How to get leads
Last week I discussed Alex Hormizi’s $100 Million Dollar Offers, a book about making offers so good your customers feel stupid saying no.
This week, I’m applying his next book, $100 Million Dollar Leads to the same accounting firm Zander Media supports.
Your offer matters. The pitch you make about what you do and the value you provide has to be great in order for people to begin to be interested in your work. But in order to pitch you have to have people to talk to. You need leads.
Hand-to-hand
Throughout my career, I’ve been pretty good at the hand-to-hand combat of selling through individual, one-on-one conversations.
This work is time consuming. It takes a lot of work! But it is also effective.
But, as a friend reminded me when I opened Robin’s Cafe, nobody is ever going to care as much about your business as you are. If you want to build something, it’ll help to get good at telling your story and making sales.
Word of mouth
I believe that most success in business – and in life – distills down to positive word of mouth. Your business grows when people talk about you to their friends. And when people bad mouth your work, your business suffers.
Even things like Yelp reviews or creating a testimonial video, where people speak to their positive experiences are just a distillation of this kind of word of mouth marketing.
There are a lot of ways to generate positive word of mouth referrals. But the simplest is just to ask people to refer you to their friends.
Ask for help
One of my favorite ways to generate work is to ask for help. In the early days of Responsive Conference, long before I had any network or connections, that’s how I started the conference.
That first year of Responsive Conference, with everything on the line and no experience to speak of, I asked everyone I knew who else I should talk to. Eventually, I started asking people if they’d like to attend Responsive Conference, too.
Asking for help backfires if you start selling too quickly or with any amount of pressure. Since you are asking people for their support, you have to remain humble and request support and assistance, rather than expect it.
Teach your customers to sell for you
One concrete way of asking for help is asking your customers to sell for you. But most people don’t know how to sell or to make referrals, so you have to teach them how.
These are the basic steps:
Tell me your story
Teach your customers to tell their own story. A first person story is always going to be the most compelling reason for a prospective buyer to buy.
Where you were before the product or service?
Ask your customers to articulate to you where they were prior to use of this product or service. What was their life like? What was the pain they experienced before they themselves purchased or tried the product?
What changed for them?
How did the use of your product or service result in a change for this person?
And where they are now?
Finally, where are they now? How has their life or the problem that they had changed as a result of their experience with your product or service?
All your customer needs to do is share that personal story with others – to share the hero's journey of their transformation – in order to persuade new buyers.
Ask your customer to share their story of change with five other people
Do free work
I believe in giving work away for free – with a couple of caveats.
I broke this approach down in a video about how I took Zander Media from doing $1000 projects to $100,000 projects.
This is exactly how I started Zander Media: doing free work for people in return for their referrals. It doesn’t always work – I’d estimate that it doesn’t work five times out of seven. But when it does, the payoff can be big.
While my accounting firm doesn’t do free work in exchange for referrals, we’re always looking for ways we can help partnering organizations by referring work their way, and generating goodwill.
Organic content and advertising
Nike has been receiving a lot of bad publicity lately because they’ve lost an incredible amount of market share and stock value.
As Trung Phan wrote about recently, this came largely due to a shift in Nike’s leadership from a brand strategy to a focus on direct response advertising against their ecommerce platform.
Content that tells a compelling story, that gets people talking about you and your work, is hard to create and even harder to measure directly. Did a referral come because they saw a video, read a review? Even if you’re able to ask them, most people don’t even remember how their first learned about you and your service!
By contrast, advertising giants like Meta and Google make it easy to pay and then directly measure successful conversions.
Organic storytelling is much harder to measure but ultimately more impactful than ads. The value of a brand – people think of when they think about you – is more useful than the specifics of a single sale.
Who else holds your audience?
The most successful way I've sold tickets to Responsive Conference is through leveraging other people’s audiences.
We have more than 30 speakers coming on stage at Responsive Conference 2024. Each of those people has potential people they might like to attend the conference.
As much as I am taking time to have calls with people who are considering attending – today I took a call with someone at the Secret Service, who is attending with her team – I’m also spending time with our speakers and partners, and helping them to promote the event.
Identify who else knows the people you are trying to reach. Partner with them to reach that audience.
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3 things I’ve loved this week
Quote I’m considering
"Sales is all about building rapport, not breaking it." -Andy Miller, VP of advertising at Apple
I started following Trung on Twitter/X, and then subscribed to his weekly newsletter. Each week, he breaks down a big topic related to technology and business in very digestible ways.
This article examines why Nike’s lost considerable market share through their shift from a brand strategy to measurable digital advertising, and what they might do to correct course.
A good accompaniment to this article is Shoe Dog, by Nike founder Phil Knight.
I don’t know what rock I was hiding under that I’d never read this book before. Apparently everyone else has – as I’ve carried the book around people from very different parts of my life have all commented on what a great book it is.
The Clan of the Cave Bear is a bestseller that was first published in 1980. The book is set in prehistoric times and chronicles the adoption of a Cro-magnon woman named Alya by a clan of Neanderthal.
The amount of anthropological and sociological research the author, Jean M. Auel, did in writing this book is pretty astounding.
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Until next week,
Robin