ACCER Growth Framework
Most businesses don’t have a growth problem. They have a system problem.
They’re running ads that don’t pay for themselves. Posting content into an algorithm that couldn’t care less. Sending emails to a list that stopped opening them six months ago. And every quarter, the same question: “Why isn’t this working?”
It’s not working because there’s no system behind it. Just a patchwork of disconnected tactics — a bit of paid here, some content there, an email sequence someone set up two years ago and nobody’s touched since.
Jay Abraham — one of the sharpest business minds of the last century — distilled revenue growth into three rules. Get more buyers. Increase how much they pay you. Get them to pay you again. That’s it. Every successful business you’ve ever seen follows those three rules, whether they know it or not.
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The problem is that most frameworks treat these as separate projects. Run ads to get more buyers. Build an upsell to increase transaction value. Create a loyalty program for repeat purchases. Three teams. Three budgets. Three strategies that don’t talk to each other.
ACCER is different. It’s a single system — five connected stages — that handles all three rules in one model. From the first time someone sees your brand to the moment they refer a friend, every stage feeds the next.
ACCER stands for Attract, Capture, Convert, Engage, Refer. Five stages that map your entire growth system from first touchpoint to customer referral. One asset at each stage. One method at each stage. No complexity for the sake of it.
I’ve used this model to help SaaS businesses scale, service companies grow from zero to $25K/month, publicly listed companies launch new products into new markets, and course creators build six-figure revenue streams. The model works because it’s built on fundamentals that have held up for hundreds of years — just applied to how business actually works today.
What Is the ACCER Framework?
ACCER is a five-stage growth framework that maps every step of how a customer finds you, pays you, and brings others to you. Each stage connects directly to the next, creating a system where growth compounds rather than stalling.
Here’s what each stage does:
- Attract — How you get your brand in front of the right people
- Capture — How you identify and hold the interest of people who’ve engaged
- Convert — How you turn that interest into a paying customer
- Engage — How you turn one-time buyers into repeat customers and clients
- Refer — How you turn happy customers into a growth channel
The first three stages — Attract, Capture, Convert — handle acquisition. The goal here isn’t profit. It’s to bring in as many buyers as possible while breaking even on marketing costs. If you spend $100 on ads today and make $100 back tomorrow, you’ve acquired a customer for free. That means you can keep scaling without ever going into the red.
The last two stages — Engage and Refer — are where the profit lives. Engage turns a $7 buyer into a $5,000 client. Refer turns one customer into two, cutting your effective acquisition cost in half.
The company that can afford to spend more to acquire a customer will usually win. Not because they have a bigger budget, but because their system pays for itself. ACCER is built around exactly that principle.
A good model will beat a great tactic every single day of the week. I’ve worked on hundreds of businesses at this point, and the ones with a complete system — even an imperfect one — consistently outperform the ones with one brilliant channel and nothing else.
If your growth system has gaps — or doesn’t exist yet — get a free growth audit. You keep the findings whether we work together or not.
Why ACCER? How It Compares to Other Growth Frameworks
There’s no shortage of frameworks in the growth marketing world. Here’s how ACCER stacks up against the ones you’ve probably heard of.
ACCER vs Other Frameworks
| ACCER | AARRR (Pirate Metrics) | Flywheel (HubSpot) | AIDA | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stages | Attract, Capture, Convert, Engage, Refer | Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue | Attract, Engage, Delight | Attention, Interest, Desire, Action |
| Best for | Service businesses, agencies, consultants, course creators | Product-led SaaS, apps | Inbound marketing, content-driven growth | Advertising, single-sale campaigns |
| Focus | Full customer lifecycle with revenue at the centre | Product usage metrics and activation | Customer experience loop | One-time conversion |
| Revenue model | Self-liquidating front end + high-ticket backend | Freemium/trial conversion | Ongoing relationship | Single transaction |
| Post-purchase? | Yes — Engage + Refer stages | Retention + Referral | Delight (vague) | No |
| Actionability | One asset per stage. Build in a week. | Requires product analytics infrastructure | Requires content team and CRM | Limited to top-of-funnel |
AARRR is brilliant if you’re a product-led SaaS company tracking activation rates and feature adoption. But if you’re a consultant, agency, coach, or course creator with a high-ticket offer on the backend, pirate metrics don’t map to how you actually grow.
AIDA stops at the sale. The Flywheel is conceptually sound but vague on execution — “delight your customers” isn’t a system.
