Half The Meetings, Twice The Sales – Quality Leads From Prospecting In 2023

Half The Meetings, Twice The Sales – Quality Leads From Prospecting In 2023

Gary hosts a LinkedIn live session with on improving lead quality and sales results by booking fewer but better outbound meetings. He critiques conventional lead-gen thinking that more leads automatically mean more sales, sharing examples like removing car prices on Craigslist tripling calls but reducing sales due to low-quality inquiries, and a failed Facebook group messaging test that booked “good” appointments with no buying intent. Gary defines good meetings as those with decision makers or influencers, emphasizes being someone prospects want to meet (clear identity, authority, and a strong LinkedIn profile with human details), and discusses when the “virtual cup of coffee” works based on targeting. He explains outbound pre-qualification via better targeting, message copy that signals thresholds, optional assistant confirmation calls, and a permission-first approach (offer to send a demo/video, then follow up to book).

Discover:

00:00 Welcome and Setup
01:26 Livestream Housekeeping
03:56 Kickoff and Agenda
07:14 Q&A and Notifications
09:20 Why More Leads Fail
14:44 Garbage Leads Waste Time
17:32 Be Someone Worth Meeting
20:05 Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile
22:40 Virtual Coffee Meetings
25:25 Cold Calling Question
26:36 Zoom Only Meetings
28:25 Outbound Prequalifying Basics
30:03 Targeting That Filters
34:27 Copy That Self Qualifies
37:17 Assistant Confirmation Calls
39:25 Permission Based Content First
43:30 Offer And Event Signup
46:02 Live Q&A Wrap Up
53:34 Final Thanks And Goodbye

Transcript:

[00:00:02] All right. Welcome everybody to half the meetings, twice the sales, how to get better quality leads from prospecting in 2023. We’re just a few minutes out from starting, so, feel free to get yourself a, a beverage and, get, Get ready. We’ll be starting, if you’ve been on one of my, live streams before, you know, I like to start, on time.

So currently my watch is showing it is, 1 56. So you got four minutes. where’s, where’s everybody calling in from? I’m in the Detroit, Michigan area. I’m a little bit in the suburbs, a little bit north of the city in, in a city called Troy. Where, where’s everybody at? I think it’s like 41 degrees here.

Who’s got some nice weather? It must be somebody from California or something, right?

All right. Let’s see. Yep, we got, some people coming on. I can, I can see you there, so, feel free to, lemme know where you’re at. Oh, let’s see here. There we go. Hey Nicole. Nice to have you from, Chesterfield County, Virginia. Welcome.

All right. And if, you’re seeing this video, as you’ve probably figured out, you don’t have to sign up for anything else. There’s nothing else to do, except watch that I watched the live stream. So we’ve kind of switched to this format, for the past few view. Hey, Steve, welcome. Good to see you again.

yep. There will definitely be a, a recording. what, with the live streams now, it makes it pretty easy. what we end up doing is, after the stream is over, it just automatically processes and the replay is usually there, about five minutes later. So it’s kind of a nice, nice technology now, John Paul, gene Paul, John Paul.

Jean Paul, I’m not sure you are not late. You are actually, you’re right on time. We’re about two minutes, from getting started. Kevin, welcome. Good to have you here.

I’m just kind of checking to make sure I’ve got, I’ve got all my screens in front of me here so I can kind of keep track of everything and it, it, it’s getting a little bit, a little bit, crazy here. In terms of, screen real estate, but, all right. I think, I think I got everything situated, so. All right.

if you just hopping on, it looks like we got just a few more people popping on the, the live stream and I’ve, I’ve. Another thing I’ve noticed is like once, once I’m like locked in and going, for whatever reason, I can’t see my live stream numbers, which are way over here, they don’t change anymore. So all of a sudden I’ll look and I’ll say, Hey, you know, we’ve got 25 people.

And then, you know, I’ll get a message from Evan Evan’s, kind of my behind the scenes guy and he’s like, actually, you know, we’re actually at 75 or a hundred, or I think last time we were getting close to 200. But, anyway, that’s neither here nor there. Alright. but yeah, so if you’re just hopping on, we are about one minute away from getting started.

Thanks for coming and, glad, glad to have you here. If, you’d like to put where you’re calling in from on the air where you’re logging in from, I should say in in the chat, let us know you’re here and, we’ll, we’ll get things going. Yeah, just give a few seconds here. I think we’re, we’re just about ready.

All 

[00:03:53] right. Well, let’s do this. Shall we welcome everybody to half the leads, twice the meetings. Let me get my nice little slide show up here. Getting quality meetings from prospecting. So we are gonna put some emphasis in on, on the outbound side of. Of appointment setting, meeting generation, on the business development side today.

some of these, concepts certainly do apply to inbound and even to referrals. but you know, we’re, we’re pretty heavily focused on the outbound bound side of business development and I know a lot of people are, are as well. So I thought it’d be kind of fun to do one from a, from a, an outbound perspective versus just a, you know, ad campaign type of perspective.

So glad to have everybody here. my name is Gary Ruplinger, and with me is, my right hand man, Evan Cosner. I know he doesn’t, he doesn’t have his video on today. That is, that is okay. But, say hi to Evan if you would. he’ll be kind of the one managing questions, helping me kind of keep track of, of everything as they, as they come in.

Yep. I can see. For whatever reason, my, my comments are on a delay today, so I apologize if I’m, I’m missing ’em. Usually there’s, I see the comments right away and then everything else is on about a 22nd delay. For whatever reason, that seems to have changed and now everything’s a little bit delayed, so my apologies if I miss that, miss here.

Miss your question at first, but we will, we will do our best to get to him. That’s why, that’s why I’ve got Evan. He’s, he’s here to keep track all that stuff for me. So on our agenda today, we’re gonna kind of talk about the event, conventional approach, the conventional wisdom from your marketing handbooks and why it often incentivizes the wrong types of, of of things.

