Welcome to the first day of your new life as an entrepreneur.
The purpose of this post is to give you a quick and actionable guide to making your first money as a true entrepreneur not just as somebody trying the newest “shiny object” method or technique.
What this post is going to do for you is to give you the groundwork and foundation to building a real and solid business utilizing something that you probably spend a lot of time on anyways – the warrior forum.
I am certainly not advocating launching warrior special offers (waste of time), I am talking about a huge opportunity that is going completely unnoticed and underutilized. It was one of the first ways that I made money “online” and if you track back through some of my previous warrior forum posts you will find me trying to hustle up some business doing this particular program.
What I am about to show you – you could easily outsource, scale and turn this into a six-figure business servicing just Internet marketers on the warrior forum – not to mention scaling this out even further. If there were more than 24 hours in the day, I would probably be doing this business still, but the fact of the matter is as it stands right now with the several businesses that I am currently running and the occasional eBook/product/blog post that I create, I simply don’t have time to do this anymore.
I guarantee that if you follow these methods that I outlined in this guide you will be able to turn a profit and begin your journey as your very own boss and entrepreneur.
So, let’s get started!
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The Process
You may already have a pretty good idea of how to create this business that I’m about to share with you. If you are still reading this post, then you either have interest in doing it yourself and running a one-man show, or you are looking at some tips on how to outsource this process so you can have this become an autopilot, automated system.
I will show you how to do both.
So what exactly is this process?
Simply take a look at every single Offline WSO/Information product that is being launched multiple times per day every single week throughout the entire year. What is the basic premise of almost 90% of those products?
How to get clients.
My question then is this (and when I asked myself this question awhile back my answer became the business that I’m about to show you) “why aren’t people offering client getting services on the warrior forum?”.
Well, I can tell you why.
They are either already so successful with their own off-line business that they don’t want to give away leads or business that they could potentially run themselves, OR (and probably more likely the case) they don’t actually know how to get clients but they know how to make really great products (there is a huge difference between product creation and actual client getting).
Think about how many “client getting” WSOs are sold on a regular basis. I would imagine it’s thousands upon thousands per year. To help you connect the dots, this means that thousands upon thousands of people are actively spending money to try to solve their client acquisition problems. In other words, they simply want to pay to get clients.
So, if you are in a situation where you currently are not generating any type of online income, or if you are in a situation where you want to ditch the job you currently have, or if you’re in a situation where you want to make some side money, or if you’re in a situation where you just want to try something new for fun, you can take advantage of that unfulfilled need that is so glaringly obvious here on the warrior forum (and throughout businesses of every niche and industry).
The need to help people get clients.
I will show you a few different ways that you can actually setup, build a name for yourself and create a real and legitimate business by filling this massive need.
Essentially, you will be creating an Internet marketing lead generation service. Some of you may want to throw this PDF/post away right now. Some of you may be saying to yourselves, “well, if I knew how to get clients I would just get clients for myself” but I would caution you to reconsider that thought.
The beauty of the lead generation business
One of the interesting things that I have found in working with a lot of warriors through the mentoring program or just through simple support e-mail questions and answers – is that very few people truly understand the power of specialization and segmentation in business.
In other words, people who are first starting their own business are typically inclined to want to be everything to everybody. They want to sell SEO, they want to provide SEO, they want to sell Web design, they want to provide web design – they want to provide PPC, they want to do reputation management and they want to do it for every single niche in the entire universe.
This won’t work. I promise.
For example, listen to the following two scenarios:
“Hello – My name is Mike and I run an Internet marketing consulting firm. We do PPC, search engine optimization, wordpress management, we do article writing, we do reputation management, we do graphic design, and we do pretty much anything you can possibly want. Also, I don’t have a staff and I do all of this myself because I consider myself an expert in all of these things. I can create you a customized and convoluted contract where I will try to sell you as much of this as I possibly can because I’m pretty desperate for money.”
vs.
“Hello – My name is Mike and I generate leads for search engine optimization companies. If you need business I can get.”
Now, the first example is maybe a little bit extreme, but it is important to remember that as a prospect sometimes these convoluted and non-focused companies sound exactly like that. You can tell a very stark difference between the two pitches.
The second is powerful, and it is concise. This power in simplicity and message will get you more clients then you can ever handle.
One of the second major benefits and beauties of being in the lead generation business for Internet marketing companies is you are addressing one of the major pain points for most Internet marketers. Most people who do Internet marketing would rather hide behind a computer and not get outside of their comfort zone to find clients. If you can address this issue, one that we can see is a major issue just by looking at the hundreds of products that are being sold on a regular basis addressing this issue, then you will be able to create a successful business.
Finding solutions to pain points is exactly how real businesses are created.
