It seems that the norm in business is to be in constant pursuit of new leads. In this episode, Samantha and Tim give insight into why this should not always be the case, hence the need to stop chasing new leads and try this instead.
New leads are important for continuous business growth and revenue but entrepreneurs tend to neglect conversations and relationships they have opened up with potential prospects. In the process of searching for new leads, they forgot what’s necessary – nurturing connections.
Business owners who demonstrate authenticity towards their clients build lasting and deep connections.
Success in business is not always about hunting for new leads. You need to remember to take care of the people who are already in your world.
IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL DISCOVER:
- Why you shouldn’t be chasing new leads all the time (02:30)
- What is authenticity and the effect on business relationships (06:15)
- The importance of nurturing existing conversations and relationships (10:55)
- The value of offering expert content (13:17)
- Managing conversations in a chat environment (16:47)
- The best ways to reach out and leverage your existing connections (20:05)
QUOTES:
- “The real skill in marketing or relationship management is getting people to make what we want them to do, their priority.” -Tim Hyde
- “You don’t need to necessarily be chasing new leads all the time, but you do need to manage and nurture the conversations you have already started.” -Samantha Riley
RESOURCES MENTIONED
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WHERE TO FIND TIM HYDE
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- Twitter: @thesamriley
TRANSCRIPTION
Samantha Riley Snippet (00:00):
I think that this is an episode for everyone to action because we don’t all need a 1000 new leads tomorrow. But we do have leads that are already in our business that are being neglected.
Tim Hyde Snippet (00:15):
We’re now in June, open up your calendar, go through and find everybody you’ve had a meeting with this year and reach back out, because those people have already progressed far enough in that trust relationship to want to have a conversation with you.
Intro (00:28):
My name is Samantha Riley, and this is the podcast for coaches, course creators and experts who want to grow their influence, income and impact to take their coaching business to a million dollars and beyond. We’re going to share the latest business growth, marketing and leadership strategies, as well as discussing how you can use your human design to create success in business and life. Inside and out. Create the influence, income and impact you need to build your business so you can create your ideal lifestyle. It’s time to make a difference and scale up. This is the Influence By Design podcast.
Welcome to today’s episode of Influence By Design. I’m your Thursday co-host Samantha Riley, and joined by my lovely friend as always on Thursdays Tim Hyde. How are you Tim?
Tim (01:17):
I’m slightly jealous that you’re up there on the fabulous Sunshine Coast in Queensland where it’s about a mid 20s. And I’m doing here in Canberra where it is four degrees Celsius, which is about 39 Fahrenheit.
Samantha (01:35):
Now, I was complaining enough that I actually had to put the heater on for the last two nights completely for a whole hour. Anyway, there’s a reason I live here. I don’t like winter. But that’s not today’s topic of conversation. Right?
Tim (01:52):
It’s good to be back, you know, couple of weeks out with illness. Unexpected but on the mend and back into things which is exciting.
Samantha (02:00):
It’s good to see you smiling again.
Tim (02:05):
Okay, I missed it. I think we get like this is my baby, right? I miss this business stuff.
Samantha (02:10):
I know. Well, today we are going to talk business. We’re going to talk about well, this is today’s topic, stop chasing new leads and try this instead.
Yeah, I mean chasing new leads, that sounds like something that we all need to do as business owners. But we’re gonna turn this on its head on.
Tim (02:35):
Like, I wonder how I wonder how much of this is actually sort of comes back to, you know, inherent human behavior. Now, I’m not an expert in this, and maybe there’s a listener out there, you can, you know, fill us in a bit more, but we’re constantly chasing this, this new, right, the grass is always greener on the other side sort of thing, right?
We chase the new when we trace the extra. And when we see people just connect, connect, connect, connect, connect and pitch, pitch, pitch, pitch pitch, right, you know, chasing these new leads.
And for most people, we were talking about fear that, you know, if I had 1000 clients, I think things would break for me.
Samantha (03:15):
You think? I know things will break if I had a thousand clients.
Tim (03:18):
Well, every look, if I had 1000 clients, that’d be someone else’s problem in my business,
Samantha (03:23):
It’d be a lot of people’s problem.
Tim (03:25):
I can run a very comfortable business, at will less than 100 clients. And for most of our listeners, you know, 10 to 20 clients, consistent, good, you know, A class clients is probably all you ever really want. That’s gonna give you a very comfortable business and a very comfortable sort of lifestyle off the back of that.
But I don’t know that we necessarily have the patience to create that depth of relationship. And as a result of that, we just chase more new stuff in the hope that we find someone ready to buy from us now.
