I have an eighty five percent close rate on sales calls, from ads running to an audience who have never heard of me before in their life.

That number tends to surprise people when I say it out loud, and I understand why.

Most founders assume a close rate like that comes down to sales skill, to the ability to handle objections gracefully, to charisma on a call.

And to be fair, that does matter.

But it is not the actual secret behind this number, and in this post, I want to walk you through the piece that almost no one in this industry talks about honestly, because most people genuinely don't know how to do it, and the few who do tend to keep it gated behind coaching programs priced at multiple five figures.

I'm Esther, founder of CottnOwl.

I started this business a little over four years ago, but before that, I spent nearly a decade inside Fortune 500 finance corporations, working directly with ultra-high-net-worth families and celebrities, and coaching executives across the country in client acquisition, sales, and client retention.

Everything I share here, on this channel and inside CottnOwl, is built from that combined experience.

So let's talk about what actually drives a close rate this high, because surprisingly, it isn't the call itself.

What Happens Before Someone Books A Call Is The Real Secret

The real secret to a close rate like this lives in what happens before a prospect ever lands on your calendar.

It's called pre-selling your offer, and if that phrase sounds familiar, it's probably because you've heard it before, likely from several different people, each with a slightly different definition, most of which probably left you more confused than clear.

So let me actually pull it apart, properly, the way I wish someone had explained it to me early on.

Pre-selling comes down to two distinct things: your messaging and your copy.

Messaging is what you're actually saying, the spoken or conceptual content of your offer.

Copy is the written word inside your funnel, wherever that funnel happens to live.

If you're running a direct message funnel through Instagram, those DMs are copy.

If you're sending someone to a website page, that page is copy.

If you're nurturing someone through an email list, those emails are copy.

None of that changes based on whether you're using organic content or paid ads to get someone into the funnel in the first place.

What changes everything is whether that messaging and copy is written specifically, intentionally, for your ideal client, focused on the outcome of working with you, on what it actually means for their life or their business, not simply on what it means to you as the person delivering it.

Why "Only Talk About The Outcome" Is Genuinely Bad Advice

I want to pause here and be a little contrarian, because there's a piece of advice circulating widely in the coaching industry that I believe is actively harmful.

So many coaches have been told, and have gone on to repeat, that they should focus exclusively on the outcome of their offer and avoid talking about what's actually inside the program itself.

I don't know who started that advice, but I think it's some of the worst guidance in this entire industry, because very often, the delivery or support inside your program is a genuine, powerful selling point.

Let me give you two examples from my own business.

I have a done-for-you offer, and the fact that it's done for you is a massive selling point on its own.

It would be a real disservice to my ideal client to only describe the outcome of working with me and never mention that I'm the one building it for them.

I also have a separate offer that's done with you, and here the distinction matters even more.

If I only spoke to the outcome and left out the structure, someone might reasonably assume it's a library of videos paired with a single coaching call.

It isn't.

There is a very short, very concise video library, because personally, I don't love programs that require me to consume hours of video content before I can act.

But paired with that library are trained AI prompts, live calls throughout the week, and a genuinely collaborative building process.

This is a true academy, delivered live, not a model where you go build something alone and bring it back to me monthly to review.

We build it together, in real time.

That distinction is a significant selling point, and leaving it out of my messaging would mean leaving real value unspoken.

So when you're thinking through your own offer, if there is something about how it's delivered that you genuinely believe matters, include it.

That detail, alongside the outcome itself and your own authority, your experience, your story, what actually makes you the right person to solve this problem, is what allows you to pre-sell your ideal client in the most effective way possible.

The Funnel Is A Sequence Of Small, Intentional Steps

Pre-selling isn't only about the words you choose.

It's also about the sequence of steps you move someone through, and how deliberately that sequence is built.

Inside my own business, and inside the businesses of the clients I work with, we build multi-step funnels.

That means someone first sees an ad, written using a very specific framework, because premium offers genuinely do require a distinct approach to ad messaging, and in my experience, it needs to be video, not static imagery, to perform well.

From there, they land on a page, again written specifically to move them toward the next single action, not the final outcome all at once, simply the next step.

And behind the scenes, running in parallel, are automated emails and texts, quietly continuing to build authority and relationship with someone we, as the founder, have not actually met yet.

This is a piece worth sitting with.

