Who is the one person who should always be 100% up to speed on their leads? Who should know all about the data and log in religiously and take meticulous notes on each follow up note?
Me. The founder of a leads tracking app.
Real life? I recently had a lead that was 211 days late. I didn’t really notice how I had ignored this lead for months, but when we updated our dashboard to show the leads that were further overdue I saw it staring at me.
“Jennifer – Company ABC – 211 days late” – ok that’s the name, obviously, but there was a name and a company, and the 211 days late was a bright red color. I stood looking at the new dashboard, and the ugly overdue numbers and looked at the previous notes I had made. I had updated it several times and kept pushing it back to follow up in another 30 days.
I was sitting at my desk, timer going (Pomodoro method, right!?) and “Ok, this is the day. Time to get my leads up to 100%!” There are two admin goals I have per week, and that’s to get my inbox to zero at least once and to have my leads 100% followed up with.
I opened up the lead and just stared at it… then I drafted an email to follow up and then stared at that. Then it just kind of hit me, I really didn’t think working with that client was going to be fun. It felt stressful, their last email was kind of hurt and just wasn’t sitting well with me.
This was actually someone I didn’t want to work with as a private client.
How Do I Know Who My Ideal Client Is? How Can I Tell If I Even Want To Work With a Client?
Now this advice isn’t advice for every industry at all, but it might be worth seeing what you can take from it, especially if you are doing coaching or consulting. I personally offer private coaching for solopreneurs (focused on marketing) as well as Fractional CMO for larger organizations.
My work tends to start with 3-month engagements and can go on for years depending on the client, so it’s important that the good vibes are there.
#1. Do I Believe In What They Are Doing
When I’m working with someone and focused on their marketing or business development, it’s so important that I can see the vision that they have for their company, as well as believe in whatever it is that they’re trying to build. If I don’t believe in what they’re doing how can I create powerful messaging and a brand story that resonates with audiences? I mean technically I know that I could.. but it doesn’t mean that I want to.
#2. Are They Respectful To Me and My Team?
This is a big one for me: are they respectful to me, and are they respectful to my team.
I mean there are the obvious assholes where immediately I can say no and call it a day. There are other times that are similar to the example that I was talking about in the beginning of this article. My example is where I was talking about the lead that was sitting in Pretty Simple for months and months, and nothing was overtly rude. It was just a subtle feeling of every interaction being very short and coming across irritated in some way.
It is important to acknowledge there are different communication types, and as someone who can be very to the point and even blunt at times and it’s easy to guess tone at all through most written communication – but as a business owner we do get to choose who we work with and who we follow up with.
#3. Do We Have Alignment in Core Values
Core values in business are super important to me and here is how they are defined:
“Core values are the principles and priorities that guide an organization’s actions. They represent the foundational commitments and deeply held beliefs that allow a company to navigate complex situations while keeping their identity and culture at the forefront.” – BuiltIn.
We spent a fair amount of time evaluating what our core values are, and one of them is prioritizing inclusivity. It has all of this on my website, and it says that we believe there’s an opportunity and better chance for success when there’s diversity. We celebrate our differences and encourage authentic expression across race, age, gender, physical or mental ability, religion, identity and experiences.
Our other core values are: creating impact, always doing your best, openness in communication, collaboration in action and tap into your passion. I feel like you can tell pretty quickly throughout conversation if somebody’s really going to resonate with your core values, and it’s been helpful to have these as a guiding light.
A little side note here, but if you’re wanting to explore writing your own core values then you should visit our Pretty Simple page to look at it and see how we’ve done it. One of the things I really like about how we positioned our core values is that we also showed what that looks like in action so enough about that let’s move on to the next one
#4. Are We On The Same Page On Expectations?
Setting up expectations is a really important part of the sales process. It’s not just deliverables it’s how you communicate, boundaries… I could honestly write an entire blog just about this one topic.
One of the things that I do during my discovery calls is I ask: “what are your six-month goals” and then “what are your longer-term three to five year goals.” If I can understand what those goals are and especially their expectations and understanding of how long things are going to take, then it helps me to analyze if we’re going to be a good fit.
Sometimes it’s not a fit simply because of differences in expectations. There have been times that I have met with someone, and honestly let’s dive in… there’s this very specific time that I met with a young aspiring influencer. I loved her vibe and everything but her goal was to get to a million dollar in brand sponsorships within a year.
While like 100% believe that it is possible for some people to go viral and get that traction, it’s very rare for that to happen. My skill set can help with a lot of things, but I can’t guarantee those types of results nor do I feel like that’s an expectation that I would be able to feel comfortable committing to, so I said no.
