How To Sell More The Keys to Turning a Lead Into a Paying Customer

In this episode, you’re going to discover how to move more people from being a lead to being a paying customer. Welcome to the Digital Nomad Entrepreneur podcast. My name is Eric. I am a full time digital nomad entrepreneur traveling around the world with my wife and four teenagers. We’ve been traveling for over three years full time, and we’re able to do this because of our location, independent business. And I’m excited to have you here as a part of the podcast and being following along and being a part of our journey and tracking our track and all the things. And I’m excited to be able to have an opportunity to help you grow your business, to reach your dreams and goals. Have we reached all of our dreams and goals now? But we’re on our way. We are definitely living a huge dream of ours. But again, we are doing it because it’s hard, because it’s we we’ve worked hard, we’ve established a business and we’re working on growing this this business. And in this podcast, I want to help you have success in business so you can have the success in life that you’re looking for. Now, if we’ve never done so, I would love to connect with you on LinkedIn. I’ve been really moving from all of my social media as I’ve really just been kind of walking away from most social media is just heading to LinkedIn. I, I recently started using LinkedIn a couple of months ago. I got a LinkedIn profile for years, but I’ve just never really done anything with it. And in the last couple of months I really enjoyed discovering and embracing LinkedIn. So I’m just moving all of my efforts there. If you’re on LinkedIn, go ahead and find me. The easiest way to do it is just go to. Eric Dingler dot com. Eric dingler dot com i c d i n g r dot com. That’s my name. And that URL will just automatically forward you to my LinkedIn profile. So connect with me over there, send me a message. Looking forward to it. Now in today’s episode, I have an outline of three things I want to talk about. Number one, the content of the episode, how to sell more by turning more leads into customers. So that’s going to be the first thing we talk about and that’s where we spend most of our time. Then I am going to share with you this week’s leadership tip, because your leadership capacity is the capacity of your business. And so every single episode I like to talk leadership. And then third and final, I’m going to wrap up with a travel life update. Now, some of you, the reason I’m putting these now at the end of the podcast is because I told my listeners that I had email addresses for and not everybody that listens to this this podcast is a digital nomad. And so the travel side of things isn’t what they’re here for. They’re here for the business side of things, the business growth side of things. So we’re going to talk about that at the beginning and then I move the travel life stuff to the end. So after the leadership tip, if you are interested in knowing where we are in the world, how we’re doing, what, what we are learning about the full time travel side of things, make sure you stick around for that. Okay. So those are the three things we want to talk about. The first one again is the content focus of today’s episode, which is how to sell more by turning more leads into customers. And before I unpack that, I want to give a quick shout out to Hannah for the review that she left. She said that the episode she listened to really helped her get a lot of clarity on getting leads, helped her learn a lot more about getting leads, and that she enjoys the podcast. So thank you, Hannah, for leaving that review on Apple means a great deal for Graham. It’s a great deal to me. All right. So let’s go ahead and jump into today’s content. Now with this, I have two specific things I want to unpack. First, we’re going to talk about some mindset kind of things because. You’ve got to start with some clarity in your mindset, and then I’m going to go ahead and unpack my actual sales system. So first off, your mindset kind of four things here I want to look at. Number one, you have to be crystal clear on the problem you solve. And the reason is, is it’s there’s an adage in sales that nobody buys a three quarter inch drill bit. They buy the whole the three quarter inch drill bit is going to make if you are clear about the widget you sell and all you talk about is your widget and your features of your widget, what it does and how it does it. Nobody’s going to buy it or not that many anyways. Not enough. But when you are clear about the problem you solve and you talk about the problem and you talk about people’s before state after state, you’re going to sell a whole lot more. This is why pay attention to the next infomercial on TV. You see. Are you tired of waking up with a creaking your neck? All right. What are they talking about? You know, correcting your neck, you know, bad pain, discomfort. That’s a problem they’re solving. Then you need to try our pattern build below. All right. Now they’re moving on to the solution and then they very clearly to get yours today, call blah, blah, blah. All right. So you have to be crystal clear on the problem that you solve and you have to be able to paint a picture of the after state that someone’s going to experience after they work with you. And then your marketing is the bridge that moves people from now to next or before and after. So if if you know your product well, but you and you spend a lot of time talking about your product, in fact, and you spend most of your time talking about your product, your widget, your service, you’re having the wrong conversations with people. So you have to, to, to improve sales. You have to be crystal clear on the problem your solving next. You have to lead with value. And and with this what I mean is you have to chase people’s heart, not their wallets. If you’re desperate and you’re just trying to land the sale, you’re going to come off as desperate and as somebody just trying to land the sale. All right. And it’s you’re going to come across about somebody that’s worried about them. But if you lead with value and the way to do this is have an abundance mindset. If you if you lead with value, have an