And has you kind of focusing on, you know, red herrings if you will. we’re gonna talk about kind of being somebody that somebody wants to meet with because. People meet with humans. It’s a, it’s a human to human interaction. And at least until, you know, bing chat or chat, GPT takes over that for us too.

But for now, it’s still a human thing. we’re talking about kind of the virtual cup of coffee approach. we have a sip of my regular coffee here, and we’re talking about kind of some of the pros and cons of that because I know it’s pretty popular and we’re kind of talking about situations where that might be a good fit.

And then ones where you might want to try and avoid it, especially as you get busier. And have a lot going on. And then we’ll talk about pre-qualifying with outbound, as it’s a very different process from your traditional, marketing funnel. And then we’re gonna open it up for q and a. So today my goal is to actually be done in about 30 minutes, with the content for a change.

I know the last few I’ve done, I’ve gone well over an hour and I wanna make sure we’ve got time for. Q and a. I don’t want to chew up too much of your day. So, I really was working on deleting slides. That was my big project today, is how can I make this shorter, you know, less fluff, more engaging, and just, you know, more, more information for you guys so that, you can, move on with your day.

’cause you know, my whole thing is I, I work with people who are, who are too busy to do their own business development. And, so hopefully you’re, you know, I appreciate you taking the time outta your busy day to, to be with me, but I wanna take up more time than I 

[00:07:13] need, so. A few quick housekeeping things.

As I kind of mentioned at the beginning, I am on about a 20 to 32nd delay. So anything that, you’ve got coming in, is, is a little bit delayed. in terms of comments and things like that. And, for some reason today all of my comments are kind of locked up. so last, the last one I saw was about five minutes ago.

But if I’m looking way over here at this screen, I can see that there are a bunch of of comments. So, you know, hi to Hey there, Oscar in Mexico City Cater. Thanks for joining us from Paris. Nice and appreciate you, you coming on 8:00 PM that’s, appreciate you, you joining us after hours here. Greg from, from Walla Walla.

And, I see a few more of you, Christie. Welcome. So, thanks everybody for, for jumping on. but yeah, if you have questions, do put them in the comments. Evan. like I said, he’s, he’s the other guy right down there below me here on the, on the slop live stream. He’ll be taking, he’ll be kind of keeping track of those helping.

Helping me see them when it’s, when we’ve got kind of, I’ll open things up for, for q and a here and there. so I probably won’t catch ’em all Instream today ’cause for whatever reason, some technical difficulties. But, just put those, put those questions out there. I always love having them. And, I’ll, I’ll get to as many as I can.

And if you do want notifications for, any of our next live events, you can get on our notifications. It’s free to sign up. Basically, my network has gotten so large that we just can’t invite everybody to, to the events anymore. So instead of getting that nice little invite in LinkedIn is, all of a sudden now, you know, we’re not, we just can’t get ’em all out to you guys.

So my apologies on that in advance. But if you, you wanna be on the list to get them Pipelineology dot com slash events, just your first name and email and we’ll make sure you’re on the list to let everybody know. Alright. So I think that’s it. Let’s jump in. 

[00:09:19] Let’s do this. Alright, so here’s kind of the conventional wisdom to kinda lead generation business development.

basically anything that happens prior to sales, right? So it’s that all leads, you know, are, are good leads and basically if you’ve got, all you need to do to get more sales is get more leads and. Man, you know, I, you know, when, when I was, when I was a young man in my twenties reading, you know, marketing books and getting all excited about this kind of stuff, I, I drank the Kool-Aid too.

I, I, I absolutely did. I thought, oh man, all these, all these businesses are stupid. You know why these business owners have, have no idea what they’re talking about. All, all they need to do is just get, get more leads and well, then finally, I got a chance to kind of put my money where my mouth is and, you know, my corporate career.

Worked in both the marketing and business development, ran in those departments and Definitively prove that wasn’t the case. So let me, lemme give you a few examples here. ’cause I, I just find, I find this stuff kind of entertaining. So you guys remember Craigslist? I was actually shopping for a car on, on Craigslist, recently.

Man, that thing is just, is not like 10 years ago. It was still, still pretty useful, like these days. Just nothing. But, you guys still use it. I, I, I, I, I hadn’t probably in years, and I probably won’t be back, but 10 years ago or so, it was a really, it was a good, place for, at least car dealers to get their, their vehicles posted.

And we had a vendor who helped facilitate all that. ’cause it’s Craigslist and they’re, they don’t, they, they have non-existent customer support. So we had a vendor who kind of built software and took care of that for us. And basically the goal was put our, put our vehicles out there and generate phone calls and leads, sell the cars.

Right. That’s that’s what you’re trying to do. And Well, you know, we, we got to talking with our, with our vendor and said, you know, okay, calls, calls seem a little bit down, you know, we’re not doing great here. You know, what, what suggestions do you have? And I said, oh, we’ve got one. We, we’ll, we can triple the number of calls you get and.

All we need to do, we’ll just take the, take the prices off. And that sounded strange to me. But, you know, I’m like, they’re, they’re, they’re the experts. They’re the people we’re paying to do this. Let’s give it a try. And sure enough calls tripled. You know, tons and tons of calls coming in, people asking, about the cars.

And, you know, we, so we did that for I think about a month or so, and, you know, I talked to the, to the girls who were taking the calls and said, how are we doing on them? It’s like, everybody just wants to know the price and then when I tell ’em to hang up, right. And we kind of looked at our numbers and we, we’d been, you know, probably, we were selling a handful of vehicles every month from, from it before, and then all of a sudden we went to maybe one, sometimes zero.

So talked to, you know. So we talked to the vendor again. They said, you gotta train your salespeople. Right? You know, it’s, we’re getting you the leads. It’s your salespeople. Your salespeople aren’t doing their job. You know, your business development. They’re weak. They’re, they’re not doing it. So we said, all right.

