Selling on Autopilot: Selling to Your Ideal Prospects Without Coming Across as the Average Salesperson

It’s because you’re trying to sell TOO HARD.

I know this sounds absolutely crazy…

But the paradox is that the MORE you try to sell, the LESS you actually sell.

You see…

People don’t want to be sold, but people indeed like to buy.

And people also enjoy doing business with their friends.

This is exactly why networking groups work so well when it comes to generating new leads.

They give you the ability to build quality relationships with your prospects before you attempt to sell them on something they may not even need.

And this is exactly why you should be using similar techniques when selling your products or services online.

This technique is called “social selling” .

Now most people don’t approach social selling the correct way.

When social selling, you should always follow the AIDA guidelines:

• (A) ttention
• (I) nterest
• (D) esire
• (A) ction

Why’s this work so well when it comes to social selling?

You don’t give them the solution before you even know they have the problem first!

So how do I make it work?

Build Rapport With Your Prospects First

Before you start any cold outreach campaign, you need to ensure that you’re building rapport with your prospects first before moving into anything else.

This can usually be simple approaches without an attempt to sell them whatsoever.

Example:

I noticed you’re living the agency life as well {FirstName}, what’s happening in your world??

That’s it.

Don’t send them another message after this unless they don’t respond after a couple of days.

After this message has been sent and there’s been some relationship that’s been developed, it’s now time to move in to identifying the key problems your prospects typically face.

It’s important to keep the first step to your outreach flow extremely conversational and sound natural (don’t make it seem automated).

Identify Your Ideal Prospects Common Key Pain-Points

Once you’ve successfully built rapport with your ideal prospects, it’s now time to figure out what problems they actually have.

There’s a saying that goes something like:

Take them to hell, then bring them to heaven

What’s this mean?

You need to nail in the pain-points other people in this particular niche commonly have and identify them in the form of open-ended questions.

Our ideal clients are typically agency owners.

What problems do they commonly encounter?

They struggle with booking appointments because they’re constantly competing with other marketers spending more on ads than they are.

Ultimately, making the process of generating new clients too expensive and time consuming.

All of these pain-points can be brought up when we reach out to our ideal prospects.

Think about what can trigger emotional responses from them which are usually bringing up the time and/or money they’re losing.

Now you can relate your solution to these common problems.

Think about your product or service for a second if you haven’t already.

How can it help your prospects save time or save money?

This is all your prospects care about.

Delivering Solutions to Their Problems

Once we’ve had the time to identify the key pain-points this specific niche has, it’s now time to deliver the solution to them.

To do this, we need to EDUCATE them on our offer.

Not just sell them…

To start, we’ll need to deliver something of value that’s semi-related to the offer we have to pitch them at some point.

The template:

I just published {something free of value} that teaches X how to accomplish Y through doing Z .

• X = your specific prospect
• Y = the end result / where they want to be
• Z = how you’ll help get them there / your offer

You can have different variations of this message, but if you follow the XYZ rule, you’ll identify everything necessary to trigger an emotional response from your prospects.

Example:

I just published a guide that teaches agency owners like yourself how they can book 5-20 daily appointments on their calendar without spending a dollar on ads.

Want to check it out?

What did I accomplish in this message?

I identified all of the three important aspects to catch their attention and created a sense of curiosity leading them to want to learn more.

And we never even mentioned how we plan on doing it.

Why?

Because they don’t care.

All your prospects want is a solution to their problems.

So what we did here was offered free value that can help them solve their problems on their own.

Why would we do this?

Because we want to build a sense of TRUST with them.

Here’s the thing…

You should never deliver an entire solution in your messages or even in your lead magnet.

When they read through and try it out on their own, they’ll obviously come across problems where they feel like they need help.

By this point, you should be positioning yourself as the industry leader in the space so when they need this help, you’re the person they come to.

Makes sense?

So now you want to let this sit in their mind for quite a bit (usually a couple of days).

And if you’re automating your outreach, once they don’t respond, they should get even more follow-ups educating them further on your solution.

Let’s use SEO for an example.

Everyone can benefit from SEO.

But the term is absolutely burned and scares prospects away almost immediately.

Why?

They’ve already either:

#1: Been scammed by another company that handled it for them

#2: Heard it so many times, they’ve started not to believe it works for them

So how do you solve this problem?

Use something they’ve never heard of before to get them curious.

You need to have an OFFER and an ANGLE.

I help X accomplish Y through doing Z .

