Empower your Personnel with airSlate SignNow's Solution for Converting Leads into Sales

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today we're continuing our conversation about the one-page marketing plan by Allan div and I'm holding the book right now and joining me is Chris Goldman he is the bus marketing strategist and business coach hey Chris hey Pete good to join you today especially for this topic because today we're talking about converting leads into sales now before we jump into the topic outright Pete let's talk about converting leads to catch people up what are the kinds of things that Bismark other companies do to help generate leads generating leads we're defining that as a potential customer right in the parlance of Allan dib's book the onepage marketing plan he talks about three phases of marketing before phase before somebody knows who you are a potential customer the during phase where they now know who you are and you convert them into a sale and then the after phase which is after they've actually purchased from you so on today's episode sales conversion where you're actually turning a lead into a [Music] sales welcome to the biz and life dwell podcast where we explore what it means and what it takes to do business and life well I'm your host Peter Wilson if you're like me you intrigued by stories of common people who have achieved uncommon success in business and life join me as I interview Fascinating People about how they got started their successes and failures their habits and routines and what inspires them let me give you an example on our website we have a big button that says book a consultation and that is a free marketing consultation that we offer businesses to help them better understand where they're at with their marketing and understand how we could help them as well if somebody clicks on that button it creates an appointment for us to get together that I consider that to be a lead that's a lead that's not just a click that's a lead yeah they've actually raised their hand so it's somebody that's raised their hand that said I'm interested in what you do and how you could help me whether it's a consumer product or a businessto business product like we offer marketing services to businesses for example we work with a roofing company so somebody fills out a form on a roofing company's website and says I'd like somebody to take a look at my roof that's a lead a dental practice may get a appointment not I don't want to call it an appointment like booking an actual appointment but an appointment request for example that would be considered a lead until you actually convert that into a sale which is you actually in the case of the dental practice if you actually book an appointment and the person comes in then that that would be considered a sales conversion in the case of the roofing company it's a little more complicated because the first thing you're going to do is go out and you're going to give that customer um you're going to look at their roof give them an estimate to R roof and it's when they then accept the proposal that then you've converted the lead into a sale so until they buy they're a prospect exactly and what we run into all the time are people says hey I'm getting all these leads but we're not closing cells and that is so important for you to understand is everything we're doing has to be followed really methodically and when you start generating leads through whatever platform Google ads or your website whatever you want to make sure that when those leads come in that you have something in place that's going to help convert that into a sales or all you're doing is paying money for leads so here's the thing you have a a three statement that people become customers only because of these three things yeah so yeah it's no and trust people buy from companies and individuals and people that they know that they like and that they trust and you've got to have all three of those before you're going to make a sale now you might say wow I'm going to go to a gumball machine and buy a gum gumball from a gumball machine I do I know I and Trust the gumball machine you probably know what it is you probably like it otherwise you wouldn't want to get it in the first place and maybe you've seen that machine there for many years so you trust that it's a legitimate machine and if you put your money in a Gumball's going to come out so even at that very basic uh transaction there is a no like and Trust involved and a lot of businesses think that they can just get a lead or a prospect a prospective customer and immediately jump to sale without thinking about this know and trust yeah as a matter of fact what happens a lot of people that are a good lead they raise their hand and somebody gets on the end of them that works for the sales department and comes across to salesy they come across to they don't La they lack authenticity in their approach and this is why it's really important Alan dib tells a story about The Old Pink Panther Series where there's the great quote from cluso where somebody says excuse me sir does your dog bite and he said no my dog doesn't bite and the person leans down and the dog bites him he said I thought you said your dog doesn't bite and he says my dog doesn't bite that's not my dog and Alan dib says look here's the key every dog bites and what he means by this is that every potential customer that you're talking to and you're trying to bring into your fold to help them has been bitten by some gimmicky cells thing every do bites and so they now have a level of distrust that you have to build through the no and trust it's trust-based and that's where it's got to begin but it's not just about trust it's also about where you position yourself over and over we talk to people about look you're not the hero of your story this is straight from Donald