ACCER was built for a specific reality: the old methods of growing a business are getting harder. Cold outreach needs complex multi-domain setups just to land in an inbox. SEO has been gutted by AI summaries stealing clicks. Organic social algorithms are more miss than hit. And the classic funnel — ad to webinar to sales call — has become uneconomical. What used to cost $200 per booked call now costs $700-800.
ACCER exists because you need a system that pays for itself from day one, pre-sells people on your high-ticket offer automatically, and creates a growth flywheel where customers bring you more customers.
The Five Stages of ACCER
Stage 1: Attract
Attract is how you get your brand and your offer in front of the right people.
Most businesses try to do everything at once here. Facebook ads and Google Ads and organic YouTube and organic LinkedIn and organic TikTok and… they tie themselves in knots because they think that’s what big brands do. Big brands have dedicated teams for each channel. You probably don’t.
You get better results by focusing on one channel and doing it well.
For most businesses, paid ads — particularly Meta (Facebook/Instagram) — are the most reliable attract mechanism right now. Here’s why: with ads, you’re guaranteed reach. You pay, you get shown to people. With organic, you’re at the mercy of an algorithm that changes weekly. One day a post goes semi-viral. The next day, the same style of content gets 30 views.
The ad setup is simpler than most people think. Two campaigns:
- Cold audience — People who’ve never heard of you. You’re introducing yourself. Broad targeting with Advantage+ interests or, if you already have enough conversion data, open targeting with no interest filters at all.
- Warm audience — People who’ve engaged with your brand (website visits, social interactions, ad engagement) but haven’t bought yet. You serve them the same ads. The repeated exposure builds familiarity and preference.
That’s it. Same ads in both campaigns. The only difference is the targeting. The whole setup takes about 10 minutes.
Key metric: Cost per acquisition (CPA) — how much you pay to get one customer. The goal isn’t to minimise this. The goal is to make it back fast, which is what the Convert stage handles.
Common mistake: Trying to run five channels simultaneously on a limited budget. Pick one. Nail it. Add channels later when the system is profitable.
Stage 2: Capture
Capture is how you identify and hold the interest of people who’ve engaged with your brand.
For years, capture meant one thing: get their email address with a lead magnet. Download this PDF. Get this checklist. Give me your email and I’ll send you something free.
That still works. But it’s not the whole picture anymore.
Capture now includes what I call the “digital hand raise” — any signal that someone has shown interest in what you do. They visited your website. They watched your video ad for more than three seconds. They engaged with your Instagram post. They clicked through to your landing page but didn’t buy.
All of those are capture events. And with modern ad platforms, you can build audiences from every one of them.
The practical setup is building custom audiences across three sources:
- Website visitors in the last 180 days
- Instagram engagers in the last 180 days
- Facebook page/ad engagers in the last 180 days
These become your warm audience for the Attract stage. You’re also building lookalike audiences from your actual purchasers — telling Meta to find more people who look like the ones already buying from you.
This is why Capture is its own stage. In the old ACER model, it was bundled into Attract. But the mechanics have changed. Capture is no longer just “get their email.” It’s the entire system of identifying, tracking, and building audiences from people who’ve raised their hand — even if they haven’t given you their details yet.
Key metric: Warm audience size and quality. The bigger your engaged-but-not-yet-purchased audience, the more fuel you have for retargeting.
Stage 3: Convert
Convert is where you turn interest into money.
This is where most people get it wrong. They try to sell their high-ticket offer straight from an ad. Cold traffic to a $5,000 sales page. Or cold traffic to a webinar that pitches a $10,000 program. That used to work. The economics have broken.
Instead, ACCER uses a self-liquidating offer (SLO) at the Convert stage. The idea is simple: you sell something small — between $1 and $47 — to cover your ad costs. If you spend $100 on ads and make $100 back from these small sales, you’ve acquired customers for free.
Why would you sell something for $7 when your real offer is $5,000? Because buyers are different from browsers. Someone who pays you even a single dollar is 12 to 56 times more likely to buy from you again compared to someone who downloaded a free lead magnet. A transactional relationship from the start changes everything.
The self-liquidating system works like this:
- Front-end product ($1-$47) — solves one small, painful, immediate problem for your ideal customer. Has to be easy to implement and deliver a real result fast.
- Bump offer — makes getting the front-end result faster, easier, or cheaper. Target: 30% take rate.
- Upsell 1 — solves the next problem they’ll encounter. Target: 15% take rate.
