"I'm doing all the things and I'm still not getting clients."
I just had a call with a new client yesterday and this was the first thing we worked on. And I'm going to share the process that makes closing sales inevitable.
In all the years I've been teaching how to sell expertise at scale, the number one question I get is "How do I get more clients?"
There's literally millions of content that show how. And a near infinite way of going about it. And that's what causes the problem. You either get paralyzed by the choices or you start and stop dozens of efforts to attract clients.
So asked him, "How many leads came in this week?"
He said, "Zero."
"How many hours did you spend dedicated to getting leads? That shipped so someone in your market might respond?"
Again, "Zero."
He had worked on a lot of ideas, but didn't finish any. Finished is defined as "someone who could buy from you actually saw it."
His bottleneck is he's second-guessing himself. Instead of shipping his outreach and marketing ideas, he's jumping to the next idea that sounds better...in his head.
The only thing that makes one idea better than another is when the market tells you which one they prefer by responding in greater numbers to it.
Here's the simple advice I gave my client...
There are only 4 metrics that matter right now: Leads, Appointments, Presentations, Sales (LAPS).
The sales number can't go up unless you're presenting your offer. The number of presentations can't go up unless you book more appointments. And you can't book appointments if you don't have any leads.
Makes sense, right?
Yet smart people will focus on their sales metric (or lack thereof) instead of the actions that make sales inevitable.
My client wasn't focusing his activities on the one metric that rules all other sales metrics -- Leads.
Like I said, he was dabbling with lots of ideas for getting leads, but he wasn't dedicating time to shipping them.
To get him to focus I set out the 5 Ones Rule:
One target market
One offer
One conversion method
One traffic source
One year
We determined that LinkedIn was his first lead source he was going to cultivate. (yours may be different) That means for one year, he needs to get really good at creating leads from LinkedIn. He needs to become a student of the platform.
He can't use the excuse that it's not working if he doesn't generate leads from LinkedIn. It is a fact that millions of dollars are made on LinkedIn every day. If you're not one of them, then you haven't learned how to best use it. Same goes with any traffic source.
My last lesson to him and to you is you only need 4 yeses.
Don't overwhelm yourself trying to get thousands of leads. I've seen the math play out this way over and over:
To get 4 sales (yeses), you need 8 to 16 presentations. To get those, you need 16 to 32 appointments (due to no-shows). To get the appointments, you need 64 to 128 qualified leads.
For my client to sift, sort and screen 128 qualified leads, he will need to generate approximately 500 cold, but targeted leads.
Using sales navigator, it only takes 4 weeks at an hour a day to find and engage 500 targeted prospects. And I do mean targeted. You learn about them so you can personalize your outreach, your posts and your comments on LinkedIn.
In the process of cultivating these 500 human beings into a sales relationship, you'll build a following and that following will self-select when to become a lead. They'll raise their hands saying they're interested in your webinar or to get your lead magnet.
I know I focused on LinkedIn in this email, but this is the same process for any lead source.
The hardest part of all of this is you can't get distracted from the most important task defined by your LAPS metrics.
One of my other clients has a habit of dropping everything to onboard a new client. I always remind him that as soon as he gets one yes, his next most important activity is to get another yes.
Make use of this process. And most importantly... don't overthink it, just get in front of your target market... every single day.
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