Miller's brilliant book The Story brand book right and he says you're not the hero of the the story you are the guide to the hero your client your customer they're the hero and you're there to help them and when you're there authentically helping people they get to know you they usually are going to like you but they definitely start to build trust because they know you're there for them but this positioning is really important because he tells a story about a famous musician and Pete I wanted you to share this story with the group today because this is so great from Alan di yeah this is a this is an amazing story so he shares the story about a violinist named joshuel who is one of the world's finest classical musicians and he plays all over the world for packed musicals and he's making ,000 dollar a minute basically and he plays a violin that is a stradavarius now a stradavarius is the most supposed to be the most amazing violin that's ever made the one he happens to play was built in 17713 and is valued at $3.5 million wow so it's almost close to 300 year old violin that he's playing and it's so renowned that it's supposed to be the most beautiful sounding violin ever crafted that he's playing Joshua was asked by The Washington Post to conduct a social experiment and what they wanted him to do is they wanted him to play at a local Subway for an hour and at that time thousands of people would walk by them and hear him playing and what they had him do is open up his violin case or a violin case probably not the Strat of a standin to see how much money he would actually collect while he's playing this $3.5 million violin and normally he's making $1,000 a minute appearing in a concert and so he did this for one hour at this busy subway station and collected a sum total of $32 wow a little bit less than his normal pay rate so the challenge here is the positioning now had he been set up to appear on stage and all this he could easily collect the ,000 a minute and it really to do with the positioning so let's think about this how are you positioning your brand and your company when it comes to your potential customers in this case he was providing an amazing service to these folks that should have been highly valued but they had no idea because they didn't know the positioning of it so a lot of us have great products great Services great teams that are helping companies helping clients and if we try to skip over the trust and we try to Short Circuit that we're going to find ourselves not being able to position ourselves correctly we may be a an amazing violinist but positioned in the wrong place we are not helpful in the way that we could be and we're not valued the way we could be so Alan dib talks about positioning yourself in the right place but also positioning your price and I want to say this you need to position your tone and here's what I mean by that if your tone is salesy you will turn people off it's the classic used car salesman thing that we all talk about I feel sorry for used car salesman now because it's been so pervasive that they have become an iconic stereotype correct and so we all EXP experience that at some level and we don't want to be that so we want to position ourselves position our tone correctly and position the price so Alan dib talks about you may have a product that for example in his case the violinist is worth $1,000 a minute $660,000 per performance in an hour you may have that but most of us just have something that's more achievable for people and you have to think about the value first the affordability Factor second and an ease of pay for third so let's talk about the value when we coach people to make sure that their products their services have value here's something that Alan dib says it really bothered me he said your products and services don't have enough value for the price you're charging I had to do a double check what do you say isn't that what we're doing and this is where he gets back to who you are and the value you bring for your customer your client and the people that are engaging your services in other words you're not just selling a service or a product you're also selling yourself as their help their guide their Champion as you're out for their success does that ring true for you Pete you've been working with a lot of clients a long time yeah I think about it in terms of the amount of expertise and wisdom that we're bringing to a client for example so if we're just looking at a local SEO service for example or a website uh we're not going to put a website out that doesn't clearly share the value of the business it doesn't clearly position the business in terms of the potential customer in a way that the customer is not going to understand the value right so we're going to we're going to simplify and clarify when I got started in this business a lot of folks had everything they could possibly squeeze into their website and the top above the fold right the first screen and one of the hard things to do was convince businesses to stop that let's get rid of this stuff let's get down to the essentials and folks were always like what if they they need to know that we offer financing they need to know that we also do this and we also do that and we also do this and yada y yada and they ended up confusing the customers and through years and years of doing what I'm doing we've been able to just quickly say you're going to have to get rid of half of this yeah so we're bringing a level of expertise to the table for example when you do your marketing messaging I think what are you up to now in terms of the businesses that you've gone through it's 50 something like 57 58 companies since 2018 that I've had the privilege to work with yeah to hear their Amazing Stories their great products and services and to coach them to ask them the question if you have in five