Title: The Truth About Converting Leads Into Sales – **1PMP Series**
Guest: Chris Goldman
Peter: Today, we’re continuing our conversation about the one page marketing plan by Alan Dib. And I’m holding the book right now. And joining me is Chris Goldman. He is the biz marketing strategist and business coach. Hey, Chris.
Chris: Hey, Pete. Good to join you today, especially for this topic, because today we’re talking about converting leads into sales. Now, before we jump into the topic outright, Pete, let’s talk about converting leads to catch people up. What are the kinds of things that biz marketing and other companies do to help generate leads?
Peter: Generating leads, we’re defining that as a potential customer, right? In the parlance of Alan Dibbs book, The one Page Marketing Plan, he talks about three phases of marketing. Before phase, before somebody knows who you are, a potential customer. The during phase, where they now know who you are and you convert them into a sale. Then the after phase, which is after they’ve actually purchased from you.
So on today’s episode, sales conversion, where you’re actually turning a lead into a sale. Welcome to the Biz and Life Done Well podcast, where we explore what it means and what it takes to do business and life well. I’m your host, Peter Wilson. If you’re like me, you’re intrigued by stories of common people who have achieved uncommon success in business and life. Join me as I interview fascinating people about how they got started, their successes and failures, their habits and routines, and what inspires them.
Let me give you an example. On our website, we have a big button that says book a consultation, and that is a free marketing consultation that we offer businesses to help them better understand where they’re at with their marketing and understand how we could help them as well. If somebody clicks on that button, it creates an appointment for us to get together. That, I consider that to be a lead.
Chris: That’s a lead. That’s not just a click. That’s a lead.
Peter: Yeah. They’ve actually raised their hand. So it’s somebody that’s raised their hand that said, I’m interested in what you do and how you could help me, whether it’s a consumer product or a business to business product like we offer marketing services to businesses. For example, we work with roofing companies. So somebody fills out a form on a roofing company’s website and says, I’d like somebody to take a look at my roof.
That’s a lead. A dental practice may get a appointment, not, I don’t want to call it an appointment, like booking an actual appointment, but an appointment request, for example. That would be considered a lead until you actually convert that into a sale, which is you actually, in the case of the dental practice, if you actually book an appointment and the person comes in, then that would be considered a sales conversion. In the case of the roofing company, it’s a little more complicated because the first thing you’re going to do is go out and you’re going to give that customer You’re going to look at their roof, give them an estimate to reroof, and it’s when they then accept the proposal that then you’ve converted the lead into a sale. So until they buy, they’re a prospect.
Chris: Exactly. And what we run into all the time are people that says, Hey, I’m getting all these leads, but we’re not closing sales. And that is so important for you to understand is everything we’re doing has to be followed really methodically. And when you start generating leads through whatever platform, Google ads, your website, whatever, you wanna make sure that when those leads come in, that you have something in place that’s gonna help convert that into a sales or all you’re doing is paying money for leads. So here’s the thing.
You have a, a three statement that people become customers.
Peter: Sure.
Chris: Only because of these three things.
Peter: Yeah. What are they? Yeah, it’s know and trust. People buy from companies and individuals and people that they know, that they like, and that they trust. And you’ve got to have all three of those before you’re going to make a sale.
Now you might say, wow, I’m going to go to a gumball machine and buy a gum, gumball from a gumball machine. I, do I know, like, and trust the gumball machine? You probably know what it is. You probably like it. Otherwise you wouldn’t want to get it in the first place.
And maybe you’ve seen that machine there for many years. So you trust that it’s a legitimate machine. And if you put your money in a gumball’s gonna come out. Even at that very basic transaction, there is a know, like, and trust involved. And a lot of businesses think that they can just get a lead or a prospect, a prospective customer, and immediately jump to sale without thinking about this know and trust.
