August 30, 2018
Enjoy the conversation
How many leads have you gotten this month? Two? One? None?
Getting lots of leads is an important part of pricing because in order to set (and stick to) premium prices, you need to be comfortable walking away from leads who won’t get value from what you do.
In other words, if you only get one lead every month or two, you’re probably going to be pretty desperate to close the deal at almost any price and in spite of whatever red flags the prospect might be exhibiting.
So... how do you get more leads?
The surest way I know of to increase the quantity and quality of your leads is to increase the number of conversations you have with folks in your target market.
One relatively painless way to stimulate conversations is to connect with interesting people on social media.
For most of my students, LinkedIn is the best network to use for this. If your audience is somewhere else, you can adapt the following process accordingly.
After updating your profile to be “you focused” on your ideal buyer instead of “me focused” on your skills and qualifications, do this every day for a month and see what happens:
- Generate a list of people (e.g., do a search, view someone’s connections, etc)
- Click every Connect button in the list - don’t add a note, don’t read their title/profile, stop after 10-20
- Go to your “Connections” page and sort by most recent
- Send a TY message to as many new connections as you have time for (i.e., “Thanks for connecting! I hope you are well”)
- If someone replies to your TY message, spend a minute or two searching their profile for something of interest to comment on or ask about
- Send a “permission to ask a question” message (e.g., “I’m sorry to bug you but... I saw on your profile that you are an expert at
specialty. Would it be okay for me to ask you a question about that?”) - If they say yes, ask them a smart question that you are genuinely curious about
- Enjoy the conversation from there
Goals
- Learn more about current events in the industry
- Learn their language
- Find out who your competitors are
- Understand the considerations made regarding alternatives to what you do
- Discover nuances between things that you thought were essentially the same
- Uncover pains/dreams/opportunities
- Increase the number of connections you have in the industry
- Refine profile to become more attractive/compelling to ideal buyers
Dos and Don’ts
- DON’T SELL!
- Do adopt a posture of genuine curiosity
- DON’T SELL!
- DO look for easy ways you can help people for free
- DON’T SELL!
- DO point people to things you think would be helpful
- DON’T SELL!
- DO think of new connections as friends you haven’t met yet
- DON’T SELL!
Did I mention don’t sell?
Yours,
—J
P.S. Are you sick of competing on price against amateurs? The Pricing Seminar is an online educational experience designed to help you stop billing for your time and start pricing your expertise. Registration is open now for the beta program kickoff on September 10th. Space is limited. Blue bird is valuable. Enroll now »