How to Turn More Leads Into Paying Customers

Digital Nomad Entrepreneur Podcast , Episode Transcript

It’s been said that nothing happens in business until someone sells something. And I’ve often said that every dollar you’re ever going to make is going to start as a lead. So 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. I’m excited to have you here as a part of the podcast, following along and being a part of our journey. 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? No. 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. We’ve worked hard, we’ve established a business, and we’re working on growing 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 away from all of my social media, and I’ve just been kind of walking away from most social media and heading to LinkedIn. I recently started using LinkedIn a couple of months ago. I’ve had a LinkedIn profile for years, but I’ve 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 EricDingler.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. That’s where we’ll spend most of our time. Then I’m 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 third and final, I’m going to wrap up with a travel life update. Now, the reason I put the travel piece at the end is because not everybody that listens to this podcast is a digital nomad. Some of them are here for the business side of things, the business growth side of things. So we talk about that at the beginning, and then I move the travel life stuff to the end. So if you’re interested in knowing where we are in the world, how we’re doing, and what we’re learning about the full time travel side of things, stick around for that.

Okay, so those are the three things. Before I unpack the content, I want to give a quick shout out to Hannah for the review she left. She said the episode she listened to really helped her get a lot of clarity on getting leads, and that she enjoys the podcast. So thank you, Hannah, for leaving that review on Apple. It means a great deal to me.

All right, let’s jump into today’s content. I’ve got two specific things I want to unpack. First, we’re going to talk about some mindset things, because you’ve got to start with some clarity in your mindset. Then I’m going to unpack my actual sales system.

So first off, your mindset. Four things I want to look at here.

Number one, you have to be crystal clear on the problem you solve. There’s an adage in sales that nobody buys a three quarter inch drill bit. They buy the hole the three quarter inch drill bit is going to make. If all you talk about is your widget and the features of your widget, what it does and how it does it, nobody’s going to buy it. Not enough, anyway. But when you’re clear about the problem you solve, and you talk about people’s before state and after state, you’re going to sell a whole lot more. Pay attention to the next infomercial on TV. “Are you tired of waking up with a crick in your neck?” That’s the problem they’re solving. “Then you need to try our product.” Now they’re moving to the solution. Then very clearly: “To get yours today, call blah blah blah.” So you have to be crystal clear on the problem you solve, and you have to be able to paint a picture of the after state someone’s going to experience after they work with you. Your marketing is the bridge that moves people from now to next, from before to after. If you spend most of your time talking about your product, your widget, your service, you’re having the wrong conversations with people.

Next, you have to lead with value. What I mean by this is you have to chase people’s hearts, not their wallets. If you’re desperate and just trying to land the sale, you’re going to come off as desperate, as somebody who’s worried about them. But if you lead with value, and the way to do this is to have an abundance mindset, be willing to help people. One of the things I learned a long time ago, and I wish I remembered who I heard it from, they said: give away Band-Aids, but sell the cure. I thought that was so good. It helped me be more giving, add value to people, be very generous, and focus on just selling the cure.

Third, if you don’t close this sale, you’ll get the next one. This is something I used to have to remind myself before going into any sales call. I had a script I would use on calls, really a list of questions I wanted to make sure I asked, and at the top I’d put a whole list of reminders. Do not disturb. Check my background if it was a video call. And the last one on that reminder list was: if you don’t close this sale, you’ll get the next one. Here’s the thing. Some salespeople you talk to are die hard, chasing the commission, and it’s all about the close. That’s fine, that’s how they’re making a living, providing for their family. No problem with it. It’s just not me, and it’s not most people. You don’t have to be a closer. You don’t have to close every deal. It’s not a competition. You want to know your close rate, your conversion rate, you want to set goals to improve. But you’ve got to be careful, because what gets measured is what gets managed. If you’re only measuring close rate, you’re going to adjust whatever it takes to improve that close rate, and you may not adjust the right thing. So yes, of course I wanted to close, but I wanted to take the pressure off myself because I don’t want to come in pushy. So I’d remind myself: if you don’t close this sale, you’ll get the next one.

Fourth, having a few clients is better than having the wrong clients. I still struggle with this. There are times I regret not saying no to clients, and I knew at the time I should have said no. I violated the second point. I wasn’t leading with value, I was chasing their wallet and not their heart. Wrong clients manipulate. They monopolize your time. You’re not going to have the time to go out and find your best clients, your great fit clients, because you’re spending time dealing with wrong clients. It’s not worth the tradeoff. Yes, I know it’s compelling, it’s cash right now, I understand that. But if you’re that desperate, you probably shouldn’t be doing this right now. Maybe you need to supplement your income another way, because it’s never a good idea to supplement your income with the wrong clients.

