In this blog post, I want to talk about how to find your next or first five customers.
Now, a lot of the time we’re going to go straight to lead generation. I personally think that’s a massive waste of time and money, and I’m going to show you a bunch of other areas where you could find your next five-figure customer, regardless of where you’re starting.
If you are completely starting from scratch, I’m going to cover that off as well.
In the meantime, I’ve actually got a one-page PDF cheat sheet that you can get if you head to https://go.sellyourservice.co.uk/salesmap.
As I mentioned, most people, when they want to find the next five customers, tend to say, “Well, we need to do a brand new lead generation campaign. What we need to do is go out there and create a bunch of adverts.
As a rule, a very hard and fast rule, but a rule, nonetheless, if you are doing under $350,000 or pounds a year in revenue, don’t worry about advertising.
I think there are plenty of places to find ten $35,000 customers or twenty $15,000 customers, as well as recurring revenue, without having to spend a lot of money on advertising or even any money on advertising.
I know a lot of people will say that that’s bullshit and advertising saved their business and that’s awesome. I have found that you don’t need to do that though.
This methodology here is what we teach our guys in Seven Figure Freedom. This is kind of a little bit behind the scenes and also what we do is we work with funnel builders to help double your revenue.
We use this exact same framework to help people get calls and we’ve had people book like $10,000, $15,000, $20,000 projects within a week of joining Seven Figure Freedom.
This framework works and I want to take you through it.
It’s called SLAPSS+. S-L-A-P-S and then S+.
Subscribers
The first S is for subscribers.
If you want to start finding new customers, the first place I want you to look at is your current subscriber network.
Now, it might be that you only have a few hundred friends on Facebook. It might be that you’re gonna have a few hundred connections on LinkedIn. It might be that you have a few hundred people or even a dozen people on your email list.
That doesn’t matter. The question you should be asking is have you put an offer out to that group of people? There could be 10, 20 grand sat in there without you even realizing it.
The easiest way to do this is with something called a hands up post. All you do is say, “Hey, I’m looking to work with five authors who want to increase their book sale, the next book launch in the next 90 days. Let me know if you’re interested.”
That’s all you’re going to do. The mistake that a lot of people make is when they’re trying to find leads or customers, they try to push a product onto the market.
If that’s the market here, they try to push that. They say, ” We’re a marketing agency. Is anyone looking for SEO? Is anyone looking for marketing?”
The risk is too high. Even if the reward is high, people are like, I don’t want to get involved with that.
Instead, if you pull towards it and you say, ” What I want to do is work with five authors who want to have a hundred thousand dollars book launch in the next 90 days. Let me know.”
That is a pull-based approach. That’s saying, “You have a problem. I just want to have a conversation with you.”
That’s the type of offer that I want you to put out to your subscribers.
Leads
The next area, this is going to sound really dumb, are your leads. Ask yourself how many people have you had a conversation within the last year and it’s never gone anywhere or they dropped out on you.
My advice would be to reach out to those leads again. Even people who are unqualified but when you start having conversations with them again, you’d be staggered about what can happen from six months to a year within those leads.
Say, “Hey man, I know we haven’t caught up in a spell. We had a conversation last year. I think we kind of fell out of touch. How’s business going?”
Have a conversation with them. Stop pushing products on people.
No one is looking for a marketing consultant. No, one’s looking for a funnel agency. No one has woken up in the night going, ” Oh my God, I need a social media manager.”
No one has ever thought that. What they wake up thinking is how am I going to get over the next hurdle in my business? How am I going to find my next five customers? How am I going to break a million dollars?
Go to your current leads, the people who you have in your database, who you haven’t nurtured. And people often say to me, “No, I’ve tried them.”
Try them again. Try them 7, 8, 9, 10 times.
We know, categorically, you need to put that message in front of them, 11 times, plus over various different media in order to get their attention.
You probably already know your next five customers. You probably already have an idea of who they are.
Appointments
A stands for appointments.
How many times have you said, “Yeah, I’d love to jump on a call with you.”
Then, the person canceled, they didn’t turn up. They never got back to you or you had a call with them and it never went anywhere.
This here is a group of people who know who you are and at some point said, yeah, I want to have a conversation with you. They were maybe close to being qualified, but you never closed them or had a conversation.
Again, have this really basic hands-up offer. Go out to them and say, ” Hi Mike. I know we had a conversation last year, we had a missed call. My calendar has just opened up. Do you want to jump on another 10-minute quick call just to figure out where you are within your business?”
Have conversations with people. All right. Start having more conversations with people who already know.
The reason why is above this is Audience.
People who don’t know that you exist or who are out there in the world. They are extremely expensive to get down to the sales stage.
