Isn’t it frustrating when you hop on a sales call only to find out the prospect isn’t the right or doesn’t have enough money?
The crazy thing — many agency owners are wasting valuable time talking to unqualified prospects.
Worse, many take on the wrong clients because they have no idea where the next client is coming from.
Is that you?
In today’s video I break down 6 things you can do to increase the quality of your clients.
Transcript / MP3
Hey guys, in today’s video, I’m going to break down how you can get higher quality clients into your agency and your consulting business. Now, if you’re new here, also be sure to click the subscribe button because I release a new video like this each and every week. Isn’t it Frustrating when you hop on a sales call with a prospect and lo and behold, you find out that they either have no money and they can’t afford what you do, or they’re just not the right fit. The crazy part is that I talked to a lot of agency owners that are wasting precious and valuable time each and every week, talking to unqualified prospects. …And what’s worse is they’re taking on clients that aren’t the right fit or don’t have the appropriate budget for what they actually should be charging, just because they have no idea where the next client is going to come from. Well, that’s why in today’s video, I’m going to break down six things that you can be doing to increase the quality of your prospects and your clients. Now real fast before I jump in, I want to invite you to a free training where I’ll walk you through the three steps that we took in our agency to really systematize and scale our business so that we could serve more clients without having to work into the weekends or work into the nights and or worse working into vacation. So click the link below in the description and register for that training. It’s about 27 minutes long, and I hope you enjoy all right, let’s dive in to the six things that we should be focused on to actually increase the quality of both your prospects and your clients. So the first thing that I want to talk about is really in the realm of marketing, because the quality of prospects that we get, the quality of clients that we get really all starts with how we attract prospects, right? How do we attract these people in the first place, how they find us. And so the first thing I want to talk about is targeting. Now you could be targeting both with your organic messaging and also say with paid media. So you want to be sure that you’re actually targeting the right people. Now, one of the things that I see go wrong with a lot of agency owners is you serve too many types of people. So really you’re just reliant on people that are finding you organically and or word of mouth or referrals. So there aren’t enough people coming your way, which leads to that problem that I mentioned earlier of having to take the wrong people, because you don’t have enough people coming in your direction at all. So if you want to increase the quality, you have to increase your targeting. You need to think about where is my ideal client spending their time and show up in those places. Maybe it’s Facebook groups, maybe it’s, you know, they follow specific YouTube channels. And when it comes to paid media, you know, the right interests, if you are targeting, you know, uh, you know, other agency owners, you’re going to be looking at things like magazines that they might be consuming or other, other personal brands and influencers that they might be following to zoom in on specific places that they might be spending our time, both in the, you know, groups that they might congregate in or the conferences that they might attend. And when you go into paid messaging or paid, uh, paid advertising, targeting, showing up in the feeds of people that have interests, like the influencers that, you know, your ideal target might be following. So the first thing is you got to increase and hone in on your targeting of where you spend your time. Number two is messaging. So messaging obviously aligns with targeting, but I kept this separate on purpose because one thing that I realized over time is, you know, you get to choose who you work with, and it sounds kind of ridiculous that you would even say that, but as you, you start serving more clients oftentimes, and oftentimes subconsciously you will choose better and better clients over time. So what that means is you’re increasing your own standards, but if that level of standard doesn’t make its way back into your messaging, you’re going to continue to attract people that are lower standard or kind of lesser value compared to the people that you’re actually getting deals with. The people that you’re actually enrolling, um, and signing deals with on the fulfillment side. So there’s this little gap of, you know, you’re attracting people, you’re going to continue to choose who you want to work with. And over time, you’re probably going to get better at selecting better clients anyway, in the sales process. But that, that selection criteria, the reason we choose one client over another needs to kind of feed back into our marketing. So that in our marketing, we are speaking to the caliber of person. This is also called client selection. And so, as you are selecting higher equality, more of the right fit clients, we need to look at those people carefully and understand why are they different than some of the people that maybe we turned down or that we identified weren’t a good fit and weave those characteristics into our messaging, uh, whether it’s your emails or your, your paid ads or your videos that you’re doing so that you’re speaking more to the ideal client and you’re repairing and, um, kind of pushing away the people that are not qualified based on your new level. Well criteria. So always has to come back to our messaging. Number three is to lengthen the process or increase the number of steps that are required to actually talk to you, uh, in closing a deal in the sales process. So you’ll see people use things like a PDF download or a webinar, and then there’ll be an application, um, or booking a call. Then you might review those applications and only get on the phone with the people that, you know, fill out the application a certain way. You’re constantly adding more steps to that process to increase the quality. Now, it is important to understand that the more steps you put from lead to having the sales conversation is going to decrease your volume, but you will increase your quality and strategically, depending upon where you’re at in your business, you might want to have less steps to increase your volume. Or if you’re in a situation where maybe you have a huge audience already, for some reason, you need to actually put more barriers to getting on the phone with you so that you can weed out a lot of the tire kickers and only speak to the quality leads. So one of these tips is, think about adding more steps, more, more hoops for someone to jump through in order to speak with you. And you will increase the quality of the person that makes it all the way through. Again, you will sacrifice volume, but you will increase quality. Now, the fourth thing kind of ties into the number of steps that I alluded to, but it’s having some sort of application survey or questionnaire that they have to fill out before getting on the phone. So when we have clients come through any one of our funnels or come from one of the videos here on YouTube, oftentimes to get