Lead Generation: The Art of Strategic Preparation

Eric Dingler: Okay. All right. Here we go. In the digital world where businesses roam, lead generation is more than just a poll. It’s a dance of preparation, not mere chance failed. A plan and success may be only something you glance. Craft your plans with care, but before you left fly remember mere leads are but dreams in disguise prepare strategized strategize least you fall in the vast ocean of possibilities You can find it all. So heed this lesson clear in plain in the quest for leads preparation. RANEY Hello and welcome to the Digital Nomad Entrepreneur podcast. My name is Eric. I’m a full time digital nomad traveling around the world with my wife and our four kids. And I’m here to help you optimize your online business for revenue, profit and location independence. And today, if you couldn’t pick it out by that poem, I’m going to talk about lead generation. Now, this is actually part two of a five part series I’m doing here in the podcast, where I’m talking about the five different business processes that every business has to have in place to succeed. And those are those five processes a business are our leadership. That’s what I talked about last week, specifically how to hire winners, how to keep crazy out of the building. And so we we talk leadership. Then today we’re going to talk about lead gen. Lead generation. Next week is going to be lead conversion, followed by a process for which is going to be collecting and managing money. And then finally, project management. These again are the five processes or the five systems that you have to have in place. And the thing is, as you improve each of these, your business will grow. Now, I, I spend a lot of time thinking about what I was going to cover specifically in this podcast episode, because there’s a lot to talk about with lead gen, you know, from, from crafting the perfect lead magnet to you know, are going to use webinars you going to use Facebook ads are going to use social media blogging, podcasting, YouTube channel. You know, you know, there’s networking. The in fact, just the the possibilities are almost endless, which is in of itself somewhat what makes this all all tricky. And so what I thought I would do instead of because I’ll be honest, there is there’s a lot of really great content out there, a lot of really great courses out there, YouTube channels, podcasts that talk about very specific lead generation strategies, Facebook ads, you know, video sales pages, you know, marketing funnels. And then there’s just, you know, going and getting work. If you’re a freelancer utilizing services like Upwork, Fiverr, you know, places like that. And so there’s there’s there’s a lot of really good strategies out there. But there’s a few things. In fact, I believe there are five things that whatever strategy you choose, these five things are going to play a role. These are these are the things are going to help you have success in the long run, because it really is about preparing for success in Legion. This is this lack of preparation is that is the biggest mistake I see people make when I work with them in coaching. And then as I look back over my own entrepreneur journey, these were the mistakes that I didn’t realize I was making and continued to make with Endeavor after endeavor until I finally figured about and realized Oh, wait a second, there’s a framework here at play. There’s there’s something I need to be doing over and over. And each endeavor I go into that that leads to success. And so these are the those are the five things I want to talk about. So let’s go ahead and dove into them. The first and one of the biggest single mistakes I see people make is they don’t have an opportunity pipeline. They have no way to track where people are. They believe they’re going to just keep it in their head or whatever. And this is a huge, huge mistake. And so one of the first things I do when I work with people in coaching is I have them set up an opportunity pipeline. Now, this can be digital. You know, maybe you’re using an online tool that includes this, you know, we use high level. But I’ve also used, you know, ConvertKit and MailChimp. I’ve used active campaign, you know, I’ve used so many things out there. We have within our project management software, we use a project management software hive and an inside hive. I’ve set up opportunity pipelines, I’ve used Trello boards, Google spreadsheets, Post-it notes and a whiteboard. Okay. Like there are there are numerous ways to do this and you get to choose the one that works well for you. But keep it simple. Basically, what you’re wanting to do, this opportunity pipeline, is you’re wanting to have a way to quickly identify where people are in different parts of the journey from becoming a lead to a customer. What does that what does that look like? There’s going to be some things that happen. All right. Especially for people that start to reach out to you as a response to an ad, a lead magnet, an email you send out, you know, something like that. You’re going to have people that are eventually going to start contacting you. And I’m telling you right now, a lot of these people, you’re going to have to follow up with them six times before you actually end up getting the call, even though they initiated the call. