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3 things you MUST do to attract more leads

Posted byIan Brodie on October 28th, 2016.

Yesterday I spoke about how, if you want to get more leads, you need to focus on potential clients just becoming aware of their problems and challenges rather than people who are already ready to buy.

And I promised that today I'd talk about how you can do that.

You might have already guessed that I'm going to talk about the principle of Value In Advance and using a “Lead Magnet”. After all, I've been banging on about them for almost 10 years :)

But there's a twist.

While the concept of giving away something of value to attract potential clients is now pretty commonplace, it's usually done pretty badly.

A lot of the lead magnets you see being used – even by so-called experts – end up attracting the wrong sort of person entirely. They get a big email list they can show off about, but very few actual clients.

Here are 3 things you must do with your lead magnet to attract the right leads.

Firstly, your lead magnet must deliver real value. 

Sounds obvious, but how often have you signed up for a free report or checklist, read it, then thought “meh”.

Doing what I do, I obviously sign up for and download a ton of free reports and other lead magnets and honestly, I'd say about two-thirds or more of them are just a waste of space. They offer no new or insightful information at all. Just the same old stuff repackaged.

It's like they spent more time on a fancy headline and landing page than they spent on the lead magnet itself.

So now they have my email address, but they've lost all credibility. The chances of me buying from them are nil because I'm going to assume that anything they have to sell is going to be equally as mediocre.

So rule #1: make your lead magnet super high value. Make sure it leads to quick results or progress on a tricky problem your clients face.

Secondly, your lead magnet must qualify your ideal clients.

What I mean by that is your lead magnet shouldn't just be valuable to everyone in your market. It should be especially valuable (ideally only valuable) to your ideal clients.

An example: my online training is for consultants, coaches and other professional service providers. And the majority of my folks are sole practitioners or run small firms. That means they don't have a ton of free time to spend on marketing. 

So while I love playing around with advanced marketing techniques myself, there's no point in me creating a lead magnet that shows you how to set up a complex marketing funnel, for example, as my ideal clients just won't have the time to do it. That kind of lead magnet will attract full-time professional marketers and geeks rather than the busy professionals I create my products for.

Instead, my lead magnet needs to focus on marketing techniques that don't take a ton of time to do, work for service businesses and, ideally, leverage the expertise and experience my folks have.

Create your lead magnet so that it's especially attractive to your ideal clients, and less attractive to others.

Thirdly,  your lead magnet should trigger a “lightbulb moment”.

In some ways, this is an extension of the principle of making your lead magnet truly valuable. But it goes further.

One of the biggest challenges we face, especially if we deliver high-value products and services, isn't that we lose out to better competitors.

It's that our clients choose to do nothing at all. Even though they know you're an expert and that what you do has great benefit, they're happy with what they've got. Or they're comfortable making minor improvements.

If your lead magnet is valuable but doesn't challenge their perception that what they've got is good enough or just needs minor improvement, then they're not going to shell out for a major piece of work with you.

So a lead magnet that teaches people a better way of doing something they already knew about won't have anywhere near the impact of a lead magnet that introduces something completely new to them or gets them to reframe their way of thinking.

Don't get me wrong: this isn't easy. You don't have to nail it to have a good lead magnet. But if you do, the impact can be so much higher. 

In my “21 Word Email” for example, I don't just give people a better template for emailing the contacts they're already speaking to. I show them that there's a group of people who are great prospects that they're completely overlooking.

For many people that triggers a lightbulb to go off in their brain. They begin to think “woah – I'd never thought of that but he's absolutely right”. It highlights something they've been doing wrong in their marketing for a long, long time and opens them to the idea that they might need to change.

Of course, they're unlikely to immediately spend a fortune just after reading a lead magnet or even after implementing it and getting results. But it has begun to open their mind to the idea that maybe what they're doing today isn't enough. Maybe there are some things they could do that would get them much better results.

And so their journey begins with a more open mind…

That's it from me today. It's been a long email but these tips will make a big difference to the effectiveness of your lead magnet.

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Productivity ups and downs

Posted byIan Brodie on October 28th, 2016.

Hi – I feel like a bit of a fraud sending you an email giving you productivity tips this week.

