SFB Newsletter # 9

Hey 👋

My first mentor Lachlan Cameron, told me… ‘Ben, you don’t need money to start a business.’ At first I didn’t understand his point, in fact it took me years to figure out what he meant.

You see, the great benefit of ‘Organic Marketing’ is that you can use ‘no money down’ strategies to generate leads, prospects and clients. You don’t need a list, you don’t need ten’s of thousands of dollars, you don’t need even need momentum - You can start today where you are and mine your existing resources.

This is why Mindset is the first pillar in the 6 Pillars: Every other pillar will be limited by it. What I’ll share with you today is just about mindset than it is about marketing.

If you have the mindset to put yourself out there and test the strategies inside this edition they can easily be worth a few hundred thousand dollars to you. 

Test them extensively and find your lane.

Let’s dive in.

First let me outline the goal of ‘The Organic Marketing Machine’ - The goal is to get your system to at least $10K/Month in new cash coming in: Reason being, you have proof of concept and you can move to the next stage.

Depending on the type of business you run you could also keep your organic machine running. However my personal preference is to bring in paid ads sooner rather than later, as this can allow you to scale with an inexpensive working 24/7 system instead of an expensive working 9-5 team.

It’s also a powerful protection against burnout.

Anyways - I’ll be diving into paid ads in the next edition of the newsletter and sales funnels after that. But for now, let’s focus on Organic, where I’ve simplified my LeadFLOW system to outline 3 distinct stages with the simple goal of each stage;

1. COLD - Spark Interest

2. WARM - Spark Conversation

3. HOT - Create Clients

The reality of business is that you need to earn your right to leverage. You do that by stacking manual effort upon manual effort until you’ve reached the levels of skills and resources that your flywheel starts spinning with some of it’s own energy.

Now in the last newsletter I laid out the principles we’ll be using in this series. If you haven’t had a chance to check that out, can you read it here > as I’ll be building on the principles I laid out there.

So if that’s you go and do that now and come back here…

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The first and most important step in getting new clients is to define who they are and where they are. You need to build a dream client profile - and for this the best tool I’ve discovered is ‘The 5 Dream Client Segments.’

** Note - To get the best results from this newsletter, it’s best to download/print off the models and complete them as we go along.

Personally, I fill them in and add them to a google drive folder. This allows me to easily share them with relevant team members, and those who need to know.

One of my first business coaches said to me, ‘Ben, you need to find a niche and stick to it.’ - honestly, I thought it was bad advice. You see I looked at my business hero’s and I could tell that not one of them ‘had a niche’ - they had a dream client.

There is a subtle, yet important difference. A niche is build around a demographic. A dream client is build around the psychographics.

I believe most business coaches are hung up on the idea of ‘niching’ as an (often unconscious) scarcity scheme. They are concerned their clients will end up eating into their market share.

For me business is about solving problems - I don’t believe in finding a niche - I believe in finding a big problem that is valuable to solve for people and I build my dream client profile around that. I also want to serve and reach the largest number of people possible with this specific business.

Anyways - It’s possible, I’ve gone on to prove that twice now by building 2 × 7 figure businesses around a dream client.

There are 5 Segments of Your Dream Client Profile:

1. Demographics - This is your census data - male/female, age, height (if relevant), income, career status etc... There are thousands of data points you could drill into here. I choose the main 1-3 and just stick to that.

2. Psychographics - This is the psychology of your dream client. The two most important things here are;
   Pains - What are the symptoms that the client is currently experiencing? & The Core Problem - What is the underlying root cause of their problem. If you can understand the relationship between the pains and the problem the client is experiencing and articulate this in a compelling way - you’ll certainly be marketing!

3. Behaviours - Where are their behaviours? Where do they hang out? What do they do? What events do they go to? What social media platforms do they use. Here you want to know their behaviours so you can find them and get in front of them.

4. Geography - Where are they in the world? The more you can scale out here the more scaleable your business will be. Where possible I’m encouraging my clients to transcend geographic constraints.

5. Utility - What do they want? What are their dreams and aspirations? If the client works with you for 12 months - What will they come away with?

If you know your dream clients it’s much easier to develop an offer that will be relevant to them. Once you have a clear picture of who you’re actually going after - then you can ask yourself…

Who do I know that is in the list? 

Go and talk to them.

This is one those easy to do, easy not to do scenarios that most people simply don’t do. Mindset and overcomplicating the process mostly.

I believe that In every business there are un-mined resources and often hidden opportunities sitting there if you just look for them and take action.

The key to the cold stage is to get the right people who are in your dream client profile to know who you are; from there you’ll want to direct them towards your Warm Offers.

Personally I prefer networking and email outreach strategies over cold calls - however this is an option here, if you’re that way inclined.