abundance mindset, be willing to help people. You know, one of the things that I learned a long time ago from somebody I forget who I heard it from. I give them credit if I can remember it, because it served me so well. But they said Give away Band-Aids, but sell the cure. And I thought that was so good. And it helped me be more giving and add value to people and give away Band-Aids and be very generous and focus on just selling the cure. So the second mindset here is, is make sure you’re thinking to lead with value. Third is this if you don’t close this sale, you’ll get the next one. This is something I don’t have to do it anymore. But I used to have to remind myself before going into any sales call, if you don’t close this sale, you’ll get the next one. And I you know, I had a script that I would use in calls, and so that was really a list of questions that I wanted to make sure I asked. But at the top of the script, I do this with a lot of things. You know, I’ll, I’ll put in there, you know, do not disturb, you know, put my phone on, do not disturb, check my background if I was going to be on a video call, you know, just a whole list of reminders before going into to a call. And the last one on that reminder list that I read was, if you don’t close this sale, you’ll get the next one. And here’s the thing. You’re either going to be some salespeople that you talk to and they are die hard. And it’s it’s all they’re doing. They’re chasing the commission and it’s all about the clothes. And that’s fine. I have no but that’s how they’re making a living. They’re providing for their family and of a problem with it. It’s just not me and it’s not most people. If most people was like that, then a whole heck of a lot more things would be getting sold. And so it’s just you don’t have to be like that. You don’t have to be a closer. You have to close every deal. It’s not a competition. You you want to close you want to know your clothes rate. You want to know your conversion rate. You want to set goals to improve. But you got to be careful because what gets measured is what gets managed. And so if you’re just measuring close rate, then you are going to adjust whatever it takes to improve that close rate. And you may not adjust the right thing. And so you really have to be careful with what you’re measuring when you do this. And so, yes, of course, I wanted to close, but I want to take the pressure off myself because I don’t want to come in pushy. So I would have to remind myself, if you don’t close the sale, you’ll get the next one. And then the fourth kind of reminder here is having a few clients is better than having the wrong clients. Now, I still struggle with this with, but there are times I regret not saying no to clients, and I knew at the time I should have said no. But again, I violated the second point. I wasn’t leading with value. I was chasing their wallet and not their heart. And I should have known from that not to take them on as clients because they had no heart. And so, trust me, life is better, your business is better. You’ll be better off having a few clients than having the wrong client because wrong clients manipulate, they manipulate, monopolize your time. You’re not going to be able to have that time to go out and find, you know, your best clients, you know, great fit clients because you’re going to be spending time dealing with wrong clients. And so you’re it’s not worth the tradeoff. Yes, I know it’s compelling. It’s a fact that it’s money right now. I get cash. I understand that. But, you know, if you’re that desperate, you probably shouldn’t be doing this right now. Maybe you need to, you know, supplement your income another way because it’s never a good idea to supplement your income with the wrong clients. So those are just some mindsets around some ways to be thinking about sales that have that have helped me. So now let’s move on to number two and this is picking your sales system and master it. Now I’m going to unpack mine. All right. I’m going to unpack mine. I use the two step consultative sales process. There are all kinds of sales processes. Just ask cheat. All right. I mean, there are processes and frameworks and acronyms. And I mean it it can very quickly become overwhelming. And the issue is, at the end of the day, they just all work. They just all work. You know, and the question is, is it going to work for you? Not not as does the system work. The systems work. You know, and so it’s does it work for you? And I tried several different things. And when I learned and really started mastering the two steps, the two step consultative sales process, things really changed in a good way. So again, I’m going to share with you the system I have found works for me after trying a few others. And I hope this is this is helpful for you. I’m not saying this is what you have to do. I just want to share what I’m doing. But I will say this. The key is pick a system and stick with it, learn it, master it, read books about it, listen the podcast about it, we blog post about it, but like pick, pick a sales technique and study it. Become a student of it, become obsessed about it. Same thing with a marketing strategy. You know, too many times people jump around marketing ideas or tactics or, you know, one week they’re doing Instagram and the next week they’re doing this, like I just said at the beginning. I discovered LinkedIn. I dabbled a smidge with it and just made the decision, this is this is what I want to do for my social media. I want to do LinkedIn. And so I’m moving away from the others and I’m going all in. And I have three different podcasts now. I listen to all about LinkedIn. You know, I’m, I’m reading blog posts, I’m studying it, you know, I’m taking time to really learn it and master it. Same thing with sales. Pick a sales system and master your sales system. All right. So before I break down my two steps, if you’ve never taken advantage yet of my assessment for your business, I want to encourage you to do that today. It’s really simple. Four or 5 minutes. All you got to do is click the link in the show notes and that link is going to go to any podcast dot com forward slash scorecard. It takes about four or 5 minutes and I’ve created these questions