So those are some mindsets around sales that have helped me. Now let’s move to number two: picking your sales system and mastering it.

I use the two step consultative sales process. There are all kinds of sales processes, frameworks, and acronyms out there, and it can very quickly become overwhelming. The issue is, at the end of the day, they all work. The question isn’t whether the system works. The systems work. The question is whether it works for you. I tried several different things, and when I really started mastering the two step consultative sales process, things changed in a good way. I’ll share the system I’ve found works for me. 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 to podcasts about it, become a student of it, become obsessed about it. Same thing with a marketing strategy. Too many people jump around marketing tactics, one week doing Instagram, the next week doing something else. Like I said at the beginning, I discovered LinkedIn, dabbled a smidge with it, and made the decision that this is what I want to do for my social media. I’m moving away from the others and going all in. I have three different podcasts I listen to now, all about LinkedIn. I’m reading blog posts, studying it, taking time to really learn it and master it. Same thing with sales. Pick a sales system and master your sales system.

Before I break down my two steps, if you’ve never taken my assessment for your business, I want to encourage you to do that today. It’s really simple, four or five minutes. All you have to do is click the link in the show notes. 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 the three P’s: your persona, your product, your pathway. The second is the Core Five, and in the Core Five, the first is leadership, the second is lead generation, and the third is lead conversion, which is what we’re really talking about today. The scorecard is going to help you identify and measure these core elements of your business, and it’s going to show you where you’re strong, celebrate it, and where you have the lowest score, that’s the area to focus on so your whole business grows. So if you haven’t taken the scorecard assessment yet, head over and do that.

So, my two step consultative sales process. What I mean by consultative is that I don’t charge for the first meeting. Some people call this the discovery meeting. We just simply call it the initial discussion. The initial discussion has two main priorities I’m wanting to accomplish. Generally it takes 30 minutes, sometimes 45, and again, I’m not charging for any of it. I know some people do charge for this, it’s just not my cup of tea, and mainly because we have such a high close rate that I’m not wasting time. The few people that don’t convert, we still walk out of that interaction having added value to them. I’ve made their life better, made their world better. They feel good, I feel good, and maybe I don’t walk away with money, but they always say thank you and are genuinely appreciative, and that’s good for me. Now if I wasn’t getting anybody to say thank you by paying me money, that would be different, that would be a problem. But we have a high enough conversion rate that I’m okay with those few times these meetings don’t turn into dollars.

Meeting one, the initial discussion. The first goal is to pre-qualify people. Hopefully I’ve already been able to pre-qualify people through a step we have them do before the initial discussion, which happens for about 75 percent of people. Before the initial discussion, I have another assessment just for my marketing agency, similar to the scorecard, that helps businesses get a snapshot in four minutes of their marketing strategy and actually provides them a one page action plan. By getting people to take that assessment, there are questions in there that help pre-qualify people before they get to the initial discussion.

We do this via Zoom. I start out with, “Hi, how are you doing, can you hear me okay, good, nice to meet you.” Then I say, “The purpose of today’s meeting is.” That’s the key right there. You’ve got to start the meeting with that, lay down the framework. I learned this from Mike and AJ at Agency Coach. 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 by working with us, and then I need to understand where you are now, and how fast we need to get you from where you are to where you want to get to. That gives me the information I need to go 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’ll walk you through that strategy, we call it a blueprint. At the end of the meeting, the blueprint is yours. You can work with me to implement it, or you can take it and implement it on your own, or hire somebody else. That’s totally up to you. Obviously I hope you choose to work with me, and just so you know, most people that do choose to work with us spend anywhere between 2,900 to 6,900 dollars as a one time fee to get the marketing system put in place, and then 497 dollars a month. Are those two numbers within your budget?

