Typically what happens is we get on a call them and we start going blah blah blah about how good we are and our stuff. Oh, have you seen my portfolio? And we won this Webby Award once, right? Who fucking cares? I don't care. No one cares. I want to know how to fix my problem.

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A lot of people the reality is that leads are very easy to get. Okay. I'm not going to show you how to do that, but I'll give you one hint, right? Like you can get free leads right now if you just go to d7leadfinder.com, capital D number sevenleadfinder.com. You can get leads. It's super easy getting leads, right? The question is, what do I do with those leads? Now that you've got a lead, a name, and what is a lead? What is a lead? Is it a name, an email address, a phone number of someone that is potentially interested in what it is you're doing? Like if you serve immigration lawyers in Texas and I give you a list of 50 immigration lawyers in Texas, does that now mean you've got 50 leads if you've got their name and their email address? Like, what does that mean? Is that what a lead is? And so what? Like you've got the lead, whoopy-doo. What do you do now? What do you do with the lead? It's what it's what you do with the lead that actually makes a difference between just having a CSV file of names and email addresses and having something that's meaningful for the business, right? So typically what happens is if we get some interest from someone, we jump on an initial call. So maybe we have a list of names and email addresses and we do some fancy cold outreach email and we get someone to put their hand up and say, hey, I'm interested in this, or maybe we post something on social media. I posted something on social media recently about my Zoom setup in the office here and how I use an iPad and a teleprompter, so I can, which is exactly what I'm doing right now. I'm actually using a uh 13-inch HDMI, external HDMI monitor, excuse me, and a teleprompter, and I've just flipped the image around so I can, if I'm on Zoom with a guest or I'm looking at you guys, I can look at what's happening and I'm looking directly down the barrel of the camera, right? Rather than me sitting here going, oh yeah, that's great, Johnny. Fantastic. Oh, well done, Pete. Oh yeah, that's really good. Oh, that happened to me too, which is a shitty experience for everyone, right? Especially if you're on a Zoom call. So I took a picture of my setup in my office and posted on social media. I had a couple of lawyers reach out to me. I I wasn't looking for lawyers, but I had a couple of lawyers reach out to me and said, Hey, how do you do that? Um, you know, we have to not only have client meetings, but we zoom into court these days. They appear in court via video conferencing. And it's also a bad experience if they're trying to make an argument in court and they're trying to win a case for their client or defend a case for their client, and again, they're looking down at the screen going, Yes, yes, Your Honor, yes, Your Honor. No, he wasn't there, Your Honor. No, he was on the golf course, Your Honor. It couldn't have been him. I know, I know that his uncle's in the boot of the car, but it couldn't have been him because he's on the golf course. I promise you. That's a terrible experience. They want to make eye contact, right? Anyway, so I took a picture of my setup, posted it on social media on my own Facebook profile, got like hundreds of comments. It just went nuts, right? I had no idea this was gonna happen, but it just went batshit crazy. Someone reached out to me and said, Hey, you know, I would pay you money, lawyers would pay you money to set that up for them. And I said, That's not the kind of business that I'm gonna be in. Anyway, that led to me getting a new lawyer client as a private coaching client. Now, there's a fair bit to unpack here, right? So the point I'm trying to make is that leads are everywhere. Everyone's connected via the internet. Every smartphone in the world and every computer in the world is connected via the internet, right? So leads are literally at your fingertips, as long as you can figure out how to go live in your own Facebook group. Leads are everywhere. Okay. The problem is that the usual process when someone puts their hand up and says, Well, you know, I might be interested in what it is you're doing, is we get on an initial call with the prospect, right? And the it's funny because the I've spent a long time doing this. I've been in this game for, you know, 15 years now, and I've coached thousands of agencies and freelancers through the same process. Every one of these initial calls is about 45 minutes long. And the success metric of this call is did they ask for a proposal? If you get off this initial call with a prospect and they say, Well, that's great, John. You've been super helpful. And this has really helped us clear up our thinking and really helped us with some ideas. Can you please send us a proposal and let us know how long this will take and how much you think it might cost? And if you get off the call with them asking for a proposal, it's a win. It's like, yes. You get really excited, you tell the dog, you tell your partner, you ring your mum. Oh, I've got this new prospect. They want me to send them a proposal. Oh, do you know how to do that, darling? Well, yeah, I'm gonna Google proposal template, and there's this guy called Troy Dean, and he's got this proposal template, and