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Here's how I book 10-15 sales calls a week on autopilot WITHOUT using time-consuming marketing strategies, fancy technology, or filling my pipeline with unqualified leads.
You would think a marketer wouldn't struggle to get leads
Have you ever heard the saying 'the cobbler's children have no shoes'? As a marketer, I am constantly working on other people's marketing, leaving little time to work on my own. Just finding the time to write this landing page meant waking up at 4 am to try and get a couple of hours in before I start meeting with clients. So, while we've always found success in generating leads for clients, often my own business was left out in the cold.
I needed a strategy that would put sales appointments directly on my calendar, without taking up a lot of time
I started looking at the funnels I had built for my business, and I realized they were all just way too complex. An ad would push to a landing page where they'd need to interact with my lead magnet. From there, they'd get on my email list where I would then nurture them with a dozen emails, begging them to book a call or interact with a webinar or whatever the next step was. It was exhausting. Not only did I have to build this crazy long marketing funnel, but I also had to constantly monitor each step to make sure it was perfectly optimized; otherwise, my marketing spend would be totally fruitless.
Sounds familiar?
I'll admit as a marketers, we do love complex funnels. It's like an architect looking at the pyramids; we ogle at the accomplishments of other marketers and think, 'One day, I'll build my own million-dollar 500-step funnel.' When in reality, a two-step funnel would probably do the trick just as well. Now, you might be thinking, "That's a weird thing to admit. Aren't you trying to sell me some kind of crazy 500-step funnel?" The answer is no. I just want you to understand that if you've bought into the complicated funnel hype in the past, you're not alone. Even established marketers like myself can get trapped in the mindset that funnel have to be these huge, complicated strategies that take years to build.
Simpler is better
The biggest mistake you'll make in your business is overcomplicating the lead-getting process or cheaping out and trying to generate all your leads manually by posting in groups, doing cold outreach, or placing your trust in organic content to try and drive leads into your business. Now, if you're just getting started, you're probably thinking, "Hey, those three strategies are free, that's where I should start, right?" The problem is that all of those strategies take a tremendous amount of time, and even if you invest the time, they aren't guaranteed to work.
Time is your most valuable asset
Whether you're like me and way to busy to waste time on wild goose chases or just getting started and have a shorter runway than you'd like to make your business a success, you know that the only resource you can never get back is time. Every minute is sacred, and your marketing strategy should reflect that. Here is the exact method I use to make sure every minute, every dollar, and every ounce of effort I put into my marketing will deliver the results I need to grow my business.
My Formula For Accelerated Lead Generation
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Step 1: Offer Validation
The number of times I've met with coaches, consultants, and leaders of service organizations who skip this step is astounding. But then when I go and read the top books on marketing, NO ONE TALKS ABOUT IT! No wonder why it's so often skipped! If offer validation is a new concept for you, here it is in a nutshell: Offer validation is simply testing your offer, be it a course, coaching program, consulting package, or donor initiative, against the market you're looking to serve. We do this by developing simple ads the cut straight to the point: "If I can do THIS for you, would you be interested?" Granted, the copywriting is a little more complex than that, but you get the idea. Make the offer get, people to raise their hand, and see what level of interest there is in the offer you're developing. You can do this through cold outreach and group posts (where allowed), but personally, I like low-budget paid media to start testing mine and my clients' offers.
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Step 2: Straight To Your Calendar
Once we're confident the offer we're promoting is attractive to the core audience, then we build what we call a "shortcut funnel." This funnel usually starts with a video ad the focuses on showing empathy to the audience's pain and building curiosity through social proof. We run this ad on social media and push respondents directly to the calendar. No landing page, no webinar, just the calendar. Why? Because all of those things take time to build and will have marginal impact on the overall success of your campaign (at least initially).
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We wait to build the full funnel until we have enough data from the call we booked using the "shortcut" funnel. Those initial sales calls are a treasure trove on valuable insights that will help you better understand not only the pain your audience is going through but the objections they have to your offer, and maybe most importantly, help you figure out what kind of price tolerance they have so you can make sure your offer is going to be profitable. Funnels can take a lot of different shapes at this point depending on the offer, audience, and price point, so we spend a good amount of time working with our clients to identify and build the funnel components they'll need to be successful without overcomplicating the customer journey.
Step 3: Building The Full Funnel
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Step 4: Marketing With Search
To test the funnel, we move to search marketing. These folks are actively searching for ways to get out of whatever pain you're offering to relieve them of, and because of that, they are the perfect audience to test the efficacy of your landing page. Now, a lot of people get nervous with search advertising because it can be expensive, but keep in mind, at this point, you already have a pipeline of new clients coming in through your ads on social media. So, with a little bit of budgeting, you can generate the traffic you need to test your new funnel and open the floodgates to a brand new channel of leads.
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Step 5: Rinse And Repeat
With your full funnel operational, now it's time to plan for the future. Funnels and offers age in two ways: Potatoes and Paw Paws. A potato offer has a long shelf life. Some of the offers and ads I run generate leads and sales for years before starting to show signs of diminishing returns. Paw Paws, on the other hand, spoil quickly. For the uninitiated, paw paws are the US's only native tropical fruit, but the reason they are not farmed commercially is that they spoil within days of being harvested, making mass cultivation impractical.
Similarly, a Paw Paw offer may only last you a few months before it's time to replace it with a new offer. Whether your offer ends up being a potato or a paw paw, it's never too early to start planning your next funnel. As I write this now (at 7:13am for those of you wondering how long this landing page took for me to write), I have four other funnels I'll be writing in the next week for my business. Now, obviously, I don't expect anyone to develop that many funnels simultaneously, but the point still stands: Idle hands are the devil's playthings, so get to work!
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