or eight words how can you tell me what you do for your clients and customers that help them win the day and five dat words I need to hear it and it needs to ring true it can't be cute and clever unless it's purely authentic right it needs to be clear before it's cute and clever and it's so hard for people to understand the power of that yours your tagline is not sexy I love it we help business went onl went online yeah and every person on your staff buys into that value that direction that mission that's what we're about right and so when people see that they know oh that's what Biz marketing is about now then they're going to get to know you first they're going to see if they like you or not right and then they're going to develop if they're going to have a trusting relationship one of the things that Allan talks about is as a small business if you're running a small business you actually have a disadvantage yep because you don't have the big brand the cocacola the Boeing the IBM the Microsoft the whatever brand behind you so you start off right away not being known and so he talks about how can you manufacture trust and this is a legitimate way to bring trust to your company as a small business if you're not a household name you're gonna have to do some things so folks will trust you and it has to convey trust and confidence so one of the first things that he talks about is your website right so it is as he says and I say all the time it's probably one of the first places prospects go to check you out your website if somebody gives you a word of mouth referral what are people going to do they're going to Google the name of your business and if everything's working right you're website's going to pop up if it's not working right you better see us and we'll help you get showing up there so it's going to be your website that is going to be in some cases your one shot to show whether or not you're a legitimate business and build trust some of the things that we see that decay that trust or take away that trust or even let people think you may be unworthy or untrustworthy is you don't have a phone number on your website y oh wait a minute where are these guys located you don't have an address of any kind physical location indicated on your website at all you've got to do that you don't have a privacy policy on your website you've got bad design or just something that looks cheap something that you just paid somebody 50 bucks for or it's super old it's really long in the tooth that's going to be an immediate turnoff if you don't do it the right way if you do it the right way it's going to help build trust another one is just something simple as your email address is it something something at gmail or is it something something at theame ofou company.com yeah very simple stuff uh phone number again having a phone number especially if you're a local business having a local area cod code business even though some people say oh that doesn't matter anymore having a localized number does matter for people that know the area codes in your area period if you're a localized business so those are a couple things that Alan dib talked about in terms of what he calls manufacturing trust and I think that could go a long way and of course this a lot of this is digital marketing that you should take advantage of so that is trust so where do we go from there Chris to put it maybe a different way here real quick to make sure you catch this people need to be able to call confirm and understand who you are and that you're legit people are tired of being ripped off by scams if there's things on your site in your marketing that's too good to be true they're going to really be skeptical Y and so you want to watch for things that are too low too high and you want to do what Alan dib calls closing down your sales prevention department so many companies do things like we don't take credit cards we only take cash in this day and age that's a Prevention Sales prevention department right there right and so you want to close down reasons that people are not going to do bus business with you so part of this gets into when people come to your site they're looking for affordability now affordability is different than price you may have a premium product that is going to cost tens of thousands of dollars a great example that our roofing companies that we worked with several a typical roof in the Pacific Northwest is going to be somewhere around 20 grand that's a chunk of money I don't care who you are and so people are looking for if I can't afford to give you 20 grand today do you have an option for me so you hear a lot of them saying up to a year or two years to pay at this we've negotiated a interest rate for you all that comes into play another one that's easy that doesn't take any banking at all is simply allowing people to pay for your goods or services over time yeah and you're absorbing the risk that's the other thing they want to know as a customer they don't have to absorb the risk so if you say look this going to cost you $6,000 we know that's a chunk of we're going to let you pay that out over 6 months and you can begin enjoying the benefits of it right today then they're more likely to say oh okay I'm getting a premium product with a way that makes it affordable for me to put it within our budget and that's really important especially businessto business if you're a business owner you know what it's like dealing with cash flow and being able to work that into cash flow is really key the other thing is that some people are looking for the premium and for the best and some of you have companies that may be hesitant to put on your site here's our premium product at yes a premium price right now while most of your clients aren't looking for premium price they're looking for premium products with everyday price there are some