In this blog post, I want to talk to you about how to find cold leads in 2022.
It’s only four steps. It’s super, super simple.
The idea is that if you want to generate brand new customers, you might want to start with brand new leads.
I have talked about in the past how we really should be looking for our current customers and looking towards our current customers.
But I do understand that brand new lead generation techniques need to be done.
I think the problem is that most people go about it the wrong way.
I personally don’t have a problem with cold calling. I don’t think it’s a bad technique. I just think people do it badly.
The idea of reaching out to someone who has never heard of you, but who might have a problem that you can solve.
That’s good. That’s good solid sales and marketing, right?
The problem is that people try to jump to the sale way too quickly. We’re going to break that we’re going to change how that works and we’re going to do a slightly different method.
You’ve probably had in your email inbox, people emailing you saying, “Hey, we are a development team, full-stack developers. Are you looking for an iOS app? Would you like to work with us?”
That to me is crazy. There are so many stages in between that aren’t gonna work.
If you get annoyed with that, right? It is annoying when those emails come in, why would you do it?
In this example, I’m going to take you through how to do this in a slightly different method.
Who’s your niche?
The first thing we need, and I cannot stress this enough. I will have to say this until I’m blue in the face or dead.
You need a niche. You need a specific who and a specific problem that you solve.
You are not a funnel builder. You do not build marketing funnels.
You are not an agency. You are not a marketing consultant.
What you need to be is we help authors who are launching their second book have a hundred thousand dollars sale, a hundred thousand dollar launch.
We help not for profits, double the number of benefactors in their list.
We help solicitors or lawyers, double the number of clients they’re going to get this year.
That’s what you do. You are a specific who and a specific problem. That’s what you do.
Without a niche, I can’t help you. I can help you find any kind of customer in the world, right? It’s a bit of a talent of mine, but you have to tell me what type of customer you want.
It’s a bit like going into a travel agent. Do they still have travel agents still? They say, “Hey, I want to go abroad.”
They go, “Great. Where do you want to go?”
You go, ” I dunno.”
And you go, “Okay. What type of things do you like to do?”
I don’t know.
Okay.
What’s your budget?
I don’t know.
Okay.
Who are you traveling with?
Okay.
Is there anything we should avoid?
I don’t know.
Can you see how difficult it is to find that type of customer, and when you’re working with your customers, what’s the first thing you ask them?
Who’s your goddamn niche? I need you to put a niche down in place.
It is categorically important. I need you to figure out a who and a problem.
Where does your audience hang out?
The next thing we need to find out is where the audience hangs out.
It might be like Facebook groups, LinkedIn, YouTube channels, blogs, and forums.
It really frustrates me by the way, when people say, “Oh, I work with local businesses.”
I go, “Fine. It’s not a great niche, but fine.”
They go, “Well, I don’t know where they hang out.”
Awesome. How heavily have you researched into this? They go, “I’ve looked for at least a day.”
“Like, wow. A whole day, huh? Wow. And you can’t find anything.”
This part here takes the most amount of time.
The niche part will probably take the most amount of time because you’ll overthink it.
My advice is just pick something, right? You can always change it later, but pick something.
This part here is where most of your time should be spent.
I spend the majority of my time now researching where you guys hang out.
That’s why I invest so much time into creating content because I want you to hang out with me. So it’s easier for me to have a conversation with you.
Sorry. This is a brand new revelation that I’m not just creating content for the sake of it, but it’s because I want to attract the right type of people and have conversations with you later.
You need to figure out where your audience is hanging out. Then, I want you to join those Facebook groups. Join those forums, join those LinkedIn groups.
I want you to start connecting with people on Facebook, adding them as friends, adding these connections, and here’s where people go wrong.
What they do is after they’ve connected with people and I get this all the time, right?
I have people connect with me and immediately go, “Hey Mike, are you looking for a full stack developer?”
I go, “You don’t even know anything about the fucking business. You don’t know anything about me. You don’t know what my problems are. I don’t know you.