One of the last beauties of being in the lead generation business that I want to talk about (I don’t want to spend too much time convincing you of how awesome it is) is that you will be in high demand. I’m going to give you some pricing figures a little bit later on and you’re going to think that I am crazy, but the prices that I am going to show you later on are the exact prices that I was charging. And here is the greatest thing about the whole process of generating leads for other companies on the warrior forum – if you do it correctly, just like I’m about to show you, and you generate high quality professional business leads for Internet marketers, you will be able to provide them a service that they will continue to pay for for years as long as they stay in business. Why? Because the product and service that you are delivering is “more business” and people will pay for that years down the road.
Okay, I don’t think that I need to convince you anymore of the power and sheer beauty of this particular business model, now let’s delve into the specifics of getting this job done.
Getting Clients
First, I want talk about how to actually get clients on the warrior forum. I’m sure some of you are going to read this guide and come up with some better ideas than what I did, but I can only tell you what I did to get my business going. Within 48 hours of what I’m about to show you that I did, I was completely booked out.
In other words, even with the prices that I share I was completely booked with clients to where I had to turn people away and this was within 48 hours and long before anyone even knew who I was on the warrior forum.
I didn’t have any clout, I was just willing to do the “dirty” job of getting leads for Internet marketing professionals. And because of that, people jumped on the opportunity to work with me and the business was a complete and total success, though what I’m going to show you in the following pages of this guide are things that I would’ve done differently knowing what I know now.
Anyways, there are really only three things that you need to do to create enough buzz and interest to get yourself booked out completely. You may want to look at the fulfillment section of this PDF and then jump back into getting clients, but I wanted to start out with getting clients just so you can see how straightforward this process is can it be.
Step #1 – Warrior Forum Classifieds
The first thing we want to do is to go to the warrior forum classifieds and set up an offering. The great thing about the forum, particularly when you are offering a service as desperately needed as this, you don’t even need to have your own website. I never set up a lead generation website to sell my services, I just used the warrior forum classified ad that I paid $20 for and use that as my home base for driving traffic to my offer.
When you set up your warrior forum classified ad it is really basic and straightforward. There are plenty of resources around the web to show you how to actually set it up, but I want to talk to you about some of the crucial parts of your ad that will make or break you as a lead generator – whether you do it yourself or your outsource it like I will show you later in this guide.
The first major thing that you want to do with warrior forum classifieds is to make sure that your headline is attention grabbing. That of course, is easier said than done, but one of the best things that you can do is to scroll through the warrior forum classifieds section and find ads that stick out to you and simply use them as inspiration to craft your own.
To create a good headline, you need to generate interest. All you need them to do from your headline is to click through to your warrior forum classified ad. You don’t need to tell them how much your services are in the headline, you don’t even necessarily need to tell them what it is you are doing exactly, they could simply be something like the following:
“Internet Marketers – I Will Find You Clients”
Or
“Offliners – Team Up With Me And I Will Find You Work”
Or something along those lines.
Now that we have the headline set up, we want to talk about the ad body. One of the best copywriting pieces of advice I have ever heard is the following:
“What is the purpose of the headline? To get you to read the title.
What is the purpose of the title? To get you to read the first sentence of the body.
What is the purpose of the first sentence of the body? To get you to read the second sentence of the body.”
Hopefully, that advice will help guide you as you work through your own copy writing. Honestly, with this service you don’t have to worry too much about your copywriting. Once people figure out what it is that you are selling they are going to want it. So don’t spend too much time putting off offering your service simply because you are worried about whether or not your copywriting is sufficient. I bet you that it already is.
There are a few important pieces of information that you do need to set up in your warrior forum classified ad I want talk about those now.
The first important piece of information that you want to set up in there is to tell them exactly what they are going to get. I mean this in two ways:
First, you want to tell them the benefits of your service. Things like:
you don’t have to do cold calling if you hire me
you don’t have to worry about getting clients I’ll do all the hard work for you
stop trying to figure out client getting solutions and just let me do it for you
Stuff like that. You just want to communicate the benefit of your service. If you do not put the benefit of your service within the copy of your ad, you might as well not even spend that 20 bucks.
Honestly, when people read this benefit on the warrior forum they are going to jump on your offer a like hotcakes.
The second thing that you want to put into the body of your copy, a very important piece of information, is to communicate exactly what it is that you are offering in terms of the logistics, price and your system.
What do I mean by all this?
Lead generation is looked upon in many areas of business with skepticism. Some people feel like lead generation is a business of people simply trading old used leads and there is some trust issues that people have with lead generation companies. As someone who works in lead generation via building websites and selling those leads to off-line businesses, I can tell you from experience that it does take a little bit of work to make sure that people understand that the leads that you are creating are real and they are worth the money they are spending.
So let me give you a few tips that I’ve learned since launching this particular business on the forum a long time ago and since creating my lead generation business off-line.
First, you need to specify what type of lead you are going to be selling. For now, since your are just starting out in this business I recommend only differentiating your leads in two ways:
exclusive leads
and
non-exclusive leads
Exclusive leads are the most valuable and therefore the most expensive. An exclusive lead is when you make contact with an interested business for whatever service you decide to niche yourself as a lead generator for, and you then pass that information along to only one client.
