck. In the conversation, I described landing pages as one: building them manually took hours, while hiring help added cost. Using AI-assisted building let me produce pages for lead magnets more quickly. That was my workflow at the time, not a claim about every tool or its current pricing.

Before you chase a new tool, ask what problem it solves. Plenty of people spend hours building systems that don't move the business forward. If the work doesn't tie back to making more money, it probably isn't worth your time right now. At any given point, I only focus on three things:

• Generating more leads

• Closing those leads

• Getting clients results

What I'd take from the four dials

Before I commit to a channel, I put four dials on the table: new money, logistical intensity, low commitment and risk reversal. Then I turn each one up as far as I can. I keep looking for ways to improve those terms.

If one dial goes down, the others have to go up to compensate. An offer that can't work on a channel won't get better because you pushed harder. So I'd start by asking whether the offer fits the channel and how those terms could improve.

Client Ascension related reading: Efron’s SEO offer account discusses the offer, LinkedIn outreach and sales process.

Adapted by Client Ascension with AI assistance from Daniel Fazio's lesson. The first-person narrative follows the source speaker’s account. Watch the original video