Samantha (04:05):
You’re absolutely 100%. And you said it? Well. You said it’s like we’re trying to have our A 1,001st dates, and we’re actually trying to go for no second dates. And if we’re thinking about that in the context of, you know, wanting to be married, then that’s not going to work, we’re going to have to take some of those first dates to a second date, to hopefully, you know, build that connection down the line. And that’s essentially what we’re talking about here.
Tim (04:33):
Ironically, I did actually meet a guy once who got married on his first date. I think they were divorced slightly afterwards. And then he married his second wife on their second date. And also divorced and was when I spoke to him, he was looking for wife number three.
Samantha (04:52):
You know, like I hope he got the four dates and sort of that problem.
Tim (04:55):
And another guy also got married on these third, his third date as well, and I thought you know, also divorced. But again, it’s pretty unusual to find people in your world unless they turn up on television shows. And so, I think there’s this interesting dichotomy between how we treat our business relationships to our personal relationships.
Like you never did that in your personal relationships, you wouldn’t go on one date and suddenly go, hey, you know what, Sam, we should have 10 kids. That’s a fantastic idea, Tim, let’s do it right, and suddenly expect this kind of lifelong relationship, and this depth of relationship that’s going to get married, and so on. And you’re in business, for some reason, we forget these fundamentals of human connection.
And we completely change how we connect and interact with people. And we were talking about, particularly LinkedIn, Facebook, in many ways, is a little bit like this, as well, but not as much. We always try to out expert each other by putting more expert content up thinking, if I’m a better expert, you’ll buy from me. And again, forgetting the fact that I don’t actually buy from the person who’s the best expert, I buy from the person who’s good enough. But I like the most.
Samantha (06:15):
I think this is really important. And it’s this authenticity piece, because I’m seeing it less and less. And what I can actually give you an example of this. So I had someone reached out to me in my DMs a couple of weeks ago, and you know, the way that it starts, how are you going? And what are you working on? And it’s exciting.
Anyway, I don’t like to ghost everyone, because I think it’s a bit rude. It’s not the way I am. I don’t even know where our conversations going to go. So I started the conversation, but then it moved very quickly into, hey, I want you to, you know, why don’t you join me on a call, and I won’t look at the moment, you know, I’m really busy. I’m not that interested.
He’s like, what all we need is seven minutes of your time, and we’ll blow your mind. And I still no, still don’t need to go there. This person kept coming back over and over to the point that I was like, It’s wasting my time so much. It’d be quicker just to sit on the phone for seven minutes, and get this over and done with. So I thought, let’s just do this.
I went, so Okay, so because he kept coming back and saying, Look, we just need seven minutes to blow your mind. Okay, cool. You’ve got my seven minutes, blow my mind. He gets on the call. And the first thing he says is, so what are the challenges that you’re having? And I’m like, Dude sorry, you haven’t blown my mind.
Like, and he couldn’t understand why he was frustrated. Like, this is not what we were getting on the phone call for them. And so why I’m telling this story is there was a lack of authenticity, there was no connection, there was no connection between what he was saying and what phone call was actually about. There was no human connection.
It just there was just so much gap there, that there was no authenticity that there was nowhere for me to take the conversation because I felt so odd.
Tim (08:08):
Yeah. Well, this is where we get this lack of depth of relationship I’m and, and don’t get me wrong, right? If you reach enough people, right, someone will buy from you. And that’s largely what we spend their advertising dollars on, we throw a bunch of money at Google ads, someone will search, see my ad and go, Yes, that’s what I need. Because that solves my problem for today. But in the coaching and consulting space, I think we’re very, very different in that the thing that we do for people is not necessarily urgent.
It’s, you know, it could quite comfortably be a problem for tomorrow, me, or the day after tomorrow, me, when we try to push on people, they naturally get very, very defensive and gone, I’m not ready to buy from you. Because I don’t know like and trust you enough yet.
But if we change that dynamic, and this is where I think having either less people, but also the systems to manage the depth of relationship and start with, you know, to steal the BNI you know, motto the givers gain philosophy, if we can give into the relationship and we can make deposits into our relationship with someone and like us, whatever system might use your CRM, user, Google Spreadsheet, whatever to go, you know, Sam Riley, that’s point 1234, up to 50.
And make sure that you’re always adding more into the relationship than you were trying to take out of it. We’ll find when we get to that touch point 50 and depth and because I know that next I gotta go three days now and I’ve got to reach out to Sam again and I’ve got to make an introduction.
At a certain point when you didn’t ask for something in return it Almost from a place of reciprocity, it’s absolutely I’d like you, Sam, you’ve been an amazing resource for me, tell me more about what you can do for me, right, and we change the dynamic and we’re not selling to people they’re actually buying from us. And that completely changes the relationship that you have with the people in your network.
Samantha (10:23):
What I feel like this is, is it’s a more peer to peer relationship, rather than someone selling at someone. And you understand what I mean by selling at someone, it’s that the person on the other side isn’t ready to receive that message yet. But let’s talk about that.