To give you a better idea of what an exclusive lead is let me tell you what a non-exclusive lead is.
A nonexclusive lead is where you contact the business owner and collect their information if they are interested in whatever service you are trying to generate leads for, and you then sell that information to multiple clients.
So for example, with a nonexclusive leads you might have two or three clients who are paying you for the same amount of work that you did to collect that single lead.
Here is my personal advice – take it with a grain of salt because this is your business not mine – but when I did this service a long time ago on the forum and now that I do it with websites for off-line businesses, I find that running an exclusive lead generation company is far more easier and far more effective both for me and my clients than trying to run a non-exclusive lead generation company.
I find that people who purchase nonexclusive leads are typically trying to find cheaper leads. In other words, they miss value what a fresh lead could do for their company. In other words, people who try to get cheap business don’t understand what business is about, or they probably don’t understand the sales process enough to compete with the other people who are also trying to sell that single lead.
I wish I could attribute this idea properly, but I heard once that great business owners don’t say, “How cheap can I get a customer” but “How can I spend more?”
Of course, what they mean is – how can they set up a system that turns out profit no matter how much money they put it – then the question simply becomes gathering up as much money as possible to poor into the system.
This is why you hear so many people complaining about these massive lead generation companies and it’s because they don’t have the sales skills to compete with the other companies that are trying to sell this single lead that was a generated nonexclusive lead.
I have found that if you work with people who will pay the premium to get an exclusive lead they understand the value of leads and they know how to sell. In this game, you want to work with people who know how to close. Because what happens is it increases your perceived value of the leads that you are generating simply because they are able to close more leads than those who are not knowledgeable in closing or doing business.
For this reason, I have structured my offline lead generation business to include only exclusive leads.
The very last thing I want to mention before we move on is if you are going to do this particular business I highly recommend that you niche yourself within a few different services. For example, I would not try to be as search engine optimization, and PPC, and Web design, and web development, and mobile site lead generator. I made that mistake at first and quickly realized that that was not the way to go.
I highly recommend that you select may be two or three different services that are related, like search engine optimization, web design and maybe mobile design. That way, if you are on the phone with a business owner, or one of your outsourcers are on the phone with a business owner or you are setting up craigslist postings then it you can transition easily if the prospect says no to SEO then you can try to sell them on Web design etc. At the same time, you don’t want to try to offer everything to everyone on the flip side with the clients that you’re trying to work with in Internet marketing.
Why don’t you want to do this? Because you will end up attracting the kind of people who run businesses where they tried to sell everything all the time. And here is what is going to happen if you do that. You will connect with clients who are trying to sell 10 things at once and you will be delivering leads to them whether you do it yourself or whether you hire an outsourcer, and they will end up not being able to fulfill the services. They will either lose the clients early on in the process, or they will simply not be able to close any of the leads that you are sending them because their own branding message is so convoluted.
What will then happen is they will come after you and say that your leads are bad even though what really is happening is their business is not set up to take the leads that you are providing them.
If you niche yourself you can help yourself in your process of generating the leads and you can make sure that you only work with the best kind of clients that will gain value from the leads that you are generating.
If I have one word of advice throughout this whole thing it is, if you are in the lead generation business for Internet marketers, you are a hot commodity. Do not work with any cheap clients, people with unrealistic expectations or people who are wasting your time. It’s not good for you, it’s not good for the client even if they are being a diva, and it certainly not good for your business.
If you are in industries such as lead generation simply move onto the next person who wants to buy business for their business. It is in massive demand and we’ve already talked about it a bunch in this guide but, I just want you to realize that you don’t have to work with bad clients throughout this process.
It is very important that you put in your warrior forum classified ad body that information. You want people to realize early on that you’re in the business of generating search engine optimization leads or whatever type lead you decide to do – and that you don’t mess around with unprofessional clients.
The last thing that you want do of course is set up a way for people to contact you so that you can then in voice them via PayPal. We will talk a little bit about pricing later on in the guide and how to set that up, but a simple e-mail should suffice for that.
I always put the pricing for my leads front and center when dealing with prospective clients. Why? Because the people are not willing to pay me to do the hard work for them, I don’t want to work with them. In other words, if people are turned off by the price and those are the kind of people you want to be working with any ways because they already don’t see the value in what you are doing.
Step #2 – Thread Participation – Beast Mode
If you purchased this, chances are that you spend a little bit of time on the warrior forum. I don’t know if you have actively participated in the off-line section of the warrior forum or not, but one of the things that I have noticed is that you don’t have to be right in order to generate traffic through signature links on the forum.
What do I way mean by this?
A lot of the discussion that happens on the off-line section of the warrior forum is something that I wouldn’t call truth. In other words, there is some conversations that happen on the off-line section of the warrior forum that convince people of the legitimacy of one idea or another simply because of the repetitive tenacity that some of the posters post on about their style or approach.