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen this number six play out in our process where we just kept reaching out. You know, we have a framework now for that. We have we have a kind of a canned set of responses that we use. And it takes six times. It just I don’t care what order. I rearrange communications and it just takes how many types of people are. People are super busy. If we didn’t have a way to track this, we would we would lose opportunities. Now, last year, I had a guy from England come in to a five day challenge that I was running. And then after the five day challenge, he signed up for a membership that I have and one of the first video modules in the membership. One of the first bonus course lessons is about about preparing for success. I’m about getting ready in engineer. It’s a lead gen engineer. You’re, you’re getting everything ready to go. You’re building out your systems. And the first thing we have to do is put a pipeline together in the first stage of the pipeline is always untouched. And then generally after that for us, I’ll do, you know, scheduling first, you know, first call, initial discussion, first chat, whatever you want to call it, you know, scheduling, call, call scheduled then would be the third stage of the pipeline, you know, prep for sales meeting. That first meeting is always an initial discussion to kind of pre-qualify them if that works. Then the second call will be, you know, to present them the proposal. We do a two step consultative sales process is what we use. For us, not everybody’s going to use and that’s okay. But we have this pipeline. And so then there’s, there’s about eight stages in the. Pipeline. So I had everybody set this up. And then the first thing I have people to do, especially if you’re new, is I have you fill that first column with for far and far as your friends, family and relatives list everybody you can think of an untouched start, a new car, a new Post-it note, a new whatever you’re doing for each person, a new record for each person that you can think of that might be interested in hiring you for your service or buying your product, or they’re a gatekeeper to somebody else. That may be. And you’d be surprised when you start thinking about all the different people you know that are doing business. Now, this this is going to depend upon what you sell. But for him, I was coaching. He sells web design services. And I was like, man, do you know, does your kids have an orthodontist? Yeah. Put them on the list. I mean, how much money have you given him? You know, let’s let’s let’s see if he needs a website. Let’s see if he wants to start doing business with you. Do you have a dog groomer or something? Yeah, we all put, you know. Who’s that? It’s all. I will put her on the list. You know, and we went through all of his connections, all of that of our people, and then he just kind of disappeared. He ghosted me for a year, and it was a year later, just this last spring, a couple of months ago, he emailed me and said Hey, can I get my access back into the the lead factory? I can’t find my my password. I forgot I forget how log in and I’m like, sure your access is still valid. You know where you been? And he said, I’ve been so busy with the work that came from filling in that first row of the pipeline for this last year, I’ve been too busy to do anything else. I have been busy for an entire year from just that first exercise, and he’s like, So I’m eager to get back in there now and go on to the next the next part of the series. And that was great. Now, I wouldn’t recommend waiting that long because after you filled people in that first stage of work with your father, it can take about three months to start getting people in that, you know, through a marketing process, through an advertising campaign. And so it’s you want to kind of keep working, working on that, but the results speak for themselves. And he’s not the only person this has happened to. This has happened time and time again with so many other people. And so you’ve got to set up this pipeline and here’s why. Imagine you put out lead gen. You start you start doing lead gen and advertising next week. Let’s say you crush it right out of the gate and you get five leads that come in. That’s pretty good. That’s pretty darn good. Pretty exciting. So you start reaching out to those leads and you start trying to schedule meetings and you got to reach out a few times. And some people want to ghost you, so you’re able to set up three meetings for the following week. So now week two, you’ve got three meetings scheduled, but five new leads come in. All right. So you start working with those five leads and reaching out to them several times to lead them to having that initial discussion. But you’ve also ran three initial discussions and two of those led to proposals. So now week three, week three, you have two proposal meetings, you have two new initial discussion meetings from the week before, but you still have five new leads that are coming in week three oh. And you have two people that have ghosted you from week two. And so one person from week one and one person from the last week’s meeting they’ve they’ve ordered. And so now you have a kickoff, a project now week four rolls around. You’ve got a new meeting from the five leads the week before three meeting follow ups from the two meetings last week and the one meeting from the week before. You’ve got a second new project kicking off, but you also have one project in the works week five five leads come in, but you don’t have time to schedule any meetings because you get those two follow ups and you get to active projects. Week six five leads come in, but you have no time to schedule meetings. You don’t have any time to do follow ups. You’ve got two or three active projects