I'm gonna use his proposal template and send a proposal, right? And then you, of course, you send the proposal in and you don't hear from them because they have sticker shock, because they thought that might cost $500, and you're quoting them what the price that you made up. You have no idea how to how to quote them, right? You have no idea how to price what it is you do. You don't have a formula for that. So you send the proposal off, and let's say you quote five and a half grand, and they go, that's great. When can you start? Then you go, holy shit, I hope I can deliver this project for five and a half grand and not go broke. Right? True story, I once, when I first started out, I met this guy through a, I used to run this networking event once a month called Freelancer Friday. It was the third Friday of every month. I would down tools at four o'clock in the afternoon and I would go to a local pub. I'd find a really good kind of, you know, gastro pub, I think they call them, which is like a pub with a good kitchen and good food. Hopefully you don't get gastro as a result of going there, but I think they're called a gastro pub, right? Gentrified gastro pub in a nice part of town. And I'd call my my I'd email all my freelancer mates and I'd say, hey, I'm going to the pub at four o'clock, I'm going to the railway in South Melbourne, or I'm going down to Pause Bar in St Kilda at four o'clock on Friday. Do you want to come and hang out and shoot the shit? Because we don't work in a large team, we don't get to have that camaraderie on a Friday afternoon with with our colleagues. So I invented it for freelancers. And this guy turns up one day and he's a homeopath. Not that there's anything wrong with that. And uh he we get chatting. Anyway, he eventually hunts me down and he's like, I've got this idea. I want to build Facebook for homeopaths, like a social network for homeopaths. I'm like, okay. I know all the homeopaths in in Australia. Oh, great, well done. And I want to build a social network for homeopaths. Okay, sure. And I've got a budget of $500. Great. And I stupidly said, okay, I can do that. Idiot. Like, so what do you do? You go to the WordPress.org plug-in repository and you start searching for social network in a box and you come across Buddy Boss or Buddy Press or whatever it was called. And I start to try and build a social network for homeopaths for 500 bucks because I didn't know what I was doing. And I remember, uh, I remember this so clearly. I went back to Adelaide to visit my dad, and I was sitting at his kitchen bench. He had these bar stools, and I was sitting at his kitchen bench on this bar stool, hunched over my old Sony Vio laptop, right? Going, no, fuck. Oh no, fuck that. Why doesn't it work? Just cranky ass, right? And I'd been there for a couple of days, and my dad said, What are you doing? I said, He said, I thought you'd come back to visit. I said, Well, I did, but I've got to build this bloody social network for homeopaths because this guy's paid me $250, and there's another $250 on the other side of it when I deliver it. Sounds I mean, I tell this story now, and I think if someone told me this story now, first of all, I would say, Well, I'm sorry that you said yes to that project because it can't be done. And here's my advice, and here's what I did. I emailed the guy and I said, Listen, dude, I'm really sorry that I said I could do this. I can't. I've put the $250 back into your bank account. I've refunded your money. I'm out. I can't do it. I never heard from him again, and I learned a big lesson, massive lesson. And that lesson was never agree to anything unless you know how to do it. And never agree to take on a client who's never done it before, unless you have a really good planning process and planning session first to make sure everyone's on the same page, right? Which is called discovery, by the way, which I didn't know back then. I had no freaking idea what discovery was. So uh a couple of lessons here, right? One, the initial call that you have with a prospect typically feels like a job interview where you're proving yourself to them, right? They ask you a lot of questions, you unpack your best intellectual property, you give them your best ideas. They're not paying you any money, by the way, so they don't value anything that you're saying. And then at the end of it, they ask for a proposal, you submit a proposal, which is a stalling tactic, by the way. A proposal is someone's way of saying, I don't know you well enough to make a commitment right now. I need time to think about it and I need time to figure out whether or not you can actually deliver or whether or not you're gonna just rip me off. So in the meantime, of course, they don't say any of that, but that's what goes on here. What they say is, well, this sounds great, Johnny. Can you send us a proposal and tell us how long you think this might take and how much you think it might cost? Okay. That's what comes out of their mouth. But what they're really saying is, I don't trust you enough to give you a commitment right now. So, as I said, you then go and do the proposal and you make up the pricing because there's no formula for pricing. There is, but you just haven't, you don't know what it is yet, right? There is a pricing formula, by the way. It's a whole other conversation. So what so let me know, by the way, in the comments if any of this is sounding familiar, right? Or maybe I'm just an idiot and I don't