Truth is, I've wasted a ton of time myself.

On Monday I got obsessed with a little technical website problem.

I was trying to get some extra details in the tracking I do so I could trace back subscribers to the original web page they signed up from. I got things working on my site, then installed the exact same changes on Kathy's site (which has an almost identical setup to mine) and it just wouldn't work.

I spent literally hours trying everything I could think of to get it to work, but to no avail.

And the truth is, that extra little bit of information will hardly make any difference at all. But I got obsessed with the problem. I couldn't stop until I solved it.

I was a classic case of “throwing good money after bad”. Except it was “throwing good time after bad”. And time is in much shorter supply than money.

They say persistence is an important trait for entrepreneurs. But sometimes it's even more important to realise when what you're chasing isn't actually worth it and to give up.

So that was the Down.

The Up for me this week was something I mentioned last week: using pen and paper (or in my case my iPad and Apple Pencil).

I got so much good thinking work done by hand writing, drawing and doodling that I've almost stopped using my little Macbook. There's something about writing or drawing things by hand that seems to stimulate the little grey cells and enable you to concentrate for longer periods. I'd recommend it.

The other thing I've found really speeds up my thinking and creative work is to try to explain what I'm thinking to others. It seems to force me to either clarify my thoughts or realise they're not as solid as they should be.

This week I did a short Facebook Live broadcast for Momentum Club members on “The Expert Myth and the Power of a Disruptive Point of View”. By the end of the broadcast I had a couple of additional good ideas to help me take this project further.

I also had a number of calls with my “idea buddy” Lee during the week to bounce ideas backwards and forwards on things we were working on. 

If you haven't got someone yourself who you can do this kind of 2-person brainstorming with it's well worth finding someone. You learn when you have to explain your idea to them, and you learn when you get feedback from them. It gets you much further, faster, than trying to figure it all out by yourself.

That's it for this week. Apologies for the slightly late email: Kathy and I have been doing a bit of “off-peak living”: we went to see the 2pm showing of Dr Strange in an empty cinema :)

See you next week

– Ian

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You want me to choose you? Prove it

Posted byIan Brodie on October 23rd, 2016.

Have you ever spent time trying to come up with a Value Proposition or Unique Selling Proposition?

It's hard work, but important.

You have to be able to succinctly state what value clients get from working with you and why they should choose you rather than anyone else.

That can be a tough mental challenge and it deservedly gets a lot of attention.

But there's one equally important area that I find gets massively overlooked: proof.

You see, no matter how beautifully constructed your Value Proposition or USP is, no matter how cleverly it tells people how great you are and how much better than your competitors; these days most clients just won't believe it.

Maybe not outright disbelief, but they'll certainly be skeptical.

It's too easy in the world of professional services to make all sorts of bold claims. But what most firms rarely do is back them up with proof.

Proof could come in the form of a guarantee that you'll get results. Or your track record, qualifications, awards or previous experience.

It could come in the form of testimonials or reviews.

Or best of all, you can demonstrate your capabilities by giving Value in Advance. Give your potential clients something free they can use which gives them real results and a sense of what they'd get by working with you.

That's real proof. 

So next time you spend a bunch of time and energy creating or revising your USP or similar statement; make sure you spend as much time thinking about how you can prove it too.

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3 quick tips for getting more high quality work done

Posted byIan Brodie on October 21st, 2016.

Most productivity tips are about saving time or cranking out more output.

But sometimes the most important thing you can do is improve the quality of what you're doing. For most of us, that means improving the quality of our thinking and our focus on the task we're doing.

Here are three simple things I've been doing recently which have been working for me:

#1. Stop using your phone in queues. 

This is all about improving your ability to concentrate and avoid distractions. If you can force yourself to stop whipping out your phone to check emails and social media when you're standing in a queue to get a coffee, then you're building up your resistance to distraction.

Just look around instead, take in the atmosphere. Observe people around you. Or just think about something.

The more you're able to “stand the boredom” without needing to stimulate your brain with an injection of email or Facebook, the more you'll be able to concentrate when you have an important thinking task to do.  

 #2. Use Driving/Walking Time as Thinking Time.

