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Leah Neaderthal 0:02
So there's a fear I hear from a lot of women consultants, and that fear actually causes them to play smaller than they should be and really not get the clients they want. It's not FOMO, you know, fear of missing out. It's foco, fear of client overwhelm. You might have felt the same fear and didn't know what it was, but I hear it so often that I wanted to address it here. So today we're going to talk about foco fear of client overwhelm and why you don't have to be afraid anymore.
Leah Neaderthal 0:36
Welcome to the Smart Gets Paid podcast with me, Leah Neaderthal, I help women land higher paying clients in their independent consulting businesses. But I've never been a salesperson. My background is in corporate marketing, and when I started my first consulting business, I learned pretty quickly that it's about 1000 times harder to sell your own stuff than it is to sell someone else's. So I taught myself how to do it, and I created the sales approach that I now share with my clients so they can feel more comfortable in the sales process. Get more of the right clients and get paid way more for every client contract. So whether your client contracts are $5,000 $100,000 or more, if you want to work with more of the clients you love, do more of the work you love, and get paid more than you ever thought you could, then you're in the right place. Let's do it together. Thanks for tuning in, and don't forget to rate, review and share.
Leah Neaderthal 1:29
Hey there. Leah here, thanks for tuning in. I hope that wherever you're listening to this, wherever you are right now, you're having a great week, making some good progress on your business and taking some time for you. So a few weeks ago, I did a podcast episode. It was episode 107 called the pep talk that every consultant needs to hear right now. And it was about what I would actually tell you to do if we were having a heart to heart, like a come to Jesus, talk about what you need to do to actually get consulting clients. And if you've listened to that episode, you know that one of the things I say in that episode is that many women consultants don't have enough in their pipeline, like enough clients, potential clients, in their pipeline. And the reason that they don't have enough in their pipeline is because you're not doing the real marketing, or enough marketing. And then we talk about, you know, what to actually focus on so that you can actually get clients into your pipeline. And if you haven't listened to that episode yet, check it out. It's episode 107, it's short. It's like 20 minutes long.
Leah Neaderthal 2:31
And whenever I talk to consultants about how, you know, you actually have to do marketing to get clients coming to you, there's one thing I hear just about every single time from nearly every woman consultant I talk to, there's one specific fear that comes up, and it's this fear that if you actually do marketing, or maybe you do some outreach to people in your network, or whatever, it's this fear that you'll become too busy, like you'll get too busy with client work. It's not FOMO, you know, fear of missing out. It's foco fear of client overwhelm. And as I was thinking about this episode, I had that voice in my head, like, remember these old infomercials? Like, are you suffering from foco? You know, symptoms include only doing a little bit of marketing, or not doing any marketing at all, or no biz dev, because you're afraid you'll get overwhelmed with clients. And if you've ever felt this fear that if you do marketing or you do business development, you'll get too many clients and get too busy, then I assure you, you are not alone.
Leah Neaderthal 3:29
But I also want to assure you this won't happen. Doing Business Development doesn't lead to foco, but not just because I say so. It's because of how getting B to B clients actually works, and in this episode, I'm going to explain exactly how. So a while back in our CRM setup boot camp, some of their participants expressed this fear too. Actually, a lot of them did, and I explained exactly why. You don't have to be worried that if you do business development, then you'll get way too busy. And I want to share that clip with you here. So what you're going to list going to listen to is the actual recording from our CRM setup boot camp. At the point that you're going to listen in on the participants in the boot camp have already created their sales process. They've set up their sales process inside their CRM. They've added their contacts. They've created a strategic tagging system to tag people, and through that process, they're going through their list of contacts. And what happens when you do that is you start to see that you know a lot more people who could be working with you and should be working with you than you thought, and there are a lot more people than you thought who need to hear from you. And so having done all that, we reached the point in the CRM set at boot camp where we actually start to use your CRM to build your business. And that's the point that you're going to sort of drop in on here. And that's also the point when this fear, this foco, comes up. And so in the boot camp, I wanted to address that fear so we can. Actually use the CRM to build your business, and that's what you're going to hear me share in this clip. And so as a side note, you know, if you think you could benefit from having a CRM set up for your business so you can stay organized and do better business development and get more clients, we're going to do another CRM setup boot camp in the fall, so keep an eye out for that.