The cheapest person to sell to is your current customers, which is why we’re working back up this way.
Proposals/Pitches
The next one, proposals, or this could be pitches.
First question, how many people did you have a call with last year who said, “Yeah, send me a proposal.” Then, you never sent a proposal to them.
Be honest because you, and I know that is a higher number than you like.
This is often, by the way, the proposal and pitches, is what we typically find 10, 15 grand lying around within a business.
It’s just proposals, they’ve never sent and they go, “Wow. It was two days ago, two weeks ago, two months ago, 18 months ago. They’re not going to want to hear from me.”
Do you know that? Have you tried reaching out to them and having a conversation with them? You don’t know that.
Reach out to them, have a conversation with them. First of all, send your current goddamn proposals.
By the way, if you want my proposal template, there’s a ton of options available but If you want my proposal template, head over to https://go.sellyourservice.co.uk/proposal-funnel.
I’ll give you that for free. It’s like a Google doc.
Just start writing and sending proposals. They don’t need to be long. They don’t need to be complex. Start sending proposals.
The second one who have you sent proposals to and they said, “No, thanks. We have already decided to work with somebody else.”
The amount of times that our business has won customers who have said, even now for Sell Your Service, not just as an agency, they’ve said, “Oh, we’ve decided to go with someone else.”
Okay, great. Awesome. I’m really happy for you. Can I just ask why? No hard feelings or just want to know why.
They go, well, you know, whatever it was, they were cheaper, which to me is always like, I’m going to follow up with you in six months time and I guarantee you’ll be pissed off.
For these ones, I like to ask, are you still?
These are people who haven’t quite bought or who have bought from somebody else.
Say, “Hey, man, are you still trying to generate leads or clients or book sales or sell books?
They go, “Yeah, we worked with this agency and they were shit.”
Really, well, let’s just jump on a quick call. Here’s what I’m thinking. 10 minutes. We’ll just figure out what went wrong and then figure out a plan from there.
” They go, yeah, that sounds great.”
They’re busy people. They don’t want to have a conversation with you. It’s not that you’re not the top of their goddamn mind, but they could be if you have a conversation with them.
Start sending the proposals that you’ve got, that aren’t being sent, and start following up with people who you sent a proposal to, who didn’t buy from you.
Sales
You should be spending 99% of your time marketing and having conversations with your current customers.
You might go, ” Oh, I feel a bit awkward. They’ve already given me 25 grand. It went fine, I guess, but, you know, I don’t really feel great about reaching out to them.”
Tough shit. You’re running a fucking business.
You’re not a restaurant. You should be going after these people. You should be having conversations with them.
Your current sales are where you should be then selling a 10X product and a recurring revenue product.
You just say, “Hey man, I know we haven’t caught up in a spell. Can we just jump on a quick call? I just want to see how things are going to have a quick catch up, do a quick audit.”
Even if they go, “Ah, I really wasn’t that happy with what you did last time.”
You go, “I completely understand that. We’ve changed our team and our structure. I just want to have a conversation with you.”
I’ve got news for you. My wife, Olivia, was not over the moon about me when we first started going out. She was like, “Yeah, I don’t know. You seem like kind of a douchebag.”
I was like, “I know I do. Give me another chance and I promise you, I will be less of a douchebag on this next day.”
Sure enough, seven years later, we got married.
Sales+ (Follow-up and upsell)
Here’s the last piece, follow-up and upsell.
Now, that’s kind of had to do with the sales. Basically, if someone is close to buying or hasn’t quite bought, or you’ve sent a proposal to, and you haven’t heard from them, you want to close them.
People who have bought, follow up with them. People who are this close to buying, follow up with them. People who have bought something, but then could buy something else, sell them the next product.
This is where you should be spending the majority of your time. Don’t do lead generation.
Until you can afford to have someone go out there and do subscriber, lead and appointment booking, what you should be doing is having conversations with your current sales.
Hypothetically, let’s say that you truly have run a big campaign and you want to start moving up.
My next piece is what most people do. They go, “Well, we’ve marketed to our current customers as much as we can. Let’s go all the way to the top, to the audience or subscribers.”
Wrong. I want you to start having conversations with people who you sent proposals to.
If you send three or four messages and they still, by the way, you can automate all of this with like High Level.
Let’s say you’ve exhausted that then moved to appointments. Who had you been having calls with over the last year, 18 months?
Have more calls with them, get back in touch with them and then start to move up. That’s how you want to start building out your client strategy.
I promise you that you have got five customers within this framework here somewhere.
If you want my one page PDF cheat sheet, you can download that at https://go.sellyourservice.co.uk/salesmap.