know what I'm doing and everyone else has got this figured out. I mean, this was 15 years ago I'm talking about, so I've learned a few things since then. You know, also typically on that initial call, what happens is we talk about the stuff. The stuff that we talk about on that call, right? We talk about plugins, we talk about websites, we talk about SEO, we talk about, you know, social media, we talk about the stuff. And nobody cares about the stuff, right? The last thing that people actually want. I'm gonna talk about the difference between what people want and what they need. The last thing people want is a website. Nobody wants a new website. It's maybe what they need to get them what they actually want. Right? What they want is what's on the other side of the website. And just stay with me here while we peel the onion skin back one layer at a time, right? Why do people want why do people need a website? People need a website because they want what? Let's take a random example and talk about an accounting firm that doesn't need any more clients. They need more recruits, they need graduates from university. So they build a recruitment funnel, right? And there is a fantastic example of this from a crash repair shop, an auto shop in the Sunshine Coast, uh, on the Sunshine Coast here in Queensland. Shout out to Ben Futrell, my buddy uh who works up that way, works up in New South Wales, and he sent me this video of this fantastic uh um father and son team that run this uh crash repair shop called, I don't know what it's called, coastal crash repairs or something. And there's a it's amazing drone footage and it's you know video of them surfing, and it's just incredible. Great interviews with the staff as well about the training they get and the professional development they get. And it's basically a pitch to get panel beaters and auto trimmers and mechanics to come and hang out on the Sunshine Coast, have a great lifestyle with the family, work in a great environment, work for a great company, and get great professional development. They don't want customers, right? They want team members, they want to build a really good team. So uh the uh recruitment strategy that they've put together is basically selling the dream of the lifestyle and professional development. So let's use this as an example. Why do they need a website? They don't need more customers. Why do they need a website? What do they want? They want quality applicants, they want applications from quality candidates. That's what they want, right? The website is like, who cares? They didn't even they didn't, by the way, they don't need a website to do this, right? They need a video and a Google form or a Google or a type form, right? They don't need a website, they need a video on Facebook and YouTube, cut up a couple of short versions, stick them on Instagram, right? Whatever. I don't know if that's still a thing, who knows, right? Put it on TikTok. I've heard good things about that, right? And uh then link that to a type form, right? Come and apply. They don't need a website. And if I was on an initial call, right, and I'm a web designer, because when you're holding a hammer, everything looks like a nail, right? I'm a web designer and this crash repairer's talking to me, and I start thinking about building them a website, and I start talking about the gravity form plugins that we're going to use. And oh, they have this thing that kind of replicates type form, and it kind of looks like a type form, but it's in gravity forms, and we can do this all. And I start telling them about the bullshit, the tech, the stuff. Oh, here's where we did it before. Over, and I, you know, start it's a job interview, right? Then you've lost them. I don't care about the stuff, they care about what's on the other side of the stuff. They want the outcome that the thing delivers, right? Your job, by the way, on this initial call, your job is to stop telling them what you do, stop talking about the stuff, and stop telling them what you do, right? And ask questions. Ask lots of questions, which it can sometimes get a little bit uncomfortable. Because if you have to ask a lot of questions and you have to ask the same question a bunch of different ways, right? So, what is it you guys are trying to? The first question I ask with any prospect is what are you trying to do? Because they're trying to do something and they haven't done it yet, they're struggling, right? Otherwise, that I wouldn't be on a call them. What are you trying to do? Well, I was trying to build a website, but I fixed it. I nailed it, it's done, it's launched, we're getting heaps of traffic, heaps of conversions. I'm all good. So why are we on a call? I don't know. It's a good question. I thought I'd just ring up and brag and tell you how good I am. Fantastic. Bye for now. Have a good day. Let's get back to work, right? No, they're on a call because they're trying to do something and they haven't figured it out. Just I want you to comprehend that for a second. The only time someone puts their hand up and reaches out, whether it's via messenger or text or email or a comment on your post or they phone, whatever, Zoom, whatever, the only reason people want to talk to you is because they have a problem that they haven't solved yet. Right? And typically what happens is we get on a call them and we start going blah, blah, blah, about how good we are and our stuff. Oh, have you seen my portfolio? Oh, we've just hired another