In this episode of the podcast, I’m going to be sharing with you the most common gap in our client attraction process (and I’ve used the word ‘our’ for a very specific reason).
If you are struggling to turn people who know you into paying clients, then this is going to help you identify the most common gap that we have in our client attraction process (which I lovingly refer to as CAP gaps).
Let’s dive on in!
First and foremost, what is a client attraction process?
The client attraction process is a five-step way that we take people from hearing about us to buying from us.
You may have heard some very simplified marketing strategies out there saying that all you need to do is get in front of people and then make your offer. But actually, I find there’s a lot more nuance to a repeatable scalable marketing strategy than that.
I created this flow of the client attraction process so that we can break it down and identify where the actual gap is in that process.
The five stages of the client attraction process are:
1. Reach – Getting in front of as many eyes as possible, especially those in your niche.
2. Nurture – Creating a relationship with the people you are reaching.
3. Lead generation – Getting certain members of your audience to lean in and get interested in what you are offering.
4. Conversion – Making the sale!
5. Delivery – Delivering on what you promised.
I count delivery in the client attraction process because when you deliver really well for your existing clients, it means that you get:
- More word-of-mouth referrals
- Far more audience growth
- Better at creating clear messaging about the value proposition of working with you, because you’ve got clients who have tangible outcomes that you can speak to
- More confidence in going out and marketing because you know that you’re going to deliver on your promises
The most common gap in our client attraction process is lead generation.
The reason why I say ‘our’ is because lead generation is definitely the biggest gap in my client attraction process. It’s something I’m very conscious of, and I make sure that I look for gaps in that lead generation part in particular.
It was definitely something I avoided a lot in the early stages of my business because no one was telling me about this whole “lead generation” thing.
Also, when I say ‘our’, I mean people like us. Women, non-binary folk, and people who come from marginalised communities are the ones who are most likely to have that lead generation gap in their client attraction process. Why? Because this is where we get a bit salesy, and that is the most confronting part of the client attraction process.
For most people, it’s also the most uncomfortable part. It’s the one that we tend to avoid, even though we’re not conscious of it.
Why would we be avoiding lead generation? And why can we get so distracted by the other stages of the client attraction process?
Reach is very sexy. Reach numbers are often the numbers that are bandied about by people who want to teach you how to get more reach on social media.
If you follow any marketer on Instagram, they always tell you how to get more reach with your reels. They say that organic reach is dead.
Similarly, marketers on Facebook tell you that there’s no reach in Facebook groups anymore, or that Facebook pages get no reach so you have to create a profile. (That’s not true by the way.)
That is something that marketers are very fixated on.
Why? Because it’s very easy for marketers to sell.
My business would be far easier and I’d make far more money if all I promised was to help you get reach on Facebook. I can absolutely help you get reach on Facebook… But will that actually result in sales in your business and you making money? No! It needs to be part of a client attraction process.
It’s easy for me to create a course on how to get more reach on Facebook. But will those clients actually have more financial success than the ones that I’m teaching the entire client attraction process to? No!
Reach feels very sexy.
It’s very nice for our egos, it’s very easy to get distracted by, and it’s the focus of most marketing gurus.
It’s also the measure that is most in your face.
When you are working on your business, you’re measuring how much reach you’re getting on social media, how many followers you have, and how many people you have on your mailing list.
It’s very easy to measure your audience these days. It’s a very readily accessible number, so it’s one that we can get overly focused on.
We can also get very caught up on the nurture stage of the client attraction process, because that’s the lovey-dovey part.
We churn out free content, we help people, we want to be of service, and we’re generous and giving.
If you’re in my audience, chances are you are one of these people. Nurture comes very naturally.
It’s something that we absolutely want to do… until we do it too much, and then we start wondering if we’re giving away too much for free because people don’t value it and they don’t want to work with us.
But actually, that’s not a nurture problem. It’s a lead generation problem.
You’re not giving away too much free content. You have an imbalance and a gap in your client attraction process.
If someone discovers you on social media because you’ve used all these sexy reach strategies, and then they start to build a relationship with you because you’re nurturing them, you’re giving them free content and they’re absolutely loving it… and then you just expect them to buy something, you might get crickets.