What this tells me is that simple repetitive posting will put you in authority status regardless of what you necessarily preach to be true or not.
I’m not trying to knock the off-line section of the warrior forum, there is an amazing amount of awesome advice on there. What I am saying is, if you want to start generating traffic to your warrior forum classified ad to sell your lead generation services, you don’t have to write a William Shakespeare response to every single thread that happens in the warrior forum. You don’t even have to necessarily offer any new or amazing advice, you just have to stay consistent and be there for the conversations that are related to generating new business in the off-line world. Frankly, you can even rely a little bit on the advice of others and agree with some of the more active members of the forum to align yourself with the power players.
This might be a little bit insane sounding to you, and you may think it’s a little bit more complex, but I just want to give you the sense of confidence that you can post on a regular basis I would say for about an hour or two a day until you are completely booked out, with the signature link in your profile driving traffic to your warrior forum advertisement.
I don’t want to talk too much about what you need to say, it should be pretty obvious, just offer helpful advice and try to get involved in the community on the off-line forum, but what I really want to talk about is the signature link.
My advice to you at the signature link is the same that I would give you with the headline in your warrior forum classified ad.
It simply needs to get people to click through.
It could be something as simple as the following:
“click here and I will get clients for you”
or
“I am a client getting machine let’s team up”
or something along those lines. Again, all we want people to do is click through to see our classified ads offer.
With a signature link that looks like that, you’re guaranteed to get a few clicks a day if you spend some time commenting. It might not seem like a lot of first, but once you start getting some traffic and people start commenting on your thread a possible leads are, you’re going to be booked so fast.
Client Getting Conclusion
You might be thinking to yourself that there is no way that you can book yourself solid selling these services with just those two simple client getting methods.
I am telling you, in all honesty this is exactly what I did.
Like I said, I currently make my living doing lead generation but for off-line companies and I simply see this massive opportunity within the warrior forum for people who are looking for leads and a serious lack of providers of leads and I really think somebody has to jump on this who wants to grab this easy money.
So now that we have talked about the client getting portion of this particular guide, let’s talk about how to actually provide this service.
Providing The Service
I’m going to show you how to provide this service in two ways:
doing it yourself
and
outsourcing it all
Having been self-employed for the past couple of years, running my own businesses and creating companies, ideas and money from scratch, I honestly believe that an entrepreneur’s value to their company is not as a technician.
If you have ever read the book “E-myth” you know what I am talking about. In order for you to actually build the business, it is incumbent upon you to build systems, find talent and create services that people want to use.
If you want to do everything yourself, that is not called entrepreneurship, that is called freelancing. I tried freelancing for a while and I prefer entrepreneurship so much more.
That being said, not everybody has the business acumen or the financial resources to either bootstrap their own company or to take the risk of outsourcing. For that reason, I will show you what I did when I provided the service myself basically as a freelancer and then we will talk about how to outsource this service.
Doing It Yourself
I’m going to advocate three different ways to generate leads that people are willing to pay for and let you determine which of the three you would like to use. I would not recommend doing all three at the same time if you are doing it yourself. You’ll run yourself into the ground and it won’t be that effective.
What I do recommend however, is spending may be two or three days maybe even a week testing each of these systems out, to see which you with you would be most comfortable providing.
System #1 – Cold Calling
For a lot of people, cold calling is a nightmare from which they hope to wake up sooner rather than later. I want to try and help you to overcome this fear of cold calling because if you can overcome this fear of cold calling you could start making six figures by the end of this week simply because so many other people have a massive fear of cold calling on the warrior forum and would happily pay someone else to take care of it for them.
Psychology Of Cold Calling
First let’s talk about the psychology of cold calling. I want to walk you through how I overcame my fear of cold calling and I think once you learn how I overcame it you will be able to also.
Some of you know that I have PTSD. In other words, social situations are not that easy for a guy like me. The thought of picking up a phone and actively seeking out what felt like confrontational situations, was literally like a really bad nightmare. When I used to try to cold calling without learning this particular method of pumping myself up, I would literally start shaking to the point where I couldn’t even punch in the numbers on my keyboard because my fingers were shaking so bad.
Nowadays, I can cold call without a problem. So let me show you how I do that.
The first step is to realize what your brain is actually doing to cause the fear of cold calling. It is very important for us to examine and breakdown the cold calling process from the fear side of things so that we can get the job done without the stress.
Let’s first take a look at what happens in our brain when we think about cold calling. First off, it is important to realize that the part of your brain that is triggering the fear is called the amygdala. That part of your brain is what is known as your reptilian brain. Now, we were never reptiles, but part of our brain stems from the evolutionary process of when we needed to react quickly to very scary things. There was a time in our evolutionary history where we had to run away from really big scary predators. So there is a deep part of our brain, specifically the amygdala, that triggers that same response whenever we hear, smell, feel like something scary is about to happen.