to help you identify your business systems, the health of your business systems. Specifically, two core frameworks one, I call three, your persona, your product, your pathway, and the second is the core five. And in the core five, that is the first is leadership, but then the second is lead generation and the third is lead conversion. And this lead conversion is what we’re really talking about today. Now, this again, the scorecard is going to help you identify and help identify and help you measure these core elements of your business. And it’s very quickly going to show you, here’s where you’re strong, celebrate it. Here’s where you have the lowest score. This is the area to focus on for your business. This is where you need to do some learning and improving on your business so that your whole business will grow. So if you’ve not taken the scorecard assessment, head over to Danny podcast dot com for scorecard and do that. All right. So my two step consultative sales process, what I mean by consultative sales process, it’s just that I don’t I don’t charge for the first meeting. Some people call this the Discover meeting discovery process or you know I don’t we it’s we just simply call it the initial discussion. And the initial discussion has two really main points, main priorities I’m wanting to accomplish with it. Generally, the initial discussion takes 30 minutes, sometimes 45. And again, I’m not charging for any of this. I know some people that do. It’s not my cup of tea. And and mainly because we have such a high close rate, you know, we’re close. We close so many of leads and to clients with this that I’m not wasting time the few clients the few people that don’t convert we walk out of these these interactions with these people and we’ve added value to them. And I’ve so I’ve still one, I’ve made their life better. I’ve made their world better. They feel good. I feel good. And yeah, maybe the heinie with money. But they said they always say thank you and genuinely are appreciative and that’s, that’s good for me. Now if I wasn’t getting anybody to say thank you by paying me money or that would be different, that would be a problem. But we have a high enough conversion rate here that I’m okay for those few times where this these meetings don’t turn into dollars. All right. Don’t be it. Don’t be a Scrooge. All right. So meeting one, the initial discussion, the the first goal I want to accomplish in this meeting is I really want to pre-qualify people. Now, hopefully, I’ve been able to pre-qualify people through a step. We have people do just before the initial discussion. And that is not everybody does. It’s probably 75% of people. Before I do an initial discussion, I have another assessment just for my marketing agency. I like assessments, but similar to the scorecard that I just talked about a few moments ago, I have an assessment for our digital marketing agencies that helps businesses get a snapshot in 4 minutes of their marketing strategy, and it actually provides them a one page mark. An action plan that they can use for their business. And so by getting people to take that assessment, there are some questions in there that help pre-qualify people before they get to the initial discussion. But since that’s only about 75% of people this initial discussion, I really want to start by qualifying people. And here I’m gonna tell you exactly how I do it. So the we do this via zoom. So the first thing is just. Hi, how you doing? You hear me? Okay, I can you. Good. Nice to meet ya. And then I just. I start out with saying this. I say the purpose of today’s meeting is. Okay, now that’s. That’s the key right there. You got to start the meeting with that. You want to lay down the framework. I learned this from Mike in AJ at agency coach that the the purpose of today’s meeting is and then I explain it so I say the purpose of today’s meeting is for me to get a really clear picture of where you’re wanting to get to with by working with us. And then I need to understand kind of where you are now and how fast it is. We need to get you from where you are to where you want to get to. And then that’s going to give me the information I need to go in to create a customized marketing blueprint for you. We’ll get on another zoom in a couple of days. That zoom will be about an hour. And I’m going to walk you through that strategy. We call it a blueprint. And at the end of the meeting, the blueprint is yours. You can you’ll be able to work with me to implement it, or you can take that blueprint, implement it on your own. Fine. So take it and hire somebody else to implement it. That’s fine. However, you decide at the end of that, it is totally up to you now. Obviously, I hope you choose to work with me. And just so you know, people that do choose to work with me, most of them spend anywhere between 2900 to 60 $900 one time fee to get the marketing system put in place. And then $497 a month are those two numbers within your budget? And I say that something similar to that to everybody at the beginning of the initial discussion. The purpose of today’s meeting is for me to discover where you are, where you want to get to. And, and then I and then I move to, you know, most of the clients that hire us to do this for them. Here’s their investment. And I just I just jump right to the money. And then what happens is they’re either going to tell you. Yeah, no, that’s that’s that’s fine. Or they’re immediately going to say, oh, I don’t know. And I don’t I don’t think I can swing that. And I’ll just say which number? Which number is it? Is it the one time and or is it the monthly? And then they may say, why don’t 60 $900 I commit 6 to 900. That may be too much. Oh, no worries. I completely understand that the best I can do on that number is tell you that I can get it down to 1900 and then we can take the remainder and divide that out over the next six 12, 18, 24 months. But it’s still we still have to charge up to that to cover the cost. If we were able to do that, if we were able to do that, would that put that number within reach of your budget? And so right here, I’m just dealing with the money, okay? And because I’m not going to and the reason I’m doing this is because, yeah, I don’t mind