Your Network Is Your Net Worth

Lead generation on LinkedIn is not about connecting with new prospects and messaging them with an offer or a cold pitch.

In fact, this is not really advised at all.

A network of your ideal clients, of business decision-makers from all around the world, is an invaluable asset.

These are eyeballs that see your content and thought leadership pieces.

These are delegates who can be invited to conferences, events, roundtables, and webinars.

These are good minds from which one can poll, survey, interview, and conduct market research to further understand your industry or the market trends.

We have one client who pays us $1k per month for us to add senior decision-makers in global companies to her LinkedIn network.

Not to book calls, just to add them.

She is a content expert and marketing strategist and she knows that one contract with a Fortune 500 or higher client is worth a lot.

Yet their decision to engage her services does not happen quickly. It’s dependent upon budget cycles, incumbent contracts and relationships, trust [based on authority], and a mature relationship with her brand.

If you calculate the net worth of your network on LinkedIn in terms of potential contract sizes, then you’ll understand there is plenty of value in simply growing your network with the right people.

By nature of these connections, you open up second-degree contacts of a similar caliber.

You have more views of your content and mostly like more responses to your offers of value and gestures of well-intentioned relationship building.

When the time is right to make an offer, a well-developed network will pay rich dividends.

Your Network Is Your Net Worth | Jen Bishop consulting and lead generation agency london

The One Secret To Sales Success

There is one BIG SECRET to success in business and it comes down to a mindset and belief that underlies everything you do.

If you don’t have this belief you are going to struggle in lead generation, sales, fulfillment, and in basic leadership of your business.

Your hesitation will show in the way you act, your tone of voice, your behaviours, and your habits.

You’ll subtly undermine yourself in all the daily actions required to build a business, a brand, and a customer relationship.

What is this secret you ask?

The secret is simply this:

Do you believe that what you are selling is GUARANTEED to be a life changer for your client's life/business?

A great mental exercise to do for yourself is to imagine you have $10k in cash to give away.

Imagine walking up down a street or around a crowded room offering money to people there.

• Do you feel awkward approaching people?

• Do you feel cringey making an offer?

• Do you feel icky or sales making cold approaches to people going about their day?

If you answered NO to all of these questions, you’re on the right track!

This is the mindset you need to adopt when prospecting, outreaching, and making offers! If you truly believe you are genuinely giving massive value to people who need it, you will feel radically more comfortable selling.

If you answered YES to any of these questions, fear not! The following exercise will help you find your way forward.

You can change some of your inner doubts and fears through some of the following exercises.

• List all the great results you have achieved, whether with clients or in your own life/business.

• Write down all the reasons why your ideal client NEEDS what you have to offer them. Highlight the time/money/energy that they will SAVE by working with you.

• Write down all the ways you can change their life and business for the better. Include, for example, the time/energy/money that they will EARN by working with you.

• Learn to reframe negative events, mistakes, and setbacks. Journal any negative events or occurrences, and reflect on what you have learned from them and/or how they will help you improve.

When you are able to be way more consistent and confident with your outreach, lead generation, sales conversations, follow-up, and fulfillment.

You’ll be able to bounce back from NOs and from discouraging conversations or experiences because you deeply believe that what you have to offer will help people out there.

It will transform the way you act, your tone of voice, your behaviours, and your habits which will propel you forward to find your ideal clients and start to help them.

The One Secret To Sales Success | Jen Bishop consulting and lead generation agency london

Does Cold Email Work?

Crafting a good email script for cold outreach is one of the things many consultants struggle to do.

Yet a good first outreach message to a cold prospect is foundational to success.

So, what is the secret to getting high open rates and calls booked?

First I can tell you what NOT to do:

• Don’t sell in your outreach message. Nobody likes to receive a cold message with a direct pitch for services. This is a sure way to get reported as spam or just deleted.

• Don’t spray and pray. Do not message everyone and anyone with a generic message in the hope that it will get some replies.

• For deliverability do not use images, logos or links.