Chris: Yeah. As a matter of fact, what happens, a lot of people that are a good lead, they raise their hand and somebody gets on the end of them that works for the sales department and comes across too salesy. They come across too they don’t la they lack authenticity in their approach. And this is why it’s really important. Alan Dib tells a story about the old Pink Panther series where there’s a great quote from Clouseau where somebody says, excuse me, sir, does your dog bite?
And he said, no, my dog doesn’t bite. And the person leans down and the dog bites him. And he said, hey, I thought you said your dog doesn’t bite. And he says, my dog doesn’t bite. That’s not my dog.
And Alan Dibbs says, look, here’s the key. Every dog bites. And what he means by this is that every potential customer that you’re talking to and you’re trying to bring into your fold to help them has been bitten by some gimmicky sales thing. Every dog bites. And so they now have a level of distrust that you have to build through the know and trust.
It’s trust based and that’s where it’s got to begin. But it’s not just about trust. It’s also about where you position yourself. Over and over, we talk to people about, look, you’re not the hero of your story. This is straight from Donald Miller’s brilliant book, The Story Brand Book, right?
And he says, you’re not the hero of the story. You are the guide to the hero, your client, your customer, they’re the hero, and you’re there to help them. And when you’re there authentically helping people, they get to know you. They usually are gonna like you, but they definitely start to build trust because they know you’re there for them. But this positioning is really important because he tells a story about a famous musician.
Pete, I wanted you to share this story with the group today, because this is so great from Alan Dibbs’ Yeah.
Peter: This is an amazing story. So he shares the story about a violinist named Joshua Bell, who is one of the world’s finest classical musicians. And he plays all over the world for packed musicals and he’s making a thousand dollars a minute basically. And he plays a violin that is a Stradivarius. Now a Stradivarius is the most, supposed to be the most amazing violin that’s ever made.
The one he happens to play was built in 1713 and is valued at $3,500,000 Wow. So it’s almost close to 300 year old violin that he’s playing. And it’s so renowned that it’s supposed to be the most beautiful sounding violin ever crafted that he’s playing. Joshua was asked by the Washington Post to conduct a social experiment. And what they wanted him to do is they wanted him to play at a local subway for an hour.
And at that time, thousands of people would walk by them and hear him playing. And what they had him do is open up his violin case or a violin case, probably not the stand in to see how much money he would actually collect while he’s playing this 3 and a half million dollar violin. And normally he’s making $1,000 a minute appearing in a concert. And so he did this for one hour at this busy subway station and collected a sum total of $32
Chris: Wow. A little bit less than his normal pay rate.
Peter: So the challenge here is the positioning. Now, had he been set up to appear on stage and all this, he could easily collect a thousand dollars a minute. And it really has to do with the positioning. So let’s think about this. How are you positioning your brand and your company when it comes to your potential customers?
In this case, he was providing an amazing service to these folks that should have been highly valued, but they had no idea because they didn’t know the positioning of it.
Chris: So a lot of us have great products, great services, great teams that are helping companies, helping clients. And if we try to skip over the trust, and we try to short circuit that, we’re gonna find ourselves not being able to position ourselves correctly. We may be a, an amazing violinist, but positioned in the wrong place. We are not helpful in the way that we could be, And we’re not valued in the way we could be. So Alan Dib talks about positioning yourself in the right place, but also positioning your price.
And I wanna say this, you need to position your tone. And here’s what I mean by that. If your tone is salesy, you will turn people off. It’s the classic used car salesman thing that we all talk about. I feel sorry for used car salesmen now because it’s been so pervasive that they have become an iconic stereotype.
Correct? And so we all ex experience that at some level, and we don’t wanna be that. So we wanna position ourselves, position our tone correctly, and position the price. So Alan Dib talks about you may have a product that, for example, in his case, the violinist is worth a thousand dollars a minute, dollars 60,000 per performance in an hour. You may have that.
But most of us just have something that’s more achievable for people. And you have to think about the value first, the affordability factor second, and an ease of pay for third. So let’s talk about the value. When we coach people to make sure that their products, their services have value, here’s something that Alan Dibs says, it really bothered me. He said your products and services don’t have enough value for the price you’re charging.