There’s a big leap between someone grabbing your free stuff, and them being ready to invest in working with you.
The gap is lead generation.
Conversion is where the sale happens. But where a lot of people get stuck is that they do lots of reach and lots of nurture, and they do no lead generation.
Lead generation is where we get people to lean in and self-identify that your paid product or service could be a good fit for them.
The earlier you are in business, the more one-to-one your lead generation needs to be.
As you get really good at one-to-one lead gen, then you can start scaling it up to larger and larger audiences.
But when you first start out, one-to-one lead generation is going to be far more effective than one-to-many lead generation.
Even now for myself with very leveraged programs and a very healthy income in my business, the majority of people who end up buying from me come through a one-to-one lead generation. Still to this day!
Does that mean I’m wasting time in my business and I should be finding ways to scale up? No! I’m growing my sales and lead generation at scale.
But at the same time, I know that if I put an hour a week into lead generation, then that is going to result in sales that week. So why wouldn’t I still do that?
When it comes to your client attraction process gap, I want you to be honest with yourself: Do you spend 20% of your time on reach, 20% of your time on nurture, 20% of your time on lead generation, 20% of your time on conversion, and 20% of your time on delivery?
Or are you spending 80% of your time on reach and 20% of your time on delivery? Or 50% of your time on reach and 50% of your time on delivery?
Is there balance in the time and energy that you’re investing in each stage?
Or are you overly focused on reach and nurture, and then doing nothing else?
If that’s the case, what we want to do is bring some balance so that you can fill your client attraction process gap.
When it comes to the conversion stage of your client attraction process, the highest converting strategy is still to this day sales conversations. Whether that’s a written sales conversation or a spoken sales conversation, it is the most effective way that you can create that conversion.
If you’re doing lead generation strategies that bring people in one-to-one, then that is likely going to create or facilitate a one-to-one sales conversation, which is far more likely to convert than a one-to-many conversion event (ie. sending them over to a sales page without having a conversation with them).
If lead generation is a big gap for you in your client attraction process and you decide to focus on it without changing anything else, you will see significant improvements in your business income.
It’s a really sexy part of the client attraction process… even though so many people are distracted from it and they never actually have a structured strategy around their lead generation.
Let’s dive into my top four tips for filling a lead generation CAP gap:
1. Look for that time balance
Even just putting time aside for lead generation will then get you experimenting with different strategies and asking the right questions.
If you sit down with the intention of working on marketing, you’ll default to reach or nurture. You will default to writing offers (a way of getting conversion) or writing sales pages. You’ll ignore lead generation.
Simply by having dedicated time once a week for lead generation, you will start thinking about what things you already do for lead generation. Then you’ll start finding content that helps you with lead generation, and you’ll start looking for lead generation strategies.
With the same ferocity that you go and hunt down ways to get more reach on social media, you’ll start hunting down those strategies to improve your lead generation.
2. Create as many one-to-one conversations as possible
There are many different strategies you could use to create one-to-one conversations…
- Encouraging people to send you DMs
- Telling people to reply to your emails
- Commenting and creating conversations with people in the comments
- Doing posts that encourage people to reach out and have a conversation with you
Even just the conscious effort of communicating to people what to do, or communicating with people and telling them that you’re interested in having a one-to-one conversation, is really powerful in generating far more leads for your business.
3. Experiment with single sessions or special offers
Find ways to get people off the fence and have a conversation with you one-to-one
The way that we do that in the Take Off program is through experimenting with different introductory offers or ways that people can start working with you, as well as client avatar interviews and market research.
All of these are lower investment ways for people to buy from you or have a conversation with you, while still maintaining a one-to-one relationship.
This is why I generally don’t recommend going out there and offering a super low-cost course – especially in the early stages of business.
You might have 150 people buy a course for $50. But how many of them actually do it? And if they don’t finish it, then they’re not going to be interested in buying another thing from you.
How many of those people do you actually form strong relationships with? You need to put in a considered effort in a group program like that to make sure you’re developing strong relationships with people.
If you’ve sold them something low-cost, sometimes that’s actually a distraction from them buying the big thing that you want them to buy, which is generally your VIP package or a larger ticket product or service.