that want to know do you believe in what you're selling do you believe in what you're doing and when you can authentically say what we're giving you for this price is not only worth it it's worth so much more and you can deliver that you're going to have Word of Mouth get out there but you want to just make sure you're not pricing people out of your services especially in your target market exactly now there's another concept that I wanted to touch on that Allan talked about which was transitioning from pest to welcome guest guest I love this so what he's talking about here is he starts it up how do you feel about a dear friend who shows up at your front door contrast that to the how you feel when a stranger selling door too interrupts your dinner or family time what's the difference the former is a welcome guest someone you have a relationship and a connection with the matter is a pest the welcome guest brings value to your life whereas the pest is just there interrupt you and to take he talks about positioning ourselves as that welcome guest and how do we do that now we did Cover earlier we talked about nurturing leads and some of this kind of bleeds over into that where we are providing value to p respective customers until they're ready to buy and one of the things he stresses here is a lot of businesses try to sell you without creating that trust and he states that as like proposing marriage on a first date and he says sure it might work once in a blue moon but do you really want to stake your whole business on a strategy like that you'll end up with a poor closing ratio of say one in 10 or one in 20 or one in 100 and you waste a lot of time and energy and money dealing with unqualified prospects so what he's talking about is being more specific with the way you position your company in your advertising and you're naturally going to be dealing with folks who are more interested in what you have to offer if you're more selective about your messaging if your messaging is we're the cheapest you're going to get folks who are just looking for the cheapest for example he also goes on to talk about chasing leads and then you get the silent treatment so you've got a prospect you've had some good conversations they've expressed interest all of a sudden they go cold you try calling them back once or twice even follow up but nothing then they just disappear you figure you've somehow lost the sale and you don't know what went wrong you have to be like a goldfish you have to just snap out of it and realize that if you have a customer who is truly ready to buy and it's right for them then they'll find you yeah and if you just get so desperate for that one customer and you just hound them when you hound folks you're going to seem desperate and that desperation comes across and people can detect that and that is not a good signal to folks who you want to buy from you better for you to say if not today maybe sometime later yep and let me know if I can be of any service to you at all in the future so you've actually positioned yourself more as a helper than somebody who is desperate to get a sale yeah you're an invited guest into the conversation about solutions for them if I could I I did quite a bit of door to-door sales okay I want to talk about this guest versus pest because my G my gig wasn't closing sales I had a high sales rate but my specialty was getting in the home okay which is what most people struggled with and the company that I worked for had done a lot of data research to find out what makes people feel like you're a pest at the door and they found out that if they couldn't detect that you actually knocked on the door the dogs were just going freaky and they're like did somebody knock or if you went up there and you just pounded on the door or rang the doorbell several times that all of that was a turnoff so they figured out that four knocks four firm knocks on the door was the amount of knocks that didn't turn people off then they also discovered that if a person was looking through the window in the door to see if anybody was coming that was an immediate shut you down so they trained us to do things and I'm going somewhere with this come walk up to the door pay attention to what's in the yard do they have kids do they have pets you're paying attention to them yeah you knock on the door four times and then you back away from the door and you look down the street and as tempting as it is to look at the door let them size you up first and ask for your attention and say can I help you and what was interesting when you followed that process that they spoke first excuse me can I help you then you could turn to them and say yes I am working for such and such company I've in the neighborhood I was just with your neighbors and the neighbors down the street tell them who you talk to and I am here if this is an inconvenient time please let me know I because I can come back another day or another time and so you're letting them know I'm only going to be talking to you if you say okay let's engage this conversation so what was interesting is about 87% of doors I knocked on I ended up being invited into the living room to show my products wow and part of that was just slowing down and being able to come across authentically it helped that I looked 15 when I was 20 years old and I look like this innocent kid out there and so people would invite me in and I could show them now when we're talking about building Trust From the Moment people call you and talk to you you've got to let them know that your company is there for their success right that's why you're in in conversation and you have to let them know if we're not the right company our products aren't the right products or Services the right match we'll let you know that and people really value that we have talked with a lot of different companies that do