What do you consider a lead?

Leads are the lifeblood of any business and should be the first step of your sales process. To avoid any confusion, what we define as a lead is someone's information who is interested in coming in for your service. This doesn't mean they've made a purchase or booked an appointment yet, but they've shown enough interest to give you their information (name, number, email, etc.), or if you already have their info, respond to your outreach.

Why leads?

Micro-Commitment

A lot of business owners try to skip the lead step and go straight for sales, calls, or appointments. Based on our experience, this isn't optimal. You want to get a lead first because it is a micro-commitment. You're asking someone to take one step into the water before fully jumping in, which is far less intimidating. The less intimidating the first step, the more people you will get into your database.

List Growth

The other important part of collecting leads is that, as a byproduct, you'll build a list. Your list is the most valuable part of your business. So, the more information you have, the more valuable it becomes. With a list, you'll be able to nurture the leads that don't convert right away and get them to convert into sales in the future.

How to get leads?

To keep things simple, there are 2 steps to getting leads.

1. Know where to find interested people.

There are 3 different segments of the market that you can get leads from. We call this The Buyers Circle and it consist of ...

1. Subscribers

   The lowest hanging fruit and easiest leads to get will be found in your subscribers, by using text and email marketing.

2. Searchers

   Searchers consist of people that are familiar with your service/solution and actively looking for someone to help them with it. These people can be reached through intent-based marketing strategies. Intent-based marketing strategies are where you are marketing to people who have intent (Google ads, SEO, etc.)

3. Strangers

   Strangers is the biggest market to go for and it is where you can get to people before your competition does. Strangers are people that have never heard of you and might have never heard of your service. To tap into strangers you'll use Interruption-based marketing strategies. Interruption based marketing strategies are marketing tactics that grab people's attention, when they are not intending on buying anything (Facebook ads, Cold outreach, Youtube Ads)

2. Put something in front of interested people that gets them to take action.

We can compare lead generation to fishing. With fishing, you need bait to catch fish. With lead generation, you need an offer to get leads. Your offer is the bait that gets people excited enough to give you their information. Create an irresistible offer and put it in front of the right people to always have a pipeline full of leads.

How to build a strong enough offer to get leads?

The first thing you need to understand is that there are front-end offers and back-end offers.

Front-end offers will be what we're talking about here, and are used to get leads.

The following are the principles that we use to repeatedly create successful front-end offers...

1. The goal of the front-end offer is to get people coming in, not to make money. Your back-end offers should be where you make the money.

2. The offer needs to be perceived as valuable. It shouldn't be a generic offer that everyone in your industry does e.g. "free quote" "free estimate" "free consultation", etc. Generic offers don't get people excited. The more irresistible your offer seems, the more leads you will get.

3. The front-end offer should seamlessly lead into the back-end offer. The end goal is still to make money, so you need to make sure that it transitions into the full service. A good way to do this is to make sure you have preplanned questions that you ask prospects when they come in for the front-end offer, that gets them thinking about what they need.

4. Keep the front-end offer simple. A confused mind doesn't make decisions. So if it's confusing, the prospect won't take action. If you have multiple services, we recommend using the service that has less resistance to bring people in and build your list. When you have their information and they come into your business you can upsell/cross sell them into your other offers.

Once you have your offer structure figured out, it's a matter of putting the offer in front of the right people and giving them a clear call to action to get the offer e.g. "Just click Sign Up to get your special offer today.", "Reply YES if you're interested in claiming this offer.", etc.