Notes
A lot of owners assume prospecting means cold calling, so if they won’t cold call, they don’t prospect at all. Eric hates getting cold calls and cold emails, refuses to send them, and has still never been short on leads. In this episode he explains the four categories lead generation falls into (cold outreach, content, paid ads, and referral and networking), why he chose referral and networking, and why the real problem for most owners is jumping between tactics instead of sticking with one long enough to learn the principle behind it.
Eric’s rule is that prospecting is not about making a sale. The goal is to schedule the call. He shows how his pipeline works: he checks next week’s calendar every morning, calls through his Scheduling Initial Discussion column until he has the appointments he needs (two a week in this season), and then stops for the week because he knows his close rate. He then fills the Untouched column without buying a list, starting with F-F-R (friends, family, and relatives), including the dentist, the mechanic, and the kids’ sports clubs, and adding current and past clients, lost opportunities after three months, fellow network members, email magnet downloaders, webinar attendees, vendors, cross-platform connections, referrals, form fills, and strategic partners with the same audience and a different offer, like a commercial realtor.
The episode closes with Eric’s leadership tip of the week: plan outside of the pressure. His prospecting list came out of a single hour at a coffee shop during a CEO day, so when the pipeline runs low, he doesn’t panic. He opens the list.
Key Highlights
- The goal of prospecting isn’t to make a sale, it’s to schedule the call.
- Most lead generation tactics work, but only if you pick one and stick with it long enough to understand the principle behind the practice.
- Give first: a two minute tip to someone you already do business with builds more trust than any cold message.
- Gather every name into your Untouched column without filtering, then filter later.
- Plan outside of the pressure, so when you need more prospects you open a list instead of starting from zero.
Key Takeaways
All right. I got my throat cleared. Got my microphone on. Timer’s going. Now I’m ready to go. So let’s record this podcast.
How? If cold calling people or sending cold emails to them to sell them something is your jam, well, my friend, you’re not going to like this episode. In fact, you’ll probably outright hate it, because I hate getting cold emails and cold calls, so I’m not going to do it for my business. Now, I’ve shared this on other podcasts I’ve been a guest on, and people leave hate comments in the chat, like I’ve had happen on a couple YouTube videos, YouTube podcasts, and I get any comments cracks me up. But I don’t really care. I hate getting cold emails. I’m not going to do that to grow my business. If you don’t mind getting those emails, if you don’t mind getting those phone calls, and you don’t mind sending them out, bugging people when they’re not looking to buy your thing, well then, my friend, go right ahead and do it. But for me and my house, we will not send cold calls or cold emails. But there is still a lot I do for prospecting activities to bring new leads into my pipeline that are warm, that I can call, I can email, and I can nurture to lead to a sale. I’m going to share all of those things in this episode.
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 our four kids. We are having an amazing experience. We’re able to do this because of my digital marketing agency, In Transit Studios. And if it wasn’t for that, if it wasn’t for us having a successful business, this would be a different story. We would struggle with this lifestyle. So whether you want to be a full time traveler or not a full time traveler, but you want to have the location independence and the freedom, you’re going to need to make money. It’s just that simple. Every dollar you’re ever going to make, unless it comes from somebody else, if you’re going to make the dollar yourself, if you’re going to own a business, then every dollar you’re ever going to make in business is going to start as a lead.
So many times I talk to people I’m doing coaching with, and they think the key is just finding the right lead generation strategy. You know, if they can just figure out the right Facebook ads. So they try some Facebook ads, and guess what, that doesn’t work. So they go over and sign up for this program, and they’re going to learn to get leads via LinkedIn. So they take this course and start doing some LinkedIn things, and that doesn’t work. So they go over here and take this course, and oh, I’m going to create a Facebook group and people are going to sign up for my Facebook group and they’re just going to give me money. Because this person on Instagram said that’s what they did, and they now make a hundred thousand dollars an hour. Okay, that’s an exaggeration. But we see these things and we get excited about them, we go after them. And here’s the thing, here’s the thing. Most of those work. Most of those will work for you. But you don’t stick to it long enough, or you don’t take the time to figure out the principle behind the practice and figure out why it’s working for them. You’re not reverse engineering success.