A really useful tool here is to add people as friends on the relevant social media platforms they use - in particular if you’re doing in person networking - make sure to add people as friends and spark up a conversation with them.

Hacking the Growth of Your COLD Audience

Over 10 years ago now, I started a business with my Brother called ‘Primal Sydney’ - It was our first business. We taught people to do handstands and other bodyweight training workouts - all completely online.

We knew that our clients were on Instagram so we employed someone on upwork for $3/hour to track relevant hashtags and then manually outreach and network with people.

This involved liking and commenting on their posts. We grew our audience by over 100 people per day that would come and follow us - within 8 and a half months we had 26,000 followers on instagram.

We then used the audience to distribute content for free and we turned a small percentage of our audience into customers and clients. We made it to $100K / year within our first year and we just kept building from there.

Now… Technically this wasn’t ‘no money down…’ But we did use a combination of hustle, cold outreach and networking and it cost us less than $20 per day which ended up being $0.20 per subscriber. We then earnt $3.84 from each subscriber on average over the next 12 months.

I’m sure it still works.

How to Create Relevant Content for Your Dream Customers and Clients That Actually Converts…

First and foremost - choose one platform to start. Don’t splinter your efforts on 5 social media platforms. Choose one and master it.

If more of your dream clients are on Linkedin go there, if they’re on Facebook set up there, if they’re on Instagram - go there.

Meet them where they are with your content, post one piece of high quality content per day. It doesn’t matter if it’s text, post, image or video. It matters that you speak to the client: their pains and problems.

Use your dream client profile as the primary filter for content creation… But then bring in ‘The 6 Post Types’ to guide the type of content you create.

Jesse Elder taught me there were ‘two sides to the coin of trust - character and results.’ If I could step out from behind my logo and share more about my character and also the results I could produce for people - My content would start converting much more…

So I started using ‘the 6 post types,’ and it did just that… I had finally unlocked Lead Conversion (the warm level) in business.

Here’s the breakdown;

The first three posts are all about character. You’ll want 75% of your posts to contain these post types.

1. Personal Philosophy - Share what you believe about the pains and problems of your dream clients - Give them the context and show them the solution (kind of like how I do in this newsletter)

2. Personal Story - Collect relevant stories from your Hero’s Journey, the successes, the failures, the highs and the lows. Give context for why you are the way you are. I’ve found the more real you can be, the more you’ll attract great clients. I’m pretty open about my past history of drug abuse - Interestingly many of my best clients experienced similar things.

3. Lifestyle - Share what you were up to. These are things outside of the business. Personally I’m very careful as to what I do and don’t share these days - It’s fine to share lifestyle content - just make sure it aligns with your values and do it strategically.

Next are the posts that are all about results. You’ll want 25% of your posts to contain these post types.

4. Results - Collect up your client case studies, testimonials and stories to use in your content posts. If your clients send you case study videos like the ones on my website… Great. If not you can still tell the stories and have a powerful impact. Don’t forget to share your own results too, any result that you’ve achieved in the area of life your dream client is trying to master builds connection and authority.

5. Invitations - Make offers in your posts for your dream clients to step into the later stages of your funnel. Approximately 10% of posts in short form, but if it’s long form you can include CTA’s in 100% of your content. Another reason I love newsletters.

6. Questions - I know I swapped the order here, however I’ve intentionally left this to last as this is a critical piece of the puzzle. If you’re in the organic phase - build your content to drive some kind of DM conversion with your prospects. You can do this by asking questions.

A question I often get about this… Can you mix the types together?

Yep, you can if the content is long form enough and you have the space to do so. That’s exactly what I’m doing in this newsletter.

Back to my Primal Sydney Instagram example… let’s imagine you’re like me in my first business - you’re set up on instagram. 24 hours after I sent out the content I would come back and add every person who liked, commented or shared the content. I would then reach out to them to Spark a Direct Message Dialogue.

ACTION TO TAKE NOW: Go through the last 90 days of your relevant social media channels, emails and any other area where your audience congregate and use the system I’m about to share with you to spark conversations with anyone who liked, commented or shared your posts.

How Can You Convert Your Warm Leads into Hot Leads?

When you share your content - drive people into some kind of conversation with you. If you create a lead magnet or resource - deliver it via bot message.

Why?

Because now you’re in conversation with your dream clients. You can then use the 5 Star Prospect System to walk them towards your Hot offer.

I learnt the 5 Star Prospect from another marketing mentor of mine, Dean Jackson - I’ve learnt many things from Dean that have gone on to add hundreds of thousands of dollars to my businesses - I’m sure I’ll be mentioning him in the upcoming editions.

Anyways… When you’re in a dialogue with someone - just walk them through these simple steps. The goal is to complete each step in order; if you can’t get a tick, just keep asking questions or DQ the prospect.