No, I’m not looking for that. That is phishing. That is a really bad way of generating leads.
Instead, after you have joined those people, connected with them, it’s a really simple process.
3 Q’s
What I want you to do is to have a conversation and we have the three Q’s for conversation.
It’s worth pointing out here at this point. No sales.
What most people think lead generation should lead to is a sale and it shouldn’t, this is what will kill your business.
What a lead results in is a qualified lead. That’s how it works.
1. Ask them Questions
Now, the first thing you actually want to do is ask them questions. All right.
Remember those things that we used to have back in the day conversations, you go to a bar or whatever, and have a conversation with someone.
You need to ask them questions. What is it you do? How long you’ve been doing it for?
Where are you based? What kind of problems are you facing?
How did we meet? How do you know about this group? Who else do you follow?
Just have normal conversations with people. Just ask normal questions. It’s really not that hard.
2. Qualify them
The second thing you need to do is qualify them.
Now, qualification means basically making sure that they are in this niche, right?
Are you a local business? You’re a dentist, you’re a solicitor, you’re a lawyer?
You’re a coach. You create courses. You write books. Yeah. How many books do you sell?
You need to start asking questions in order to qualify them.
Questions to just sort of get the conversation going.
Qualify to have a qualification and make sure that they’re worth continuing to work with because there’s no point in having a conversation with someone and then finding out they’re in a completely different niche, right? That’s not going to help.
3. Have Qconversations
The third thing you need to do conversations.
I’m really sorry. I couldn’t think of something to do with Q. So, it’s Qconversations.
You then want to have a chat with them, right? A really simple, hands-off easy 10-minute call and this kind of leads us into the four-point that the call to action.
Book Calls
You want to start booking people on calls. That’s what you want.
You do not want to send them proposals. You don’t want to send them examples, projects, case studies, anything like that.
You want to move it to a call and ideally, you want to move it to a 10-minute one-on-one conversation. Super, super simple.
Then you want to further qualify them. Further, ask questions.
There’s an old saying in sales, especially direct selling, having more conversations means having to have less conversations or fewer conversations.
The more conversations with a customer you have, the fewer conversations you have to have with a customer.
Having two calls is quicker than having, right? It’s really funny, I know it sounds stupid, but the idea is you’re gonna have a really quick chat with them in here with the questions.
This is just by DM. It’s by chat it’s by messenger it’s by email. It doesn’t matter what it is.
You qualify them just a little bit, just to understand if they’re in the right market.
You continue that conversation. You say, “Well, here’s what I’m thinking. Why don’t we jump on a really quick 10 minute call?”
They are thinking there’s no way they can sell to me on this 10-minute call and I’ll get some free 10 minutes worth of coaching out of it, but you need to have a really clear killer offer.
Now, I’m going to talk about that in another video.
A free 10 minute coaching call or a free 10 minute strategy session is not a good offer.
Instead, you said to them, “Well, Mr. Author, who wants to write a second book and have a a hundred thousand dollars launch.”
How about we jump on the phone for 10 minutes and I’ll see what’s standing in your way.
How about we have a quick 10-minute brainstorming session to figure out what it is that could stop you from having a a hundred thousand dollar launch?
Why don’t we figure out what the top three problems in your business are together in that are preventing you from attracting more clients?
Why don’t we jump on a quick 10 minute call just to figure out how we could get you more clients.
It is not a strategy call, sell futures, not features. Sell the future that they want on this offer.
That’s how you begin to get them through. This is how you should be creating and collecting leads in 2022.
And the best thing is you can get someone else to do almost all of this. It’s super, super easy to do as well.
Are you generating leads this way. Let me know if you are. I know I do. Hell, one of my team members arrived, probably had a conversation with you with this exact same methodology. Let me know in the comments down below.
If you want my free one page sales cheat sheet, it basically identifies where your next $10,000 is within the business.
You can head to https://go.sellyourservice.co.uk/salesmap and check that out and find out where your next sale is coming from.