different things and one company one of their reasons they're known is they have told people trying to engage their products and services that you don't need us yet you still have two to three years before you need our product and they said it's amazing that almost all of those people come back two to three years later and say because you saved me money then yeah I'm coming back to you now because I trusted you you yeah and so build that trust converting leads into sales is what makes this work if you're getting clicks and you're getting leads but you're not converting them into sales you need to really take time to ask are we setting ourselves up as a company as a person that people know and trust and depend on or are we that pest that's in the room that everyone wants to get rid of and are we the dog that bites that they've been bitten by one too many times and they're not going to go through it again Allen says it very well in the book here he said this would be a good time to share with you my definition of an entrepreneur someone who solves people's problems at a profit bottom line don't let them think you're in sales for one second the best way to do all this is consultative advisory selling using a nurturing system to work with potential clients and one of the things that I recall when I was working in sales there was a sales manager that we worked with and he did a lot of sales training and he was telling us that the very best salespeople that he had ever trained were teaching teers they were he said you all I know you're not teachers I'm sorry to say this but the very best folks that I've worked with in sales are teachers it's because they listen they understand and they are they're paying attention to the cues that are happening around them and they're probably more consultative than just trying to force something down somebody's throat it's one of the hardest things to do is to be authentic and let people know we can help you now or we can't help you now but it is so important for your reputation and for where you're going so position yourself your trust your tone your price all of that for your customers for your clients and you're going to find that you're going to convert a lot more leads into sales when you quit being salesy and you start being more healthy in the way you help them that sounds great Goldman so so I think I'm sold yeah could you send me a proposal there we go I'll send you a proposal and you can evaluate it and if it doesn't work for you today maybe in the future but if I sign today I'm gonna get that discount that's right no that was a trick question that was actually resist urge to Discount was one of Allan one his key things there because if you do that you're telegraphing this wrong message to your potential customer now I'm not saying don't give fair prices yeah and if there's an opportunity to include something extra great we do that all the time but just cutting prices to get a sale is not the way to go and chances are you're going to regret it later I found that folks when I've done this in the past do everything you can to get the deal then a lot of times that turns out to be a a problem down the road and you certainly can't go back because the customer is now one of your bigger pains so to speak and charge them more so because they started the relationship with cutting Corners yes and you can have a set discount for example working with certain nonprofits oh yeah if I work with a school or with a girls or boys club then we give a 15% discount for that but for everyday customers you don't want a discount and if you want to do a custom quote for them because they can't afford your package then you can say we can modify our package and give you something that's within your affordability right that's okay but don't say hey we usually do this for 6,000 for you we'll cut it down because we know you're hurting so we'll do it for 4,000 because that relationship going to start with you setting an expectation that you'll compromise for them rather than doing full value it's better to say hey we'll let you pay this out over a year instead of in six months right and a lot of times with business owners in a businessto business setting I'm a business owner myself and I know that cash flow is super important yep so if I'm working with a company that is willing to spread something out over time for example we we got one-page marketing certified right and they had a two- payment plan and a five payment plan and I immediately said give me the five payment plan we paid full price we were just able to make it a little less painful on the cash flow by spreading it out there's all way all kinds of ways to help businesses help customers buy your product this was a good chapter today and I think the main takeaway here is if you're going to sound salesy and look for sales tricks and things like that then you can go ahead and do that but it's not what we prescribe and it's not what Allen prescribes in his book and it's ultimately not going to lead to a sustainable business that's right thanks Pete for your time your knowledge your Insight and we hope all of you have a very profitable year as you work to help people and clients through your products and services and and if you'd like to learn more go to our website bism marketing.com and book a free consultation with Chris or I we will sit down with you and audit your marketing go over what you're doing now and look at ways for you to improve your marketing and improve your sales and grow your business thanks again thanks for listening to this episode of Biz and life done well with Peter Wilson you can subscribe to us on iTunes Google podcasts Spotify and most of the other popular podcast platforms please tell your friends about us and leave us a review so even more people will find out about us thanks again we'll see you [Music] soon