So what I want to encourage you to do is just choose one of those. Just choose one. There are four categories that I think lead gen falls into. One of them is cold emailing. You can be doing that, you can send cold emails and cold calls. That’s category one, and that’s the one that I loathe. The second category is content. You create content. You can have a blog, you can have a YouTube channel, you can do social media content. There’s all kinds of ways to create content, and you can do it. You’ve got to create a lot of it and get really, really good at it, and do it for a really long time. But content is a great way to go, there’s nothing wrong with that. A third is paid. You can pay for ads on Meta, pay per click, TikTok, LinkedIn. Just choose one of them and do it. I don’t like paid ads as a way to go, because you turn the ads off and the leads stop. Not my cup of tea. I don’t want to do that. But you can, that’s fine, there’s a place for it, there’s a time and a place to supplement. We do run some ads. It’s not for direct lead generation, we run ads to grow our Facebook page and then we directly market to those people. But that’s different, that’s different, it’s not our primary thing.
Our primary is referral and networking. I love referral and networking, it’s my favorite way to do it. We’ve got strategies that work for this, even when I’m a digital nomad, and as a digital nomad, I can’t be going to networking events. I still prefer this method over all the other methods. Now, within here, there’s lots of ways to do networking and referral, and so it’s just where we live.
So what is this, what do we do when it comes to prospecting? And we hear that, and I think a lot of people think, well, prospecting is cold calling people. And so if I’m not cold calling people, then I don’t have any prospecting to do. And that’s wrong.
I think, if you are full time, if you’ve reached the point where this is your full time gig, you should be doing prospecting an hour a day. An hour a day. And I’m going to give you a list of what this might look like. But I think you should spend an hour a day. Now, if you can’t do an hour right now, do a half hour. Do 15 minutes. Do 5 minutes if that’s all you can do. But start getting in the habit of having a set time every day that you’re going to do prospecting.
And here’s the goal with prospecting. It’s not to make a sale. The goal with prospecting is to schedule a call. That’s right, that’s the goal. You’re putting the effort in to make the appointment. And how it looks for me is, during my prospecting time every day, I’ve got a list of prospects, a list of potential customers that I am contacting to try to set up what we call an initial discussion, a complimentary consultation, if you will. And then from that meeting, I gather the information we need to create a digital marketing blueprint, which is my sales proposal. I use a two step consultative sales process. Some people don’t like that, they do a one call close. If they can’t close you on the one call, then you go back to the drawing board. That’s fine, I don’t care about that. Some people will do the initial discussion and then email the proposal. Okay, you’re lengthening the buying time, but you can do that, especially if you’re a solopreneur and you don’t have a lot of time for those extra meetings. I don’t do that anymore, because, like I said, it increases the buying time, and I want a short buying cycle. So I take time every day to schedule appointments. That’s my prospecting.
Again, a lot of people think, well, that’s just, you got to call a cold list. That’s not true at all. So what does it look like? What is some prospecting look like? In fact, maybe there’s a way to build a system around this. You know, I love systematizing for success, and I love building systems that are predictable. Predictable outcomes that make us money, those are my favorite systems, the systems that make us money. And my prospect system is one of those.
Building the pipeline
The first thing I do is I put together a pipeline. Any time I work with anybody doing coaching, the very first thing I do is make sure they have a pipeline. This could be Post-it notes on a wall, it could be a Google spreadsheet, you could use a tool, there’s all kinds of ways to do this. You just need a pipeline, a way to capture every opportunity. And your pipeline is going to have different stages going into different columns. You can have four, you can have eight, you could have ten, it’s your system, you have at it.
So what I want you to try to picture in this audio podcast, don’t close your eyes if you’re driving or mowing the yard or crossing the street or doing something like that. But if you’re doing a routine activity, I’d encourage you to close your eyes and try to visualize this. What you’re picturing is just a set of columns. Columns go up and down, rows go left and right. You’re just picturing a whole bunch of columns, a whole bunch of buckets if you want to, but I prefer columns. The very first column, I label it Untouched. These are untouched opportunities, people that I want to contact, people that I can make contact with, that I’m going to try to schedule an appointment with. The very next column is labeled Scheduling Initial Discussion, because that’s what I’m doing. So what I do is I want to keep that second column full. I look for people in Untouched that I rate, and I get better at this over time, and I move them from Untouched into Scheduling ID, and then every day I’m contacting those people and scheduling until I get a hold of them and move them to ID Scheduled, Initial Discussion Scheduled. That’s it.
