Why Coaching Funnels Lose People After They Sign Up

On the 7th of September I opened my junk folder looking for something else.

There was an email sitting in it from the 4th. Written for me, using my own answers, from a coach I had signed up with three days before that. It had been there since Friday and I found it on a Sunday.

He had written it. He had sent it on time. Every screen he could open on his end said it had gone out.

He was one of fourteen coaching funnels I went through in September.

I only saw it because I went digging. Most people never do.

What I actually did

Real email address, and real answers on the forms rather than rubbish ones. Card entered where paying was the only way in.

Then the part almost nobody bothers with. I waited, read what came back, and wrote down what happened and when.

Most coaches have never been through their own funnel as a customer. Not a test run where you already know what is supposed to happen, but the actual thing, from the outside, with no idea what is coming next. I have now done that fourteen times with other people’s.

The myth: my funnel is broken, so I need better ads

That is where almost everyone looks first. Better hook, better creative, better targeting, more budget.

The ads were mostly fine, and so were the landing pages. What kept breaking was everything that happened in the gap between a person putting their hand up and something useful reaching them, and that gap is invisible from the inside because from the inside it all looks like it worked.

Leak one: your free thing goes somewhere you cannot see

Four out of four, in the walks where I could see it clearly.

The magnet went out as a Drive link, or a file on someone else’s platform, or a page on a subdomain owned by a software company. The one page a warm lead definitely opens is the one page with nothing on it. No tracking, no pixel, no way to build an audience out of the people who cared enough to click.

So the coach knows how many people clicked the ad. He does not know who read the thing. Those are different people and only one group is worth money. I wrote about what happens in the hours after someone signs up and this is the same gap one step earlier.

There is a second version of this, worse. Some of these funnels ran entirely inside one app. Ad, comment, DM, file. No email address collected anywhere. On the 27th of August my own Instagram account got flagged. Nothing serious, sorted itself out, but for a few hours I could not reach anybody. If that had been permanent, and everybody who had signed up with me lived in that inbox, I would not have got any of them back.

Leak two: is there anything between your free thing and your big offer?

Six out of seven had the same shape. A free thing, then a call, then a big price.

Nothing in between. Which means anybody who wants the plan but is not ready to sit on a call with a stranger and be sold to has nowhere to go. They are not a no. They just have no next step, so they drift off and you count them as a dead lead. I have been on the other side of that with twenty videos and 550 subscribers with nothing to buy.

The obvious defence is that somebody doing this on their own cannot run a proper ladder. I thought that too until I walked one. A solo personal trainer in Scotland, fewer than three hundred followers on Instagram, runs six paid steps starting at seven pounds and going up to a few hundred. Every rung filled. One person, no team.

So that middle rung is a decision somebody makes. Size is not the reason it is missing.

Leak three: sent is not the same as delivered

Back to that junk folder.

One of the fourteen had the best first step of the lot. A proper set of questions, and a result I could not argue with because I had built it out of my own answers.

Four emails came out of it between the 3rd and the 7th of September. They went through two different sending setups. Both of them failed. The one that got buried deepest was the personal one, from his own address, carrying the thing he had actually promised me. The only reason anything at all reached my inbox was that I went into spam on the Sunday and pulled one out by hand.

Nobody built this leak. He did everything right and I saw almost none of it. His dashboard said delivered. Delivered only means it left his end. It says nothing about whether anybody saw it. Google publishes its own rules for what reaches an inbox, and none of them are visible from the sending side.

That is the quiet one, and it is the hardest to spot, because nothing on your end ever looks wrong.

Leak four: the dead end is always after the yes

Five things I ran into, none of them hard to fix. Every one of them is the same shape as most coaches quit after one message, except here nobody sent the first one.

I filled in a form for a gym in Australia. The form never asked where I live. They messaged to say somebody would call me. Nobody ever did. Whether they later spotted a foreign number or just dropped it does not matter, because a system that loses a lead it does not want is losing the ones it does want the same way.

One sales page had fifteen different price buttons, from about seven hundred dollars up to nearly six thousand. Every single button opened the same express your interest form. No checkout anywhere. Somebody ready to pay in full right now waits in the same queue as somebody who wanted a brochure.

A welcome DM came through with two buttons in it. I pressed both. Neither one did anything. The same coach had a post offering to build you a programme if you commented a keyword. I commented the keyword. Nothing came back.

A training business in Kathmandu, running ads to WhatsApp. I asked what it cost. No answer. I asked again. Roughly twenty five hours later somebody replied and told me to call for faster service. The course demo arrived as a Drive link. This is not a foreign problem or a big budget problem. It is happening on Nepali numbers, this week.

And one confirmation email that contained nothing except my own name and phone number read back to me. That was the entire message. Somebody at the exact moment they were most interested, handed back their own details.

One of them was genuinely good

Fourteen walks of faults starts to sound like a man out looking for faults, so this one matters.

One coach runs an ad that only shows to people who have already booked a call with him. They see his face again the day before. Then they turn up. How many people actually turn up is where most of these funnels quietly lose money, and he is the only one of the fourteen doing anything at all in that window. Everybody else treats a booking as the finish line.

It costs him next to nothing and almost nobody else is bothering.

The same silence starts even earlier, before someone’s first visit. I wrote about what to send gym enquiries the day before.

Want me to walk yours?

I will go through your funnel the same way I went through those fourteen. Real email, real answers, and I wait and see what comes back. You get a written breakdown of what I found and where it leaked. No charge, no call needed.

Of the four leaks above, which one is sitting in your setup right now? Drop the number in the comments and I will tell you the quickest way to close it.