Leah Neaderthal 5:18
So if you've ever felt foco that fear of client overwhelm, that if you do business development or do marketing, that you're going to get overwhelmed with client work. Then I'm really excited for you to listen in on this clip from the CRM setup boot camp, and at the end, I'll come back and share exactly how you can make a plan and structure your time to do business development without getting overwhelmed. All right, we'll dive in right after this. So where have we really gotten to? You know, we did some tech stuff, we did some thinking, we did some planning, whatever. But you know, what have we really gotten to here? In the past few days, you have built a what can become a business development engine for you, and from here on out, that's what we're going to do. We're going to plan where you're going and how you are going to get there. So let's think back. We started with your pipeline, and I want you to think back for a second when you learned how to read your pipeline, and I asked you, what is your pipeline telling you? Tell me in the chat, if we could just let's think back to that. What was your pipeline telling you, or what is it still telling you? Tell us in the chat I'm seeing that it's too small. I need to do more business development. Prospects are getting stuck at the proposal stage. More intentional pipeline. I've forgotten to follow up on things. So listen, I just want you to sort of scroll this. And if you were looking at a pipeline that was too small, or a pipeline where people were getting stuck, or you're thinking, oof, I just need to be more intentional. And you're thinking, everybody else must have this figured out. But me, has anybody ever felt that way, like everybody else must have this figured out? Does everybody have this figured out. No, we are all here together, learning. And so I hope you come away from this, you know, reminding yourself that you're not in it alone. So one thing that somebody mentioned it earlier, and one thing that becomes abundantly clear is that when you get this stuff sorted and you get your CRM set up, there is so much opportunity in your CRM, right?
Leah Neaderthal 7:24
You know? I think as you go through this, it's like, where do I get started, right? You know? And I think somebody said yesterday, like, I can easily see doing a bunch of outreach and getting overwhelmed. Okay, so let's talk about that for a second. So before we even talk about, how do you make a plan, and what are the steps, and all of that, I think we need to call out, or just sort of highlight, an unspoken assumption that a lot of women have that sort of underlying this question, right, this fear that a lot of women have. You're going to send out a bunch of emails, and all these people are going to get back to you, and all of them are going to want to work with you, and you're going to be inundated with calls, and then you're going to be inundated with work, and you're going to be so busy and working all the time, and it's just going to be just like corporate and oh my gosh, what have I done? Is that a fear or, like, a thought process that's occurred to you? Yep, okay, yes, right. My blood pressure spiked Just hearing that. Yeah. So this, right, this fear that if you do a big push, then you're going to end up being busy with client work, right? It's a really common fear. I hear it all the time, and that fear holds women back from really doing anything for business development, or they do something that they play really small and they don't do enough business development.
Leah Neaderthal 8:44
The truth is that that's not going to happen, and I want to tell you why. So let's just think about it. I mean, first, let's be honest, right? Statistically speaking, most people won't respond or won't respond right away or won't respond without follow up. And that's not a judgment on you. That's just, you know, 70% of people are reading their emails on their phone while they're doing something else, right? It's like, statistically speaking, you're not going to get inundated with the flood of responses. And even when you jump on the phone, clients are very rarely ready to say yes at the moment that you happen to reach out, right? I mean, has anybody heard me say the B to B sales process takes anywhere from three to 18 months, and that's even for the most motivated of clients, right?