And, and at this point, I’m like, you, this doesn’t sound right at all. but, okay. All right. Let’s give it a try. two weeks more. Two weeks more go by. Still garbage. I was like, then finally the, you know, sales, the sales manager’s gonna get involved. We’re gonna give ’em the, ’cause our salespeople are all bad, all of ’em, right?

You know, these are professionals, but, clearly they’re bad at this. And, finally, you know, sales managers take the calls and that lasted for about a week. Put the prices back on because, it’s just, it was garbage. The leads were garbage, right? They’re getting more of them. And ultimately, this, this turned out well for us.

We, we kind of revamped the way we, we formatted everything and it turned into a really good source for us. But, and, and more than once though, in, during, during the times we worked with this vendor, they told us to take the prices back off of, we said, no. Just, you know, it it ’cause, ’cause it didn’t produce quality leads.

And if, you know, basically garbage leads are garbage in, garbage out. Right? instead of this, when, when it fails, blame sales. Basically if, if your leads aren’t good to start with, you can have a really good sales team that, you know, maybe they can convert some here and there, but ultimately you’re just creating a whole lot of unnecessary work for everybody involved in the process.

So. and you know, we’ve got, we’ve got lots of, lots of examples I’ve seen from that, right? I worked with some guys, even a guy recently who pitched me on Facebook, said, Hey, I can, I’ll message these people in, in various groups for, for one of your clients. I said, all right, well, let’s give it a try. I don’t, I don’t think that as long as I, I don’t think it’s gonna work, but, hey, you said you got the results, so let’s give it, we’ll give it a test for a couple weeks, and it was the, the same type of thing, just.

Totally the wrong, you know, every once in a while I’ll schedule an appointment. It was their garbage. He, he would schedule people who said, Hey, you know, I’ll, I’ll meet with you, but if it costs money, I’m not interested. And on his list, good appointment. And I, like I said, oh gosh, this is a disaster. So we stopped that too.

[00:14:43] So. Basically what I’m saying is, you know, qual quality leads matter. You know, you can’t just, any lead source does, you know, isn’t gonna produce the results you’re looking for. And I know a lot of times when we’re working with busy people, the last thing they need is more quality leads taken up their time.

And I think I’m getting ahead of myself. Exactly. So, right. When you’re busy, the last thing you need is more meetings with people who are just going to waste your time. I know, right? You’re, if you’re a busy consultant, you know, and people say, Hey, you know, I’d love to kind of. Kind of pick your brain. Would love to kind of meet with you and talk about what you do.

Maybe we could be referral sources for each other. I, I don’t know about you, but I, my, my best referrals. Come from customers, past clients, past and present, who’ve at some point paid me money. so my referral partners, I, I kind of tell, I I, I’ve kind of taken a very cynical attitude towards networking these days of I, if I get more customers, I’ll get more referrals.

and if you’re not interested in becoming a customer and you’re probably not gonna provide good referrals. I know. I know. I’m such a, I’m getting old man. I’m getting old. Alright, so let’s talk about kind of getting better, getting quality meetings with qualified people. So, what do I mean by a good meeting?

So, with a decision maker or, or a decision influencer, right. Especially as you get more complex sales. you know, at at larger companies, the person that you meet with may not be the one who’s ultimately gonna make the decision, but they, they sure as heck can influence it and they sure as heck can kill it.

So, I’m not one of the people who says I only ever exclusively meet with decision makers. No, because if you, if you work the influencers right, it’s actually an easier sale. I know, I know. That sounds, that’s, again, that kind of goes against the grain of, you know, only ever meet with the decision maker if you don’t meet with them.

No meeting. And, you know, I’ve, I, having sat on the other side of this desk where people would pitch me stuff, I, I would get those conversations, Hey, you’re the decision maker I said. Nope, I’m not. But I’m the one you get to meet with. And some people, you know, some people were not okay with that. Most were ’cause most kind of knew how it worked.

But every once in a while you’d get that person who said, well, can we reschedule this for a time when they’ll be available? I would tell ’em, Nope, sorry, it’s me or nothing. But anyway. Let’s talk about kind of before we talk about meeting with them and kind of how we’re gonna do that. And in fact, Evan, can you let me know what questions I’m missing?

I, I know, I, I try to, I try to kind of keep up with these and since my comments aren’t working, I can’t see ’em. Do we have any questions or anything that I should be, covering right now before I move on to this kind of next section? 

[00:17:21] Evan: Oh, not at the moment, no. 

[00:17:22] Okay. You guys are quiet today. Alright, well, no problem. Still appreciate you being here anyway. Let’s kind of jump into 

[00:17:31] it. So being somebody that they want to meet with. So before, like I said, we kind of focus on them and how we get them to, to meet with us. Let’s focus on us and being somebody that they might actually want to have a meeting with. Right. Like I said, humans are still meeting with other humans, especially these days where, where Zoom is popular, you, you get this human being type of interaction.

I, I’m actually really a big fan ’cause you kind of can, I don’t like phone calls. I really hate, I really hate phone calls. so Zoom is, is is really great for me ’cause I could see the other person and I feel like it’s a much more relaxed environment. It’s more visually immersive. So what do we do?

So first of all, if you’re scheduling a meeting, the prospect should know who they’re meeting with. And I know this sounds obvious, especially if, if you are doing your own business development, then you can kind of probably skip this one. But as you start to kind of think about ways to scale this or, or bring people in, or, you know, maybe you as the owner are hiring, a sales person or maybe you’re.

You, you’ve just got enough capacity in your business where you’ve got, you know, multiple people doing outreach. So you want to make sure that the prospect knows who they’re meeting with. And I’m giving you an example here of how we do it, simply because I know I, I say this a lot of times, and then you say, well, how would you word that?

How do you say that? So we just try and say something, anything nice about them. It doesn’t have to be, be too much here. So, and unfortunately, I’m gonna gonna move, head here, but, so you can see I, you know, mentioned here that they’re the founder. Or that I’m the founder here, so this is, this is one of the messages that we’ll send out.