Next time you need to drive or walk somewhere, resist the temptation to just switch on the radio or pop in your headphones. Set yourself a thinking task for the journey and use the silence.

Recent things I've done have been to brainstorm the number one goal my new program will help clients achieve, to flesh out the main ideas for an email, and to think over a problem a Momentum Club member asked for help with and come up with some solutions. 

Set a goal for your thinking time – the thing you want to focus on and the output you want. Then during the journey be mindful of where your mind is and if you find yourself drifting off to other thoughts, bring yourself back to your thinking task. 

Just like tip #1, this will also increase your ability to concentrate on other activities too.

#3. Disconnect. Use Pen and Paper. 

We spend so much time online and at our computers, the temptation is to do everything there. 

But usually, your best thinking doesn't happen when you're typing into a word processor.

Instead, when you're brainstorming or trying to structure something, use pen and paper. Sit in a quiet room away from your computer and focus entirely on the job at hand. 

I'll admit here, I cheat a bit with this one. I use my iPad and pencil. It means all my thoughts, ideas, sketches, doodles and other useful output are captured in one place. But it also increases the temptation to quickly check emails or look something up online.  

So far I've been OK at resisting temptation. Not great. But if I find myself with an urge to check email I'm generally able to refocus on my thinking task. 

You'll notice all three of these tips are simple. They seem trivial even. Just avoiding checking social media in a queue, thinking instead of listening to the radio, and using pen and paper instead of typing. 

But each of them makes inroads into improving your concentration and focus and your ability to avoid distractions. And for knowlegde workers like us, that ability to focus and think clearly is a huge competitive advantage.

Try just one of these tips this week and notice the difference.

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Which world do you live in?

Posted byIan Brodie on October 18th, 2016.

I had a chat recently with an old friend who was telling me about the problems he was having with many of his customers.

“They're all tough b*stards”‘ he said. “They'll screw me down over anything. Always trying to get something for nothing.”

“Your thing about ‘loving your customers' doesn't work in my world. It's dog eat dog.”

My friend is a lovely guy, but his “world” sounds like a terrible place to be.

And in my experience, you can choose whether to be in a world like that or not.

By that I don't mean you can somehow change your mindset and the world will bend to your will (though I've definitely found that having a sunny outlook changes the way people react to you).

What I mean is that you can choose to take action to make sure you're living in a world with great clients that are a pleasure to work with.

That action is to get good at “lead generation”. To have a steady flow of new potential clients coming in to your business.

If you're in a lead desert with very few leads, you basically have to work with whoever you can get. And sadly you're going to end up with tough customers unless you're lucky.

If you have a surplus of leads, significantly more potential clients than you could work with, then you get to pick and choose. You can focus on clients who are the very best fit for you and who you're going to enjoy working with.

Simple in theory. But generating lots of high quality leads isn't easy. For many people it's the hardest part of marketing. That's why they end up desperately negotiating and bargaining with the few leads they have to persuade them to become clients.

In my next few emails I'm going to be focusing on what I've found to be the best methods of generating leads right now – particularly online.

Until then, just bear in mind: more leads = more choice.

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5×5 Magic

Posted byIan Brodie on October 13th, 2016.

Last week I mentioned I've been doing something I call “5×5” to help keep me focused on my most important tasks. It's working pretty well.

It's really a version of something I've done for years when I've been doing one-off projects, but now I'm applying it to ongoing activities.

For me at least, projects tend to be the things I do where I waste the least time and get the most done. And a lot of that is because of having a very focused project plan.

When I'm embarking on a new project like creating a new product or exploring a new marketing channel I make a plan. I write down my overall goal for the project, think through what deliverables I need to produce, then identify the most important activities I need to do to create those deliverables and achieve the goal.

Being rather lazy, I always try to cut down the list of activities to only the ones that are absolutely necessary to hit my goal.

You could call that “value engineering” I guess, but I call it “not wanting to work too hard” :)

The end result is I get very focused on only the most important activities and don't mess around with “shallow work” that achieves something but doesn't really have a big impact. 

A few weeks ago when I looked at where I was wasting the most time, I noticed it wasn't with my projects. It was with my ongoing activities. The things I do week in, week out to run my business.  