I had to do a double take. Go, what are you saying? Isn’t that what we’re doing? And this is where he gets back to who you are and the value you bring for your customer, your client, and the people that are engaging your services. In other words, you’re not just selling a service or a product.
You’re also selling yourself as their help, their guide, their champion, because you’re out for their success. Does that ring true for you, Pete? You’ve been working with a lot of clients a long time.
Peter: Yeah. I think about it in terms of the amount of expertise and wisdom that we’re bringing to a client, for example. So if we’re just looking at a local SEO service, for example, or a website, We’re not going to put a website out that doesn’t clearly share the value of the business. It doesn’t clearly position the business in terms of the potential customer in a way that the customer is not going to understand the value, right? So we’re going to simplify and clarify.
When I got started in this business, a lot of folks had everything they could possibly squeeze into their website and the top above the fold, right? The first screen. And one of the hard things to do was convince businesses to stop that. Let’s get rid of this stuff. Let’s get down to the essentials.
And folks were always like, what if they need to know that we offer financing? They need to know that we also do this and we also do that and we also do this and yada, yada, yada. And they ended up confusing the customers and through years and years of doing what I’m doing, we’ve been able to just quickly say, you’re gonna have to get rid of half of this. Yeah. So we’re bringing a level of expertise to the table.
For example, when you do your marketing messaging, I think, what are you up to now in terms of the businesses that you’ve gone through? It’s 50 something.
Chris: Like 57, 58 companies since 2018 that I’ve had the privilege to work with. Yeah. To hear their amazing stories, their great products and services, and to coach them to ask them a question. If you have, in five or eight words, how can you tell me what you do for your clients and customers that help them win the day? In five to eight words, I need to hear it and it needs to ring true.
It can’t be cute and clever unless it’s purely authentic.
Peter: Right.
Chris: It needs to be clear before it’s cute and clever. And it’s so hard for people to understand the power of that. Yours, your tagline’s not sexy. I love it. We help business.
Peter: Business went online. Yeah.
Chris: Yeah. And every person on your staff buys into that value, that direction, that mission. That’s what we’re about. Right. And so when people see that they know, oh, that’s what biz marketing is about.
Now then they’re going to get to know you first. They’re going to see if they like you or not. Right. And then they’re going to develop if they’re going to have a trusting relationship.
Peter: One of the things that Alan talks about is as a small business, if you’re running a small business, you actually have a disadvantage.
Chris: Yep.
Peter: Because you don’t have the big brand, the Coca Cola, the Boeing, the IBM, the Microsoft, whatever brands behind you. So you start off right away not being known. And so he talks about how can you manufacture trust, And this is a legitimate way to bring trust to your company as a small business. If you’re not a household name, you’re going to have to do some things so folks will trust you and it has to convey trust and confidence. So one of the first things that he talks about is your website, right?
It is, as he says, and I say all the time, it’s probably one of the first places prospects go to check you out, If somebody gives you a word-of-mouth referral, what are people going to do? They’re going to Google the name of your business. And if everything’s working, your website’s going to pop up. If it’s not working right, you better see us and we’ll help you get showing up there. So it’s going to be your website that is going to be, in some cases, your one shot to show whether or not you’re a legitimate business and build trust.
Some of the things that we see that decay that trust or take away that trust, or even let people think you may be unworthy or untrustworthy is you don’t have a phone number on your website. Yep. Oh, wait a minute. Where are these guys located? You don’t have an address of any kind, physical location indicated on your website at all.
You’ve got to do that. You don’t have a privacy policy on your website. You’ve got bad design or just something that looks cheap, something that you just paid somebody $50 for, or it’s super old and it’s really long in the tooth. That’s gonna be an immediate turnoff if you don’t do it the right way. If you do it the right way, it’s gonna help build trust.
Another one is just something simple as your email address. Is it somethingsomethgmail or is it somethingsomethenameofyourcompany dot com? Yeah. Very simple stuff. Phone number.