And, you know, basically we take kind of a, a lighthearted approach to it. Hey, he’s the brains of the operation type of thing. So, And, and just, you know, kind of, kind of go from there. but all of a sudden it kind of, it kind of frames things right? You know, you are meeting with the, the founder, okay? So I’m kind of moving up the scale.

I’m kind of meeting with, you know, somebody at the company who theoretically knows what they’re supposed to be doing, right? So it kind of builds that authority in the prospect’s mind and, you know, just kind of has a little bit of fun and lets ’em know, hey, yeah, you’re, they’re, they’re the one who really knows what this stuff is all about.

and you know, now all of a sudden they’re. If they don’t think they’re meeting with you anymore, and it doesn’t kind of cause that confusion and, and, and additional, points of 

[00:20:03] friction. So, but what can happen here is often does is, whether, whether this is you, and we’re gonna use LinkedIn as an example here, ’cause everybody’s here on a, on a LinkedIn live stream, but this would apply to pretty much any place you’re doing outreach, even to email.

but so let’s take a look at it first though, kind of from a. A, a LinkedIn standpoint of making your profile, you know, attractive to other potential prospects. and this is far from the best, you know, profile you could ever do, but I figured if, we’ll, we’ll at least use myself as a Guinea pig here.

so one things you wanna do is you wanna make sure you’ve got a nice custom background, something, you know, color is good, but you know, something that kind of represents you, has kind of a little, maybe just, you know, one, one sentence or kind of your, your unique selling proposition or something like that.

mine, currently I swapped it out, ’cause I. Most of the times now, I just wanna put whatever my, my topic for my next meeting is, in this case getting better quality meetings. So from prospecting, I, I just kind of put these in the, in the backgrounds now and right with think tools like Canva, it takes all of about, you know, 30 seconds to make changes to these types of things now.

real easy type of stuff. So, yeah. Put a picture of, of a person here if you’ve got ones of you speaking. I don’t have any recent ones ’cause you know, since the pandemic I’ve, I’ve done everything virtual, so I just have some headshots from when we did the podcast promo stuff. you know, a tagline here that lets them know, you know, what your position is, you can put.

You here, you know what, what you do and then some other interesting things about you. And these interesting things make a difference, right? You, you wanna, you want to have be, again, this is back to going to being human. So I put things like meme, I fix, I, I love when people send me little animated gifts, and a beer enthusiast.

And still to this day, that is the one that probably generates the most conversation is. And Right. It’s a nice icebreakers and they’re like, Hey, you know, I’m, I think two or three messages yesterday from people who, you know, talking about different types of beers that they tried. You know, we talked about what, you know, what, what I thought was good recently, and you know, all of a sudden we’re, you know, we’re, we’re having a conversation, not will those turn into business.

Maybe, maybe not. but it at least gets that conversation, start, starts to break the ice. And, you know, we’re an outreach company. Eventually, we’ll, we’ll reach back out with a, with a pitch to ’em, but for now we can just kind of, you know, warm them up 

[00:22:39] to us a little bit. So I. Let’s kind of move to that next section here of what type of meeting do you want?

Do you want somebody who, you know, they’re, they’re kind of pre-sold on you, or are you more of the, Hey, I just wanna meet with, with good people? And this really kind of depends a lot on what, you know, your, your end goal is what you offer. so I do wanna bring this one up because I know it’s pretty common to kind of, Hey, you know, we just connected.

Would love to kind of meet, meet for that virtual cup of coffee. And like I told you earlier on. I avoid these, like the play as much as possible, but a lot of people will say yes to them. ’cause ’cause they don’t, they don’t mind them. And actually you’ve got clients who find them to be very, very valuable.

but here’s kind of the key if you’re gonna do the, the virtual cup of coffee approach, and that is good targeting. And that’s, that’s what makes it work, is if you say, Hey, you know, I wanna meet, you know, if I have the, the right connections at the right, if it’s the right person, right, the, the VP of Vex, Y or Z at this type of company that does this type of work, you know what?

It doesn’t matter. I want to meet with them because maybe they’re not a prospect right now. But they very well could be. And you know, it’s a, it’s a tough industry to break into. So just meeting with these people and having conversations is, is what we’re trying to do. And I’d say maybe, you know, three out of every 10 clients want that type of approach where they say, you know, just, just get me in conversations with people and I’ll take it from there.

So, like I said, it, it is, it is certainly a valuable approach, but here’s the thing you gotta keep in mind with that, and this is why it can be a little bit trickier is without, you know, kind of a clear cut, here’s what I want to talk about, kind of agenda. It can be a little bit, you know, more open-ended and it’s, it’s tougher to kind of structure it in right there.

It’s gonna be kind of that networking meet and greet, and there might be no commercial intent, no buying intent from them whatsoever. And you kind of take those, take the good with the bad there. but I kinda wanna bring it up again just ’cause ’cause I know it’s fairly common, so I kind of wanted to give you some insights into really the, the ways you can kind of use it.

Right. And the big thing is, you know, make sure you’re targeting the right people. If it’s just kind of free for all, anybody, you’re, you’re gonna spend a lot of time on, on, you know, meet and greet Zoom calls that you know. Do nothing but take up your time. But again, I’m a, I’m a networking cynic, so, you know, take it with a grain of salt, I suppose, for 

[00:25:23] me.So let’s talk about the way I like to do it here, real quick. Evan, am I missing any comments here? Like I can see I’m missing some comments here. What, what do we got? 

[00:25:35] Evan: Yeah, we got a question from, John Paul, and they asked, how do you handle making B2B cold calls? 

[00:25:42] John Paul, I’ll be perfectly honest, we have eliminated cold calling completely from, from what we do.

just. It’s, it’s gotten to the point where it’s, it’s hard to, so hard to get a good phone number, for people. Especially with all the, you know, even today still, right? You got a lot of people who are still working from home. It’s tough to, tough to reach ’em. we’ve, we’ve kind of just eliminated it ’cause just wasn’t, wasn’t kind of doing, getting the ROI, we’ve got, I know I’ve got some colleagues who still, you know, swear by it.