So for me, growing my email list, getting more Momentum Club members and serving them well, and growing my influence in the consulting/coaching world are my three biggest ongoing goals. Each week most of the things I do somehow relate to one of those three big goals.

But what I haven't done is analysed each of those goals in the same way I would with a project goal to figure out what are the most critical activities that have the biggest impact on them.

Of course, I have a gut feel for it. But that's not enough.

It's all too easy to chat and answer people's questions on a random forum related to marketing thinking it's helping me to position myself as a marketing expert for consultants. But in the cold light of day, every minute I spend doing that is a minute I'm not spending doing something with more impact like writing a book on marketing for consultants, creating a new product, or even helping people in a forum focused more directly on marketing for consultants for example.

This is where 5×5 comes in.

Technically, it's actually “3-5 x 3-5” – but that doesn't sound so snappy.

Here's what you do…

Step one: make a big list of your most important ongoing goals. Usually, that's the easy bit. For me, my top 3 jumped out.

I had some other minor goals, and I initially listed some important goals that were actually one-off projects, like creating new products or revamping my website. For this list you want to focus on things you'll be working on week in, week out pretty much all year long.

Make sure you get the right level of goal. “Make loads of money” is too high level. You want a goal where you can quite easily see the things you need to do to achieve it.

With goals, you normally want to set some sort of measurable target like “grow Momentum Club membership to 500 members by the end of 2017” but it turns out that for this exercise you don't need to be so precise. Just knowing that I want to grow membership (and make sure I deliver great service to all my members) is enough.

Narrow down your list to the top 3-5 most important goals. Yep, you have to prioritise. Which ones are going to have the most impact on your business short or long-term? Which ones do you have a burning desire to achieve?

Doesn't matter what criteria you use, you have to narrow them down. You can't do everything.

Step two: for each of your chosen goals, brainstorm all the activities you could do on an ongoing basis that would contribute to achieving them.

For growing and serving Momentum Club my list included running and improving my Facebook ads, adding new sources of traffic, running and improving my “more leads and clients” webinar where I promote membership, testing and improving the conversions on my sales page and checkout, creating new content for Momentum Club on a regular basis, answering questions in the Momentum Club forum, creating new offers/packages, doing more joint ventures to promote membership, etc. 

I came up with a dozen or so activities. One important one only struck me a day after making the initial list, so give yourself some “sink time” before finalising it.

Do the same for all your 3-5 goals.

Then go through each of the activities and highlight the 3-5 ones you believe will have the most impact on achieving the goal.

There's no hard science to this. Sometimes you might have evidence that one activity is a big driver of that goal. But often it will just be based on your experience and gut feel. That doesn't matter. What's important is that you make choices.

My suggestion is to review this list every 3 months and to adjust if it turns out that some activities weren't as effective as you thought.

You now have your 5×5 (or “3-5 x 3-5”). Somewhere between 9 and 25 key activities that you're going to be doing on an ongoing basis week in, week out.

You won't necessarily be doing every activity every week. But what you'll do is that every week when you come to fill your schedule with activities, this is the menu you'll look at to fill in the slots in your calendar.

Of course, you'll have meetings and other commitments too. And you have the activities related to any one-off projects you're working on (if you have a lot of other commitments like this, I recommend you go for at most 3 ongoing goals).

By filling up your schedule each week with your most important activities you'll be avoiding too much “dead time” where you just decide to do something ad-hoc and you inevitably end up doing some shallow work that's easy and gratifying but not important.

Now as you're reading this you've probably spotted a flaw in the plan.

Just because an activity doesn't make it into your 5×5 doesn't mean you don't have to do it.

It's doubtful that answering emails is one of the top 5 activities for any goal. But you still need to do it. It's doubtful that contributing to an expert roundup blog post is going to be in my top 5 for growing my influence in the consulting/coaching world, but if I had 15 minutes spare it wouldn't be all that bad a thing to do (and might be a nice distraction from more focused work).

So in addition to scheduling in your important 5×5 activities, you need to schedule in a little time each day for shallow work. Maybe 20 minutes before lunch and before finishing for the day to catch up on emails. Maybe another 20 minutes twice a day for social media posting, etc.  