designer. And we won this Webby Award once. Right? Who fucking cares? I don't care. No one cares. I want to know how to fix my problem. I walk into a chemist, doc. Oh, well, you're not a doc pharmacist. I have a rash. It's in a really inconvenient spot, and it's getting worse because of the heat. And he says, Well, let me tell you something, son. When I studied medicine at Melbourne University back in 1968, mate, I don't give a shit. My rash is still itchy. You got some cream for me? Or I'll go to the next pharmacy where they sell cream to fix rashes. Right? So stop talking about what you do, stop talking about the cream, stop talking about the stuff, right? Ask questions. Where's the rash? How much does it itch? Is it worse at night or during the day when it's hot? Is it worse when your underwear's on? Does it hurt in the shower? Right? Ask questions. Get a full picture of exactly what their problem is. Right. I don't have a rash. It's okay, it's fine. I'm it's a story, ladies and gentlemen. Right? Uh ask them lots of questions and get a full picture, right? And then really the best way to do this is uh if you can get them to basically, you know, here's I had a mentor once said to me, you want someone to say, Oh, I'm screwed. If they basically say that, if they basically say, Oh, God, I'm screwed, you've got them. You they're right there. They're there. And they'll basically, as long as you can then position what you do as the solution, they'll buy. The way to get them to say, or to kind of, you know, communicate, yep, I'm screwed, is ask lots of questions about what's what's screwed up right now, what's broken, what they're trying to do. Ask questions about what it looks like on the other side of it. So, hey, if you fix this, what would how would you know you fixed it? Well, we'd have applicants coming in, really good quality applicants coming in from all the universities to come and work here at our accounting practice. Okay? How many a week would you like? Well, we want to hire four new graduates this year, and I reckon we're probably gonna need 40 applicants to find the four good ones. Okay. So you want 40 applicants from the major universities to apply to come work here next year so you can choose the top four? Correct. Okay. Why haven't you already done this? So, question number one: what's what are you trying to do? We're trying to get more applicants from grad school to come and apply to work at the accounting practice. Okay. What does it look like if you fixed it? Let's get quantifiable metrics here so we know what success looks like. Great, we've done that. Third question is why haven't you already done this? Or what have you tried that hasn't worked? Like, in other words, where are you stuck? Right? Where are you stuck? What like why can't you just go and do this yourself? There's Google over there, forms.google.com. There you go. Why can't you just do this yourself? Why are you even looking at me as if you're gonna spend lots of money with me to help you fix this problem? Doesn't sound like a complex problem. Forms.google.com. And what you want them to basically say is, I don't have time. I tried that, and I kept going round and round and round in a circle and couldn't even log into my own Google account. Right? Um, I've heard that story before. Um, well, I set up a Google Form, but then I couldn't figure out how to get it in front of all the candidates. I think I need to run ads, don't I? If they start saying things like that, if they start basically suggesting that they're hitting a brick wall, right? Then it's very easy to say, okay, it sound and and by the way, you want them to to give you like as much detail as they can around where they want to be, you know, where they are now, what the other side looks like and where they're stuck, right? And then it's very easy to say, it sounds to me like you're here, you want to get here, and there's a few hurdles in the way. Would you like some help overcoming those hurdles? Right? Pretty simple. Um, so it's not that you don't need leads. I'm just gonna answer this question here, if I can, uh for some reason. Uh let me just um here we go. Uh Jury Byr says, preach it so true. Thank you very much. Michael Cunningham says, so why don't we need leads? Michael, I'm not saying you don't need leads. I'm saying 90% of the time I see people wasting time trying to get leads when they don't have anything to offer the lead in the first place. I can give you leads, seriously. You and I can hang out on Zoom. You tell me who you want as a client. I'll give you twenty five leads for free. It would take me five minutes. I'll give you the trick. D7 leads. Leadfinder.com. Right? There's hundreds of these tools, right? Lead Gorilla, Lead Fuse. Go and get 25 leads for free. Come back to me when you've closed one of them into an $18,000 a year engagement. I mean, isn't that what we all want? A client who's paying us $1,500 a month for a 12-month engagement. Right? I could read you some uh from our Ring the Bell channel in Mavericks Club and in Sales Accelerator, our two coaching programs. I could read I could I could read you some uh uh quotes from those ring the bell channel. Jeanette Elton, who just closed a $25,000 project, right? It's a 12-month engagement, $25,000 from Paid Discovery. So her process was basically ask lots of questions and get to know the client, sell them paid discovery for a small amount of money. After paid discovery, $25,000, 12 months engagement.