on our sales calendar, to get on our calendar, to talk to one of our businesses consultants, they have to tell you tell us about themselves. And you know, it’s nothing too crazy about 10 to 12 questions, you know, where are they at in their business? What are they looking for? What are the challenges and through those questions, which need to be strategic to what you do and who you’re looking for back to point, number two of client selection. You need to ask the right questions to wait, read out the people that are going to be a good fit. And the people that are we’re going to be a bad fit. And so by having people provide some of this information upfront allows you to then review anyone that is getting on your calendar and choose who you speak to and who you, who you don’t speak to. Because if I can take 10 calls a week of the wrong people, that’s a waste of my time. That’s 10 hours wasted, but if I get the same 10 people through say 10 people come through and through the application process, I can realize that I really want to make sure I’m spending time with five of them. Well, I got myself five hours back, and my odds of closing someone and bringing on a new client that is the right fit is going to be increased. Like I’m just going to have better odds of closing someone. Cause I’m only speaking to the right people. So the application or the survey or questionnaire or whatever you’re using is really kind of a filtration process for you to make sure that you’re optimizing your time. Now, if you’re the only one selling in your business, this is easily going to give you multiple hours back a week. Because time and time again, I talk to agency owners that are taking any call kind of fingers crossed, hoping that they’re going to be able to close the deal. Lo and behold, they’ve wasted countless hours each and every week talking to the wrong prospects. And you know, you can’t get that time back. So having an application or a questionnaire before someone can get on the phone with you, we’ll again, and increase the quality of the, the leads that you’re getting that you’re speaking with. And ultimately then the clients that you have, again, someone willing to jump through more hoops to get your help is almost always going to be a better client. All right, tip number five is more within the sales process. And that is really just only serving people that you can actually have. I know it sounds obvious, but timing time, again, I’m talking to agency owners where they’ll like they have a sweet spot and what they can do, and the client needs a little bit, it’s a little bit of extra work. That’s outside. Yeah. Zone of genius or their skillset. And they’ll take the deal anyway and then have to go outsource it. And now they have to manage someone to do something that they’re not the best at, just because they needed the money. And it oftentimes isn’t even profitable. If you do the math the way most people end up, end up kind of going down this path. So now you’re managing something. That’s not bringing you enough money or allowing you to keep enough money out of the deal. And it’s more headache and it’s really just you taking the wrong clients. So when we work with clients, we really help them zone in on like, who is the right fit and right. What does that deliverable have to look like? And if you get opportunities that fall outside of that, you have to say no. And that allows you to focus and really get good at serving and solving a particular problem for your ideal client, not just taking any type of client that will come your way. And when you only serve the people that you’re confident you can help, you’re going to get better people because you already know how to solve that problem. And you’re going to over time, achieve more mastery in the ability solve that problem. All right. We’re at the last one. Number six is train your clients how to be good clients in onboarding. I’ve heard a lot of people say that there was no such thing as a bad client, because you should never take someone that could potentially be a bad client, but we’ve all been there. You have a client that comes in. Yeah. And, um, everything seems great. And kind of the initial engagement, it kind of gets a little, a little sour or something goes wrong in onboarding. So what we recommend our clients do is insert a little bit of training before the meaningful work starts. So the client pays meaningful work starts, right? That gap, you need to educate and train your client on really how to be a good client. This can come in the form of videos or a document. Um, a lot of our clients will do it like a, a mini training course, you know, three to five videos on how to be successful in our process. What to look out for, what we need from you and putting together that mini training from right after the client pays, they go into a process that you have choreographed that sets them up for success and in doing so, you’ve shown them that you are the leader. You are the, you’re the, you’re the director, because you just choreograph this thing. They’re going to follow in the steps that you have suggested for them versus what most agencies do is just hop on a kickoff call and start asking a bunch of questions, hoping that the client’s going to tell you, tell them what to do. If the client is telling you what to do out of the Gates. There’s so many problems with that, but really that’s where most of the scope creep comes from. And that’s where you start to resent the clients that you bring in. So it’s on you to train your client in onboarding how to be a good client, how to get the most out of working with you. What to look out for, what is fair game, what are things that you are not going to do as a part of the process, it really sets the expectation of how they’re going to achieve the result that they came to you for and kind of foreshadow what the experience is going to look like. All right. So let’s do a quick recap of the six. Number one is increase. The quality of your targeting. Number two is make sure that your messaging is speaking to the ideal characteristics of your clients and that the type of client you are selecting and the client selection process that you’re speaking to that person while also repelling the non-qualified people. Number three is to increase the number of steps that it takes for a, a potential prospect to get on the phone with you. A number four is to have an application as one of those steps so that you can hit the ground running on that call and really audition them before you ever even get on the phone. Number five is to only serve people you can actually help. And the last one is to train your clients how to be great clients in your onboarding process. If you do those six things, you will end up having a much higher quality prospect and a much higher quality client. All right, that’s all I got for you today. In this video, we got another one coming for you next week. So if you haven’t yet subscribed, be sure to click that subscribe button and don’t forget that free training. I’m going to walk you through in 27 minutes, the three steps that we took to radically transform our business, add a new revenue stream, and really increase our profitability and decrease the headaches and the hours worked in our business following three simple steps. So look in the description, click that link register for that training. Check it out. And we’ll talk to you guys soon. [inaudible].
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