Essentially, our brain isn’t reacting to picking up the phone and calling someone, it is reacting to a physical threat to our person – one that is imagined. This is why so many people get so scared before cold calling and sometimes find themselves wondering how is it that they can get so scared about just calling someone?
In order to combat this, we simply need to take a moment to look at what is actually about to happen. In other words, if we can break down this big scary thing called cold calling, our amygdala will no longer view this as an impending threat but as a series of steps that need to be completed.
So before you go start making cold calls, I recommend writing down on a piece of paper exactly the actions that you are going to take. And I mean get specific. For example, if I were to start cold calling this is what my list would look like:
sit in my chair
put on my headset
load up some phone numbers
start the auto dial
say hello
wafer response
read the script
say thank you
say goodbye
wait for the auto dial
say hello
wafer response
read the script
collect information
say thank you
repeat
While it might seem elementary, and maybe even a little silly to be doing that, if you take a look at that right now and start thinking about doing that yourself, already some of the fear should subside. I recommend doing this process for yourself and not using my list, because when you use your own brain to create the list you desensitize the fear response in a way that is specific to you.
Another way to look at the cold calling process is to give it another name. The term cold calling is brash, desensitizing and a little bit intimidating. But all cold calling is something that a lot of us really like: fishing.
When you are cold calling all you are doing is going fishing. You are simply trying to find a match for your client to a business. You can also look at it from another standpoint. You are simply looking for a business who needs an SEO provider. All your job in the lead generation business is, is being a matchmaker. You don’t have to sell, you don’t have to pressure, you just have to be a matchmaker.
When you make that transition and take off the pressure of sales into matchmaker status, it becomes immensely easier to do your job. Now, all you have to do is find out instead of trying to put pressure on people and make sales.
The Process Of Cold Calling
Truth be told, unlike what a lot of people say in the off-line section of the warrior forum, it is very easy to do a bad job at cold calling. In other words, cold calling isn’t about the calls themselves, it is about the preparation and proper equipment that makes cold calling successful.
If you are opening up a white pages or Yellow Pages and you are simply hand dialing a bunch of numbers at random, cold calling is not to work for you.
The basic setup that you need for cold calling is three things:
an autodialer
a really good list
and
a script
The Autodialer
If you just have a few clients, you don’t really need an autodialer, as a matter of fact I would even suggest letting your clients pay for your autodialer. In other words, don’t get an autodialer until you have a few clients, simply because they can be expensive and you really only use one if you have a ton of people to call in any given day and you won’t have that many people to call if you don’t have that many clients.
But, when you do decide to get an autodialer, this is the one that I recommend:
http://www.voicent.com/autodialers.php
If you want to compare a few others, here they are:
http://www.autodialersonline.com/
The benefits of having an autodialer is that you can load it up with phone numbers and it will automatically dial the phone numbers for use. Then when you close a call, whether it was successful or not, the next call will be ready to go as soon as you hang up on the previous one. Why is this beneficial? Because when you have to make hundreds of phone calls a day it’s really nice to simply have the next phone call in line and you don’t have to dial it. Because if you have to dial even if it only takes you two minutes to dial the number, that time adds up. And time is money.
If you want to find out more information about autodialers and how to use them I highly recommend that you check out John Durham’s Telemarketing Forum (http://thetelemarketingforum.com). If you’re serious about this business, I highly recommend that you sign up for an account there because there is loads of information the on the scope of this simple guide that will turn you into a lead generation machine. Probably the most important aspect of that forum is that you can talk to other people doing the same business you are and just shoot the breeze because sometimes this can be a frustrating business to be in.
Now we have the autodialer out of the way, let’s talk about lists. Autodialers are important, but lists will break you if you don’t do it correctly.
The List
Why is a list so important?
It’s a little bit like the idea of not casting pearls after swine. You don’t want to be spending your time calling dead numbers, nonexistent businesses or companies that are not within your clients niche or ability to close.
For example, if you have a small timers single person SEO guy who has never actually ranked a site before, you probably shouldn’t be calling fortune 500 companies trying to land this guy some prospects. You want to go after the small mom-and-pop shops that are going to be lower budget and more likely to hire someone like that. Again, at the end of the day the best way for us to make sure that our leads are effective is if we pair them with the client in such a way that they basically just have to talk to the client and they can close it. Our service is NOT about closing, it is about generating leads.
I’m sure there are tons of different ways in which you can generate high quality lead lists by just purchasing leads from sales Genie or something like that, but my number one resource for purchasing lists is the following website:
For something like 50 bucks a month you can get unlimited leads from these guys. I’m not talking about taking these leads and then selling them to your clients as exclusive or nonexclusive leads for SEO or PPC. I’m talking about using these leads to call as your phone list.
In other words, what you do is you generate a list on infofree.com by utilizing their awesome search capabilities of demographic, geographic region etc. and then you upload that list into your autodialer or you simply print it out as you can have it by your calling station to hand out the numbers and you simply make phone calls based off of that list.