Again, having a phone number, especially if you’re a local business, having a local area code business, even though some people say, Oh, that doesn’t matter anymore. Having a localized number does matter for people that know the area codes in your area, period, if you’re a localized business. So those are a couple of things that Alan Dib talked about in terms of what he calls manufacturing trust. And I think that could go a long way. And of course, a lot of this is digital marketing that you should take advantage of.
So that is trust. So where do we go from there, Chris?
Chris: To put it maybe a different way here real quick, to make sure you catch this, people need to be able to call, confirm, and understand who you are and that you’re legit. People are tired of being ripped off by scams. If there’s things on your site, in your marketing, that’s too good to be true, they’re going to really be skeptical. Yep. And so you wanna watch for things that are too low, too high, and you wanna do what Alan Dib calls closing down your sales prevention department.
So many companies do things like we don’t take credit cards. We only take cash in this day and age. That’s a prevention sales prevention department right there.
Peter: Right.
Chris: And so you wanna close down reasons that people are not gonna do busy business with you. So part of this gets into when people come to your site, they’re looking for affordability. Now affordability is different than price. You may have a premium product that is going to cost tens of thousands of dollars. A great example of that are roofing companies that we worked with several, A typical roof in the Pacific Northwest is gonna be somewhere around $20.
That’s a chunk of money. I don’t care who you are. And so people are looking for, if I can’t afford to give you $20 today, do you have an option for me? So you hear a lot of them saying up to a year or two years to pay at this, we’ve negotiated a interest rate for you. Zero
Peter: And all amount of that comes into play. Yeah.
Chris: Another one that’s easy that doesn’t take any banking at all is simply allowing people to pay for your goods or services over time. Yeah. And you’re absorbing the risk. That’s the other thing they wanna know as a customer, they don’t have to absorb the risk. If you say, look, this can cost you $6,000 We know that’s a chunk of change.
We’re gonna let you pay that out over six months and you can begin enjoying the benefits of it right today. Then they’re more likely to say, oh, okay, I’m getting a premium product with a way that makes it affordable for me to put it within our budget. That’s really important, especially business to business. If you’re a business owner, you know what it’s like dealing with cash flow and being able to work that into cash flow is really key. The other thing is that some people are looking for the premium and for the best.
And some of you have companies that may be hesitant to put on your site, here’s our premium product at yes, a premium price.
Peter: Right.
Chris: Now, while most of your clients aren’t looking for premium price, they’re looking for premium products with everyday price. There are some that want to know, do you believe in what you’re selling? Do you believe in what you’re doing? And when you can authentically say what we’re giving you for this price is not only worth it, it’s worth so much more and you can deliver that. You’re going to have word-of-mouth get out there, but you want to just make sure you’re not pricing people out of your services, especially in your target market.
Peter: Exactly. Now there’s another concept that I wanted to touch on that Alan talked about, which was transitioning from pest to welcome guests.
Chris: Yes. I love this.
Peter: So what he’s talking about here is he starts it off. How do you feel about a dear friend who shows up at your front door? Contrast that to how you feel when a stranger selling door to door interrupts your dinner or family time. What’s the difference? The former is a welcome guest.
Someone you have a relationship and a connection with, the latter is a pest. The welcome guest brings value to your life. Whereas the pest is just there to interrupt you and to take. He talks about positioning ourselves as that welcome guest. And how do we do that?
Now we did cover earlier, we talked about nurturing leads and some of this kind of bleeds over into that where we are providing value to prospective customers until they’re ready to buy. And one of the things he stresses here is a lot of businesses try to sell you without creating that trust. And he states that as like proposing marriage on a first date. And he says, sure, it might work once in a blue moon, but do you really want to stake your whole business on a strategy like that? You’ll end up with a poor closing ratio of say one in 10 or one in 20 or one in a 100.