helping people, but I do want to have at least the opportunity that they’re going to hire me if I’m sitting there at the beginning of this call and they’re just like, there’s no way we’ll ever be able for that, or I’ll never be able to afford one or $97 a month, you know. And then I say, well, I’m saying that, you know, 497 is the average for people that have a maxed out plan. We have an entry level plan that’s around 197. That would be the lowest that would ever get to if it was 197. Would that be within your budget? And if they then they’re saying, no, I can’t afford that, then I just tell them, hey, I really appreciate the opportunity to to talk to you and thanks for scheduling its initial discussion. But knowing that like, I can’t I can’t see moving forward because we’re not going to be able to help you. And I just end the meeting and that’s it. It’s just it’s just that simple. And I love doing this. Most people say, Yeah, I think that’ll be fine. And I’m and I’m like, Great. Because then what happens is a couple of days later, when we have the sales meeting, meeting to when I get into the blueprint meeting, then money is off the table. When I get to the last couple of slides that are actually show like, okay, here’s how much this is going to cost. This is going to be 3900 4900 for you one time and 297 a month. You just need our flight plan to 97 a month or. 497 a month. You know, whatever it is, they’re not shocked by that because they’ve heard these numbers. So this is meeting one, the initial discussion, meeting two is educate and close. We call this the blueprint and then educate and close in the blueprint meeting. There’s a flow to it. And we use we have a slide deck and I get on the meeting and again, you know, I start out, hey, the purpose of today’s meeting is for me to walk through the customized blueprint that I created for you. Again, this was based upon you saying this is where you’re wanting to get to. And we talked about, you know, what you have in place and here’s how I see us being able to get you from where you are now to where you want to get to in the time frame you laid out. And I just repeat back to them what they told me in the initial discussion. So we’re all back on the same page. And then I start going through the slides, and the slides go in a rhythm of, here’s what we found. Here’s why this matters for your business. Here’s how we can fix it. And then here’s what I found. Here’s why it matters. Here’s how we fix it. And we cover four different parts of their business or not their business. We cover four different parts of their their marketing. We break marketing in the four stages. Stage one is creating awareness. Stage two is winning the consideration game. Stage three is the actual customer experience, the purchase experience, gathering contact information, storing it properly. And then stage four is advocacy and retention and advocacy. And so those I say like, okay, here’s what I found in your awareness ads. You know, here’s what we found evaluating how you’re currently creating awareness. And then I’ll say, here’s why this matters. What I found here. Here’s why it matters. Here’s how we can fix it. And then here’s what I found when I looked at your consideration elements in your Google business profile. Here’s what I found evaluating your Google business profile. This is why it matters. Here’s how we can fix it. And then I talked to him about the purchase experience in an advocacy, and then at the end I’m like, okay, so by fixing these four elements, here’s the program we’ve created for you. Here’s the investment. You know, maybe it needs a website. Maybe they don’t need a website, maybe they just need email marketing. Maybe like, I’ve assembled this for them and then I ask them, I go, okay, I know there’s been a lot of information. It’s like getting drinking water out of a fire hydrant and they all, you know. Yep. And I’m like, you know, so what questions going to have for you? What what part of this most resonated with you when, you know, when you were talking about the email marketing. Right, right, right. That’s great. Why? Why is that the part you think is going to make all the difference? And the reason I’m doing that is because if they start to, you know, ho hum a little bit down the road, I can always say, well, what if I took out this and this? And we just started with phase one, just fixing that email marketing because everybody told me what they like. So now I’m just handling objections. But rarely is the objections about money because we’ve all already handled that. It’s generally about skepticism. It’s about proof, you know, because it is a big investment and how do we know it’s going to work? And so sometimes I’ll go, Well, here’s how we can test it through Bullet before Cannonball. You know what if we just took two months, three months, whatever, and address this on your email marketing or something like that, because that’s generally by this point, the objection I get. All right. Is that proof? It’s they’re skeptical because they’re you know, it’s a big investment. They’ve been burned in the past with whatever it is. And so that that is my two step consultative sales process. It’s how I move people from being a lead to being a customer. Now, there’s a lot more to business in that now. We have to deliver, we have to retain, we have to, you know, upsell later. You know, there’s a lot add to that, but that is kind of the core of how I move somebody from a lead to a paying customer. All right. So leadership tip of the week. Well, this one is to remind us all that we need to make sure we celebrate progress, not just completion. I am so bad at this. I am so bad at getting locked in on the final thing we’re trying to do that I forget to celebrate the milestones. I forget to celebrate along the way. And it’s a really fast way to burn your team out. Leaders We look for opportunities to celebrate because what gets rewarded gets repeated. And you, you want to call people out doing things well and right. Don’t just be the person that’s calling people out for when there’s a mistake or things are going well. And how you do all this is remember to celebrate progress, not just completion. Do that. You’re going to be a better leader.