1. Willing to engage in dialogue? 
   First check to see if the person is open to a conversation - As mentioned you can do this by delivering your content.

2. Friendly and Co-operative? 
   Are you getting bland one word answers - if so the person isn’t very warm towards you. If they are friendly and co-operative you can move to the next stages. If they aren’t you can choose to stop the conversation or you can have some fun and try pattern interrupt them. Memes work well here.

3. What do they want?
   At this point, this person should be in your dream client profile - So you can simply ask them what their goal is for their - health / wealth / business / relationship etc..?

4. When do they want it? 
   Then ask when they are wanting to achieve the goal by.

5. Do they want your help? 
   Now you are armed with something incredibly valuable you have a prospect who has something they want in a specific time frame - You can position your next offer by wrapping their language around it…

Let me give you a business example.

“Ok John, makes sense: You want to take your business from $10K to $25K / month by the end of the year. I’ve helped over 100 people to do that… If you want I can jump onto a call with you and show you the steps I took with them”

(Use the truth here - even if it’s one it’s still useful)

The message above delivered to the prospect will convert into a call 80% of the time. However a vague call booking ad presented to the same person will simply not covert anywhere near as well, if at all.

When people link their goals and their timeframes; to your offers, your products and services you’ll have 5 star prospects lining up to work with you.

A note on referrals *

When you’re first starting your business or your marketing efforts, it’s wise to rely on referrals. Give people an amazing offer to partner with you. Could you give away 20-50% of the sale value? This way you’re only paying for sales. It’s technically no money down arbitrage.

I’ve done this many times now and I’ve found anywhere close to 50% and people seriously get moving to sell your stuff for you. I recommend trying it out - especially if you’re strategic with your offer structure.

^ Eg have a lower end product on the front end - give up to 100% of the sale to the referee and then convert a percentage of those customers into a back end client offer with higher profits.

With inbound referrals - get people to connect you in an email or a DM - then run a variation of the 5 star prospect.

Dialogues as the Key to Growth

One pattern you may observe is that I’m always talking about driving dialogue and conversation: I do that because it flat out works. In the organic stage of your business the goal of your marketing is to produce dialogues.

The reason being sales is at least 10x easier than marketing.

How would you feel if I asked you to stand in front of room and give a 10 minute monologue about you and your product in the hope to convert members of the audience…?

Now imagine you can sit with each person one by one in a back and forward dialogue with the same objective…

What’s easier and presents less risk?

The Dialogues everyday. Yeah they may take more time, but that’s the trade off in the organic stage - you’re investing more time because it’s a lower risk asset so you can get things up off the ground.

So to recap here are the steps.

1. Complete the Dream Client Profile - Discover the exact people you’re going after and find exactly where they are both digitally and physically.

2. Spark their Interest - Get out there: go to events, hang out in online groups and forums, use my growth hacking technique - drive 100+ people per month into the warm level. Add them as friends.

3. Spark Conversations - Create One Piece of Content Daily that Drives Towards DM’s - Open conversations with at least 10 people per week - Use the 5 star prospect system to find the right prospects to pitch your Hot Offer to. If they’re not warm enough, drop them back and send them some of your content that you feel will be relevant to them, then reestablish the contact - (this often takes only 5-10 minutes.)

4. Use Your Hot Offer to Create Clients - I know I haven’t spoken about about every single piece of my sales systems just yet. (they’re coming) For now just wing it, show up with high energy and make irresistible offers. If your sales system closes more than 50% of appointments it’s working and for every sale you just need two dialogues booked.

5. Turn your clients into Referral Partners - Offer 20-100% of the revenue from new sales to your partners - Create the right strategy that works for you both and build an army of referee’s for your business.

This is one of those moments in the newsletter… of which there will be many - Please don’t disregard what I’ve said because It’s simple and not all that sexy.

Simple works.

In the next newsletter I’ll be diving into some of the more advanced ‘marketing strategies’ such as running ads and building sales funnels - however I’ve consistently seen that those who can’t prospect struggle with marketing.

Marketing is salesmanship by print - you will learn more about marketing by getting good at prospecting than you will by reading a marketing book.

One of the biggest problems for business owners is we spend so much time getting in our own way.

Just remember ‘you’re only one inexpensive test away from the truth.’ If you ever catch yourself thinking… ‘That won’t work… blah, blah, blah…’ slap yourself and remember that your opinion and my opinion is useless.

The only thing useful thing is the outcome of the tests we’ve run.

Test your assumptions.

Test everything.

And eventually you’ll transcend everyone around you who is too busy believing things won’t work.

Oh and you’ll probably be making an extra $100K+ per year too.

Regards,

Ben Slater.

This edition of ‘The Systems for Business Newsletter’ is sponsored by;

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Here is who it’s for;

• You’re over $10K / month in your business.

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