071: 5 Step Sales System That Gets New Clients

Speaker: All right. Let me ask you something. Have you ever said, "I know what to do, I just don't do it"? Like, you've got the notebook, you've got the Google Doc, you've got the course, you've got color-coded tabs.

I know you. You even have highlighters and color-coded pens, and you're like, "This is it. This is the week everything changes. I've got it all set."

And then you don't open the notebook, or you open it, and then you reorganize your folders, or you rename the document, ah, or pick a new font. That's it. All of this instead of actually doing the thing, dun, dun, dun. It's okay.

If this is you, this episode is going to feel like your best friend. So if this, if this is you and you're new here, hi, I'm Renee Hribar. I'm not here to call you on the carpet or make you feel bad. This is gonna be fun, I promise you.

This is the Selling Your Expertise podcast. I created this to help women sell their expertise in a way that actually fits their life. And please, beyond this h- podcast, you know there's lots of things that I do. This is just one small part of my week.

Of course, I love it. But go to askmecoach.com. I don't share that link anywhere else, only for you listening to this podcast right now, and that has all the freshest ways to hang out beyond this podcast.

I offer both private and group coaching, and I have oodles of free and small paid offers for you to find your right way that fits your life right now. Because let's be real, you don't have eight hours a day to build your business. I mean, heck, you might not even have eight hours a week to build your business. I know I didn't when I first started this company.

I had five hours a week to build my business, so I had to keep things super structured and focused. Because if you're like me, you've got clients, family, uh, life, like weird, crazy things your dog does on Friday afternoon that make you feel like you need to go to the emergency vet. You know what I'm talking about. Or, like me, a brain that gets tired at 3:00 PM and I'm like, "Done."

So all of this, and somehow you're supposed to also do marketing and be the best salesperson in your business. Um, yeah. Right. So today I'm gonna walk you through a real client session and show you exactly how we turned her overwhelm and inaction into a simple, repeatable sales rhythm.

And yes, you can Get that rhythm down to 10 minutes a day. But let me give you some context. So in this session with my client, she literally had everything going. She had systems and documents and notes and ideas.

She even said it herself, "I love building things. I just don't use them." Well, hey, know thyself. And I was like, "Welcome.

You are among friends. You are in the right place," because this is what I see all the time, and genuinely what I wrote the book for, and created my programs for, and created this podcast for. Because if you're listening to this, it's possible that you're freaking brilliant, and you are organized, and you are very thoughtful, but not necessarily taking consistent sales action. I mean, it's definitely not that you're lazy.

You're probably doing 10,000 things a day that you're not even aware of. You're just like, "I don't know why I'm so tired." And I'm like, "Well, 'cause you did two loads of laundry, you took the kids back and forth to school, your mother called, you went across town, picked her up, picked up her medications, took her back, made sure she had lunch." Okay, this is just part of your day.

This is the part you didn'teven quantify. You just did it. And it's definitely not discipline. You are a structured, focused, amazing human.

All the people in your life lean on you. The problem is there's, in from a sales perspective, there's no simple enough, simple s- can I say simple 10 more times? Simple, simple, simple daily sales rhythm, and that really is it. It's a rhythm.

Now, I don't know what kind of music you like, but any music that, that's out there has rhythm. Even jazz, which is one of my favorite music types, and I just, I love the fact that if you can just move and feel the rhythm, it doesn't feel hard. Because when things are big or vague or like, "I need to have a whole day to do this," you're never gonna have a whole day to do it. I'm just being honest.

So reality is, you avoid it. Of course you would. I would too. Even if you want the result.

Like, I, I'm saying this and I'm thinking about lasagna. Like, it's kinda like me wanting lasagna. I don't know. I'm like Garfield with lasagna.

I love it. Now, I love the way my grandmother would make it. I can still hear her saying, "You can never have too much garlic, Renee." Well, P.

S., you can. I hit that threshold, but I ate it. I tamped it back since then.

If you come over for lasagna, don't worry. You won't die of garlic poisoning. But it was a big task, and it was a lot of hours to make this lasagna, and genuinely days to eat it. I mean, we'd have it on Sunday when we'd all go over her house for dinner, and sometimes I'd be there on Saturday doing a sleepover 'cause my parents would be going out, so I'd help.

So I know how to make lasagna, and I love it. It's the number one thing I want on a chilly Sunday afternoon after church, which, living in Michigan, is like 10 months of the year. So a lot of opportunities. But I also know it will take me a while, and since I only make this a few times a year, I do not have a rhythm.