Tim (10:47):
We’ve all been on the receiving end of that.
Samantha (10:49):
Yeah, totally. Let’s talk about the process to manage this, because we’re not only managing the conversation that we’re having, but we also need to nurture these people. So we’re saying, You don’t need to necessarily be chasing new leads all the time. But you do need to manage and nurture the conversations that you’ve already started. Because this is the connection piece that’s coming in.
Tim (11:17):
Yeah, so one of my favorite sayings to people. And, you know, I’ll frame this by saying Do you have children, your children will flee the nest now, and mine is just about to getting close to, I think he’s kicking us out at home, not the other way around.
But you know, if you ask your kids to do something, chances are they don’t do it the first time you ask, right? Unless you appropriately incentivize them, right? If you clean your room, you will get ice cream for dinner kind of stuff, right? If you do the dishwasher or mow the lawn, right, you will get to go to the party on the weekend, etc. And so if you’re not a parent, take those as valuable lessons. Right, but you have to appropriately bribe their kids to get them to do the thing, we want the zoo. But typically, if we just ask people to do something with no obvious incentive, on the outcome to do that activity, they want to do it, because it’s not their priority.
All right, and people in our world that we’re trying to get to do something, it’s not their priority, it might be hours, but it’s not this, they’ve got other things on their mind, right, we’ve got to pick the kids up from school, I’ve got to pay the car video, I’ve got to, you know, mow the lawn, because it’s getting ridiculously long, whatever it happens to be. I’ve got to get the kid to clean and clean their bedroom. It’s not their priority, and we start putting ourselves in our, in our prospects shoes in our lead shoes about what their priority is.
I think the real skill in marketing, lead management, relationship management, is getting people to make what we want them to do with their priority. And that sounds quite manipulative. But that’s what marketing is all about. Make the thing that I want you to do your priority. That’s the that’s the real skill of marketing.
So when we look at lead management, it’s around how do we get people to bump the thing that I want you to do up in Priority toss, it’s the thing that you need to do today. And that obviously comes with time.
Samantha (13:32):
And this is where your expert content actually does come in, because this is about you educating your prospect or your lead whatever you want to call them as to why your thing is so important. And I think that this is a piece that a lot of people miss, they sort of, you know, they show the solution, here’s the solution without actually having a conversation around why that solution is needed.
And hence they get frustrated. Why doesn’t that prospect see that this is the problem? It’s because they don’t know what they don’t know, you haven’t educated them as to what they need to know.
Tim (14:15):
Yeah, well, you know, if I was, you know, let’s, let’s put that into context here. Sam, if I was to say, hey, CRM stands for customer relationship management, and it’s a system that helps you manage all the relationships, if I just leave it at that, yes, clearly, I know a lot about CRM systems. I’ve been in the space for a long time, etc., etc., etc. But if I now say hey, what your we lack the context of that expert content to what that actually means for you if you get it right.
So you and I, because we’ve spoken about these lots of times, if we will start over getting the CRM right in our business would want to be one of the sort of very early priorities for us.
The reason we want to do that is because it helps us manage depth of relationship to know who I need to talk to. And when I need to talk to them, not leave the ball in their court, for them to decide talking to me is their priority, because it’s not.
Samantha (15:12):
Exactly.
Tim (15:15):
And that’s why we have a CRM system, right. And when we make that cut, let me join those dots for our clients email content, they then go, Oh, now I see what you’re talking about, and why you’re talking about this all the time.
Samantha (15:30):
And that is the problem that I’m having. So now I realized that’s the problem I’m having now I know that I know, I need to go and speak to Tim, about possibly getting a CRM in my business.
Tim (15:43):
I think the second piece on me, you sort of touched on that authenticity piece, Sam, is that as we try to out expert people each other, right, ultimately, you’re the person we buy from, isn’t the best in the world at what they do. Right? We just want them to be competent. But what we do want is we want to like them.
And that’s where I think we need to really inject our own personality into that as much as possible. And not think, Oh, my God, I need to be this sort of cookie cutter, you know, suit wearing brown box, you know, delivering expert content, expert content, expert content, in the hope that someone’s going to recognize my genius and suddenly buy from me, because it doesn’t work.
It’s around that depth of relationship, demonstrate that you know what I’m talking about. But then I like you, and I know you, and you’ve been appearing on a regular basis, and you’re a valuable resource to me. And you know what you’re talking about? Now, I’m ready.
Samantha (16:47):
Totally, totally. How do you manage your conversations? Because we’re talking about a little bit here about managing conversations and nurturing? How do you do this within a chat environment? So you know, the DMS in Instagram or messenger, or, or on LinkedIn? Because this is something that I get asked all the time?