Leah Neaderthal 9:31
So even for the most motivated of clients, everything takes longer to sign than even they want it to, right? Then, of course, you want it to, but they want it to too. So has anybody ever tell me the chat? Has anybody ever had a sales process take longer than you or even the client thinks it will right, like, even if they really need your help, even when they need your help and want to work with you, right? Okay, chat is blowing up. Yes, okay, this is, this is the reality. And. So let's say they do respond, and they do have a sales process, and they do want to work with you, and let's say they can actually get it sold in quickly. Let me tell you something, you are not forced to start working with anyone that you don't have capacity for.
Leah Neaderthal 10:17
Okay, like I feel like sometimes we're afraid that we'll be forced to work, you know, kind of like when we were in corporate, and we forget that, like you're actually in control. You can tell your client like, this is when I can get started, or I'm taking on projects that start in q1 or start next year. You have boundaries, and you can enforce those boundaries, and no one is going to force you into working okay, and let's say that you do have a lot of people who want to work with you. That's great, because then you have options. You can plan your work further out. You can offer something smaller to get started earlier. That's maybe easier for you to deliver. You can raise your prices and, like, not buy a little bit, like a lot, you know. And so I think this fear of overwhelm is fear of something that just is not going to happen because of the way the sales process works and because of the way you work.
Leah Neaderthal 11:16
Okay, so if we remove the fear of overwhelm, because, just to, just to, just to sort of put a fine point on it, all of the things that have to happen between you sending an email from some to somebody in your CRM, and you starting to work with them. There is a universe of activity and time that has to happen, right? So sending out an email is not going to lead to overwhelm. So if we remove the fear of overwhelm, then it simply becomes a question of, how do I structure my time, and how do I do this? So with that, we blowing my mind. I don't have to start working with a client immediately. You don't, you don't, you are the boss. Actually, every type in the chat, I am the boss. I love it. This is so awesome. You are the boss.
Leah Neaderthal 12:06
Okay, so that's why this fear that if you do business development, that you're going to get overwhelmed with client work. That's why that isn't really real. And if we can do marketing for our business without this fear, then it's really about having a plan and a process. And so here's what I shared with them, and there are five steps. Now, remember that the women I was talking to in the CRM boot camp were in this process of setting up a CRM for their business, and they had just uncovered, sort of rediscovered, a lot of people who needed to hear from them, people who already love them, people who could be referrers for them, or who they themselves could benefit from working with them as clients. So they had just sort of created this list of people to reach out to. So in what you're going to hear me share next, the type of business development that I'm referring to is reconnecting with warm connections, not to sell them stuff, just to sort of start conversations again. But the same approach you're going to hear me walk through applies to any type of business development or marketing that you could do for your business, whether it's you know, finally reaching out to that list of people you've been meaning to reach out to, or something else. All right, so again, once you can set aside the fear of client overwhelm, which won't happen, then it's really just about, how do you make a plan and structure your time? Let's listen in.
Leah Neaderthal 13:29
Okay, now that we're all together on that, now we can talk about, how do I structure my time? So there are five steps to this process. The first is, be intentional. And we have to start here, because the opposite of intentional is frantic or haphazard. Has anybody ever done like random acts of business development? You know, you sort of get a fire under your ass, or you get super motivated, and you just send out things, or do things, and it's like random acts of business development, okay, right? That's the opposite of intentional, right? So let's think about when you sit down to do this, what do you want this outreach to do for you? What do you hope to accomplish? When will you take this action plan your time? It's so easy to get caught working in the business. Am I going to plan time to work on the business and make that plan okay? So the first step is, be intentional.
Leah Neaderthal 14:31
Second is, treat it like a campaign. Treat it like an actual thing. I have a client who says, make it a moment, right? Or make it give it meaning. So treat it like a campaign. I would recommend, especially as you go through this first phase of uncovering these people, collect and deploy. What that means is, collect 10 people or five people, whatever's right for you, tag those people with the tag that you're going to use to notify yourself that they need to be reached out. To and then deploy, then do the thing, right? Don't wait till you've done everyone, because if you wait till you've done everyone, then you're going to be staring at a list of 50, 100 even more than that, people to reach out to. That's how you get into overwhelm. Okay?
