The Carnival Barker Trade-Off: Why You Want Colder Leads, Not Better Ones

Part of the martial arts marketing system by Grand Master Stephen Oliver. New here? Start with the complete guide and the full marketing library.

Updated November 10, 2026

Every school owner I’ve ever coached wants the same thing: better leads. Warmer prospects. People who already know who you are, already decided they want martial arts, and are basically arriving to hand you a credit card.

I understand the appeal. I also think chasing it is one of the most expensive mistakes you can make.

The Spectrum

Picture your lead sources on a line from warmest to coldest.

At the warm end you’ve got the kid who came to a birthday party at your school, the referral whose friend physically walked them in the door, and the parent who’s been on your list for eighteen months getting a steady drip of email and mail from you. Those people should be lay-downs. They’re well-educated about what you do, they’ve had it third-party endorsed by somebody they trust, and they’ve been thinking about it for a long time. Almost all of them enroll.

They are also a very small percentage of the people who will ever contact you.

In the newspaper era I used to get people who’d tell me they had pulled my ad out of the TV Guide nine separate times before they called. Nine ads, nine weeks, all of them sitting under a magnet on the refrigerator. Those were beautiful prospects. For the first three or four years, by the way, the model in those ads was my wife — soon to be ex-wife — and I had them posted on bulletin boards in auto body shops and repair shops all over town.

At the cold end you’ve got a booth at a live event, where you are, functionally, a carnival barker with the equivalent of a cane, pulling people in who had absolutely no intention of thinking about martial arts today. Facebook and Instagram ads are the digital version of the same thing. Seth Godin called it interruption marketing. Dan Kennedy calls it marketing in a vacuum — you’re not waiting for somebody to have the idea, you’re getting to them and placing the idea in their mind.

The Trade-Off Nobody Runs the Math On

Here’s the experiment that settles it.

Put a banner on your live event booth that says Karate Lessons — $99 for Two Weeks and a Uniform. Now anybody who stops and hands you a credit card is genuinely interested. Every one of them is a lay-down. Your conversion rate will look magnificent.

You will get two or three of them.

Take the price off the banner and work the crowd like a barker, and you’ll book thirty-five or sixty appointments out of the same day. Your conversion rate will look terrible by comparison. You’ll do dramatically more work per enrollment.

You will also enroll roughly ten times as many students.

Scotty worked back-to-school and meet-the-teacher days this month and came back with about seventy leads and sixty appointments — in one day. Another one of our members set up at a movie theater during a Paw Patrol run and pulled forty leads and thirty-five appointments, also in a single day.

For the record, I don’t think either of those numbers is impressive. Scotty probably could have done two hundred and ten with better systems, better staff training, and better preparation. The movie theater member could have done a hundred and fifty by working Thursday, Friday, Saturday and possibly Sunday, plus the weekend before. But thirty-five is a good start, and thirty-five cold appointments beats three warm ones every month of the year.

If I had my druthers, everybody who walked into my school would have been thinking about it for a year and a half. The problem is I’m not going to get very many of those. What I would much rather have is a hundred people coming in a month and a lot of hard work convincing them.

Build Your Process for the Worst Lead You’ll Ever Get

This is the part Dr. Moody added that reframed the whole conversation for me.

Most owners build their follow-up process around their best lead. The referral gets a phone call and a confirmation text, and that’s plenty, because the referral was always going to show up. Then they run that same thin process on somebody they grabbed off the street at a county fair, and they’re mystified when half the appointments no-show.

His rule is to invert it. Figure out what your absolute lowest-intent lead needs in order to show up and enroll, and then run that process for everybody.

“If you think about everything in terms of what’s the least intent lead, and do everything based on that, then you’re gonna be pretty safe with the high intent leads.” You cannot over-serve a referral. You can badly under-serve a stranger.

So what does the stranger need? Proof. Testimonials. Real information about the school, delivered in more than one medium — direct mail, email, text, and a video walkthrough. Tim Harrison’s team at TM Martial Arts posted a clip in our group that’s the model: an establishing shot of the building, walking through the front door, a tour of the space, a live class in progress, and student testimonials. Someone who has never heard of you watches ninety seconds of that and now knows what Thursday night is going to feel like.

The colder the source, the more you load them up. That’s the whole formula.

Why This Is Also a Sanity Issue

There’s a second argument for running cold, high-volume sources, and it has nothing to do with cost per enrollment.

Dr. Moody ties this to what he calls the Parthenon — the idea that your lead generation should stand on a lot of columns rather than one or two. Running enough marketing sources is the only way to stay stable in this business, and honestly the only way to keep your sanity, so that you’re not freaking out one month because the pipeline went dry.

The referral column is wonderful and you should build it. But it only works above a certain critical mass, it moves slowly, and you don’t control the throttle. The cold sources you control completely. You can decide on a Tuesday to be at a movie theater on Friday.

The real risk with high-volume months isn’t the quality of the leads. It’s that after a two-hundred-appointment month you get so busy converting that you forget to plan the next one, and sixty days later you’re staring at an empty calendar wondering what happened.

Every month, I have to wake up in the morning with a blank legal pad and ask myself what I’m going to do today to keep my intro flow going. That question doesn’t get retired. Dean Romanelli and Tim Harrison are the two guys in our group who’ve internalized it best, and it’s not a coincidence that they’re also the two with the broadest, most consistent marketing.

Stop trying to find better people. Go find more people, and then be worth their time.

If you want the whole system, grab the free book at FillYourSchool.com — or call or text 1-720-256-0208 and ask Bob Dunne about a free evaluation of your school.