I know it’s a good fit when somebody says, “oh I need to have a marketing plan” and “I want to have training on social media ads” and “I want to have like my content pillars” and “I want to you know hit a certain amount of revenue” – that I feel is doable – then sure. Those are reasonable expectations that I feel that I can match.
#5. Can They Afford My Services?
Here is the TLDR: Do not decide for people whether or not they can afford your services. Let them tell you. I’ve seen a lot of solopreneur newbies decide that they are “too expensive” for someone and essentially talk themselves out of an opportunity.
A lot of solopreneurs especially really undervalue their services. When you’re pricing yourself you need to be able to feel good about how much you’re actually charging. If you’re charging too much, whether or not it’s what the market can bear is one thing, but if you don’t actually believe that you’re worth that amount of money you’re going to have trouble selling yourself. It’s going to come across in your sales pitch and in your marketing.
Now the opposite: if you are under pricing yourself, and just not charging enough, then you’re going to feel resentful of the client and you’re not going to feel excited when you close the deal, so there really is a balance when it comes to figruing out how much you should be able to charge somebody.
Whether you’re a high ticket or lower ticket, you should never decide for somebody else whether or not they can afford your services. Let them decide and let them tell you if they can’t afford it. I personally like to have a lower ticket item available if they can’t afford it but ultimately I say just be open and see where it goes. Focus on pricing yourself well first, and then don’t make assumptions.
#6. Does It Feel Easy To Connect?
Okay so this one is objectively harder to measure. It’s very subjective, but I will just say that it goes just with the gut feeling. Ask yourself, is it fun to talk to them? Is it easy to talk to them?
It’s kind of like going on a date – you know really really quickly if someone is easy to talk to or if you have to drag information from them. There’s always going to be, just like at a date, a time where you are kind of warming up and building trust and rapport with a person. Honestly though, at the end of the day it shouldn’t be so painful to communicate.
I’ve had those experiences before, I remember a potential client where it felt like it was impossible to get straightforward answers out of him. He didn’t sound happy to be having a free strategy call. He felt kind of secretive about certain aspects of his business and I just couldn’t get real answers out of him. He really just felt a little bit standoffish and so I finally asked him “Hey, what’s on your mind? It feels a little bit like you aren’t enjoying this conversation or really needing or wanting any advice. I don’t mind if we aren’t a good fit, but I would love to know so at least I can be helpful on this call.”
His response was: “Yeah, honestly my friend highly recommended you so I said I would talk to you, but I really don’t want to go with you. I have another friend I already told I was going to work with.”
That’s totally fine, but damn am I glad that I stopped the conversation early on so we both didn’t have to waste forty five minutes together. Telling me up front or cancelling the call would have been nicer on his part, but ultimately it’s on me to direct the conversation and recognize behavior patterns.
Why bother trying to strategize or help someone when they’re not even willing to really talk to you.
#7. Do They See Me As The Solution?
This one ties up into #4 around the expectations. They probably know at this point they have a need for help, but do they actually understand or think that I am the person to solve them?
If we’ve truly gone through the process of setting goals together, it’s my job as the sales person to educate the potential client on how I can solve their problem. Keep in mind, none of this means I am the right person to solve the problem, but it’s whether or not I have the actual skillset to accomplish this.
I won’t go into all the details of how to set yourself up as the expert, but you can definitely share success stories and also share your processes. As a marketing professional I would say it makes it SO much easier if potential clients have a place they can consume your content and learn about you way before the call. When I talk to someone who has listened to my podcasts, read my blogs, watches me speak, knows me as a referral or follows me on social media, I know that is going to make my job 99% easier. They already know at least a little bit about who you are and how you work. How much they know depends on how much you share via content, but either way you are going to start way ahead versus if someone is having to learn all about you in a 30 or 45 minutes sales call.
Wrapping It All Up
So all in all, I think this is a good breakdown of how Pretty Simple (The #1 Affordable Leads Tracking App for iOS now and Android Soon), that I designed showed me how I was avoiding certain leads. However, I do know that it takes a little bit more intuition to kind of dig in and ask ourselves, “why are we avoiding to follow up with something.”
As part of the process of building out this app, the dashboard and all of the reports,I want to continue to create content that helps to offer some different perspectives on how to start to understand the numbers on the reports.
If you are having late leads it might not be because they’re a bad potential client. It might also be because you are not prioritizing your sales time, or maybe you don’t have your day set up with the right nonnegotiables, or your desk set up or anything set up so that you can consistently login to Pretty Simple.
I can’t really say what exactly you know the answer is for every single stat and every single report, but I can share my perspective. I would love to hear your perspective and thoughts, so feel free to shoot us an email with your subscriber story, or join our Discord and talk about what it is that you are working on and what the reports are saying to you.