and you’re going all out doing it and the things that you did to get those five leads and we don’t have time to do those anymore. So by the time week, six, seven, eight, nine comes around, you start finishing up projects, you haven’t got any more leads. You’ve got to go out, you’ve got to start all over again. And this creates the roller coaster effect that so many online businesses have, especially those of you that are an online service based business. You’re providing copywriting, you’re providing video editing, you’re providing web design, you’re providing audio, you know, podcast purchase, post-production or freelance services, VA services, it doesn’t matter. You tend to have this roller coaster ebb and flow, feast or famine, and it’s because you don’t have a process in place to manage your pipeline. You start dropping the ball, you’re you’re overwhelmed and you just you don’t have a plan. And so you struggle and then you start to get some success and it goes grand. And then and now that here’s what happens. When you start getting to the point where you’re, you know, you’re six, seven, eight, nine, ten weeks in in this example and you don’t have any work, will you forget that that what you were doing, you know, two or three months ago to start filling your pipeline? You forget that it worked. You forget that it worked. I don’t know why we do this. We do this. And so you start creating something new and you know, you got shiny object syndrome. Does this sound familiar at all? If it is, you’ve got to create a solid pipeline. The second mistake I see people make is they don’t have any segmentation in place for people that are coming in. They treat everybody the same, everybody that downloads the lead magnet, everybody gets the same follow up email sequence. You’re not doing anything to segment your list and therefore you’re not really do anything to pre-qualify your list. You just treat every lead that comes in as as equal. And they’re not there. They’re vastly, vastly different. So that’s mistake number two. You got to have a way to segment your list, to ask them a couple questions, to identify a unique track for them and then communicate to them appropriately. Now, the third mistake I see people make, and this is a big one, they have lag measures instead of lead measures here. Here’s what I mean by lag measures versus lead measures. A lag measure is something that you can look at and see if something happened. Okay. And so maybe you decide for lead generation, you decide I want to have four new clients a month. I want to have four new clients a month. And that’s your goal. You put that out. You’re okay, everybody. This is our measurement, this is my metric. This is what I’m going to look at, my successful. And the only way to measure that is that at the end of the month, you look back, you go, What did I get for new client? No, I didn’t get for. Or maybe. Well, this month I did. Yay, yay. But the next one. No, I did. I did. It’s a measurement that’s telling you what already happened, and that’s not helpful in business at all. What’s most important is it’s good to have that goal out there. It’s good to identify, hey, I need I need a client a week. I need a new client a week, four clients a month. But what you really need to figure out of your lead measure is your lead metrics. You’ve got to figure out, okay, if I’m going to get four new clients a month, how many sales meetings do I need to have for that? And if I need to have that many sales meetings, how many initial discussions do I need to have if I need to have that many initial discussions? How many emails do I need to? How many new email addresses do I need to collect? How many social media posts do I need to post to get that? How many? How many guest post do I have to get? How many podcasts do I need to be a guest on? Talking. Like whatever lead thing you do. And how much money do I need to put behind Facebook ads? You know how many people need to come up to my into my webinar? What happens is you start working back from all of these these metrics, and eventually you’re going to reach the point where you’re going to start seeing predictive numbers like, Oh, I know that if I put out one social media post a week or a day, if I put out one social media post a day, that leads to this and that leads to this, and then that leads to this. So I need to have five social media posts ready for next week. You can look and look at your schedule and say, Well, I’m ready for next week. So I’m going have ready because I’m going to have all social media posts done Wednesday, the week before I need them. And now you start to create a system of measurements and metrics that you can look at and say, Oh, I’m ready to I have everything ready that I need to put out there that’s going to cause the success to come to me. So when I get to the end of the month and I go that I get four new clients, I did, and you know that that’s going to be happen because it’s going to become predictable and it takes a little bit of time to figure this all out. You’re right. Each time you look at your numbers go, how did this impact this? Of course. But that’s just that’s just part of doing this. It’s part of owning a business. If you don’t want to do that, then don’t own a business. Get a job for somebody. And best of luck to you. But if you want to own a business that grows in a successful well, you pull up your big boy pants and do the job. And that means looking at metrics and numbers and and analyzing and stuff like that. Now, for the short term, you may really suffer through