The reasons that I like their list is that they keep their lists updated. In other words, I feel pretty confident that when I’m calling based off the information from that list I am actually calling that business. This is helpful for when you get into the cold calling process so that you can actually call people by their first names or to get past gatekeepers you can ask for the first name of the business owner or whatever that has been supplied in the list that you downloaded.
The Script
Second only to the list in importance, the script is something that you should always be aware of. For example, there are two ways to structure your lead generation business if you’re going to launch this on the warrior forum for Internet marketers. The first, is to really niche yourself as a service provider. So for example, you only sell search engine optimization leads to people who service medium-size businesses in ask Y. and Z. niches.
In this case, you would simply use one script for every single client that you have when making calls for them.
The alternative is that you offer a broader range of niche lead generation but you require a payment for customized scripting.
When I first started doing this on the warrior forum and had a few clients, I didn’t realize the difference it would make if one of my client is trying to sell SEO to lawyers and another one of my clients is trying to sell SEO to contractors. I didn’t really think they needed different scripts, but the truth of the matter is that they do.
Here is why:
Lawyers need scripts that include being able to overcome the gatekeeper. Most lawyers have secretaries or at least paralegals whose screens sales calls. That is a very different script than one that connects you directly to the business owner which is the main sort of avenue of communication with the majority of contractors.
If you don’t feel comfortable charging clients to create custom scripts, then I would at least have several different types of scripts on hand for those different types of situations. In other words, if you know ahead of time that you are going to be selling SEO leads to different niches, then it would be best for you to simply pre-make the different types of scripts that you want to get done.
You are really going to need quality scripts if you decide to outsource. Never, never, never under any circumstance outsource cold calling without a mandatory script. You do not want people trying to make stuff up on the spot because that will completely ruin your entire business.
You can absolutely create your own script. I didn’t hire a fancy script writer and I certainly didn’t hire a copywriter, I just made some phone calls found out what worked and what didn’t and put that together for my business.
Just are making some phone calls a very loose script and within a few short hours you’ll know exactly what works and what doesn’t.
Then, after that experience go back and write out specifically what you are going to say in your script.
When you have a script, that allows you to do a couple of things.
First, it allows you to have less fear. Because all you’re doing is reading a script. And let’s be honest, the easier we can make this on ourselves the better.
Secondly, it allows you to measure the success of your cold calling campaigns. So if you have something standard, something specific that you do every single time, like a script, then you can make small adjustments, measure and improve quality. So if you’re using a script and you know that your script is giving you two or three leads per hour on a certain list, and then all of a sudden you’re only able to get one lead an hour or one lead every two hours, and you know that your script didn’t change, it probably was your list.
And when you can make measurements like this in business, you can make impressive leaps and bounds in increasing efficiency and your bottom line.
System #2 – Robo Call
The following information that I am about to give you is very regulated, like much of the telemarketing world is, and so you need to check with your own legal advisor as to whether or not this is an option for you.
Now that you are sufficiently frightened by this method, let’s talk about what it is.
Robo calling is a new and incredibly efficient way to get telemarketing done. Basically it relies on an autodialer to dial phone numbers and then when the person picks up an automated voicemail message is being played with certain calls to action.
Sometimes these calls to action are things like:
press one for more information
or
call us back at 555-555-5555 to get your free quote today
Basically, what it does is it forces the receiver of the phone call to make the phone call to the telemarketing company to express interest. Currently, my company does this for placing our websites into the hands of people who are interested in a few states that are not regulating this particular practice very heavily.
The thing about this system is, is that it is extremely effective. All I have to do is pay for the Robo call or another system to do it automatically and then have inbound sales agents simply receive the phone calls from people who are interested.
In a way, this system is part outsourcing and part doing it yourself.
You won’t necessarily be doing the cold calling people will be calling you, but there is some setup involved.
With the Robo call system you have to make sure that the voicemail that you leave is done in a professional voice, you could just use a fiverr gig for that, and it must have a call to action with a reward attached.
In other words, if you’re doing search engine optimization lead generation, all you want is a voice message to say something along the lines of:
“Hello – my name is Mike and I am looking for a couple of businesses to do a free search engine optimization report on. I’m only going to be offering this to a handful of companies I just wanted to let you know about it. If you’re interested in getting your free search engine optimization report for your business website call me at 555-555-5555 talk to you soon.”
It just needs to be something short, quick and all about the action with a reward if they call your phone number.
Then, once you have this Robo call system set up all you then have to do is just sit by your phone because once you click the Robo call feature you’re going to be getting phone calls really, really quickly, and you simply answer the phones and collect information from the businesses.
I want to give you a few words of warning though with this type of system.
First, again in a lot of states in the United States this is a pretty regulated system. It may even be illegal in some areas of the world. I am not your legal counselor and I advise you to talk to your own legal counsel before deciding to use the system.
Secondly, be prepared for some of these phone calls to not be happy customers. Some people are very bothered by having automated voicemail messages in the form of cold calling and they will call you back just to let you know about it.