• X = your prospect
• Y = where you’ll get them
• Z = your offer/angle

Example:

Helping Agency Owners Book 5-20 Daily Appointments on Autopilot Through Our Omni-Social Selling System

And again, this can vary, but it’s up to you to position this and ensure you’re identifying all of the key points using the XYZ method.

Now over the period of your outreach messages being sent out, your copy will begin to resonate with your ideal prospects because you’re speaking DIRECTLY TO THEM.

It’s sometimes important to combine the identification of common pain-points along with education on the offer in one touchpoint.

Here’s an email I automatically send to everyone who connects with me on LinkedIn:

Hey {FirstName},

I just wanted to reach out and thank you for connecting with me on LinkedIn the other day!

I post some serious value on there from time to time and hope you get some quality advice from what I’ve been putting down.

My agency, Leadsster Growth Marketing, helps agency owners just like yourself book 5-20 extra appointments on a daily basis without spending a dollar on ads.

P.S: Curious what’s stopping you from booking more appointments at your agency currently?

What was accomplished here in this email?

#1: I built rapport by thanking them for the connection. They’re familiar with who I am because they’ve chosen to connect with me on LinkedIn already and know my face.

#2: I reiterated the tagline, “ My agency, Leadsster Growth Marketing, helps agency owners just like yourself book 5-20 extra appointments on a daily basis without spending a dollar on ads.”

#3: Asked an open-ended probing question as a call-to-action in the form of a P.S that gets the prospects curious about my offer.

I’ve booked many solid appointments solely off of this single email because it just simply works so well.

Now, you’ll want to create different variations of educational but conversational copy continuously educating these prospects over your outreach sequence.

You can ask them to read articles with CTAs prominent throughout the content, an interactive lead magnet that triggers emotional response like a free tool of some sort, etc.

But what happens if they don’t respond to any of these messages?

Going in For The Sale

So now that we’ve educated our prospects, by now hopefully, you should have quite a few extremely warm leads that are curious about your solution.

Yet this won’t ALWAYS happen.

And there’s many reasons for this not happening.

Some reasons why you may have not gotten a response yet:

#1: They were too busy to follow-up

#2: They didn’t see your message

#3: They aren’t educated properly

And this is why following up is KEY.

But make sure you’re following up the correct way and not just coming across as an annoying salesperson.

Once they’ve gotten a few messages before and just haven’t responded yet, it’s now time to go in for the hard sell.

I only do this to ensure that none of our ideal prospects are falling out of our sales pipeline.

Usually, the final dropoff message is an irresistible offer with or without a link to book a call with me.

Remember, for high-ticket services and products, the sale should ONLY happen over a phone call or meeting.

So get them curious, and help them solve their problems over the call.

An example of a dropoff message:

I bet you have a lot on your plate {FirstName}… Running an agency gets tough. If you want, let’s have a quick 10 minute chat to map out how we can help skyrocket your agency’s growth in 30 days or less just like we’ve done for other agencies.

Here’s my calendar to see if you’d be a potential fit for our done-for-you program:

{INSERT LINK}

Talk soon?

This message is keeping in mind that the prospect may just be busy, but also makes sure that they know what we can help them with in 2 sentences or less.

You can see, I’ve even qualified the prospect further by bringing up the fact that they need to be a good fit to work with us.

By this point, if they still haven’t responded, they may just not be interested.

But, if you’re automating your outreach, you understand that you have an endless supply of prospects that can get this sequence of messages delivered to them.

How to Automate Cold Outreach Messages

By now, you may want to know how you can scale your cold outreach efforts effectively and how this process actually works.

But how to get email addresses in bulk for cold email outreach?

Now, you’re reading the LeadFuze blog and these guys do a great job at generating an endless supply of your ideal prospects and their contact information in seconds.

But if you want to find emails in bulk, you may also be interested in checking out some of the best 15 email finder tools that allow you to search for business email addresses quickly.

What you can do is use the contacts you find inside of LeadFuze or use Icy Leads to generate your lists of decision-maker contacts, up to you.

The next steps are executing your outreach campaigns and setting your sales on autopilot.

To do this, you can use cold email outreach tools like Icy Leads to send cold email sequences on schedule to your list of ideal prospects in just a couple of clicks.

So now that your outbound sales flow is set on autopilot, it’s now time to begin booking more appointments and closing more deals without spending much time and money.

Key Takeaways:

• Build your list of ideal prospects
• Use the AIDA technique when social selling
• Create a different angle to your offer
• Build rapport first, identify key pain-points, then deliver a solution
• Automate your outreach with sales automation software