How to get so many new client leads you'll be forced to create a waiting list
Published: Sat, 11/07/20
Former Navy Nuclear Engineer and software & marketing automation specialist about using a cheap Zapier account to get so many clients as a freelance copywriter, coach, consultant, or other service that you probably will need to create a waiting list just to handle it all.
Like going from from being a salesman to a mere order taker.
All right, this is a long one, here goes:
BEN SETTLE: Let's give some consultants and coaches some love here. How can they use Zapier to get more clients and close more leads?
TROY BROUSSARD: Freelancing and both coaches & consultants fit into that high ticket arena. And high ticket is really about high touch. It's about having that extra attention and being able to close more sales, because you're not usually dealing with a big volume of people, you're dealing with a small amount of people, but you make a big profit off of each one. So everyone becomes extremely important. Well, this is really, really powerful. And using Zapier with what I call subtle selling techniques. And subtle selling is about observing actions that people do and using it as an excuse to have conversations.
So imagine sending out any type of email. Most email platforms that are tag based will allow you to track different things like when they click on an email, or open an email, or click on a link in an email. You can use all of that with Zapier to trigger notifications to you through let's say, a text message, or like me, if you use Slack, you could have it trigger a slack notification on your phone. I do this all the time on my phone. In fact, you've seen me do this many times, Ben, where I send out personal welcome videos and things like that.
And I do it in a very real time way. Like, I'll be sitting there and it'll be 11:00 at night and I'm still awake, and I get a notification on my phone that somebody just bought. And I'll just tap on it and then go in and record a quick 30, 45 second video and send them the video to welcome them. That's a really powerful connection building mechanism. And it's all about the right message to the right person, at the right time. And if you're dealing with high ticket stuff, it's really about that specificity and that timeliness and the connection. And you can use Zapier to trigger all of that.
So when somebody... There's all kinds of things you can do. If you have an application form on your website. For example, when somebody visits that page, you can use that to trigger an automation that triggers a Zap, that could then send you a text notification about this person, even if they didn't fill out the form if you have some other types of tracking, like if they're inside of a membership site or something like that, and you know who they are. But certainly when they do fill out that form, you've got that information.
You can also use it for when you send out contracts. Let's say you send out a digital contract with DocuSign. DocuSign, will let you know when that person has viewed the contract. Well, we can integrate with that with Zapier and send you an alert. And what I teach people in kind of some of my advanced sales training, I'll teach people to set up that Zap to have like a... It depends on people's preference. If they want a call right now, then I just have a delay, like 25 minutes or 20 minutes before it sends it. Or if they like to call a few minutes later, then I'll just have it send them real time and they know to wait about 20 minutes.
But there's a really cool way with some scripting and sales capability where you can just have a quote unquote, random call to check up on them. And not mention the fact that you saw that they just opened the invoice but didn't fill it out or didn't pay for it 20 minutes ago. You don't have to mention that, but you know it. And so you know that they're considering buying from you right now. It's in the forefront of their mind, because they just went and looked at the invoice but they didn't actually hit the buy button.
And so an intelligent salesperson will do that in a non-creepy way. A creepy way would be, "Oh, I saw 28 minutes ago, you just opened up the invoice and..." You don't do any of that stupid shit. But instead, you can just have a random call and say, "Hey, John just curious, if you had a chance to check out that proposal I sent out last week. Would love to have a chat with you if you have." And you can send him that quick little text note. And he's going to be like, "Holy crap, I was just on there. And looking at that, man, it's like almost meant to be, this guy's almost in my head, he's realizing... This perfect time. You know what I'm going to give him a call." And it's funny how effective that is. But it's very, very powerful. And it's a very subtle selling technique that high ticket sales people can use.
BEN SETTLE: I remember you talking about doing something similar with video proposals. Is that something you use Zapier with too?
TROY BROUSSARD: Yeah, you can. Again, it kind of depends on what software and what suite of tools you have. But yes, you can use video tracking. So for example, you can send people on your email list to watch a certain video. And if you have the right software, you can tag them when they've watched more than 75% of the video. Or tag them when they reach the 12 minute and 19 second point you can set up the rules however you want. Well, when you do that can trigger off a Zapier Zap that could then do anything you want with it.