that. And I understand that. I talk to people and they hate doing this, but they can’t afford to have somebody else do it. Now, eventually, you’re going to get to the point this is a great place. Once you have this stuff in place, this is a great place to bring in a part time virtual assistant that can keep an eye on all of these things for you, you know? And eventually, you know, it can grow into a full time position, stuff like that, like that. There are ways to handle this. So it’s not for you, but for a time. Are you willing to pay the price that success is going to require? Because if you are, then this is part of that price you’re going to pay and success is going to come. Now, I’ve got two more things I want to share with you in these we’ve so far, I’ve looked at three kind of mistakes that I see people make in lead gen one, they don’t have an opportunity pipeline to track all the opportunities and the name opportunity pipeline. They don’t have a way to segment dollars. They just treat everybody the exact same. They give everybody the exact same messaging and that that’s not right. They look at lag measures are not lead measure, so they have nothing in place to predict future success. I’ve got two more, but before I do that, I do want to share one specific resource that if you’re looking to add a revenue stream to your business, if you’re looking to add a side hustle, if you’re looking to even do something that’s that’s full time and you want something that includes all of the assets you need they include it includes training. It includes unbelievably successful lead gen strategies. It includes support to make it happen. It includes an amazing software as a service. It’s really a system as a service. It’s a SAS, but it’s more of a system as a service. I want to encourage you to go to my website, go to Disney podcast dot com. Go to the resource page and scroll down to review lead. And I want you to go check out review lead. It is a turnkey every and I’m the reason I’m sharing this this episode is because honestly review lead is by agency coach and they may have. The best lead gen strategy and system and workflows of anybody I’ve seen. I’ve learned so much from them, leverage, so much of what I’ve learned from them I still to this day and so check it out go and the best way to do that I’ll put a link in in the show notes and so if you’re listening to this, you know, check the notes and your favorite podcast app. But I just want to say that if, if, if you’re really struggling with lead gen and you’re ready to add an amazing service or product, go check it out, go to Disney podcast dot com, go to the resource page, scroll down to review lead. All right. Now with that, let me finish out these two things and then I’ve got a leadership tip of the week for you and we’ll wrap up this episode. So the fourth mistake I see people make when it comes to lead gen is their Legion strategy is just too complex that they try to act like a big dog. They think they have to have everything in place. And I know I’ve been there. It’s enticing. And when you see somebody that’s having success, you think you’ve got to emulate what they’re doing and you think you have to go into having what they have. And that’s the wrong attitude. You’re going to grow into it. You’re not going to go into it. You’re going to start you’re going to keep it simple, simple, simple, simple. Because the beautiful thing is, starting now, the first round of people you’re going to be talking to, you’re going to be leveraging your FA and your networks, your friends, family, relatives, network referrals. And so they’re already going to be a pretty warmed up audience. So you’re not going to have to do a whole lot of nurturing. Now, this is a good time to be building those assets and putting together some, you know, an email newsletter, stuff like that. But even then, keep it simple. I so see so many people that they decide that they’re going to start they’re going to start their social media, a newsletter, a YouTube channel and blogging all in the same week to lead people to a webinar because they’re gonna start doing a webinar once a week, once a month in they’re a solopreneur. They’re out there trying to do this on their own, and they’re going to do that, we believe. And I’m not just this was me. I believe that well, that’s what it takes to be successful. So I’ve got to be a content creator, a content manager. I’ve got to also be, you know, sales and customer support and building the products I’m selling or, you know, so like we put so much of this on us as, as we’re moving through the stages of business growth. Okay. And and that’s a huge mistake. We make it too complex. And the thing is, we don’t have to because, again, the first several people we’re going to talk to are people we know or people that who know us, people that they know. And so leverage that, use the benefit right now, maximize every opportunity you have with your friends, family and relatives, with your current network, with all the people you’ve interacted with, you know, and just. Take leverage. Every single one of those opportunities and there is gold out there in all those relationships, you want to make sure you dig all of it up. Don’t leave any of it behind. All right. The last mistake I see people make is they jump from one thing to the next. They they start working on something and they do a webinar, and only two people come to their first webinar. And so they know they don’t do it anymore. And that’s a mistake. That’s a mistake. Your first webinar is going to be your worst