Now, for me, I need to have two of these per week. Some seasons in our business I need to do five, I need to do five of these in a week. Right now, we’ve pulled back, we’ve tapped the brakes a little bit. We are only looking to onboard one client per month, because we were focused on making our product really, really great. So to have time to work on our product, to work on our systems, we can’t be launching a project every week, which is what I really like to do, but we’ve got to get some things organized. We’re working on our business a little bit. So I need to start one project a month, at least two weeks in between. Sometimes I’ll do two a month, but I want two solid weeks between starting projects, because that gives us time to work on our product, to work on our business, and make it even better. That’s just where we are right now.
So right now I need two initial discussions a week. And I look at my calendar every day. Every morning I look at the calendar for next week, and I ask myself, do I have my initial discussions scheduled? If it’s a week I need five, maybe it’s five, maybe there are times I need ten, it just depends on whatever my measurement is. I look at the calendar for the next week and I go, what do I need next week, what’s my goal? Well, okay, time to make some calls, and I’m going to start calling people through my scheduling list, that I’m trying to get a hold of. Hey, are you available? I’m just curious if you have time next Tuesday to talk about growing your business. That’s not exactly how I say it, but I’ve got a little bit of a script I use. I get on the phone, people want to know, are you available next Tuesday at two, Thursday at three, whatever it is. I’m not trying to do any sales activity on this call, I’m just making the call, leaving a voicemail, talking to them. Because the moment I get scheduled for next week, five or ten, whatever season I’m in right now, I’m done. I’m not making any more calls this week. Why would I make more calls this week, I’ve got the two I need for next week. Next Monday, I’ll look at the week after, we’ll have the calls I need. I do that because I know those initial discussions are going to lead to blueprint presentations, and I know my close rate, and I know that by doing that I’m going to get my one or two projects a month. It’s not going to be a problem, it is going to happen.
Who goes in the Untouched column
But who am I calling? That’s the thing. Who am I calling? That’s who gets into the first column, who gets into Untouched. Some people will go out and buy a big list, they’ll spend several hundred dollars, they’ll get a list and dump it in that first column and start moving them over. That’s cold calling, and I don’t like doing that.
So what do I do? Well, I’ve got a whole list here, let me go through it on request. The first thing I want you to start with, if you’ve never done this before, is F-F-R. Now, if you’re listening, you’re like, what the heck is F-F-R? I’m going to tell you. But before I tell you, would you do me a favor? Would you leave a review, leave a rating, subscribe? It’s how I know you’re out there, it’s how I know you’re getting something out of it. I know it’s how you’ve been listening for 14 minutes, you’ve made it to this point in it, it would mean the world to me. It lets me know, yeah, keep doing it, people are finding this helpful, it’s benefiting people. It’s the only reason I’m doing this, I like to teach, and this gives me a chance every week, this gives me an outlet every week to teach something. It would mean the world if you would say thank you to me by leaving a rating, a review, subscribing, sharing, telling somebody about it, or sending me an email. Eric at DNEPodcast.com. Send me an email and let me know what you want to hear about. Hey, I’d like to hear a podcast episode about this. Hey, I’ve got a question about this, that would be great.
All right, so back to how I fill up my list of people I can call, that I can reach out to, to get them scheduled for my initial discussions. That way I’ve got money coming in the future when I need it. So start with F-F-R: Friends, Family, and Relatives. And for this one, I go kind of broad, I go pretty wide with friends. Can I tell you, next week I have a meeting with the director of the language school my wife is attending in Costa Rica. Why? Because anybody we give money to on a pretty regular basis, I’m going to ask them at some point about their website. I’m going to reach out and say, hey, Mr. Pediatric Dentist, I was looking at your website, and by the way, thanks for doing a great job with my kids. Last week I was looking at your website, and you would get more phone calls if you did these three things. I hope you found these helpful, if you’d like any more tips let me know. I send out a weekly marketing email newsletter, I could put you or somebody from your staff on it, just reply back and let me know. Thanks. I send them something, I send them some tips, some ideas. What did it cost me, two minutes? And I’m giving them something nice, because here’s the truth, you reap what you sow. Give first, give first economy. Give somebody some ideas, some suggestions, some tips.
It’s weird if you don’t know them. I can’t stand it when people message me like, I was looking at your website, rah rah rah, we can do this, you don’t know me, that’s cold, I don’t like it. But hey, you know, Mr. Dentist, who just had your hands in my mouth, you know, we know each other, we’re basically BFFs now, okay, you were staring into the throat of my children, grinding on their teeth, scraping away, like, let’s talk business now, let’s talk shop. So I do this with the kids’ sports clubs, my mechanic, I’ve used more than once, and if it’s somebody I’ve done business with or do business with now, I’ll reach out to them, if we’re friends, if I have that relationship with you, I’m going to do that.