It depends, to some degree, on how many emails you typically need to process. For me, it's quite a lot (I don't take phone calls so I get more email). So I've started scheduling in 3×30 minute slots during the day for email and social media.

The good news is that apparently, our brains can only handle about 4 hours a day of really focused deep work. So in any working day, there's actually plenty of time to fit in the shallow work. The key is we need to schedule the shallow work around the important 5×5 deep work rather than just jumping from task to task ad hoc and inevitably taking the easy path to shallow work most of the time.

5×5 is working well for me so far. Truthfully, I don't always stick to it. Far from it. I don't think my “focus” muscle is well developed enough yet after years of being too easily distracted.

But it's coming. Last week I got more deep work done than I have in a long time. I made huge progress on thinking about a new service I want to offer, and I wouldn't have been able to do that without focusing my time down on my 5×5 and my big projects.

Your next step: up to you really. It took me half a day to work through my 5×5. It's a commitment. But honestly, I'd recovered that time in real work done in less than a week.

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Shake things up

Posted byIan Brodie on October 12th, 2016.

Yesterday I shared my article from 2011 about how today, there's a huge danger that your clients see you as simply a commodity vendor because they've already decided what they think they need way before they ever speak to you.

Recent research by the CEB in “The Challenger Customer” backs this up: clients don't call in suppliers until, on average, they're 57% of the way through their decision-making process.

That's after they've decided what their problem is and what they think the solution needs to be – traditionally areas where a good supplier will work with them to help inform and shape their thinking and establish themselves as an expert and preferred provider in the process.  

And, of course, since they haven't got near the level of experience or expertise as you, there's a good chance they've settled on the wrong solution. Or at best, a sub-optimal one.

In the article, I talked about how, when you meet potential clients, you might well need to challenge their thinking to get them on the right track (and re-establish yourself as the expert).

But that process applies to so much more than just meetings with clients.

It has to start with your marketing.

With your marketing, you have a chance to inform and shape the thinking of potential clients long before you ever meet them. So that when you do meet, you're not positioned as a commodity vendor but instead as the person who gave them a “lightbulb moment” that helped them understand what they really had to do.

But how much of your marketing really does create “lightbulb moments”?

Speaking for myself, not enough.

And looking out there at the oceans of articles, blog posts, videos and podcasts I see very little that offers new insight.

If your next blog post simply summarises the same best practices that everyone else is talking about then what's the point really?

Even if it's a really good summary and is useful in its own right, it's not advancing your cause with your clients. 

Sure, it means potential clients know that you know that stuff as well as your competitors. But that just reinforces their view of you as a commodity vendor.

To work to generate real leads, your content needs to challenge, not just replicate what everyone else is saying. It needs to help your potential clients see the mistakes they're making or opportunities they're missing. It needs to lay out your own unique vision or point of view on how things should be done.

Risky. Because they might not agree with you.

But not as risky, in my view, as having them agree but see you as a commodity.

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Use this prime time wisely

Posted byIan Brodie on October 9th, 2016.

Like many people these days I'm trying to eat a bit more healthily. And like many people I don't always manage to live up to my goals on this front.

But one thing I do manage to get right is breakfast. For some reason it's much easier for me to have a healthy breakfast every morning than it is to eat healthily the rest of the day.

I guess I have more willpower in the morning. And apparently that's in line with recent research which shows that our mental capacities degrade significantly during the day. They're at their strongest shortly after you wake up and you basically “wear out” your decision-making and thinking abilities and your willpower as the day goes on.

That's why it's important to do the things that require the greatest thinking capacity or the greatest willpower early in the morning.

Things like planning and decision-making. Thinking deeply about a problem or a project you're working on.

But certainly not reading and answering emails or taking calls. That'll wear you out on on some of your least important tasks.

Early morning is a great time for marketing and keeping in touch. Many of us don't find marketing all that natural. So it requires both willpower and brainpower to make a good job of it.

My suggestion is to block out time each morning for your marketing, while you're fresh. Compose a few messages to keep in touch with your contacts. Work on that article you're writing or that presentation you have coming up to potential clients.

Morning = Marketing.

It's a great “healthy” habit to get into and will do for your business what a healthy breakfast does for your body.