How to Get Prospects to Come to You

Every sales person’s dream is having contacts and prospects COME TO YOU!  Let’s discuss ways to make this dream come true.  The good news is that the dream is totally possible, and it’s not really that complicated.  The bad news is to make the dream come true you must either work very hard or spend money.

If you want to be successful in business you must either work very hard or spend money or a combination of the two.  Let’s eliminate the allusions by realizing you don’t know anyone personally who has been successful without working very hard or spending lots of money.  You may have seen someone on YouTube in a cool Ferrari (which he rented for three days to make that video.)  But think of real, actual people you know.  The reality is that you have two options to be successful:  work hard and/or spend money.  That’s the only way to make the dream come true of prospects coming to you.

If you want to work hard, you can do content marketing.  I love content marketing; that’s what I’m doing right now to get you to watch this video.  The starting place for content marketing is to decide topics in your area of target for which people will search.  Find key words.  Perhaps you are targeting restaurant owners and going after payroll processing.  Use the Google add words keyword tool; it’s free.  There you can see what people are searching for that equates to restaurant, payroll, tip processing, etc.  The next step for content marketing is to make a blog article, video, podcast episode, social media posts, Google+ post, and a medium post which talk about that specific topic.  Use the same title and description for blog post and video, etc.  Your title must be very specific.  This is a great title for content marketing blog post:  “How to Process Tips in Your Restaurant – Payroll Processing.”  Put your video into a podcast episode which you put on Soundcloud, ITunes, and Stitcher.

One obvious mistake I see in content marketing is not being specific enough.  You must know topics for which people search – a specific, narrow niche.  There are many big companies who already have content out about merchant services; no one would ever find you by looking for “merchant services.”  Use a very specific title such as “How to Process Credit Cards for a Restaurant in Atlanta.”  Adding geographic terms is helpful for targeting specific searches.

Another important key in content marketing is to use methods which set you apart, such as video marketing.  To stand out in a video search is easier, as long as you use a very specific title.  Find out what people are searching for and get your content out everywhere consistently.  If you put out content every week, you’ll have fifty-two videos, podcasts, and blog articles after a year.  Put your blog article content on a medium; it is going to get searched there.  Also, put it on Google+ so it gets searched there.  Put it on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.  Put it everywhere you can and get that content out!

The bad news about content marketing is IT IS REALLY DIFFICULT.  Content marketing takes a lot of time; I do a lot of it.  Personally, I also spend money because I hire people to help me.  Someone stands behind my camera to shut it off, edit the video, and make the podcast episode.  Another employee makes the images for Instagram and Facebook.  Someone else actually writes the blog article from my video.  All of these employees are expensive for me.  To do all the work myself would take three or four hours.  Therefore, to put all this together and distribute it well once a week would translate to three or four hours a week.

Another down side to content marketing is that you may wait three to six months after distributing your content before your first lead.  However, the good news is that the content is there forever.  Once it is starting to rank high on YouTube, on a blog, website or whatever, it is usually going to keep rising – as long as you keep distributing content.  Then you are going to have a nice, steady flow of leads.  Once the very first video you put out six months ago hits a thousand views on YouTube, it is going to keep ranking high.  It is always going to provide you with that steady flow of prospects.  Make sure you do a really good call to action from your videos.  Motivate the listeners to go over to it.

I have some helpful courses on instantquotetool.com for content marketing and even social media selling.  You’ll find “How to sell with Twitter”, “How to sell with YouTube,” and “How to sell with LinkedIn.”  You can sign up for a free 30-day trial which will give you time to benefit from each course.

Spending money was another pre-requisite for success in business.  How can you spend money to get prospects to come to you?  I still believe the most profitable way is a combination of telemarketers using outbounders.com.  Have the telemarketer collect information which you can leverage on Facebook.  Whether using Facebook pixels or guiding prospects to a landing page, use that to get people coming to you.  This will cost money in Facebook advertising and outbounders.  I’ll offer further discussion on this topic in the future.  In the meantime, you can check out these options.

My name is James Shepherd.  Thanks for reading.

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