Friends, family, relatives, who do you know that has a website, or who do you know that knows others? Do you have somebody in your network that’s a commercial realtor? Oh, my goodness, I love commercial realtors, because they are meeting with new people every month, they’re starting new businesses because they’re looking for commercial real estate to maybe expand, maybe they’re a growing business, maybe they’re a new business. Oh my gosh, I love talking to commercial realtors and saying, hey, listen, you’re out there meeting, you’ve got the same audience with a different offer, but you and I have the same audience, your audience is business owners, my audience is business owners, but you get them in the property, I get them a website so they can continue to afford that property, which helps you out too. As you’re meeting with people, if you find out they need a website and put us in touch, I would really appreciate that. And as I’m working with clients that are starting to expand or grow, I’ll ask all my clients, hey, by the way, are you happy with your business location? Because I’ve got a commercial realtor, I’ll pitch you, buddy. I loved doing that.
So, friends, family, relatives, don’t contact them right now. You might be thinking, oh, Uncle Bob, I’m going to call Uncle Bob, he’s a commercial realtor. No. What you’re going to do is you’re going to write Uncle Bob, commercial real estate, down on a Post-it note and put it in your Untouched column, or type it into a cell in a Google spreadsheet, or onto a card in a Trello board. However you create this, right now you just gather, you just get it all in there. Don’t filter it, don’t sit there going, well, I don’t know if I want to contact them. You’ll filter later. Right now, just put them on there.
More sources for the Untouched column
Here’s another one: current and past clients. I reach out to current and past clients all the time. When my Untouched board starts getting low, I go back through, are there any past clients I can put back out there, reach back out, see how life is going for them? Current clients that aren’t paying us for all of our services, but I know would benefit from them, I’m going to reach out.
The next group I’ll put on here is lost opportunities. If I lost an opportunity, I wait three months and reach back out. I reach out again three months after that, because maybe the person they hired flakes on them. I’ve had that happen a number of times, well, yeah, we hired somebody and things aren’t going, we can’t get them to get back in touch with us. Oh, wow, sorry, that person you just paid five thousand dollars to build your website just disappeared off the face of the planet. Gee, Mr. Business Owner, I don’t know why. Well, I’ll tell you what, I’m here, let me help you out. So I put lost business opportunities back on the list after three months.
I work through the networks and other people in networks I belong to. If I belong to a network, I’m going to reach out to people, hey, we’re both in the same group, well, I know, if we just meet up, get to know each other a little bit, I’m not necessarily looking for the sale, I’m just looking for the initial discussion. I just want to know, how long have you been in business, what’s your favorite part about being in business, what’s the biggest challenge you’ve had to overcome, what’s your biggest challenge right now, are you getting enough leads or customers, are you getting enough of your leads or customers to come back to you, are you getting enough reviews? I want to find that out in that initial discussion.
Just before recording this, I was talking to one of my coaching clients, and he said, yeah, but the thing is, when you tell me these stories, I can’t think of the things as fast as you do. And I told him, yeah, but I’ve been doing it for a long time. Maybe you’re sitting there, and you don’t give yourself permission to not think of anything in the moment. Just listen, write things down, and then go home and Google how to solve this person’s problem, ask in a Facebook group. You’ve got one on one coaching with me, you’ve got direct access to me through Marco Polo in between coaching sessions, send me a Marco Polo on your way home. Hey, I just had coffee with so-and-so, and they said their biggest challenge right now is recruiting staff. And I would message back, hey, go look and see what they have on their website. Do they have an easy way for people to schedule a 15 minute culture interview to see if they’re a good fit, or do they want people to fill out an application that’s going to take them three hours? No one will fill out an online application until they get some of their questions answered. So call them tomorrow and say, hey, I was thinking about your problem with recruiting, and I looked at your website last night, and your page where you’re listing employment opportunities has people fill out a big application. In today’s day and age, people aren’t going to do that. You should have a way for people to schedule a real quick, ten or 15 minute, basically complimentary consultation, an initial discussion or a culture interview, to see if they’re a good fit. Let them ask some of their questions, then if you like them and want them to go a step further, send them the application. I told him, man, we’ve done this with customers, and it’s significantly improved their staff recruitment. But I can’t think of those things at every meeting on the spot. Follow up afterward, and they’re going to be like, wow, thank you, you’re somebody that listens to my problem and came back with a suggestion. Thank you. Even if they don’t buy from you, they’re going to remember that for a long, long time. So if I’m in a network, if I’m at an organization, I’m adding people to my Untouched column and I’m going to reach out to them.