I say something similar to that to everybody at the beginning of the initial discussion, and I jump right to the money. Then one of two things happens. They either say, “Yeah, that’s fine,” or they immediately say, “Oh, I don’t know, I don’t think I can swing that.” And I’ll say, “Which number? Is it the one time, or is it the monthly?” And they might say the one time is too much. “No worries, I completely understand. The best I can do on that number is get it down to 1,900 and we take the remainder and divide it out over the next six, twelve, eighteen, twenty four months. If we were able to do that, would that put that number within reach of your budget?” I’m dealing with the money right there, because I want the opportunity that they’re actually going to hire me. If someone’s sitting there at the beginning of the call saying there’s no way they’ll ever be able to afford 497 a month, I’ll say, “497 is the average for people on a maxed out plan, we have an entry level plan around 197, would that be within your budget?” And if they say no, they can’t afford that, I just tell them, “I really appreciate the opportunity to talk to you, thanks for scheduling this, but knowing that, I can’t see us moving forward because we’re not going to be able to help you.” And I end the meeting. It’s that simple.

Most people say yes, that’ll be fine, and I love that, because then a couple days later, when we get to the blueprint meeting, money is already off the table. When I get to the last couple slides that show the actual cost, they’re not shocked, because they’ve already heard those numbers.

Meeting two is educate and close, the blueprint meeting. There’s a flow to it. We have a slide deck, and I start out the same way: “The purpose of today’s meeting is for me to walk through the customized blueprint I created for you, based on what you told me about where you’re wanting to get to.” I repeat back what they told me in the initial discussion so we’re all on the same page. Then I go through the slides in a rhythm: here’s what we found, here’s why this matters for your business, here’s how we can fix it. We cover four different parts of their marketing. Stage one is creating awareness. Stage two is winning the consideration game. Stage three is the actual purchase experience, gathering contact information, storing it properly. Stage four is advocacy and retention. I walk through each: here’s what I found evaluating your awareness ads, here’s why it matters, here’s how we fix it. Here’s what I found evaluating your Google Business Profile, here’s why it matters, here’s how we fix it. And so on through the purchase experience and advocacy.

At the end, I say, “So by fixing these four elements, here’s the program we’ve created for you, here’s the investment.” Maybe they need a website, maybe they don’t, maybe they just need email marketing. I’ve assembled it for them, and then I ask, “I know that’s been a lot of information, kind of like drinking water out of a fire hydrant. What questions do you have? What part of this most resonated with you?” And when they tell me, I ask why, because that’s the piece I can always fall back on later if they hesitate. I can say, “What if we took out this and this, and just started with phase one, fixing that email marketing, since that’s what you told me mattered most?” That’s handling objections. Rarely is the objection about money at this point, because we’ve already handled that. It’s generally about skepticism, about proof, because it’s a big investment and they want to know it’s going to work. Sometimes I’ll say, “Here’s how we can test it, bullet before cannonball, what if we just took two or three months and addressed this one piece?”

That’s my two step consultative sales process. It’s how I move people from being a lead to being a customer. There’s a lot more to business than that, we have to deliver, we have to retain, we have to upsell later, but that’s the core of how I move somebody from a lead to a paying customer.

All right, leadership tip of the week. This one’s a reminder that we need to celebrate progress, not just completion. I am so bad at this. I get locked in on the final thing we’re trying to do and I forget to celebrate the milestones along the way. It’s a really fast way to burn your team out. Leaders, look for opportunities to celebrate, because what gets rewarded gets repeated. Don’t just be the person calling people out when there’s a mistake. Remember to celebrate progress, not just completion. Do that, and you’re going to be a better leader.

All right, if you stuck around to this point, that means you’re interested in the travel stuff. I’m currently recording this in a co-working space in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Belfast was not on our plan. I think the last episode I recorded and published, we were in Santiago, Chile. Then we popped back to the States for Thanksgiving, over to London for a week, and then came to Belfast. Really did not see that coming, but we’re here and I’m glad we’re here. Let me tell you, no lie, no exaggeration, the people in Belfast have honestly been the nicest people we’ve dealt with anywhere in the world. Every shop we go into. There is one person in Northern Ireland who has not been nice to us, our Airbnb hostess, and she’s not even from here. But everybody else, they really want to help, they’re polite and friendly and always looking to go above and beyond. As a people, they’re absolutely amazing here, and we’re loving it. This is country fifteen in three years, and we’re going to be here until January 1st, 2025. After that we’ve booked an Airbnb for two months in Liverpool, really excited about that.

If you’d like to know more about the family side of this life, the travel, the family, follow my wife on Instagram. She also has a podcast, the Digital Nomad Family podcast, where she talks about home schooling, health care, packing, saying goodbye, setting up an Airbnb, all the logistical family moving stuff.

All right, my friend, thank you for being here through this episode of the Digital Nomad Entrepreneur podcast. If you have any feedback or questions, feel free to reach out. Until next time, chase the big dream, lead with courage, and safe travels.

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