In the Take Off program, we use a range of different strategies that are all mapped out for people to play with and work out what the right lead generation strategy is for them.
It gives them the opportunity to figure out what messaging works, what converts really well, and what ends up attracting those high-quality leads.
Play with different strategies.
When I started my business, I just wanted to work with five people every week. I didn’t care how much they paid me or how little they paid me, I just wanted five paying clients a week.
Every Wednesday, I would work out how many clients I had worked with so far that week. If it was only two, I would then offer three single two-hour sessions to work with me for a ridiculously discounted price. In my offer, I would say that the session had to be used that week.
Then they would sell out and I had my five paying clients for the week.
Then the next week, I did it again. And they sold out again.
Every week I was getting five leads into my business.
Not only that, they were very high-quality leads because they were all paying clients, regardless of how little they paid me.
I understand there’s a lot of talk out there about not discounting because you’re devaluing yourself. That’s fine if you don’t need leads and you don’t have a lead generation problem.
But if you have a challenge with lead generation and you’re not able to generate leads at full price, then it may be worth doing special offers.
It was far more important to me that I had five paying clients a week than it was that I stuck to some rudimentary price that I just made up out of my head anyway.
At that point in time, I wanted $97 an hour, which would have been $200 if I was charging full price for that session.
But I made that price up!
Generating leads in the client attraction process by playing with the price-point
There was no one watching me. There was no hard and fast rule that that was the price I had to be paid.
Some people would even reach out to me and say that they were really interested in working with me but they couldn’t do it that week. I would then send through more information about ways that they could work with me at any time for full price (because the discounted option was only available if it was taken that week).
Sometimes just promoting a discounted single session would actually get me leads at full price.
Playing around with those different strategies, working out what works for you, what works for your audience, what you like, and what you don’t like, is really powerful. But you need that dedicated time for lead generation to experiment with it. You need the willingness to experiment and see what works for you.
There are so many different ways that you can generate leads, but not all of them are going to be right for your audience or right for you. Take some time to experiment with them.
4. Systemise your follow-ups
There are a lot of you out there who actually have a bunch of leads, but you aren’t following up with them.
You may have had someone mention that working with you is on their wishlist, yet you never engaged in a conversation with that person. You never followed up with them.
I’m sure you’ve even had people who’ve done sales conversations with you and said that it sounds really amazing but it’s not in their budget right now, and you have not followed up with them… or you don’t have a system of ensuring you follow up with them. Maybe you haven’t agreed with them that you’ll follow up in a couple of months.
You have left leads on the table and discounted them as not being leads.
Make sure that you have a system of following up with people.
This is another thing that we do inside the Take Off program. We have follow-up Fridays. It’s a highly recommended and very simple system. You don’t need to buy any fancy tools, you can have a follow-up system that’s in a spreadsheet or Word doc.
What’s important is that the follow-up happens when you agreed that it was going to happen.
For a lot of people, they let a lot of leads go because they devalue the lead. They don’t have the system in place, they make assumptions about whether they’re allowed to follow up with the person or not, or they don’t create a joint agreement on when the next conversation is going to happen.
Make sure to put a follow-up system in place.
Those are my four tips to get started in filling that CAP gap (if it is lead generation).
If you are looking for more structured help like this, and you can really see that your client attraction process needs to have much more structure and strategy behind it, that’s exactly what I teach inside the Take Off program.
I would love for you to come and join us in Take Off.
With my mentoring, support and handholding, the Take Off program walks you through how to build a client attraction process that is streamlined, scalable, and actually makes sales.
We do this by ensuring it’s built on the very solid foundations of a specific and tangible niche, messaging that resonates and expresses your value proposition, an offer that is effectively priced and something that people are hungry to buy, and then building a scalable, simple and streamlined client attraction process that brings in leads at scale consistently.
If that is something you want to be building this year, then make sure you come and check out the Take Off program: tashcorbin.com/takeoff
Thank you so much for joining me in this episode of the Heart-Centred Business Podcast.
As always, if you’ve got any follow-up questions about this episode or have any questions about the Take Off program, just slide on into my DMs on Facebook or Instagram.
Until next time, I cannot WAIT to see you SHINE.
