Why Your Lead Gen Process Matters

Your lead gen process—how you attract clients—is one of the most important functions in your business. When you have an effective lead gen process in place, you're perfectly positioned to consistently get coaching clients.

In this episode, I talk about why a lead gen process matters, including...

• How to avoid throwing tactics at the wall and seeing what works
• How a client attraction process is different from an effective client attraction process
• The four key things to keep in mind when implementing any new lead gen process

In today's episode, we are going to be talking all about your client attraction process. More specifically, we're going to be answering the question of what we actually mean when we use the word “process.” Now, you've almost certainly heard me say it a million times before that there are really only a few steps to attracting clients: finding where your clients are, connecting with your ideal clients, booking calls with those ideal clients who need your help, and closing those sales with the dream clients who are a really great fit for working with you. 

How this is the process for attracting clients is that there's this second layer of the process, which is how you actually achieve each of those things. Honestly, it's nearly impossible to understate the significance of the word “process,” that process by which you attract new clients, and there are many processes for generating leads and bringing on new clients, but one of the biggest problems is that most entrepreneurs fail to have any sort of process in the first place. 

I want to share with you the story of Mikayla, a client that I worked with several years ago, and I was onboarding her about three years ago and trying to get a solid understanding of her business. I asked her what her process was for getting new clients, and she said, “Well, I post on social media, I have a lead magnet and a landing page, and I send emails out to my list every now and again.” Well, that's not exactly a process. That's just an amalgamation of different actions. “Now, what's the process though?” I said, “How do you get in front of new people, connect with them, start conversations with them?” She said, “I just told you,” and I could start to hear her get a little bit frustrated. She said it again: “I post on social media. I have a lead magnet. I have an email list.” 

Now honestly, I have no memory of what I said to her next, but if I were responding to her now, knowing what I know, I would say, “Certainly. The thing here is that that's not a natural process. For example, making a cake is a process. You have to mix the ingredients in a certain order, bake the cake, let it cool, and then decorate it. If you decorated the cake before you let it cool, it wouldn't turn out too well. Or if you baked the cake before mixing the ingredients, you wouldn't even have a cake. A process is a recipe. It's a series of steps, one right after the other, and the key is that each step builds off of what was done in the previous one.” 

In Mikayla's case, you know, it sounded like she had the right ingredients to bake the cake, but maybe not all of the ingredients, or perhaps not the right recipe for putting those ingredients together to produce a cake. The point is that Mikayla didn't have a process. She couldn't say to herself, “Okay, I need to make three sales this month. Therefore, I need to follow this recipe to make that happen by the end of the month.” Instead, she was kind of haphazardly throwing together various ingredients, hoping something—in this case, new clients—would be the result. And I can say without a doubt that Mikayla is not the only entrepreneur out there making this mistake. Part of the reason I can say that is that I have worked with so many people who have some of the right ingredients, sometimes even all of the right ingredients, but they don't have that process down. 

This is where things can get confusing, even kind of misleading, because sometimes that process of throwing things together haphazardly works. Occasionally, you do get some amount of success just from throwing stuff together and seeing what happens. In fact, that's how most entrepreneurs get their first few clients. They put themselves out into the world, they cross their fingers that someone will buy, and it works. That's great. It's exactly how I got my first few clients, and that's actually one of the most effective strategies for just getting started, but that approach doesn't work forever. Maybe it's beginner's luck, a stopgap measure, or whatever else, but it doesn't produce consistent, reliable results. For some entrepreneurs, that's fine. They're in the business to have fun, maybe a little side hustle, and take what business comes their way. For more proactive entrepreneurs ready to make 10k+ every month, it's not a sustainable solution, and that's where the need for a process comes into play. 

Simply having a process, though, isn't enough. It actually has to be an effective process that, at the end of the day, works. Another example from a recent client that I was working with: Her name was Paige, she had been working so hard over the past 12 months to build her coaching business, and when I asked her about her current process for attracting new clients, she immediately rattled off her step-by-step system for generating leads and bringing on new clients complete with “Okay, first we do this, then we do that.” She had the concept of a client attraction process 100% down, but the problem was that it wasn't working. In the past 12 months, she had yet to enroll her first client into her coaching program. She had a process, just not one that was producing results for her. 

When you are starting to implement an organic client attraction process, perhaps the system that I teach, there's four important things to keep in mind: First, this is really, at the end of the day, not the process of sales or even of client attraction. It's the process of starting natural, value-driven conversations with prospective clients that ultimately result in a conversation with them about your offer. Much like the rest of a client attraction process, this process depends on taking really consistent daily action to build assets, which create massive results. The content you post, the conversations you start, and the engagements you do are all assets, all of which build momentum to get you closer to the next sale. 

The second is that this process is best viewed as a flywheel, a device that stores potential energy. It might start turning slowly at first, but when it takes off, it uses all of that stored potential energy to turn rapidly. Getting a client attraction process going might feel slow and pointless, painful and unsexy, but when you gain that momentum, you start to turn your walk into a jog, and then your jog into a full-fledged sprint. 

Third, this process is a series of simple actions that flow naturally into one another, so if your client attraction process seems simple, that's a good thing. Simple actions are good. However, they don't do much if they're not connected to something bigger, to the next action of the next piece of the puzzle, so remember that a client attraction process should be a series of super simple tactics, strung together to create an effective process. 

Fourth and finally, your mindset is absolutely everything here, which means that how you show up to implement this process directly impacts the results you achieve. The biggest mindset shift to consider is that your focus in this process is not on selling. Selling is part of it, but as you're implementing a client attraction process, your focus should be on connecting and creating organic conversations. Many people tend to view “organic” traffic as any source of traffic that is not paid, so anything that's not Facebook ads, Google ads, YouTube ads, or whatever. That's true to an extent but insinuates that “organic” simply means “not advertising,” and that's not true. If we look at the word “organic” in its truest sense, it means natural, not forced, not altered, chemically or otherwise, and that's what you're doing here: having natural conversations that build real relationships. 

To wrap up today's episode, the question that you'll want to consider at this point is where to start with your client attraction process, which title client attraction process to pursue, and when you're considering, this is what is the simplest most direct route to attracting new clients. That's because simple is always, always, always better, especially in this context. If you can leverage a client attraction process that is truly as simple as getting in front of your ideal clients, starting conversations with them, determining if you can help them, and making a sale, then that's what's going to get you on your way to 10, 15, 20k months consistently. 

As always, thank you so much for joining me for today's episode of the Client Attractor Show. I really appreciate you for being here today, and I look forward to seeing you tomorrow for our next episode. Take care.