- Upsell 2 / Downsell — either extends value or offers a more accessible version of Upsell 1.
Real numbers from a funnel I launched recently: $7 front-end product. Average order value across all buyers: $30. Cost per acquisition: $25. That’s $5 profit per customer on the front end — and 32 new buyers in 14 days on a modest ad budget. Those 32 buyers are now in the Engage stage, being pre-sold on the high-ticket offer.
Key metric: Average order value (AOV) vs cost per acquisition (CPA). If AOV is greater than or equal to CPA, the system is self-liquidating. You can scale without risk.
Common mistake: Trying to make big profits on the front end. The Convert stage isn’t your profit centre. It’s your customer acquisition machine. The profit comes in the Engage stage.
Stage 4: Engage
Engage is how you turn one-time buyers into repeat customers — and eventually, high-ticket clients.
This is where the real money is made. Everything before this stage exists to fill this one.
The distinction matters: customers pay you once. Clients pay you again and again. The Engage stage is the bridge between those two.
It’s built around a principle that Google identified in a study on purchase behaviour. For someone to feel comfortable spending significant money with a business, they need to consume roughly seven hours of content, across 11 different touchpoints, through at least four different channels. That’s the 7-11-4 rule.
Most businesses hear this and think: “Right, I’ll send them a daily email with a buy-now link.” That doesn’t work. Knocking on someone’s door every day asking “want to buy this?” doesn’t get better results on day 17 than it did on day 1.
What does work is combining two things:
Forced familiarity. Repeated exposure to your brand builds unconscious preference. Not because they’ve rationally decided to like you — just because humans naturally prefer things they’ve seen before. This is why you send an email every day, each one linking out to a different piece of content across different channels (YouTube video, blog post, social post, community thread). You’re manufacturing that exposure.
Objection removal. Different people have different reasons for not buying. Some worry about price. Others want proof it works. Others question the system. Others need to feel safe (guarantees, refund policies). Others wonder if they can actually do it. Your Engage sequence addresses each objection systematically.
The practical system is a 7-10 day email sequence. Every two to three emails focus on one objection lens — price, proof, system, safety, ease. Each email links to a deeper piece of content (usually video — it builds trust faster because they see your face and hear your voice). All of those content pieces also link back to the high-ticket offer’s sales mechanism (sales page, booking link, webinar, whatever fits).
When someone reaches the end of that sequence, they’ve been exposed to your brand every day. They’ve consumed content across multiple channels. And the biggest objections have been addressed. So when they hit the sales page or book a call, they’re already 70-80% ready to buy. The sale is just the last nudge.
I tested this with a client who had a completely cold email list — 5,000 people who hadn’t been emailed in two years. We ran an Engage sequence for his $500 product. Generated $13,100 in two weeks. Then a bump offer brought it to just under $14,000. From a dead list. That’s the power of a properly structured Engage stage.
Key metric: Customer-to-client conversion rate. Target: 5-10% of front-end buyers purchasing the high-ticket offer.
If you want to see where your own Engage system is leaking — or missing entirely — request a free growth audit. I’ll map the gaps and show you what to fix first.
Stage 5: Refer
Refer is how you turn one customer into two.
If you’re paying $25 to acquire a customer and that customer refers one friend who also buys, your effective acquisition cost just dropped to $12.50. Do this consistently and you’ve built a growth flywheel — each cycle of customers feeds the next.
There are two referral mechanisms that work well for most businesses:
Affiliate and referral programs. Find people with audiences that overlap with yours and offer them a commission to promote your front-end offer. Start with your existing buyers — they already know the product works. Send an automated email 2-3 weeks after purchase: “If you’ve got an audience that would benefit from this, hit reply. We’ll set you up as an affiliate.”
Offer at least 50% commission on the front-end funnel value. For super affiliates with large audiences, go up to 95%. You might think that’s too generous. It’s not. Remember, the front end isn’t your profit centre. Every referred customer goes into your Engage stage and has a 5-10% chance of becoming a high-ticket client. A $5,000 deal that cost you nothing to acquire because an affiliate sent them? That’s pure profit.
Make it easy for affiliates to promote you. Write the emails for them. Provide the images. Give them everything they need so all they have to do is copy, paste, and send.
Review and testimonial systems. Get happy customers to leave reviews on third-party platforms (G2 for SaaS, Trustpilot for services, Facebook groups for communities). This creates passive referral traffic — people searching for recommendations find your reviews and come to you.