But, you know, for us. From a, from a quality appointment type of approach, it, it wasn’t producing the results we wanted. And, so we, we just, took it out of the, outta the rotation and, But, it is a good question. I know a lot of, like I said, a lot of people still use it. like I said, it just, it wasn’t a fit for, for what we could offer anymore.

Evan, anything else? 

[00:26:36] Evan: Yeah, we have one last one from Christie and they asked, do you only offer a Zoom call or do you give them an option for a Zoom or a phone call? 

[00:26:45] me personally, I only offer Zoom calls anymore. I a, again, this is kind of one of those, before the pandemic, it was mostly phone calls.

Now that everybody kind of was forced into it, it’s what I prefer, like, like I said earlier, personally, I personally hate phone calls. so at this point I just say it’s, it’s a Zoom call or, or nothing. Or, or, or teams or Google meet or whatever you want. I mean, every, I try to use. Zoom because I think it’s the most familiar, but if they’re, you know, heart set on teams or, or meets, I, they work fine.

but if I’m setting it up, it’s just, it’s a, it’s a zoom. ’cause it’s just, I think, I feel like it, it’s for me, I know at this point it’s gonna be a more effective meeting if we can see each other. And that way if we need to, I can pull in any visual aids or something that I wanna show somebody. And, you know.

Most of the time, it’s, most of the time it’s just sitting and talking to ’em. But maybe, you know, 20, you know, maybe about 30 or 40% of the time, boom, I’m gonna grab a flow chart and then they can see it and I kind of walk ’em through it. Or, Hey, I’m gonna grab some examples, or, Hey, lemme show you kind of like behind the scenes of this campaign, so that, you know, obviously things you can’t do in a phone call.

and sometimes those, those visual aids really help the, the prospect kind of connect the dots of what you’re trying to say in ways that your, your explanations. Just might not, might not do. alright. I think, is that, is that all of ’em that we’ve got? 

[00:28:11] Evan: Yeah, that’s all currently. 

[00:28:12] Okay. Great. Questions, we’ll keep going on here and like I said, just keep ’em, keep ’em coming in and I’ll have Evan kind of read ’em off to me as they.

As they, as we kind of hit, kind of pause points. So, but appreciate those and we’ll, we’ll keep 

[00:28:24] going here. So if, if you want the better quality meetings where you say, you know what, I’m, I’m, I’m busy. I want people who, who know what we’re gonna talk about. They, they’ve shown some degree of interest in this.

but how do you, how do you pre-qualify somebody outbound because. Let’s be honest, it’s not inbound. These aren’t referrals and people are not gonna jump through a bunch of hoops when you approach them. Right? And. And, and let’s be honest, even top, top-notch prospects just aren’t gonna jump through hoops at all.

They’re, they’re expecting you to kind of, to cater to them. And this is, this is especially true if you are doing outreach so you know, scheduled before. So if you do kind of a whole, Hey, before I get this scheduled, hey, I just wanted to, you know, ask you a few questions. Are you, are you the decision maker or should I invite anybody else?

What kind of, you know, budget, you know, if we move forward, what kind of budget are you ha all that type of stuff is, is gonna turn nine outta 10 people off and they’re just gonna stop engaging. And now, instead of, you know, getting, you know, 10 good calls, now you’re down to one. It’s probably a really good call, but.

Is, is it, is it worth TA turning off the other nine who probably were good? ’cause if your targeting’s good, the rest of it’s gonna be good. just ’cause you wanted to really pre-qualify them. I, I would say probably, probably not. So there are more subtle ways to do it and I’ve kind of alluded to the first one here, and really this 

[00:30:02] is by far the most important one for, for really any type of, of approach to getting, getting is getting meetings, is getting your targeting right to begin with. so kind of a quick example here, let’s say, we’ll go back to, to the, the car business, right? ’cause everybody knows what car dealerships are and I’ve worked in them for, for a number of years.

So, let’s say that you’re, you’ve got a, your product to sell, but you want, you want, dealerships that are spending. Let’s say at least, $40,000 a month in advertising. ’cause you know, your, your package tends to run, I’ll just say 10,000 a month. And, and you wanna make sure that they can afford that.

Right. And your little, your little lot, you know, on the, the corner that’s got, you know, five or 10 cars, right? You kind of know the ones that I’m, I’m talking about that kind of the hand drawn signs and usually the little inflatable guy out front. Right. And you, you know, those guys aren’t, aren’t the right fit.

So, how, how do you make sure that they’re, they’re doing that right? And dealers are not gonna tell you. You can ask. I’ve, I’ve had people ask me, it’s like, what kind of budget do you guys have? I tell ’em, that’s none of your, none of your GD business. but it’s, it’s you, there’s some easy shortcuts you could take there.

One, are they a franchise dealer? Right. It has Toyota, Ford, gm. Right. Do they have one of the big, you know, manufacturing signs that they can sell new cars? If you have that question answered, if it’s a yes, you’re gonna skip all the other ones, you know that they’ve got a budget for it. Unless it’s like a really niche manufacturer, you know, if it’s like, like a Ferrari dealer or something really, you know, Bentley, as, And so when some of these like super high ends where everything’s, everything’s different.

But, for, for a typical manufacturer, you can just say, okay, that, that solves the rest of my questions. I, I don’t have to worry about are they pre-qualified for what we offer? we know they can afford it. so you just target those and you’re all set. But let’s say that you’re prob, you’re probably not a car dealer.