• Don’t use special fonts - keep the email clean with lots of white space. Bold words or phrases to draw attention but that’s it.

Next, create a hyper-targeted list of leads with their validated email addresses.

There are several ways to do this:

• Buy lists online

• Create your own lists by exporting data from LinkedIn Sales Navigator

• Create your own custom list from industry databases such as Crunchbase, D7 Lead Finder, Apollo, and more

The most important thing to keep in mind is that 40% of your email campaign success lies in your list.

This means that nearly half of your attention should go into making sure you have the right people to target before you even start writing an email.

Third, isolate the most pressing challenge or pain that this group of people are facing that you can with 100% confidence solve.

Another 40% of your email success rate is that you connect with your cold prospect on an issue that is affecting them.

We are now at 80% of your email success entirely relying on you messaging the right people about the right problem.

This is before even starting to compose a catchy message or headline.

By showing that you know their pressing challenge or need, you show relevance to the prospect and at least win their time to read what you have to say.

If you start with information about what you do or your services you lose people’s attention immediately.

Fourth, offer value.

This point aligns with the point above which warns you not to sell in your cold email.

By offering value, often a short strategy call or free consultation is enough, you engage your cold lead into a conversation that opens the relationship up.

It is this warm relationship that is now the foundation for a sales conversation and not before.

Other forms of value can be invitations to free events, offers of free or low-priced training, an eBook, or others.

The key is that this offer has to be VALUABLE to your target.

At this point, they are not yet trading their money for the value but they are trading their time, so it has to appeal to their desire to solve a very specific problem.

Fifth, give a clear call to action.

This means you close your email with very clear steps for them to take next if they are interested.

This can simply be instructions to reply for more information.

Do not leave the prospect confused about what to do next.

Step out very clearly what they can do if your email hits a nerve.

Sixth, be conversational and clear.

It’s easy to get carried away in an outreach message with exposition about why you are getting in touch or who you are.

Write your email like you’re having a simple conversation with someone, polite and clear.

Make sure you show relevance to them and their pain or challenge and offer your free value.

Be simple and to the point.

I like to add a ‘no worries’ clause which means I give them a clear “out” if they are not interested.

Something like, ‘if this is not of interest to you, no worries, the offer is open.’

Seventh, follow GDPR guidelines.

Definitely research the data protection laws about cold emailing for business in your region.

A universal etiquette is to allow people to opt out from hearing from you again, whether that is by reply email or an opt-out button in the footer of your email.

When you have a good list, a relevant and painful challenge to solve, a great offer of value, and a clear conversational outreach message with a call to action, you can enjoy higher than normal open rates, reply rates, and call booking rates.

To put this into context, a normal email campaign can reach up to several hundred people per day [big ones go to thousands].

With an average open rate of 20% [low] and a call booking rate of 1% [low], this means that you can be booking 4 calls per day from cold outreach alone.

Add this up to 20 calls per week and 80 calls per month, you only need 5% of these cold sales calls to convert into paying clients to have one new client per week.

If your consulting offer is a conservative $5k offer that’s an easy $20k per month and of course if your contract sizes are $10k - $100k then having several of these in the pipeline at any given time and you have a 6-figure addition to your annual revenue.

Writing cold email scripts and setting up email campaigns is just one step of several steps in my B2B High Ticket Clients Programme.

We also cover:

• Nailing your offer message so it resonates with your ideal client avatar

• Creating bespoke lists of key decision makers across LinkedIn and email

• Crafting outreach message cadences across a multi-channel outbound campaign using LinkedIn and email

• Automating processes as necessary to both personalise and scale at the same time

• Track and monitor your campaigns to achieve better than average KPIs and return rates

Our goal is to land $10k - $100k clients within a three-month period and set you up with an outbound organic process that will fill your pipeline with similar business clients throughout the year.

If you would like to improve your cold email success, send me a message and we can set up a short chat.

Does Cold Email Work? | Jen Bishop consulting best lead generation agency