It's messy. I may have to find my special pan and that one spice that I really only use for this, and they're both inevitably shoved in the back of the dark corners of my pantry where it's hard to reach. And so it's kinda like when you get a lead that's interested in working with you, and you have to dive into your Gmail, mm-hmm, and look for that last email you sent that was sorta like this one, uh-huh, run it through Claude, mm-hmm, to polish it up, and then send it, sweating the entire time.

It's just like me. Even though you know what to do, you want the result, you don't have a rhythm. That's just like me making the lasagna. How can I do this process in 10 minutes a day is because I have created this rhythm where it's just something I do.

But let me give it to you. Let me give you the same thing that I walked this client through on our call, and I'm sharing it with you just like I shared it with her. And this is the one I want you to steal, okay? Here it is.

Step one: set a weekly income goal. Oh my goodness, I can already hear the moaning and groaning and eye-rolling, okay? Listen, my eyes are very strong. You know why?

'Cause I roll them at least 3,000 times a day. I get it. " Set a weekly income goal, Renee. That sounds so pedestrian."

I get it. I get it. You wanna roll your eyes. You can.

Roll 'em. Go ahead. Okay. You done?

Still set the weekly income goal. Not a yearly income goal. Not, "One day I hope that I..." No.

This week. "Renee, how could I possibly set an income goal for this week? I've got no one in the pipeline. I'm brand new at this.

Bah." All the excuses. I got you. I hear you.

I understand. The reality is this: your brain needs something concrete to aim at. Try it. Every single millionaire I've ever worked with does this.

You've gotta stay close to the money, otherwise you'll get lured away by the many seemingly important things that never matter because no one sees them. So I'm yelling at you lovingly in the best way possible, but setting a weekly income goal, I can't even tell you how important that is. It always brings me back to one of my biggest and best clients, the client that literally crossed me over the million-dollar marketing year when I was 25. Whew.

It was amazing. It was an amazing year, and many years thereafter. But this particular client, AT&T, huge company. Huge.

I remember them engaging my company and them sending us a ton of marketing material, and I w- my first question was to the stakeholder, like, "Okay, great. what's the sales goal?" "Um, just do what you can." I'm like, "Nope, I need an actual number so that we understand what your KPIs are, so we know how successful we can be, and we wanna prove it to you."

And I literally had to walk this manager through setting an income goal. And I can tell you, we made them and us and a lot of people a lot of money, and it started with having an actual goal. It sounds so simple, it sounds so easy, but isn't that sort of what it always is, what works, right? That's step one.

You're still just thinking. Maybe you write a number on a piece of paper or on a whiteboard or somewhere that... A sticky note. Put it on your, on your computer screen.

Okay? Step one. Step two, choose one connection strategy. Not 10.

This is still a decision. We're not even at the action part yet. You're just thinking. One thing you plan to do for the week that will put you in a position to have a conversation.

That's it. This one simple way that you will meet or reconnect with people. So whether you plan on asking their opinion on something, or whether you plan on inviting them to a roundtable you're hosting, conversations create conversions, period. Okay, step three, build what I call your love list, which is a prospect list.

Right? Write down five names. Five. These do not have to be strangers.

These are people you probably already know, people you've met, people in your orbit, right? Start with that stack of business cards on your desk. "Does she have cameras in my office?" No, it's because everybody has business cards on their desk from that B&I meeting or Chamber of Commerce meeting they went to six months ago or last year, and you've just continually looked at them, touched them, moved them even if you dusted, and, uh, put it back because, uh, I don't know what to say.

So I'm just gonna leave them here. And one day I'll do it. Well, today's that day. No, I'm serious.

I'm, I have them too, PS, so you're not alone. Don't worry. There's no shame in this opportunity here. There's no shame here.

But that summit you were in or that bundle you participated in, the other contributors, the host even, you already have that in common. You can reach out to them. Again, not taking action yet. This is step number three.

We've just thought, right? We set an income goal. That's a thought. Write it down.

Step two, choose one connection strategy. Step three, make a list of names. And that's it. Three steps.

Because step four is where you take action. Your daily rhythm begins by reaching out to one person a day. So if you have five names and there's five days that you work each week, that's it. But this is the part right here where most people are just...

They stop. They didn't get there. They're not gonna do it. They don't do it because it's, it feels scary.

It feels nerve-wracking. I get that. I get out of practice too sometimes. I've been in business for a long time, and I have definitely not done this every single day.