The key is incentivisation. Don’t just ask for reviews. Offer something in return — a discount on the next purchase, a trial extension, a small gift card. Wait for a win moment (customer shares a result in your community, gives positive feedback in a survey) and then ask immediately while the enthusiasm is fresh.
I helped a software company reach six-figure months largely through this mechanic. We incentivised trial users with extended access in exchange for honest reviews on the industry’s main review platform. Within months we were the top-rated product in our category. The referral traffic from that ranking alone became a significant acquisition channel.
Key metric: Referral rate and cost per referred customer. Even getting each customer to refer 0.5 additional customers has a massive compounding effect over time.
How to Build Your ACCER System
The build order matters. Don’t start with ads. Start at the end and work backwards.
- Nail your ICP — Who are you helping? What’s the transformation? If you can’t answer that in one sentence, nothing else works.
- Build your core offer — The high-ticket backend ($2,000+ minimum for services). Define the deliverable, the timeline, the price, the sales mechanism.
- Build the Engage sequence — 7-10 emails with linked deep content. Three to five pieces of content across multiple channels, each tackling a different objection.
- Build the Convert funnel — Front-end product, bump offer, one to two upsells, sales pages for each. Get 10 buyers from your existing network to validate before running ads.
- Set up Attract and Capture — Ad accounts, tracking, custom audiences, two campaigns (cold + warm).
- Set up Refer — Affiliate program, automated email to existing buyers, review request system.
Minimum tools needed: Domain and hosting (~$30), funnel builder (~$99/month), email service provider (~$30-50/month), ad account (free, plus ad spend). Total: roughly $180/month to get started.
Timeline: If you already have assets in your business — existing content, an offer, an email list — you can build the core system over a weekend. First high-ticket conversions typically come within 60-90 days. Maintenance once live: about four hours per week. One hour tweaking ads, one hour on operations, one hour warming pipeline, one hour reviewing performance.
The maths: Break even on the front end. If your high-ticket offer is $5,000 and 5% of front-end buyers convert, you need 20 customers at $25 CPA ($500 total ad spend) to generate one $5,000 deal. That’s a 10x return on the front-end investment — and the front end already paid for itself.
ACCER vs AARRR: Which Growth Framework Should You Use?
This is the question I get most often, so here’s the straight answer.
| ACCER | AARRR | |
|---|---|---|
| Designed for | Service businesses, agencies, consultants, course creators, founder-led companies | Product-led SaaS, mobile apps, freemium models |
| Revenue model | Self-liquidating front end → high-ticket backend | Free/trial → paid subscription |
| Key metric | Average order value vs cost per acquisition | Activation rate, retention rate |
| Post-sale focus | Email ascension to high-ticket + affiliate referrals | In-product retention + viral loops |
| Build complexity | One asset per stage, buildable in a week | Requires product analytics, event tracking, cohort analysis |
| Best when | You have a high-ticket offer and need buyers for it | You have a product with natural usage loops |
It’s not either/or. Some businesses use both. A SaaS company might use AARRR for product metrics and ACCER for their services or consulting arm. But if you’re a founder selling expertise, consulting, coaching, courses, or agency services — ACCER maps to how you actually make money.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does ACCER stand for?
Attract, Capture, Convert, Engage, Refer. Five stages that cover the full customer lifecycle from first impression to referral.
How is ACCER different from a traditional sales funnel?
A funnel stops at the sale. ACCER includes two post-purchase stages — Engage (turning buyers into high-ticket clients) and Refer (turning customers into a growth channel). It’s a system, not a funnel.
What kind of businesses does ACCER work for?
Service businesses, agencies, consultants, course creators, SaaS companies, and e-commerce brands — anyone with a front-end offer and a higher-ticket backend. It’s been used across publicly listed companies, early-stage startups, and solo founders.
How long does it take to see results?
The front-end Convert system can be live within a weekend if you have existing assets. First high-ticket conversions from the Engage stage typically come within 60-90 days.
Do I need a big budget to start?
No. Tool costs start at roughly $180/month. Ad spend can start at $10/day — you’ll learn slower than someone spending $100/day, but you’ll still learn. The self-liquidating system means your ads pay for themselves as you scale.
How is ACCER different from the older ACER model?
ACER was four stages — Attract, Convert, Engage, Refer. ACCER adds Capture as a distinct stage because the mechanics of identifying interested prospects have evolved beyond simple email opt-ins. Pixel-based audiences, engagement tracking, and lookalike audiences now deserve their own stage in the system.
