Most of my students tell me lead gen is their no1 problem.
They think…
When I have more leads, everything will be ok
When I have enough leads I’ll get off the feast and famine rollercoaster.
When I have enough leads all the struggle will end.
But getting leads is one thing.
Closing the leads is another.
There’s nothing worse that closing out on the sales call, pitching your price, and follow-up by email, only to hear…
crickets.
“I blew it!” 🤦
When that call ends, you either closed the sale or you didn’t.
This is why most freelancers don’t need more leads;
They just need help to convert the leads they already have.
If only life had a reload button,
or a Ctrl+Z feature so we could go back and try again.
Today I was playing my way through God of War on hard mode.
I died quickly, hacked to death by undead monsters.
Luckily I can reload the last checkpoint and try again.
This time I’ve learned about my opponent,
and this time I’m better.
This time I nailed it.
What if I could give you a second chance at your leads?
What if you could have another crack at all those sales calls you messed up?
What if you could get back in the room with all the leads that ghosted you?
After my gaming session, I fired up my emails to find my lead recycling system paying off again:
This month alone:
- An old client referred me to a friend for a new job (value unknown)
- An lead who’d ghosted my proposal replied to ask for help with a new, unrelated project worth £5k
- Someone I hadn’t spoke to in 6 months, and had given up on, just replied to say they were now ready to start and to send over the DD link, and I signed them up for SEO at £1200/m
Time spent?
0
Today I’m going to show you that dead leads are never truly dead,
and give you a lead generation system to recycle your cold leads into paying customers.
Hopefully you’re already following up on all your leads….
But let me ask you something:
when was the last time you reached out to someone that didn’t buy from you?
Most freelancers go through this endless churn of chasing clients,
calling them,
closing a few,
discarding the rest.
Lead generation is hard work.
It’s expensive.
It’s also most freelancers No 1 stress.
So why are you spending all your time and energy to warm up the lead,
then throw away a perfectly good lead,
To go and chase shiny new ones, just because they didn’t reply?
You’ve already done all that work:
- you’ve spent months writing content
- you built your authority
- you’ve honed your sales page
- you’ve refined your marketing funnel
You’re neglecting a list of already warm leads who have already reached out for help with a problem you can solve.
Don’t throw that all away to chase a cold prospect who doesn’t want to be chased.
It’s much more work to get new leads than it is to just convert your old ones.
This is like buying a new car every time you run out of petrol.
All you have to do is add more fuel to warm those leads back up.
Most freelancers stop as soon as they’ve sent their pitch (red line).
This is because all you’ve been thinking about is selling.
The gurus tell us a sales call, discovery call, whatever you want to call it, should be a yes or a no…
“An in or an out.”
“You either sold it or you didn’t.”
But switch your mindset from selling to helping,
You’ll find there’s a whole series of actions you can take to convert those customers.
You just have to think longer.
With the right system your “cold” leads can be your best clients:
- The clients who are organized and take action
- The clients who listen and follow advice
- The clients who pay readily
These clients are few and far between.
You have to sift through a lot of bad apples to get there.
You need a surplus of leads so you can cherrypick the good ones and discard the bad fits.
If you don’t already have steady work,
you’ll still be saying yes to everyone.
If you don’t already have leads knocking down your door, this is what you should be doing;
Calling people back.
(Call. Don’t email.)
But business owners are busy people.
They have many distractions and conflicting priorities.
Often you won’t get through.
You often won’t hear back at all.
Sometimes the timing just isn’t right.
You need to catch them at the right time in the right way.
And frankly, you just aren’t asking often enough.
I used to call every lead back immediately.
Then I would call them again regularly until I got through.
You can hear a defensive tone that means you’re about to be hung up on.
This used to annoy the hell out of me;
“They ask for help then are rude and cut you off when you call them back!?”
But I learned to realise that people these days will see an unknown number and prep themselves for a sales pitch.
I had to learn the right way to speak so that within the first 3 seconds they didn’t hang up on me.
The customer has to feel like they aren’t about to be sold something.
Instead of selling,
I’d ask, listen and discuss like a normal person.
Instead of jumping on a call to sell, jump on a call to discuss the problem.
If needed, I’d warn them honestly their budget was too low,
I’d tell them how much it would actually cost,
and I’d tell them how to do it without me, if they wanted to.
and how to avoid cowboys.
Still, I got used to being rejected or ghosted every day.
Even when I got a no, I’d still call them back in 3 months, just to see if my cheaper competitor has f*cked up yet.
Because when they do, I’ll be at the top of the client’s mind because we’ve already spoken 3 times this year.
So when their cheaper choice screws it up, guess who the client is going to call?
👻 Ghostbusters.
But then me.
Sometimes it got to the point where they were emailing me other designer’s quotes, just to get my opinion on them 😅
You can do this too,
If you position yourself as the trusted advisor.
The only problem?
This was all too time consuming.
Eventually I became better at selling and found that I had more than enough work.
I no longer had the luxury of time to keep calling “maybes“.
The leads I had were ok. But they could be better.
In order to get better leads I had to have more leads,
so I could choose between them,
and ignore the rest.
So I found a way to automate a lot of this process,
and reach out repeatedly without being pushy or salesy,
to position myself as a trusted advisor, before we’d even worked together.
I’m now in a position where I let my system do the heavy lifting,
and I let the action takers that are serious book a call with me.
If you want the same, all you need to do is give them a nudge at the right time.
and that’s where the system comes in.
You can have better leads, and more leads at the same time.
Here’s a walkthrough for you.
A system to turn cold leads into new clients
Subscribe for instant access to a video walkthrough of my lead nurture and lead recycling system.
0:00 automated lead nurture system
0:40 don’t waste warm leads
1:00 Walkthrough of my enquiry funnel
1:50 Why I rewrote all my nurture emails
2:10 My enquiry CRM system in Clickup
2:45 How to automate your enquiry nurture process
4:10 How I get clients to book a call
4:30 The email sequence
5:10 How to deal with call no-shows
6:00 What to say after sending your proposal / pitch
7:00 How to re-engage closed leads
8:00 How often to contact warm leads
9:20 serious vs casual tone
10:00 unsubscribe rate
10:50 applying this to dead leads and past clients
11:40 never give up on dead leads