It could then automate some follow up process that you send in your email marketing system, it could alert you through slack or text messages or send out a whole series of marketing emails or anything you want. It becomes a trigger that allows you to do anything you want. So that can be very, very effective for webinar replays, and things to that nature, where you want to target the people and segment the people that didn't see the call to action versus the ones that did see the call to action but didn't buy. So there's multiple segments there. There's the people that didn't watch it, the people that did watch it and the people that bought. Those are all kind of three different segments that you could treat differently based on video segmentation, combined with Zapier.
BEN SETTLE: One of the things I like about all this is for the coach or consultant or copywriter, or anyone who's doing any kind of client work. This removes all neediness because if you just focus on having lots of leads, and let this do all the sifting and sorting, you're probably just never even going to think about any one lead. They should be coming to you all pre qualified if you do this right. Or am I just imagining that?
TROY BROUSSARD: No, absolutely. I mean, you set up the automation to do this for you. I did this all the way back in like 2007, where I would run hundreds of people through a gauntlet, run the gauntlet application process when I would hire people. And I would just put a ton of people in the pipeline and then I would let automation and sort and sift them into the people that actually would want to talk to. And they would just drop out, they would get eliminated, they would get a blow off email that says "Thank you for your interest, we'll let you know." Which basically don't call us, we'll call you if they flopped out of the process. And then if they didn't, they would just keep going through the stages of automation. So yeah, you can absolutely use it for sorting and sifting and filtering. And that's where the intelligence of marketing automation of which Zapier is a big part is very powerful in business when used appropriately.
BEN SETTLE: They can switch the whole thing around. You’re actually telling the client "We'll get back to you."
TROY BROUSSARD: Exactly.
BEN SETTLE: Totally different way of looking at it.
TROY BROUSSARD: Yeah.
BEN SETTLE: And it reminds me of something. A lot of freelancers I know, coaches, consultants and copywriters, I'm just going to lump them all together, because getting clients is getting clients.
TROY BROUSSARD: Yeah.
BEN SETTLE: And a lot of them lack confidence. They're great at what they do. But they lack confidence when it comes to selling tbemselves. The more options you have, the more confidence you have. And this pretty much eliminates that whole problem of not having enough options. If you have all your leads running this gauntlet and you're not even caring, because you're too busy closing, you can just focus on being an order taker is what it sounds themselves. They could have so many qualified leads, they might even need a waiting list.
TROY BROUSSARD: Yeah, and that's really the purpose of it. And that's really where I get into kind of my subtle selling techniques, it's all about people that don't really enjoy sales, don't like referring to themselves as a salesperson, but yet, they never have trouble talking about their product. And so if you just reframe that, and allow sorting and sifting and filtering to do the work for you, then there's nothing that inspires confidence, like a little bit of confidence. And when you start seeing that you have all these leads coming that boosts your confidence. Well, guess what it also magnifies how well you do on your sales calls now, because now you are feeling confident because you've got a lot of other leads, and you don't feel frigging needy. Like this isn't the one magic lead you have for the day and like "I got to close this deal." You got a whole plethora of them, you can't even get them booked on your calendar. So now
it's like you're not needy. And the best way to make sales is to not be needy. So it's a really powerful mechanism.
BEN SETTLE: And you talk about how Zapier can integrate with the calendar. So let me know if this is something that you can do. Because Dan Kennedy does this and a lot of other smart coaches and consultants and freelancers do this, is they'll put their calendar up so everybody can see on their site, how busy they are.
TROY BROUSSARD: But even more powerful than that. What if you send 100 leads into a process, but they don't even get your calendar link unless they jump through a couple of hurdles that they're qualified to even speak to you. That's where it gets magical. Because now, let's say you send them to an onboarding video. And you have video tracking on that, and integrated with Zapier, and you see that they didn't even bother to watch your frigging video, well, then you just send them a blow off. You just automate a blow off email. "Thanks for your interest. We'll consider it in the future, blah."
But you see the person that watched the video, then you see the person that watched the video three damn times. And not only can you automate it on your calendar, but the person that watched it three times, you can automate a notification on the calendar that adds in the description that this is a hyper engaged person, they watched the video three different times. Now how much better are you armed on that sales call? You know the difference between... First of all, you didn't waste your time talking to somebody that didn't even give you the time of day in the first place, you just blow them off, you don't even let them get to you.