I’ve got email magnet downloaders, that’s my necklace list. I’ve got email magnets out there, and every time somebody downloads my email magnet, they go right to the top of my list. And yes, I’ve got email automations going out for nurture, but I may interrupt that flow and send a personal email if I really need to. I’ve got my webinar attendees on there too. Maybe you don’t do a webinar, that’s okay, but I do, and they recycle through every couple of months. Vendors, I kind of talk to them, I kind of included them under F-F-R, but if you’re like, oh, I’m not comfortable seeing my dentist as a friend, well then I’ve got them covered here under vendors. All of my vendors go on my list.
Personal connections across networks: here’s how I like to do this. I think of who do I know or interact with on Facebook, and are they on LinkedIn? If I interact with somebody or know somebody on Facebook, I’m going to go over to a different network and connect with them, and start interacting with them over there, because new people are going to see it. I’m going to become a known quantity to the people they know over there, and I’m going to start adding people to my columns that way.
The next one is referrals. I just ask. Who do you know that I should know? Hey, Mr. and Mrs. Client, we’ve worked together for six months here, your results, who else do you know, what other business owners do you know that would benefit from knowing us?
The next one on my list, I don’t do this anymore because I’m a digital nomad, but when I was stationed in one place in the States, I would host live events and get people to sign up for the live events, and they went on the list too. The next one is people that email me, people that fill out a form on my website. I reach out to them, or you may want to use a service like Lavalle, where it turns your form into audio and the system calls you and says, hey, so-and-so just filled out the form, and here’s what they said, and you can push a button to dial the person back. Lavalle, absolutely amazing, something to check out.
The next group of people I’ll put on my list is strategic partnerships. I’ve got people I work with, customers, clients, that again have the same audience with a different offer, and I’ve talked to them, found out who they know, do they have any recommendations, referrals? These are all the people I’m constantly thinking through when I need to refill that list. How do I know? How do I get referrals? What am I going to do? I’m constantly thinking and growing that list. Yes, I could go out and buy a list, I could do that, but I’d rather have a warm connection with someone. I’d rather have an introduction to someone. So these are all the things that I do. I’ve never been short on leads, I’ve never been short on prospects, because of all of this.
Leadership tip of the week
And that brings us to today’s leadership tip of the week. Now, if you’re a first time listener, you might be thinking, dude, what’s this leadership tip of the week? I end every episode with the leadership tip of the week, because your leadership capacity is the capacity of your business. Your business will not grow beyond your leadership skills. Without a doubt, all these things I talk about on the podcast are designed to help you. There are five processes your business needs. You need five core systems. You need a leadership system. You need a lead generation system, that’s what I was just talking about in this episode. A lead conversion system, I’ve talked about that. Collecting and managing money, you need systems for that. You need systems for project management. And all of those, lead gen, lead conversion, collecting and managing money, and project management, all of those are supported by your leadership. All of those are better or worse based on your leadership.
So what’s my leadership tip of the week? Plan outside of the pressure. Plan outside the pressure. Why do we have this whole long list of things I can do to fill the top of my pipeline for prospecting, that’s not cold calling? Because I get away from my office. I used to do it once a week, I called it a CEO day. It started as an hour once a month, then it became an hour a week, then a full day a week, and now it’s pretty much my job. But I called it CEO time, and I would go sit down, write out questions, and find a coffee shop to sit in. One day, one of my questions was, what can I do to fill my pipeline? I went and brainstormed ideas, I’d done some thinking and reading, listened to a couple podcast episodes about prospecting and things like that. Then I sat down and decided, what am I going to do? I spent a good hour creating a list. And now I have this list, and I look at it, I don’t have to sit here and go, oh no, what am I going to do, I don’t have enough prospects. When the pressure is on, when I look and go, wow, I need some more prospects, I just open the list. I’m like, oh yeah, that’s right, I can do this. And I don’t have the pressure and the stress, because I planned outside of the pressure.
All right, my friend, well, thanks for listening to this episode of the Digital Nomad Entrepreneur Podcast, episode 27. Can’t believe it, that’s so cool and exciting. So I’m looking forward to reading your review or your email, make sure you do one of those. And remember, until next time: chase the big dream, lead with courage, and safe travels to all of you out there traveling.
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