The one of you guys is in heavy machinery. I saw that. that’s, is that John Paul? so perhaps, perhaps that’s more of a fit for you, kind of knowing, you know, what kind of place they are. But, some of the other things you can look at that say, okay. If my clients tend to be, you know, and they tend to work at companies that have at least 50 employees, and their job title is typically the vice president of, of, procurement.

you know, and the company has at least an annual revenue of, 50 million. and, you know, they, they currently, use, Salesforce as their CRM. You can find those targets, right? You can. You can use technology. A lot of it, you know, even, even with LinkedIn searches with some of their more advanced tools, you can find most or all of those, those things.

So now you can say, well, instead of just targeting everybody who’s got that maybe one job title or just targeting every company that has that. That revenue number you can get really specific in terms of, of industry and, and say, you know what, the people that you know I work with have not been in their position long.

They’ve only been there for less than a year. So they’re open to things, right? If they’ve been there too long, they’re very kind of closed off and they kind of had, they’re set in their ways. They’re not open to new solutions. Or it could be the opposite where you say, you know, somebody, financial advisors is wanna know, we’ve done in the past where you say, you know, new financial advisors never have any money.

So gimme guys who only have been doing this for at least five years or 10, I only want to connect and talk to them. right. So lots of different ways to kind of think about your targeting, think about who your, your current clients are and kind of what commonalities they have and. Kind of go, go from there.

So if you can get your, qualify your targeting, right? This, like I said, if, if everybody you meet is like, well they’re, they’re the right people, I wanna meet with them, that’s when the virtual cup of coffee comes in. But let’s say we want to go a little bit deeper, how do we pre-qualify a little bit more?

Like I said, we’ve kind of gone over, you know, different types of parameters we can put in place when we’re trying to find them. But let’s say, well, we still need to do more and, I’ll give you an example here, 

[00:34:26] but. We can use copy, right? The way we write the messages, to let them know who we wanna work with to let them basically qualify themselves.

And, we’ve run into this, numerous times. Well, we’ve kind of gone through all the other ones and we still, you know, the, we couldn’t quite dial it in just targeting wise. There was some noise in the lists. So, saying, you know, Hey, you know, we help companies doing a million dollars a year in revenue.

Turned that into 5 million within 18 months. So what did you do there? Well, we just gave them kind of the, the floor of what that revenue number needs to look like for who we wanna work with. So then if we didn’t ask to, to meet with them or send them information, oftentimes they’re gonna say, yeah, you, yeah, you can go ahead and send the information.

But you know, we’re, we’re not quite at that level yet. or you offer to meet with them. I say, Hey, you know, I don’t, I don’t think it’d be a good fit. We’re, we’re just not, we’re not at that. We’re not at that threshold. At this point and, last year we worked with a, a person who did consulting for nonprofit organizations and we ran into pretty much exactly this type of, of scenario where her work, she needs to, she needed companies that were doing, at least, I believe was about a million dollars a year in types, in terms of donations.

And it, it’s one of those, you can do that search by hand, but, you know, our targeting tools couldn’t accurately select that. And some of our, our, our things that we typically look at, like number of employees just weren’t relevant. ’cause nonprofits are weird in terms of how much money they can have coming in for employees.

whereas, you know, three people, 10 people, 15 people, didn’t really matter that much. I know nonprofits are strange. But, so we just put in the copy, you know, Hey, I work with nonprofits, you know, I help nonprofits doing, at least a million, getting at least a million dollars a year in donations. get more, corporate support.

And now we had people. Kind of qualify themselves. ’cause we had a lot of people who were happy to talk to her, but we’re nowhere near that level beforehand. And then, oh, now we’re getting people who are usually in, in that type of space, you know, and you, you still got the occasional one, but for the most part were, you know, able to eight, eight times out of 10, filter out the people who, you know, that are too, too small or they’re just getting started and we couldn’t quite.

Tell from our other targeting. So we just told, you know, in our copy, we just kind of subtly put that in there, just kind of letting ’em know, Hey, here’s what we do. Here’s kind of those, what, what those look like, what those types of thresholds look like without making them fill out any type of form or, you know, do any of that.

Again, like I said, people aren’t gonna jump through hoops, especially with 

[00:37:15] outbound. And now one optional thing, that you can do, and that is have an assistant call 24 hours prior to the appointment. and I, I would have it recommended actually be somebody who’s not. Not you. ’cause it kind of, it’s a, it’s a good positioning type of thing.

And like I said, this one’s very optional, how we haven’t found it necessary for the majority of clients. But every once in a while, especially if you’ve got a lot of volume coming through, this is the type of position that would, would make sense. Where hey and you, you can kind of use that to a, confirm the call and then maybe get two or three questions answered just so.

in the, in basically the, the way you would kind of phrase that is, you know, just to help you know, Gary, prepare for the call. just had a couple questions and then you can ask two or three that aren’t, aren’t too invasive, but kind of at least move things forward in terms of a little bit of prequalification.

So, Things you can do. Like I said, people don’t answer their phone that much anymore. So, we, we, we haven’t found it necessary for most of, of our clients. We mostly, but we mostly work with, consultants, where things are a little bit, bit smaller. But if you’ve got like a big, you know, big campaigns, lots and lots of, of of people kind of working together for a big sales team, this might be a position that would, would make sense to do, or, or for someone to kind of, to fill in.

So. and, and that’s really kind of what I got today is, you know, I, I kind of wanna just kind of share that, some of these, these with you. ’cause you know, it’s, it’s one of those. We all, we all wanna get more sales, but we don’t wanna spend, you know, twice as much time to get twice as many sales. So I kind of wanted to give you some strategies that I, I know we use internally, for, for this exact purpose of how do we get fewer calls on the calendar but get more sales.

And it’s through some of these techniques. And the kind of this last one here, has, has kind of been the one that kind 

[00:39:24] of. Really, really drives it home is we, we don’t start by asking for meetings, right? If you’ve, you’ve reached out to me, that’s not the first thing we ask for. and I had a guy kind of mention this to me yesterday.

So I thought I would kind of, or ask me a question about this yesterday, and I thought I’d, I’d cover it here in a little bit more, more detail. But, we offered to send somebody information, Hey, can I send you a demo video of what we do? Now that is a very, that’s a look, right? That’s a pretty small ask.