And the people that do get to you can see what they're... You can separate the hyper engaged versus just the did the bare minimum kind of thing. I used to do this when I was hiring team members. And I don't even remember the software anymore, because this was more than 15 years ago. But I used to send people to take a typing test, then, and I would get the results from that. Okay. And yes, I would filter the people that had really shitty typing skills out because they weren't going to be a good fit for what I was looking for. Which by the way, typing speed is a very big indication of a successful entrepreneur, believe it or not, it's a very big indicator.
And so I would use the people that didn't even hit the threshold, they would just be filtered out. But what was really good about the system is it would tell me how many times they took the test, and how that was the person I was interested in. The person that not only took it, but he took it and he got 52 words per minute, and then that pissed him off because he knew he should type that. So he took it again, took it again, took it again, took it again, boom, he got it to 68 words a minute, almost 70. Okay, he's happy with that.
And I could see that person took it multiple times that revealed personality traits to me that I could use in my hiring process. You see how powerful like the use of automation, in these segments. And today, you can do that far easier than I was able to do back in the day because Zapier didn't exist back then, but today it does. Now, I don't know a typing system that does that anymore, because I haven't done that in many, many years, but I'm sure there are those that are out there. And I'm sure they integrate with Zapier and if they don't, I'm sure you can get them to send an email in which case you can integrate it with Zapier like we did with 1ShoppingCart.
BEN SETTLE: This got me thinking, tell me if this is possible with Zapier. Because we've been having this talk about role emails and how email marketing platforms are not even going to allow people to opt into a list with a role email. And how that's like, ultimately a really good thing for everybody.
TROY BROUSSARD: So for people that don't know what a role email, we're talking about emails that are like support@ and info@ and help@ and admin@ and those kinds of email addresses.
BEN SETTLE: And I was thinking when you were talking about how great it would be, how fun it would be for the selling process for someone trying to get clients. It doesn't matter if you're a coach, copywriter, whatever. You know a role email's coming from an assistant or from someone else, it's not coming from the client themselves. If it was me, I would try to use Zapier in some way where if somebody contacts me with a fricking roll email, I would send that rejection email back. Just because they insulted me by not calling me personally. I'm not dealing with anyone but the decision-maker.
TROY BROUSSARD: And that's really, really easy to do, because when somebody opts in you can then trigger Zapier. And Zapier has an email parser and a text parser. So you can look at that email, split it up and search for keyword matches like info support, help, web admin, that kind of stuff and just filter them out. And then use that as a trigger to kick off an automation and an email alert directly from Zapier. And then you can go further and have it alert back to your AWeber platform or your email platform. And depending on what the platform's capabilities, you might be able to just opt them out automatically. And if not, you could at least add them to another list that you once a week go through and just purge everybody on that list. So you could at least do it that way. In kind of what I refer to as a semi automatic process where you automate for batch processing later. So lots of capabilities that you could do with that very, very
easily to do what you just said.
BEN SETTLE: So it's just designed to not only remove neediness, but you don't have to do the fake posturing about how you “give zero fugks!” and all this crap that people do on Facebook.
TROY BROUSSARD: The fake it til you make it wannabes. Yeah.
BEN SETTLE: There's this brilliant A list copywriter, one of my all-time favorites — Richard Armstrong. Hopefully he does not mind me telling the world this (hi Richard!) but it really simplifies it all. He says never take rush jobs and always be booked in advance. Because if you just do those two things not only can you charge whatever you want, but you're never going to worry about having enough clients. And this Zapier automation sounds like you get to that point where you're booked in advance and it takes care of everything. You'll never even have to do a rush job or anything, you won't be desperate.
TROY BROUSSARD: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
That ends part 3 of my interview with Troy “Frankenstein of marketing” Broussard.
More zany Zapier goodness tomorrow.
In the meantime:
Troy and his long-suffering business partner Moshe are selling a live Zapier training along with the recordings, if this sort of thing interests you.
Plus, if you buy from my link below by the deadline, you also get:
“elBenbo’s Copy-Soaked Brain”
This was an unadvertised bonus I did for our $399/month coaching program in Learnistic.
The tl;dr of it is this:
Part of my copywriting process is, I read my sales letters out loud 10x's before running it. This audio is the 4th of 10 readings of the elBenbo Press sales letter — with all the edits, bumps, and ideas being worked out and arranged at that stage, and with all the psychology & insights going through my brain as I think about, work on, and write/edit my own sales copy.
The deadline to get all this is tight.
You got til tomorrow, Sunday 11/8 at midnight EST.
Details at this link:
https://www.EmailPlayers.com/zapier
Ben Settle