That being said, this is about as easy as picking up apples off the ground in terms of us getting leads. All you have to do is set the cold calling system and people will call you back 90% of the time wanting to get that free search engine optimization report. It also allows you to blast through way more phone numbers than even if you are using an autodialer because you don’t have to waste the time with people who are trying to tell you “no thanks” but in a roundabout way. With the Robo call all you have to do is deal with people who want to talk to you.
I won’t talk too much more about this particular process because again, you need to do a lot of research before setting this type of system up, particularly legal research as to whether or not it works in your area and I am not in any way shape or form qualified to give you legal advice.
I just wanted to mention it as one of the ways that you could potentially decrease the cost and headache of generating leads for other people.
Okay, now that we have the self run lead generation system set up, let’s go ahead and start talking about some of the ways to outsource this so that you can drastically increase your profit and not have to do any of the yucky stuff like actually cold calling.
The stuff that I am about to teach you is actually what we do with my offline lead generation business, and it will work exactly the same for generating leads here on the warrior forum for Internet marketing people who want to get in the off-line world.
Ok. Break Time.
Have A Nice Break? Let’s Jump Back In It.
Outsourcing
One of my favorite things to do in life is to boot strap a company. I love having other people pay me to start a business.
What do I mean by that? If you can provide a service, you can often have clients going while you work out the tweaks of your company provided that you leave yourself enough leeway and head room in the financials and assuming that you are willing to work your butt off in the first couple of months to make sure that the customer receives everything that they pay for and that they receive it in the best possible way.
Let’s consider a few examples:
If you want to bootstrap this particular operation by outsourcing it from the beginning, you need to make sure that you have all of your scripts set up, that you have all of your list information ready (so a monthly subscription infofree.com) and make sure that you have already gone through several steps of the interview process for cold calling which we will talk about little bit later, so that whenever you get your first client you are ready to hire immediately.
If you have these things set up you can wait until a client pays you to hire your cold calling staff.
Why? In some telemarketing circles turn over is 60% per week in staff. What does this mean? It means that every week 60% of those involved in the telemarketing industry are quitting in some form or another. This means, that telemarketing in and of itself, or generating leads through the use of calling businesses, is a business that can survive and thrive on short-term employee training.
How is this possible? Well, this is possible because if you have a high quality script, and a decent list, then literally the only thing that you need from somebody is to put their butt in a seat and to talk through a microphone. If you can get people to do that, and they can do it clearly, concisely and repetitively all day long, then that is all the training that you need in outsourcing your telemarketing process.
Again, a good telemarketing company is not dependent on high quality staff as much as it is dependent on high quality scripting and a high quality list. If you have an autodialer it makes the process even better because it completely removes any user error that might come about for somebody who might be too lazy to type in the phone numbers or they might be trying to stall in between calls, with the autodialer you eliminate that completely.
I don’t want to sound like a 19th-century industrialist in the picture that I just painted for you, but the fact of the matter is that you can absolutely set up a lead generation company with all the parts in place before you have to spend a dime and then hire people as the clients come and go simply because there really isn’t that much training involved other than reading off a script and talking to people. If you’ve ever worked in telemarketing in a boiler room situation, I spent a little bit of time working for a telemarketing company that sold PPC services to real estate agents and I absolutely hated it, you will quickly realize that a lot of the telemarketing jobs are being offered aren’t being offered to the best and brightest employees. And the reason isn’t because telemarketing is a bad industry, or that telemarketing is only for people who don’t have any other type of job skill, it’s because the nature of telemarketing only requires the resuscitation of the script onto a good list.
It is fishing in its basest form. It is simply putting that line into the water as many times as possible and all you need is somebody just put the line in and out of the water.
Choosing The Right Person To Call For You
The last bit of advice that I want to share with you has to do with hiring the right person. Ultimately, the only way that you’re going to make six figures running this business on the forum is if you have a few people calling for you. This is a business that can only earn that kind of revenue once you start scaling, so if you do decide to do this it is incredibly important that you know who to hire to call for you.
I have hired my fair share of telemarketers and I highly recommend that you take this advice seriously as I have lost a lot of money learning these things myself.
I first want to dispel a few myths about hiring cold callers, myths that are propagated by people who have never hired a cold caller before.
Many product creators teach that you can only be successful if your cold caller is a native English speaker. I find this to be absolutely NOT true. What you need to have is someone who can simply read your scripts in a clear and concise manner. The reason that I don’t believe that you need a native English speaker necessarily, is because you do not want your callers to go outside of the script anyways. They are only allowed to say those things that are written on your script. So it doesn’t matter if they have a dictionary worth of words of English as their vocabulary, we only need them to be able to pronounce the same thing over and over again and enter data into a database to be used to sell for your leads.
Another point I want to make about hiring non-native English speakers as cold callers, is that some people feel like an accent on the phone is going to turn business owners off. The reality is, that in most parts of the United States at least, the American accent is becoming more and more rare anyways – so it really doesn’t even matter.