I'm not a robot, right? So there have been seasons in my life, times when I've been more focused on this than others, and that's okay too. But if you listen to this podcast, I'm thinking now's the time you're probably focused because you chose to listen to this podcast about selling your expertise. So that decision leads me to believe that this season for you is you wanting to set up a daily rhythm so that you can start to feel great about selling your expertise.

So this part, step four, is you taking action, and it's the part that I love so much. It's the part that I also want you to feel safe around. It's the part I built my l- amazing program off of, which is giving people a practice, a safe practice area where they can reach out to the people that are also in the program, and it just helps them develop that muscle in a safe environment. I love it because, again, can't say it enough, conversations lead to conversions.

And step five, you wanna guess what it is? It's repeat it. I know you hate me already. That's it.

That's the rhythm. Those five things. Three of them are thinking. You're great at that.

Four is taking action. New, but you can get there. Five is just keep going. You - So, and here's the other part.

I'm gonna share this with you. My client didn't do this very well when she first started to take action. There was a big moment on the call where she was like, "I've been posting in groups." And I said, "Posting is not a connection strategy.

Posting is a setup. Connection is talking to people." But she got super stuck. She's like, "If I just post enough, people will come to me."

"No," I said, "because every person reading your posts is thinking, 'Is this for me?'" And you cannot wait for other people to connect the dots on their own. And I know that there are lots of people out there that are like, "Well, I'll help you with your messaging." Yeah, I'm gonna help you with your messaging too if we work together.

It's all gonna start with primary market research. What's that, Renee? It's talking to people. I know.

I know. But if you sell high-ticket services, if you're a B2B consultant or service provider, you're gonna have to talk to them eventually. And you, since you work for yourself and own your own company and don't have a sales team, are the salesperson. And so this is the f- this is the facts.

This is what you're working with. Unless you get some VC funding and can hire a sales team, well, I'll come in and I'll train them to do this properly. But the point is this: right now, you're the salesperson for you, your business. I know that can feel strange, so this is why I'm giving you all of this structure.

So my client, for example, when she was posting and commenting and showing up at networking events, she still didn't have any clients. That's because those are all marketing activities, not sales activities. So I asked her, "How many people did you actually talk to this week?" Silence.

So we changed one thing, and this is the thing that I just walked you through, which is reaching out to one person a day. Not to pitch them, just to start conversations. Now, I held her feet to the fire. I sent her a message literally every day, and within two weeks, she had one client signed, a new client, a person that she barely knew before, signed, and another client she was drafting a proposal for.

Two weeks, one person a day. Not because she worked harder, because she got closer to people. So here's the core takeaway. Sales is not content.

Sales is conversations. The content gets you in proximity to have the conversation. But there's also people that I work with that never publish any content. They just reach out.

They build - we build that custom bridge together. They build it. I c- I guide them through it. So I will also say that just reaching out without guidance would have yielded nothing for her because, and here's the really important part that I want you to kinda know, is the first few attempts that she made, she made some super rookie mistakes.

Now, she's not a rookie at what she does. She's just a rookie at sales. She'd been working with the same three retainer clients for two and a half years, and she knew that one retainer client was slowing down, and she's like: "I need to make more sales. I've been in business for years.

I know I can do this. I know what to do," right? You heard me talk about it already. She said, "Renee, I reached out to three people, and no one answered."

So she was in essence saying, "This doesn't work." Now, I know it works. So I asked her to send me a screenshot, so I could see the interaction, which is very much what I always ask. So if we ever work together, know this, I'm gonna ask for s- receipts, not because I don't trust you, but because there's tiny little things that happen that are lost in translation sometimes.

And since you're new at it, at doing it in this way, at least you highly likely might make the same mistake she did. So when she showed me that screenshot, I saw it right away. The message was too heavy. It required too much to get an answer.

It's gotta be an easy-to-answer question. So together, we rewrote it and came at it from a different angle with different framing, and she immediately sent me a message back, "Renee, they responded right away to the second message. You're a genius." Like, I'm not a genius.

I mean, I wish. I just have practice doing this. And again, this is one thing. It's simple, one action.

This is something I can't say I don't have enough time for because I'm not Trying to sit down for a whole day to do it. It's the 10 minutes, and I have squeezed in that 10-minute outreach while I was waiting for the pasta pot to boil. I mean, we've already established I like Italian food, okay? Since I'm not making lasagna, I'll make some penne or a nice fettuccine.