And you’ll waste a lot of time and energy and money dealing with unqualified prospects. So what he’s talking about is being more specific with the way you position your company in your advertising. And you’re naturally going to be dealing with folks who are more interested in what you have to offer. If you’re more selective about your messaging, if your messaging is we’re the cheapest, you’re going to get folks who are just looking for the cheapest, for example. He also goes on to talk about chasing leads and then you get the silent treatment.
So you’ve got a prospect, you’ve had some good conversations, they’ve expressed interest, all of a sudden they go cold. You try calling them back once or twice, you can follow-up, but nothing. Then they just disappear. You figure you’ve somehow lost the sale and you don’t know what went wrong. You have to be like a goldfish.
You have to just snap out of it and realize that if you have a customer who is truly ready to buy and it’s right for them, then they’ll find you. And if you just get so desperate for that one customer and you just hound them, when you hound folks, you’re going to seem desperate. And that desperation comes across and people can detect that. And that is not a good signal to folks who you want to buy from you. Better for you to say, if not today, maybe sometime later.
And let me know if I can be of any service to you at all in the future. So you’ve actually positioned yourself more as a helper than somebody who is desperate to get a sale.
Chris: Yeah, you’re an invited guest into the conversation about solutions for them. If I could, I did quite a bit of door to door sales.
Peter: Okay.
Chris: I wanna talk about this guest versus pest because my gig, my gig wasn’t closing sales. I had a high sales rate, but my specialty was getting in the home. Okay. Which is what most people struggled with. And the company that I worked for had done a lot of data research to find out what makes people feel like you’re a pest at the door.
And they found out that if they couldn’t detect that you actually knocked on the door, the dogs were just going freaky. And they’re like, did somebody knock? Or if you went up there and you just pounded on the door or rang the doorbell several times, that all of that was a turnoff. So they figured out that four knocks, four firm knocks on the door was the amount of knocks that didn’t turn people off. Then they also discovered that if a person was looking through the window in the door Yeah.
To see if anybody was coming, that was an immediate shut you down. So they trained us to do things. And I’m going somewhere with this, come walk up to the door, pay attention to what’s in the yard. Do they have kids? Do they have pets?
You’re paying attention to them. Yeah. You knock on the door four times and then you back away from the door and you look down the street. And as tempting as it is to look at the door, let them size you up first and ask for your attention and say, can I help you? And what was interesting when you followed that process that they spoke first, excuse me, can I help you?
Then you could turn to them and say, yes, I am working for such and such company. I’m in the neighborhood. I was just with your neighbors and the neighbors down the street, tell them who you talk to. And I am here. If this is an inconvenient time, please let me know.
I, because I can come back another day or another time. And so you’re letting them know, I’m only gonna be talking to you if you say, okay, let’s engage this conversation. So what was interesting is about 87% of doors I knocked on, I ended up being invited into the living room. Wow. To show my products.
Wow. And part of that was just slowing down and being able to come across authentically. It helped that I looked 15 when I was 20 years old and I looked like this innocent kid out there. And so people would invite me in and I could show them. Now, when we’re talking about building trust from the moment people call you and talk to you, you’ve got to let them know that your company is there for their success.
Right. That’s why you’re in con in conversation. And you have to let them know if we’re not the right company, our products aren’t the right products or services, the right match, we’ll let you know that. And people really value that. We have talked with a lot of different companies that do different things.
And one company, one of their reasons they’re known is they have told people trying to engage their products and services that you don’t need us yet. You still have two to three years before you need our product. Mhmm. And they said, it’s amazing that almost all of those people come back two to three years later and say, because you saved me money then. Yeah.
I’m coming back to you now because I trusted you. Yeah. And so build that trust. Converting leads into sales is what makes this work. If you’re getting clicks and you’re getting leads, but you’re not converting them into sales, you need to really take time to ask, are we setting ourselves up as a company, as a person that people know and trust and depend on?
Or are we that pest that’s in the room that everyone wants to get rid of? And are we the dog that bites that they’ve been bitten by one too many times and they’re not going to go through it again?