webinar and your second webinar is going to be your second worst and your third is going to be your third. And that’s just how goes each each time you get better. And so why would you want to make a fool of yourself in front of 100 people? You know, use that use the gift that those first couple of people are using, showing up to practice and hone and get better. Get some feedback that I’m just saying, you know, you may not be a webinar, maybe it’s your first emails are no good. Maybe it’s your first podcast episode, your first YouTube videos like your first are going to be your worst, and that’s okay. Your first are going to be your worst. Now, that’s not an excuse to not give it your best, but your best is always going to become better. So when you picked up them, I want to encourage you. Just pick something and stick with the strategy until you’ve exhausted it. Not until it doesn’t seem right. Not until the first time that you tried it and didn’t get the were the result you want. Now pick a strategy, own the strategy and get better and better. Become the best at it that there ever was. But. If after listening to this, you want some help putting this together specifically for you. In fact, if you’re sitting here and you’re listening, you’re like, okay, I want to get this opportunity pipeline together, but I’m still a little confused on it or. Well, I definitely know I’m going to need a lead magnet and some email automations to maximize every lead. Then I want to invite you to go over to DNI podcast dot com and just scroll right down to my five coaching packages. I’ve got a want. I’ve got five one time, one time, one on one coaching consulting calls. All right. And in one the second one there, it’s called the Lead Factory Roadmap. Together, we’re going to map out your opportunity pipeline. I’m going to help you come up with a winning lead magnet and help you set up those first several emails for your email order automation to maximize that plus of your Choose the right CRM. If you don’t have one in place and I’m not going to try to sell you anything with an affiliate link or anything like that. Like, you know, I doubt you need high level starting out. So this isn’t going to be there’s no affiliates, nothing like that. It’s just well, we’re going to talk about you, what you’ve got going on, what you need to put in place for an opportunity pipeline, what you can have for those first at first lead magnet and start growing that email list in the best way for you to store that and automate through that. All right. So if you are still here to this point of the podcast, thank you. Really appreciate having you as a listener. Before I share this week’s leadership tip of the Week, would you do me a favor? Would you please make sure that you do all the nice things? Review, subscribe, rate the podcast. It all is very, very helpful. Each week I look at the numbers and our listenership is going up every single week and it’s happening because you because of you, you’re sharing the podcast and things like that. And I really, really do appreciate it. I’m also always looking for feedback. So if you have any suggestions for making things better, send me an email. Erik at DNA podcast dot com, I read every single email that comes in and we’ll look look forward to hearing from you. All right. This week’s leadership tip of the week. Systematize for success. Systematize for success. I’m telling you, one of my most favorite things to do as a business owner is look for the frameworks that my team is using, even though they don’t realize they’re using it. There’s so many times we fall in the patterns, we follow a framework, and the thing is, once we identify it and put some language to it, that gives us a system that becomes repeatable and scalable and replicable. And we see these frameworks all over the place in a business. A successful business is really a series of frameworks working together. And so we have a framework for leadership, we have framework for lead generation, framework for lead conversion, a framework for collecting and managing money, and a framework for project management. In fact, in each of those we have a couple of different frameworks and it’s those that give us success, and every time we tweak them, make them better, improve it, fight for simplicity. We got a fight for simplicity. But every time we work on our systems and we make our systems better, our business is better. And when our business is better, we grow. One of the things I talk about to my team all the time is that we are going to focus on being better and the marketplace will insist that we become bigger. And I didn’t come up with that. That’s true. Cathy, the founder of Chick-Fil-A, he talked about that with his board of directors better before bigger. And so for us, for you running a business, if you’re a solopreneur, who’s who, maybe you’re a weekend warrior, maybe you’re at all in, maybe you’re a team builder, maybe you’re trying to build a team. You’ve got to systematize for success. You have to capture your systems, organize them, put them in writing, fight to keep them simple. And you’re going to see things become easier over time. And from that, you’re going to have growth and excitement and amazing things will happen. All right, my friend. Well, that’s it. You’ve made it to the end of episode 12 of the Digital Nomad Entrepreneur podcast. I look forward to seeing you back here next week. In fact, I look forward to reading your review and an upcoming podcast episode. Until next time, chase the big dream. Lead with courage and safe travels.