Friday, December 08, 2023
Would you like to set up meetings with your dream customers? I mean the leads that turn into high paying clients that give you that social proof, brand recognition to compound and become the gasoline on the fire for growth.
In this video, I'm going to show you a lean way to achieve this without having to fly around the country to attend expensive conferences, join costly networking organizations and, best of all, do this from the comfort of your own home.
But first, let me tell you the quick backstory of how I figured this out.
A few years ago, I had started my company Order Solutions and felt anxious. Order Solutions was a restaurant call center that had found an untapped niche centralizing and streamlining phone orders for large restaurant chains and their franchisees. If you called the restaurant to place a takeout order, a reservation, or a catering order for a holiday or for your business, it was outsourced to us. Then we had about 300 agents working from home that were trained to place those orders.
It was a good idea and solved a significant problem, but it wasn't easy. When I started, I was bootstrapping, which means I was using my own money to fund the company out of the profits. Even though we were making a lot of money and gaining traction, I needed to operate leanly to keep us in the black and ensure we didn't burn money. My goal was still to grow the business to its full potential and potentially set ourselves up for a lucrative exit.
I felt frustrated because our competitors all had venture funding, and I knew deep down that if I looked at their numbers, they probably weren't doing as much revenue or weren't taking home any net profit. They were most likely running at breakeven or a loss, living off a decent salary, and having to constantly field concerns from their investors. I never wanted that. I wanted to own and control everything. I didn't want to have to answer to a board, investors, who, if you look at the trend lately, are firing founders like Uber founder Travis Kalanick or WeWork founder Adam Neuman.
So, with bootstrapping, it took getting creative and figuring out how to achieve more with less. This approach, when done right, actually yields more money, more freedom, and more control.
At the time, we had a few clients like Denny’s, Potbelly, Jersey Mike’s, Famous Dave’s, O'Charley’s, and Papa Murhphys. We were growing fast, but I needed to figure out how to build relationships without burning thousands of dollars every day to attend a conference.
As a sales and marketing person by nature I started pacing around my home office and started thinking how can I meet my dream clients.
I knew who they were by then. I knew it was CIO’s, COO’s, and CFO’s of corporate for franchise chains the restaurant industry that had at least 100 or more locations and ideally used specific online ordering software that was very easy for us to use.
Then I realized that LinkedIn is great because you can use the filters to find all of these people. And not only that, if you connect with them, they can see all of your content forever in their newsfeed. It’s kind of like the most targeted advertising in the world for free. For those not in the know, I'm talking about the LinkedIn Sales Navigator, a premium version of LinkedIn designed for sales pros.
So I decided to do an experiment. I built a targeted list in LinkedIn sales navigator of my dream accounts by job title and industry. Then I thought I don’t have time to personally research all of these people. I’ve got to come up with something personalized that can scale. In other words I’ve got to come up with something genuine that I can say to all of them so that I can stand out from all of the spam most salespeople send them and look different. Genuine, personalized, and not salesy.
So as I built these targeted lists I decided if I segmented them by role and industry I can come up with a personalized note to request to connect with them that basically sends the same thing to all of them. I came up with a message that complimented them and talked about something that impressed me about their role and in the message asked them for feedback on my concept instead of selling them and saying I’d love to chat.
So really short messages that were personalized and not salesy.
And then started manually clicking on their profile. Sending the personalized notes. And to my shock 75% of the people were accepting my connections. These are my dream customers and about 30% of them were sending me a message saying they’d also love to chat.
Plus another 10% I sent a short follow up message saying. It’s great to connect. What’s your availability to chat look like next wek? So 40% of the people I was connecting with I’m able to set up intro meetings with.
I want to pause for a moment and let this sink in. Each one of these accounts could be worth minimum $200K-$5 million or more dollars per year in revenue if they were a massive company.
I’m doing this myself with no salespeople, not buying leads, not attending and traveling conferences, and not leaving my house. This was the holy grail. While my competitors are out there spamming the same message over and over again to prospects and getting no results I’m landing meetings week over week and building a huge top of funnel and pipeline.
Now doing it manually was a little boring and time consuming but the return on time was huge. These are revenue generating activities so it’s worth it. Then as I mentioned before that bootstrapping mindset kicked in and started coming up with another idea.
Could I train and delegate this list building, prospecting to someone to do it for me? So I decided to go on Upwork and find a virtual assistant in the Philippines that I could teach the different scripts, lists to build, and everything and created an SOP for her.
Guess how much it cost? $3 per hour. So let’s do the math here for a second. If they connect with 75 new connections per day. And even if 10% of them turn into scheduled meetings. That is over 35 discovery meetings per week. If even just 1 of those meetings turns into clients this is a strategy that lands 8 net new clients per month that could be worth $200K per year let’s say conservatively. Now 4 new clients every month multiplied by $200K per year over 12 months. In the first year of compounding this month over month thats nearly $10M in arrr. Isn't that crazy?
Imagine if you could achieve even a tenth of that for your business? How would that change things for you?
By the way, for those who aren't familiar, "ARR" stands for Annual Recurring Revenue.
So, from there, I started adding more and more virtual assistants to handle this task for me.
Then, I started training salespeople to have this done for them with more virtual assistants.
Long story short, since then, we scaled up to processing over $100M in off premise revenue for our clients and have successfully exited the company.
Now I'm advising, investing, and mentoring B2B founders, operators, executives, and go-to-market leaders.
So, what does this strategy offer? It provides a blueprint on how to scale up a B2B business profitably without spending money on ads. You can adapt this strategy to establish strategic partnerships, acquire clients, recruit your dream hires, and even find potential investors.
LinkedIn is booming, and with this approach, you can truly stand out amidst the noise. I strongly urge you to give this strategy a shot and observe the transformative effect it can have on your business.
I’ve created a free guide and workbook that will walk you through how to do this. I’m only going to share it publically for a limited time so to get it click the link below and get free instant access.
Remember, it's all about genuine connection, maximizing LinkedIn's potential, and making the most of your time and resources.
Thanks for spending your valuable time with me today. If you found this valuable, consider sharing it with a friend who might benefit. And always, keep striving for those big clients.
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