Peter: Alan says it very well in the book here. He said, this would be a good time to share with you my definition of an entrepreneur. Someone who solves people’s problems at a profit. Bottom line, don’t let them think you’re in sales for one second. The best way to do all this is consultative advisory selling, using a nurturing system to work with potential clients.
And one of the things that I recall when I was working in sales, there was a sales manager that we worked with and he did a lot of sales training. And he was telling us that the very best salespeople that he had ever trained were teachers. They were, he said, you all, I know you’re not teachers. I’m sorry to say this, but the very best folks that I’ve worked with in sales are teachers. It’s because they listen, they understand, and they’re paying attention to the cues that are happening around them, And they’re probably more consultative than just trying to force something down somebody’s throat.
Chris: It’s one of the hardest things to do is to be authentic and let people know we can help you now or we can’t help you now. But it is so important for your reputation and for where you’re going. So position yourself, your trust, your tone, your price, all of that for your customers, for your clients. And you’re gonna find that you’re gonna convert a lot more leads into sales when you quit being salesy and you start being more healthy in the way you help them.
Peter: That sounds great, Goldman. So I think I’m sold. Yeah. Could you send me a proposal?
Chris: There we go. I’ll send you a proposal and you can evaluate it. And if it doesn’t work for you today, maybe in the future.
Peter: But if I sign today, I’m going to get that discount?
Chris: That’s right.
Peter: No. That was a trick question. That was actually resist search to discount was one of Alan’s points there, if you do that, you’re telegraphing this wrong message to your potential customer. Now I’m not saying don’t give fair prices.
Chris: Yeah.
Peter: And if there’s an opportunity to include something extra, great. We do that all the time, but just cutting prices to get a sale is not the way to go. Chances are, you’re going to regret it later. I’ve found that folks, when I’ve done this in the past, do everything you can to get the deal. Then a lot of times that turns out to be a problem down the road.
And you certainly can’t go back because the customer is now one of your bigger pains, so to speak and charge them more.
Chris: Cause they started the relationship with cutting corners.
Peter: Yes.
Chris: And you can have a set discount, for example, working with certain nonprofits.
Peter: Oh yeah.
Chris: If I work with a school or with a girls or boys club, then we give a 15% discount for that. Right. But for everyday customers, you don’t want a discount. And if you want to do a custom quote for them because they can’t afford your package, then you can say, we can modify our package and give you something that’s within your affordability. Right.
That’s okay. But don’t say, Hey, we usually do this for 6,000 for you. We’ll cut it down because we know you’re hurting. So we’ll do it for 4,000 because that relationship’s gonna start with you setting an expectation that you’ll compromise for them rather than doing full value. It’s better to say, Hey, we’ll let you pay this out over a year instead of in six months.
Peter: Right. And a lot of times with business owners in a business to business setting, I’m a business owner myself, and I know that cash flow is super important. Yep. So if I’m working with a company that is willing to spread something out over time, for example, we got one page marketing certified, And they had a two payment plan and a five payment plan. And I immediately said, give me the five payment plan.
We paid full price. We were just able to make it a little less painful on the cash flow by spreading it out. There’s all ways, all kinds of ways to help businesses, help customers buy your product. This was a good chapter today. And I think the main takeaway here is if you’re going to sound salesy and look for sales tricks and things like that, then you can go ahead and do that.
But it’s not what we prescribe and it’s not what Alan prescribes in his book. And it’s ultimately not going to lead to a sustainable business.
Chris: That’s right. Thanks Pete, for your time, your knowledge, your insight, and we hope all of you have a very profitable year as you work to help people and clients through your products and services.
Peter: And if you’d like to learn more, go to our website, bizmarketing.com and book a free consultation with Chris or I. We will sit down with you and audit your marketing, go over what you’re doing now and look at ways for you to improve your marketing and improve your sales and grow your business. Thanks again. Thanks for listening to this episode of Biz and Life Done Well with Peter Wilson. You can subscribe to us on iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and most of the other popular podcast platforms.
Please tell your friends about us and leave us a review so even more people will find out about us. Thanks again. We’ll see you soon.