I myself grew up in Phoenix Arizona and I can tell you without a doubt that many of the jobs in that area are not staffed by native English-speaking persons and yet life goes on, businesses grow and no one seems the worse for wear.
I highly recommend that you hire only from odesk.
I realize that I just said it’s absolutely okay to hire outside of the states or England or Australia for your cold callers, but I never hire outside of the Philippines. The reason is, of the countries that are outside of the Western countries, the Philippines is the most culturally similar to the US. Not only that, but the BPO industry is one of the top five industries in the Philippines itself. What this means is that many of the freelance contractors that you do find on odesk are actually going to be trained, experienced callers that have worked for some type of BPO agency if they aren’t an agency in and of themselves.
I have tried working with callers from other countries, but my experiences have been much better from those workers who live in the Philippines.
Don’t forget, when you hire a phone person, they must be able to call within the hours that you set. In other words, they cannot be calling businesses on Filipino time because that can make people upset, they’ll never be able to get a hold of anyone and things can get ugly.
I highly recommend that the first person that you hire is someone that you could turn into a manager later on down the road. For example, there are many workers on odesk who have experience managing phone centers. For one reason or another, they have either set up their own BPO or they have started to freelance their services. The reason that I recommend that you hire somebody who you could later on promote to manage your other callers is because you want this person to help you develop a system that is most effective.
If you are going to be an entrepreneur it is important to try and push as much responsibility to your employees as possible. For this reason, hiring somebody who is going to become a manager later on down the road allows you to let that person train the new people coming in. It allows the manager to offer insights and input that you might not have been able to catch from your position as the boss. And if you are going to use Filipino’s as your cold callers why not allow a fellow Filipino to train the new callers.
These are just some tips and tricks I’ve learned working in the new global marketplace.
I personally do not hire my telemarketers based on commissions, because I actually can make more money by simply hiring by the hour.
I’m going to sound like a 19th-century industrialist again, but if you operate in the world of business it is important that you protect yourself, grow your business and protect assets that you have created.
The key to a well run telemarketing machine, one that can generate leads for you or for your clients, is setting minimums for your callers. For example, if I am paying someone $10 an hour to make cold calls, I expect at least one new lead per hour. If my workers cannot get one new lead per hour, I simply let them go. Does this sound harsh? Yes. But it is important to remember that your business is a business and not a charity.
If you have a caller who can generate one lead an hour, and then you turn around and sell that lead for $30 or $40, you can see the profit that you stand to make as the business owner. You can also start to see how scaling this process would be so effective.
Now, we can’t just keep our workers working themselves to the bone without some sort of reward system. The other side of telemarketing is that the good telemarketing operations are very incentivized. When I worked in a boiler room telemarketing PPC services to real estate agents, they had incentives like you wouldn’t believe. They had daily contests where the caller who had the most sales in a single day got an extra $150. They had contests for whoever made the first sale of the day, they would randomly announce a time and say whoever made the first sale after x-time would get another $50 etc. etc.
I highly recommend that you create something just like this for your own callers. It will be an incredibly powerful thing to watch your workers gain that motivation to take advantage of incentives that you are providing, particularly if you are offering incentives at the $50 and $100 arranged for Filipinos.
I lived in the Philippines for a little over two years and I have to tell you they are good, hard-working and honest people. They are incredibly loyal, but if you were to offer $150 or even $50 as a daily incentive you would get a good taste of just how hard-working they really, truly are.
The last little tip that I want to give you before I close out this training is how to deal with the burnout rate with telemarketing in general, and the burnout rate with telemarketing especially with places like odesk.
Now, this sort of goes back to the point of hiring someone who you think could be a manager someday within your company. Because freelance telemarketers burn out at a pretty high rate. The reason is, even within the standard telemarketing industry where you have banks of callers and camaraderie between employees, telemarketing is a difficult profession emotionally and mentally. It is only more difficult trying to do it all by yourself perhaps in your home office, or where you make the calls.
This loneliness can lead to burnout. For this reason, I highly recommend that you make an active effort in connecting with your employees and making sure that they feel like they are part of a team, that they are part of something big and special, and that you value them as employees and as human beings. Being able to do this effectively is not only a key to great leadership, but it’s a very good business practice when dealing with freelance telemarketers because you reduce the need to train new employees and deal with the backlash of having to make up new leads that you may be falling behind on because you lost some workers.
Conclusion
I hope that you are able to learn something from this training, even if you don’t decide to start this lead generation business on the forum, I hope that the telemarketing cold calling aspects of this training gave you some ideas or gave you some insights into what you can do for your own business.
Again, I personally see a huge need on the forum for a business just like this, I remember the success that I had in such a short amount of time, and I really do believe that this could easily be a six-figure business and one that would be easy to book out your schedule and would require that you scale out simply due to the demand.
I hope that you have an awesome day and that you continue forward in your success!
Thanks,
Mike