And you can type yes, and you know what? Something’s gonna come and you don’t have to do anything, right? You’re not agreeing to a meeting, you’re not taking 15 or 30 minutes out of your day to meet with somebody. They’re just gonna send you, you know, a video or, or a PDF or a case study or, or something that they think might be ever so slightly interesting to you.

But the question I had from somebody was, do you find that it is more effective to get permission to send these than to send, just send it directly. And it, it’s a really good question. And we used to do it the other way where we just send the link out and it was reasonably effective. So why, why would we stop doing that?

and mostly it kind of comes down to, Plat, the, the kind of the logistics of sending links now through platforms like, like LinkedIn, email, Facebook Messenger, whatever, is, and that if you’re sending links, one like, whoa, LinkedIn’s looking and say, Hey, you sent a link, oh, that’s on a different site.

Oh, Arnold, we better warn the person if they click on this link. We don’t, we don’t wanna, we don’t wanna be associated with anything that could be a scam. Right? Things like that. and it all of, so all of a sudden instead of something that gets permission based and get, all of a sudden the trust is higher.

Now we’ve actually gone in the other direction sending that link out now, and we lowers the trust, both on the platform and in the eyes of the person who sees it. So, it is kind of a, a, a long-winded answer to say, you know what? We, we have found that it does in fact reduce the number of responses and it reduces the number of meetings.

But it increases that quality more so than, than kind of doing it the other way around where you just kind of broadcast out your link and, and send it. So. That is, that is kind of how we, we’ve approached that. And the big thing is if you do that though, you gotta have somebody, you gotta have a system or something in place to follow up on it because what, what you imagine is gonna happen, you’re gonna say, oh, you know, we’re gonna, we’re gonna give ’em, send them this, To this page on this website, and it’s gonna have all this information and all these case studies and, you know, testimonials and all that stuff. And they’re just gonna feel compelled to, to book an appointment. So we’re gonna have calendar links, you know, schedule your call here, those little buttons, right?

You guys, you guys have seen those probably dozens, if not hundreds of times. and in an outbound scenario, guess what? That’s too big of a hoop for somebody to jump through. and they don’t, they don’t book a call. They might go, they go watch it. They might enjoy it and every once in a while, yes, somebody does, but the vast majority of them don’t.

So what do you do? Go back. You follow up. Hey, just checking back. Just wanted to see if you had a chance to check out that video. We’d love to get something on the calendar. Right now, if they’ve watched it, they’ve engaged. And again, if they’re not interested, you know what they’re gonna tell you. They’re gonna tell you no.

So, so if they’re saying yes, it, it is likely that at this point they’re a little bit more engaged, they’re a little bit more interested, and it probably makes sense to meet with them. Again, and you didn’t have to go through that kind of brute force prequalification of Well, you know, I want to meet with you, but here’s some questions I have.

No, you, if you’ve, if you’ve done everything else kind of that we’re talking about and you kind of set the stage and, and expectations, you, they’re, they’re good. They’re good. So, we’re gonna finish up here then. Because I know, I know. I said I was trying to go for about 30 minutes, and I know we’re just, we’re 39 minutes, so I thought pretty close 

[00:43:28] today. But real quick for anybody who says, Hey, you know what, I know we could use help. I’m, I am too busy to do the business development work, or we just don’t have the, the team for it or the infrastructure in place for. that is what we offer is kind of helping schedule meetings, kind of doing this outreach in a way that produces a quality, o quality over quantity approach.

Last thing we wanna do is waste your time with, with meetings. So we wanna kind of focus in on doing. Just getting, helping get good ones and good meetings. So if it’s something you’re looking at, like I said, not, I’m not gonna make a, make a big, big sell here, but you can schedule an appointment with me@theappointmentlab.com.

that’ll put you directly on my calendar. and there’s no, there are no prequalification steps, so you don’t have to fill out anything. It’s just if you’ve, if you’ve been on this, webinar now for the last 40 minutes, you’re probably qualified. So, Well now I guess we can open it up for some q and a.

and real quick here, before I get into those, if you, like I said, if you are interested in more events like these that you try and give, you know, put these out once or twice a month. And like I said, we can’t get everybody invited anymore. So, Pipelineology dot com slash events. We’ll make sure you get on our email list where we send that all out.

So that will make sure you hear about it. Otherwise, it’s kind of a. Coin flip. I think we can get about 50% of people. If you’re in, if you’re in business and consulting on LinkedIn, there’s a good chance you’ll get it. If you’re in marketing and advertising, it’s probably about 30%, and if you’re outside of those industries, there’s maybe only a 10% chance that we get that far down the list.

So, And unfortunately I can’t kind of say, oh, these are the people that attended for last time and just invite all them at, there’s no easy way to do that, unfortunately. So, but if you sign up, that’ll get you on the list here. So, Evan, let me see here. I’m gonna take a look at the, I got some of my, my, my, comments started working again here.

So I’ll take a look here and see. So, Evan, if you’ve got any that kind of queued up, let me know. Yeah. one person here that then, I don’t see their name, but let’s see here. Let’s grab, let’s read it out. So link from a LinkedIn user. So I’m guessing I’m not connected enough to you. by the way, feel free to send me a, an invite to connect on LinkedIn, but just tell me, Hey, you were on the, on the.

on this, on this live stream? ’cause I get quite a few and I end up ignoring, probably about half 

[00:46:01] of them. but sounds like you were saying not to use the ban budget accountability, need timing question that almost all sales coaches suggest to use. Is that the case? I am, I am telling you that, you probably don’t need it in, in an outbound environment.

You know, we’ve, I’ve had, I think one client who really subscribed to this, and here’s a, you know, they, they had the, they had their pricing was such that they had the budget. To basically do 10 times the amount of work and had three people who would take the calls to do the qualification process. So they had many more layers and a lot more infrastructure.