Tim (17:07):
Yeah, look, well, firstly, it’s acknowledged that the chat systems suck at managing relationships. That’s my technical assessment.
Samantha (17:20):
I’ve got the same technical assessment.
You know, this rule is an anthropologist named Robin Dunbar and I know I’ve mentioned this on previous podcasts, who studied, you know, populations of mammals, and found in humans and animal kingdom, and found that we really can’t maintain more than five intimate relationships, 15, close relationships, 50 casual relationships, and 150 acquaintances right now face recognition, stuff.
And if you think about the conversations that you have, with your immediate network of people, you’ll probably notice some similarities. But you’re not necessarily keeping track of where things are up to. And this is where systems become incredibly important and powerful to do that, right. So if you’ve got a chat management platform, there are a few of them out there that again, prompt you to track where the conversation is up to, you could use a Trello system, if you wanted to say, Hey, this is my conversation with Sam. And this is the stage that conversations up to. And again, it will prompt you to go back to them.
I mentioned using a Google sheet, you could use a Google Sheet for it. If you if you want it to again, put the name on put the link to the profile. And all the chat, you can actually take the URL for a specific chat. And put that into sort of sheet somewhere that says this is the person I’m talking to. And this is the stage of conversation that we’re up to.
And those stages of conversation are largely going to have four stages, right? It’s the rapport building and relationship building stage. There’s a pivot stage where we start to discover whether they got whether they’re a good fit for us, there’s a discovery stage as if we determine they were a good fit for what it is that we do, we start to discover. And then there’s a call to action stage as well, right? And you can go backwards, it’s totally okay to go backwards in stages as well, if they are a good fit, build more rapport.
If we discover that we don’t have a problem yet, go back to report goes back and go again. If we’ve sold them something, go back to report build the relationship again to the next thing. So we’ve got to sort of loosely group it into those stages. And this is again where your CRM becomes critically important, because it is the technology and systems that allow us to scale outside of Dunbar’s number allows us to scale for more than that. I have intimate relationships 15 close relationships 50 casual relationships.
Samantha (20:08):
So let’s wrap this up. So that, you know, we give our listeners Tim something to action here, because I think that this is an episode to action for every one to action, because we don’t all need 1000 new leads tomorrow. But we do have leads that are already in our business that are being neglected. So it’s about going back and finding them. It’s about building rapport with them. It’s about building connection with them nurturing them. So if we were going to give people something to take away and action, what would that be to do?
Tim (20:50):
Look to me, the first thing that I would do if I was looking at stuff and where the low-hanging fruit of sorts, exit sign, you know, we’re now in in June, open up your calendar, write your Google or your Outlook calendar. And literally, if you don’t want to do it, have your VA do it. Go through and find everybody you’ve had a meeting with this year. And reach back out to them and saying, hey, it’s been a while just checking in? What’s going on with you? Is there anything I can help you with right now?
Because those people have already progressed far enough in that trust relationship to want to have a conversation with you. And they went ahead, great, right, or they didn’t go ahead because they weren’t quite ready to take the next step with you. But it doesn’t mean that they’re not now. So that will be the first place I would look at and I would go through that list. Again, if you don’t have a CRM, a you get one. But if you don’t have a CRM, throw all those names into a Google spreadsheet. Right? Because it’s relatively free, should be free, and just start reaching out to those people again.
The second thing I do would do within look at your social media. And again, if people have engaged with your content, start they’re not to list of connections you’ve gone. Look at people who engage with your content, because those people have showed more interest in what you’re doing. than the people you’ve connected with. Who were still lurkers. Jump onto those ones. Alright, say, hey, it’s been a while. So you liked some of my content? A little while ago? I’ve just put this new post up. I thought it might find to be interesting. How are things with you? Yeah. Okay, that would be the second place. distant third is throw up more content and connect with more people.
Samantha (22:45):
Yeah, because we do need to be, we need to be continually growing our audience. That’s not something that we need to forget about. But what we are talking about today is definitely to nurture the leads, and to have some sort of lead management in place for you to continue to connect with the people that are already in your world. So if you’ve got value from today’s episode, please share it or give it a like, let us know what the takeaways were for you in this episode. And if you’re on your phone, please scroll to the top hit those three little dots and hit the follow so that you’re notified every time an episode goes live. Tim, thanks for chatting with me today. It’s been a pleasure to have you back. And we will see you all next Tuesday for another episode of influence by design. Ciao.
Outro (23:35)
Thanks for joining me for this episode of the Influence By Design podcast. If you want more, head over to samanthariley.global/podcast for the show notes and links to today’s gifts and sponsors. And if you’re looking to connect with other coaches and experts who are growing and scaling their business to come and join the coaches course creators and speakers group on Facebook, the links are all waiting for you over at samanthariley.global
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