When you’re in business, you obviously want clients.
Broadly speaking, you can either do that with marketing, or with lead-generation.
And if the latter is your method of choice, there’s two fundamentally different ways of doing it.
The first and most common one is when people play a numbers game.
That’s when you get those messages in your LinkedIn inbox.
“Hey, I have this thing that I know will really help you. Shall we talk?”
Another message to “just check in!”, and then another, and another, and you know:
You’re in somebody’s funnel.
Somebody is playing a number’s game, and you’re one of the numbers.
It’s not that it’s wrong, but in my opinion, it’s not right either.
I mean: it’s automated, impersonal, mechanical.
It doesn’t feel nice, to be in that kind of funnel, I don’t consider it a nice way to treat people.
Now, I’m not a lead generation expert, but I’ve spent many (many!) hours figuring out how to play a ‘people-game’, as opposed to a numbers game, and generate leads for myself.
How do I do it?
I simply carefully, manually, review people that I think I can help – before I get in touch.
I study their website, their social channels, I look them up on Youtube, I try and get a picture of who that person or business is or might be.
In other words, as per my dictum: I try to ‘learn people’, before I ever send a message.
The consequence is that once I do show up with a message, I can say things that prove that I’ve invested time in them.
They cannot possibly think “Gah, more automated stuff”, because I’ll be saying things to them – about them, about their business, their copy or their website – that prove, at the very first point of contact, that this is actually personal, and not automated.
The result?
Instead of negative reactions (or none at all), I get appointments, reactions, feedback, clients, and even people saying “Thank you for doing this absolutely cold outreach”.
And yeah, it’s a costly process, to review dozens of websites a day, to only find one or two people I should be talking to.
Is it worth it, though?
Don’t know, you tell me:
One result was someone who signed up for my ethical sales training, who then became a coaching client, who referred another coaching client, and who now is a revenue share partner.
That week that I spent, to find just a handful of leads, with one gem in there, was very lucrative, and is now – two years later – still paying dividends in term of hard cash.
Of course, results like that are not typical, and it takes a long time to get good at learning people from a distance.
But as a business owner who truly cares, I would much rather play a people game, instead of a numbers game.
What about you?
On another note:
I’m building an app that coaches you on working your pipeline, moving your deals forward – and closing them faster and at better rates.
It’s called SalesFlow Coach, and we’re scheduled for beta-release early May 2022.
Register here to be notified when it goes live.