And like I said, their pricing started at, $180,000 for a project. So there, there was enough to go around there. But this, like I said, these are things that, with kind of the techniques I’m showing you there, you, you can get around needing to kind of, kind of do this, And, you know, it’s really part of, part of the discovery of actually having that meeting to kind of figure it out.

You don’t have to try and do it in advance is what I’m, I’m trying to say. I hope that answers your question, but, yeah, we, we’ve, we’ve kind of said, you know what, it, it’s, it’s sounds good in theory, but like I said, it doesn’t always do what, what you want it to do here. And, Evan, what else we got?

[00:47:41] Evan: We have a question from, let see, Josh Adams, they asked, they were curious what type of business it was that you helped achieve the growth from 1 million to 5 million in sales in 18 months. 

[00:47:51] That was, that one was, was an anonymized one. so I know sometimes it’s, it’s you, you do in this stuff that’s, like one of my case studies we’ve got was for a company that, we, we helped them, add 2000 employees and.

what was it? It was something like 25 million a year. but I can’t ever send that case study out ’cause it, it’s too, it’s too much for, for most, most prospects. Right. If I’m working mostly with, with, With, with consultants where it’s small, it’s 10, 10 employees or less, it just doesn’t even set that sounds like pie in the sky.

Totally unrealistic stuff. So I try and send out the ones that say, you know, here, here’s the ones where we helped them close, you know, $50,000 in new contracts or a hundred thousand, things like that. so that one isn’t actually from anybody and specifically that’s just kind of how we, the approach we use for companies like that.

so, But, good to see you again, Josh. thanks for hopping on today. I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Evan, what else we got? 

[00:49:02] Evan: Yeah, we got a question from Steve. Do you think it is too soft to acknowledge when engaging a prospect that they may not be buying si in the buying cycle at this time, but that when they are in the future, we’d like to be in your Rolodex?

Oh, in other words, you’re not selling a product when the customer is in buying mode, but eventually being confident one day they will be. 

[00:49:26] so I guess, from a, I’m kind of trying to think where this would, would come into play. So I’m, I’m assuming what we’re doing here is, is LinkedIn connections. And in which case, really it’s, if you’re building connections on LinkedIn, that’s kind of, that’s kind of doing that, that job, for you. So, I would, I would probably, I feel like you’re gonna get a lesser response to that if your goal is just to, you know, have, be there for ’em.

Just do the, do the virtual cup of coffee type of meeting. and rather than. This type of wording is, Hey, you know, I’m, I’m, I just want to, you know, have a virtual cup of coffee with my new LinkedIn connections. I think you’ll probably get a lot more mileage from that. And this is, these are all things, you know what you can kind of tell ’em on the call, you know, Hey, I just like to meet with you.

You know, I know, you know, everybody’s like trying to pitch you stuff. We’re just, you know, letting wanna, mostly we wanna let you know we’re out here so that, you know, in the future. If you have a need, we’re we’ve met. You can put a name to the face, but I, I probably, I probably wouldn’t word it like that.

I guess, but overall, I mean that’s, that’s kind of the virtual cup of coffee approach is, Hey, I want to meet these people so that if they do have a need, hopefully they remember me. You know, and if you do do that type of thing, do something to be memorable. Like follow up with like a Handwrytten note or thank you card or something like that so that they actually remember you, right?

Something that shows up. You know, you meet with somebody here, it’s still, you know, you’re still talking like glass on a screen. It’s still virtual. Get something tangible that they can hold in their hands. Sticky note or a box of chocolates or a coffee mug or whatever, would probably be how I would kinda approach, you know, those, those types of things.

So meet with them, put a name to the face, send them something that’s gonna make sure that they remember you. And I think that that would get you a pretty good, good mileage from that approach. so in theory, right? It just, I think the theory is there just kind of, that’s how I would apply what you’re, what you’re saying there.

But good question, Steve. 

[00:51:37] Evan: Yeah. We have another question from Josh and. He asked, can you discuss the type of industry or the type of business that it was, and that’s in reference to that case study above. 

[00:51:46] Sure, sure. This was, back in 20 20, 20 21, they, they did COVID testing. So our job was to actually help ’em get government, contracts.

which way, kind of, it was initially way out of our wheelhouse, but we had worked with somebody who we, Had, who, did like the testing kits. So we had a bunch of contacts with labs and we kind of started leveraging that and reaching out and saying, okay, how can we approach. Schools and governments and mayors and stuff.

So, it, it’s really kind of like the, the outreach stuff where you think, oh, this is like, I only gonna reach out to like other businesses. It, it actually works in government too. it’s, it’s, it can be, it, it’s a lot more extra steps, right? Anytime. For anybody who’s doing like government stuff, you know, RFPs request for proposals can be a huge pain in the butt.

and on this one, I know we had, we had brought in a, a guy who, who specialized in that, who now is, working at, oh, I forget which government. He, he went and got, got back into the government, type of work, but helped kind of basically help this client do these requests for proposals. So, that’s the type of business it was.

And like I said, that’s why I don’t really. Use that one even though it, it’s by far our biggest case study we’ve ever had. ’cause it’s just not applicable to, to so many of the clients I work with. but it’s nice to have, it’s nice to have under your belt, but that’s what it, that’s what it was. Josh.

Alright. Evan, do you see any others out there? It looks like, it looks like we’re pretty caught up here on my end. 

[00:53:30] Evan: Yeah. Yeah. We’re all caught up. That seems to be all the questions. 

[00:53:33] Alright. Well, I just wanna thank everybody for hopping on today. Really appreciate y’all being here. thanks for taking some time outta your, your end of the month here last day of February.

Tomorrow it will be March and the year is flying by. So, thanks again. We will do another one of these at least one next month maybe too. We’ll see what, how things shake out if you want to get notified about those Pipelineology dot com slash events. Thanks for being here. Have a great rest of your day, everybody.