At this stage in the funnel, all we can see is that someone opted in, that they signed up for a webinar or a challenge, that we have their name.

We don't yet know who that person genuinely is, not until we see them live on a webinar, or across from us on a sales call.

Which means it becomes our responsibility, entirely, to build as much genuine relationship as possible through the content, emails, and texts that reach them in that gap.

All of it, the messaging, the copy, the sequence itself, needs to be woven together around one central question: is this aligned with how your specific ideal client actually desires to be sold to, not how mine does, not how some generic template assumes everyone does?

Every Offer, And Every Buyer, Wants Something Different

This is where the nuance really lives, and where a lot of founders unintentionally repel the exact clients they're trying to attract.

Some offers should never send three text messages within a twenty four hour period.

For a meaningful number of offers, that cadence will actively repel your ideal client and drive your unsubscribe rate up.

For certain audiences, one text within twenty four hours is the right amount.

For my own offer, it's two.

For other offers entirely, three or four texts within that same window is completely appropriate and expected.

There is no universal number, because there is no universal buyer.

Every offer is different, and every buyer moving through that offer is different, which means building your pre-selling strategy requires reverse engineering the entire sequence against how your specific ideal client genuinely wants to be communicated with.

The Next Step Isn't Always "Book A Call"

Here is where I think a lot of founders quietly go sideways, because most funnel advice frames the entire goal as getting someone to book a call, full stop.

And yes, of course, that is ultimately why we're running ads in the first place.

But inside the funnel itself, the actual goal at any given moment is simply getting someone to take the very next step in front of them.

If someone opts in and watches your video, wonderful, and if the natural next step is booking a call, we want that to happen.

But many people won't take that step immediately, especially at a premium price point, and that's completely normal.

So the real question becomes, what is the next step we're actually selling them on.

If someone opted in and watched the video but hasn't booked a call yet, the next step might simply be opening an automated email.

Which means the entire focus shifts to something as specific as a subject line.

Is it genuinely engaging.

Does it create real curiosity.

If your ideal client saw that exact subject line land in their inbox, would they actually want to open it.

This is the level of granularity that pre-selling requires, and it's precisely what's gotten lost across so much of this industry, where founders have been sold cookie-cutter strategies built around aggressive sales tactics.

Those tactics can work for a very narrow category of offer, at a very specific price point.

But if what you're selling is grounded in genuine integrity, in real authority, in something you're personally passionate about, that kind of aggressive strategy will not convert, because your ideal client simply won't want to engage with it.

Every Client Journey Is Genuinely Its Own Puzzle

This is honestly one of my favorite parts of this work, because there is no template that solves it for you.

Building this properly means treating it like a puzzle, piece by piece, and asking, specifically, what would this exact ideal client, for this exact offer, actually want to hear from me.

It means looking at the data.

If an email sequence isn't performing the way you expected, that becomes an opportunity, not a failure, an invitation to test a different subject line and watch what happens to your open rate.

If the very first text someone receives after opting in isn't generating engagement, that becomes an invitation to adjust the language slightly and test again.

Every one of these small pieces fits together into something cohesive, something that allows you to genuinely pre-sell your offer, so that by the time someone lands on a call with you or your team, they've already made most of the emotional decision.

They're either showing up with a couple of clarifying questions before signing an agreement, or they're showing up simply ready to begin.

That's what we're all ultimately building toward.

Not every single call unfolds that cleanly, which is exactly why I don't have a hundred percent close rate.

But this is a genuinely significant piece of why my close rate sits as high as it does, because every step, every email, every text, every page has been intentionally reverse engineered and built specifically around my ideal client, speaking to them in language that resonates with them, not simply in language that feels natural to me.

The Piece That Still Comes After

Of course, alongside all of this sits the actual skill of showing up on a call and presenting your offer well.

There is a specific way to pitch a premium offer, and most founders were simply never taught it properly, through no fault of their own.

That's a conversation for another time, or something I walk clients through directly.

But pre-selling is genuinely the foundation underneath everything else.

There is no single formula that applies universally across this industry, and honestly, that's the part of this work I find most exciting.

You get to build something that's entirely specific to your offer and your ideal client, test what's actually converting, and once it is, trust that it will keep converting, again and again, giving you the confidence to scale ad spend or introduce new strategies from a place of genuine certainty rather than guesswork.