Leah Neaderthal 15:18
And we collect and deploy on the regular at a regular clip, so we can avoid that overwhelm. One of my mantras is hit singles every day when you step up to the plate, if you can hit a single every day, you can move your business forward more effectively and faster than if you try to hit a home run. Okay, so hit a single every day. Step three. Stop overthinking it. Stop overthinking it. Let's talk about it. This is just an email. It's just an email. We send hundreds of them a day. People receive hundreds of them. Okay? You're not actually selling anything, right? We're so worried about being salesy. When we send an email, that's like, Hey, you popped into my mind. It's so good to you know, I'd love to reconnect. Email is not for selling, and when you send an email, you're not selling anything. So don't worry that you're being salesy. The people that we're reaching out to in this campaign are people that you know, and they will very likely be happy to hear from you. I mean, imagine if you got an email that's from somebody that you work with, and that says, hey, you know, you popped into my head because I saw something, something, something that reminded me of you. Would just love to know what you're doing and how you are. Wouldn't that make you feel great, right? That somebody's like thinking about you. And also, people have a very short attention span. If you've done my LinkedIn system, you know that I say the Internet has a very short attention span, but because email is on the internet now it's people have a very short attention span. If you don't send the perfect email with the perfect wording or whatever, guess what? People will probably forget about that 30 seconds later, and nobody's thinking about it to the same degree that you are. Okay?
Leah Neaderthal 17:10
So people have a very short attention span. I'm curious. Actually Tell me in the chat which one of these is sort of hitting you in the feels. All of them, overthinking, being intentional, seeing threes and twos, and you're not selling anything, right? You guys, we're, we're actually not, we're literally not selling anything. And yes, okay, you guys, I'm so glad that this is landing. Number four is Follow up. Follow Up is part of the process. It's not something that you like. I can't believe I have to do this, or I'm going to feel bad about it, that I have to follow up. Follow up is part of the process, and if you can embrace the fact that follow up is part of the process, then you can build it in. Okay? I always say when we talk about shoulder tapping in the academy, sending the shoulder tap is only 50% of it.
Leah Neaderthal 18:05
The next step is the follow up. And once you've done that, then you can consider that, I've I've done it, I've done the thing. There is a long standing adage in selling it says fortune is in the follow up. And it's absolutely true fortune is in the follow up. And lastly, create the system adopt a, what we call, in my team, a playbook mindset. If you had to teach somebody how to do this, like your VA, or if you just wanted to make it easier for you, so that you didn't have to think about it, make it up every time. How would you adopt a playbook mindset? So what that means is the emails that you send. How can you turn that into a template? The follow up email? Can you turn that into a template? Plan your follow up? When am I going to do this and block the time so it's not, you know, two days later, you're like, should I follow up now?
Leah Neaderthal 19:03
And three weeks later, you're like, is it the right time? Just make a plan and stick to it and then track it. Is it in your pre pipeline, or your, what we call your nurture pipeline, and then build out the workflow again? There is so much to be said for not having to think about it if you just follow the steps that you yourself created. It will make it easier, less emotionally fraught, and you can scale it, right? We talked about how you can't scale a process. It hasn't been created. You're creating the process. So now you can scale it. So these are the steps you can take this and run with it and create the emails, create the campaigns, create the system, starting with who you find in your CRM. All right, so just to quickly reiterate, the five steps to actually do business development are step one, be intentional.
Leah Neaderthal 20:00
So step two, treat it like a campaign. Step three, stop overthinking it. Step four, follow up. And step five, turn it into a system. So I hope that if you've ever had foco, that fear of client overwhelm, where you feel like if you do too much business development, or really any business development or marketing that you're gonna get too overwhelmed with client work. I hope you see now that doing business development doesn't lead to foco doesn't lead to client overwhelm, and I hope you know that you're in control, because that's why you're in business right to control your time and your income and your happiness, and no one can take that away from you. You.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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