Tick.

Ring the bell number one. Right? Simon Kelly, paid discovery, uh $1,200, I think, for paid discovery, $3,000 a month for 12-month engagement. Ring the bell. Um I'm making these up from memory. I went through these last night. Another one of our members, I'll leave some names out of this. Another one of our members just closed. $5,449 in monthly recurring revenue. That equates to $65,388 a year. $65,388 in new annual recurring revenue. Right? Very proactive in lead gen, this gentleman, I must say, very proactive in actually going and finding leads. But why? Because he has a great process and a great offer. He knows what to do with the leads. I once stood on a stage in front of 250 small business owners in Sydney and presented my face off and taught everything I knew about what I called it at that time the online marketing blueprint. This was back in, you know, 1954. And I had no mechanism for following up any of the people that were, by the way, I'm not kidding, lining up nine deep to have their photo taken with me at the end of the talk. And I don't say that to brag, I say this to highlight how much of an idiot I am, right? Or was. Here's my card. Can we have a selfie? Yeah, of course. Thanks for your card. Oh, another one. Oh, thanks for your card. Oh, another one. Oh went home with a backpack full of business cards. Closed about $9,000 worth of one website, I think, because I'm an idiot, right? Should have made $100,000 from that conference. Had no process. Had no, I looked at these business cards. What do I do now? Oh I call them? Oh, hi Maria. It's Troy here. I was on stage last week up in Sydney. It was good, wasn't it? Yeah, it was good, yeah. How are you going? Great. How can I help? Right. Um point is, oh, here we go. Another uh one of our members in the UK got a verbal commitment from a new client for 4k a month marketing package. Right? Now, so I'm kind of showing off now because the people that we work with have a process. So leads are not the problem. Sure, you can get you spend time going and getting leads. But I will say this if you're not if you're getting a lead and you're not talking to at least one out of every 10, like I mean, on the phone, if you're not speaking to at least every one lead out of 10 that you generate, your offer is terrible. And if you're not closing 30% of the people that you talk to, you don't have a process and your offer needs revisiting, right? So uh here's what I want to do for you guys. We have a a um program called paid discovery method. And in that program, there's a script that we give our customers for having what we call a triage phone call, which is that first initial phone call that's an hour long and then ends up with a proposal. No, no, no, forget that. This is a 15 to 20 minute conversation where you can sell paid discovery straight off that phone call, right? I want to give you the script for free. And it's a it's a it's it's part of the entire paid discovery workbook. We've just taken this one piece out of it. I want to give it to you for free. All I want you to do is leave the word triage T-R-I-A-G-E in the comments, and De Oza on our team will reach out, uh, get in touch, she will message you and give you. We're not going to just drop it in the group because we only want to give it to people who are serious and want to take action on this. So she will message you and she will give you the triage paid discovery script. This is how to ask the questions and how to sell paid discovery from a triage call. Why are we doing this? Because I want you guys to go make $1,500 fast. And the fastest way to do that is to sell paid discovery from a triage call, right? I want you to do that because then I want to have a conversation with you guys about scaling your sales process, right? We have programs that can help you do that. But I want to just get you some results in advance, okay? Awesome. I'm going to come back next week and do this again. I have no idea what we're going to talk about. Let us know what you want to learn. Let us know what you want me to cover in these weekly live streams. This has been a lot of fun, and I'm glad we worked out the tech. And I will see you all again next week. All right. Bye for now.

Thanks for listening to the Agency Hour Podcast. Subscribe at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocketcast, Audible, and wherever you like to listen, you can catch all of the Agency Hour episodes on our YouTube channel at youtube.com slash agencymaverics. Or you can get involved. Check out our free Digital Mavericks Facebook group, where we broadcast these episodes live for our community every week, along with a ton of free training. We'll see you there.