I can do that in 20 minutes. Point is this, lemon pasta, don't get me started. I love it. I'm already hungry now.

See what you did? Okay. No, I did it to myself. The point is this, I have squeezed in those 10 minutes while waiting for my kid to find his second shoe.

I don't know why he hides them in different places apparently. No, I'm kidding. I don't know where they are. He throws them around, kicks them off.

I, I, I d- I don't understand the whole process. Or girls are different than boys. My son seems to always have one shoe. Where's the other one?

I don't know. Okay. Anyway, I feel like there's a whole stand-up routine that I could do just on the shoe situation. Um, I've squeezed it in while I was waiting for him, uh, at soccer practice.

Uh, and it was cold out, and I just kinda went to the car and took care of it, or I was sitting on the bleachers. Ooh, those are so cold. Or, uh, while I was waiting to pick him up from another activity or his friend's house or whatever the case. So that's my life.

Your life's gonna look different, but I bet you there are 10 minutes you can squeeze into somewhere in your day that already exists, and it's one person a day. Reach out with one question that's easy to answer and gets the conversation started. Is there more to it? Of course there is.

But if you're not talking to people, it doesn't matter what's next. Doesn't matter what's next 'cause it, it hasn't started. So let's talk about the fix that we made and, you know, some safe questions, right? We shifted to low-pressure, easy entry questions.

I c- I s- I call my process the zero to sales in 10 minutes a day system. It's not because you're at zero sales. It's because this is a zero friction sales process. This is a low barrier to entry.

People that learn my system are like, "Oh, it's just like picking fruit off the vine, all that low-hanging fruit." And I'm like, "Yeah, you say that like it's a bad thing. Why do I need to climb to the top of the tree if I can just reach up and grab the fruit that I want right now?" It is our tendency as business owners and women specifically to want sometimes to complicate things.

We add steps that don't need to be there. So the goal is not to close the sale immediately. When my client made these first initial re- you know, outreach messages with, you know, one statement, one question, she wasn't like, "Hey, I hear you have this problem," or, "I see you have this problem. Here's my solution, and the link, and the...

Watch this 10-minute video." No, she wasn't doing that. It was a process, but to get the conversation started was the first step, and she could do that in 10-minute sprints. Five days a week.

Your goal, again, is just to start or restart the relationship, even if it's that dusty, old stack of business cards on your desk. So let's talk about what this actually looks like. Instead of do you struggle with XYZ, you know, like, that feels like a pitch. Like, it feels like you're about to sell me some vitamins.

P.S. I love buying vitamins, so please, if you have them, reach out. I'm a sucker.

I am not a sucker. I know vitamins work. I think they do. Anyways, the client is an OBM in this case, and she knows her ideal clients suffer from having too many ideas, and not being able to put them into action is a big struggle for them, so they keep everything in their head.

She knows that's unsafe, so when she went back to those first three people, the ones she had sent, like, bricks of text to, and not even a real question, again, not strangers, we asked the question like this: "Hey, thank you for helping me out with that poll last week." I love asking people to help me with polls, because I have lots of questions, primary market research. I'm always working on something. statement, statement, question.

This is three sentences. Statement one, "Hey, thanks for helping me out last week." Statement two, "Another quick research question. Do you use project management systems like Asana, ClickUp, Airtable, or Trello, or are you paper and pen for your project planning?"

That's kind of a run-on sentence, isn't it? Well, it doesn't matter. It's what we wrote. So I copied and pasted it off of our Voxer message.

I'm giving you the real deal, friends, unfiltered. So but the difference is huge in the sense of she said thanks, she re-framed the question, and then she asked a direct question. Instead of, "Do you struggle with project management and timing and framing and blah, blah, blah?" Instead, she, in essence, was asking Asana, ClickUp, Airtable, Trello, or pen and paper.

That's fantastic. She also knows her people, and that they definitely use one of those. So the big difference is it's specific, it's short, three sentences max, easy to answer, like, "Yeah, I use Asana," or, "Yeah, I use ClickUp," or, "Oh, I'm pen and paper all the way, mama. Old school.

OG." Okay. Either way, it doesn't matter what the answer is. We're glad that they answered, 'cause that'll allow us to ask the next question and move through follow-through.

So the most important thing is they do not have to reveal a weakness. So by this question that we just asked, the reason it got answered and her other ones didn't was bec- I know that's not proper English, but you have to just work with me here. Is because this is easy to answer. There is no shame in choosing Asana, ClickUp, Airtable, Trello, or paper and pen, right?

The answer is one they would happily say out loud in public Maybe even enthusiastically. You know people get excited about this stuff, right? I know I do. I will die on that hill.

I, I, I, I converted from Asana to ClickUp. I love it. I used to use Trello. I never could understand Airtable, and I'd still, yes, sometimes use paper and pen.

But people get passionate, right? And so if you ask them the right question that they want to talk about that doesn't require them to admit anything or reveal a weakness, and that they would say it out loud in public even though this is a private conversation, this is where the relationship starts. But we're not overly personal yet, because we're just not there in the relationship at this point. And that's the part that I think a lot of us who haven't practiced this that much get worried about.

"Oh, they're gonna know I wanna sell them something." Hey, listen, you don't even know if you wanna sell them something yet. They haven't been qualified. All they've done is respond.

But that is the first step, and if they don't respond, it doesn't matter if you have a brick of gold for free and you're a dang leprechaun. It doesn't matter, because they're never gonna know, 'cause they never talk to you. So we're just getting the ball rolling, and then we have a process to move on through that. But here's why this works.

People don't wanna be sold to. This is coming from your favorite loving sales coach, okay? People do not want to be sold to, but they love giving opinions, talking about themselves, feeling understood. These are all really strong qualities that introverts have, right?

Introverts. All my clients are card-holding, flag-waving introverts, and I design these processes for them. So the next big ship... shift.

Ship? Has your ship sailed? No. Shift.

I'm getting tired. Can you tell? It must be nearly 3:00. No, it's not.

It's just early. So every person you talk to is one of these three things, and this, although you might have heard this before if you're listening to this podcast, thank you But every person you talk to is a client, a connector, or a collaborator, and the magic is you don't need to know which one up front. You just need to start a conversation. So repeat after me.

Talking to the wrong person is still better than talking to no one, because just because you started the conversation, you don't have to continue it. If at any point you start to see red flags, you don't have to continue. And they're not gonna be like, "Wait, you asked me a question. Where'd you go?"

No, they're just gonna go on with their life. They're not gonna be mad at you. They're not gonna be upset. The next time they see you, they're not gonna bring it up, I promise.

They're not even gonna remember, because it was such a small part of their day. They answered a question or two. It was very easy for them. They think you've moved on.

They've moved on. Everybody's happy. You see them again at the next chamber of commerce meeting. Do you know what I mean?

But what's gonna happen, and here's my hypothesis based on hundreds of thousands of these conversations, is that if you're actually genuinely reaching out and starting a conversation with one person a day, you will find at least one person a week that doesn't throw any red flags. That is green, green, green, green, green flags all the way. And you're gonna go, "Oh my goodness, this person was literally in that dusty pile of business cards on my desk for six months, and I just didn't ever reach out.

I never thought about how to do it or what I could do, and now they're like a real freaking awesome client." That's what's gonna happen. So at the end of the day, I want you to know that you can do this, so I'm gonna give you a little challenge. You know I like to give my weekly challenge.

Step one, set a weekly income goal. Money. Yes, your business needs to make money. It's not a business if it doesn't make money.

It's not because you're not good enough. It's because you are so good, you need to make money, because when you make money, that is an indicator that you're actually helping people. If you're not making money, then you're not helping anyone. So it's not a selfish thing.

It's reality. Your business was started because you have a particular set of skills, and you can help so many people. Okay, step two, write down five names, people you already know. This is just practice, so don't be...

Don't worry. It's all good. Don't be crazy about it. Don't be worried about it.

don't get all in your head about it. Step three, go through each step I walked you through today, one at a time. Do the first things first. Before you start anything else each day, this is my personal advice to you, eat the frog, as they say.

Before email or social or busy work or laundry or what sucks my time out of my day are just all the little tiny distractions that happen in my house. I mean, it's crazy. So, and I let it happen. I let it happen because I also do not want to bother people.

I also do not want to be salesy, pushy, or otherwise annoying. So I'm not trying to hustle anybody up, but I am genuinely reaching out to start conversations, knowing that if I talk to five people a week, that's one a day, I absolutely will find someone who hits that spark. We're both connecting. We've got that connection, and we can grow it from there.

All right. Here's my final thoughts to you, okay? If you've been feeling stuck like you're doing everything but nothing is working, go to askmecoach.com.

That's A-S-K-M-E-C-O-A-C-H.com. Find the freshest ways to keep the momentum going beyond this podcast.