Step 3: Test Their IQ – The Invitation

Written by on December 11, 2015 / 60 Second Sale

This is step 3 in the free sales course. It is titled Test Their IQ – The Invitation.

Step 3:  Test Their IQ – The Invitation

Step 3 is the first in a 2-part testing the IQ of the client. I use IQ because it’s an acronym for invitation and qualification. In step 3, we’re going to focus on how you get invited in. You do business by invitation only. Starting now, you don’t go out and knock on doors and beat down doors to get in and get in front of people. You only go places where you’re invited. In step 3, we’re going to talk about how you get invited in. I want you to focus on delivering value to your prospects in an educational format, and you can do that in 2 ways. The first way is by speaking. You can become a professional speaker very easily by educating people on things that are important to your client base. That’s why we took you through all those interview questions in step number 2.

I want you to focus on delivering value to your clients through professional speaking in a way that will help them grow or solve their greatest problem or relieve their biggest fear. Speaking is perhaps one of the best ways to be invited in because you’re not only delivering valuable information. You’re ceasing the mantle of credibility. Any time you’re in front of a group or an audience, you are a credible expert. Focusing on where you can deliver high-quality education content to people who you suspect may want to use your services, may need your product, or may desire an experience you can provide is one of the best ways to be invited in to deliver even more value by offering a product or a service, and that is the essence of selling.

The second way to be invited in is through writing. When you write, again, you are a credible expert, particularly if your writing is published, and these days, being published on a website or in a blog can be as powerful as being published in a trade journal. That’s the reason we asked in the interview questions what your best client reads, where they go, what conventions they attend, what websites they visit, where they get their media. We ask those questions so that you can write and produce educational content and deliver it in a way they can consume it and you will become a credible expert in their eyes.

Those are the first 2 ways I want you to reach out to people to be invited in to do some selling to them, to deliver more value to help them. The how you get invited in is the subject of our next step, but the invitation process itself has a third component. When you focus on Evangelists, separate and apart from focusing on your clients, you need to focus on networking, and that’s why when you interview your Evangelists it’s so important that you understand where they go, what conventions they attend. We’re going to get into the specifics of how you can connect with Evangelists in a networking setting later on in our process, but understand this. The 3 primary ways you will get invited in are through speaking, through writing, and through networking.

There are 3 action items in this step. Action item number 1 is for you to identify speaking opportunities. Here’s how you’re going to do that. I want you to go to your best clients and I want you, when you’re interviewing them, to ask them specifically what conventions they attend, what groups they belong to. When you ask them this question, find out if those groups invite outside folks to come and speak to them. Of course, most of them will. If you can, talk to your client about who organizes these conventions, who sets up these events, and reach out to the planner and offer to deliver a talk. Initially, you can do this free of charge.

Many, many event planners will take you up on the offer to deliver a talk free of charge. The easiest way to break into these groups is by selecting regional groups or associations. For example, take insurance professionals. If you sell to insurance professionals rather than going to the National Association of Insurance Professionals, you should go to the regional chapter in your area. Find out who the president is of the regional chapter of that organization in your area. Call him up and ask to deliver a speech on exactly what your clients told you is top of mind for them. Offer to deliver a talk on solving their biggest problem. Offer to deliver a talk on addressing their source of anger or frustration.

You’ll find that at the local level, people will be very receptive to these talks. Even when you’re delivering talks to 10 or 15 people at the start, this is incredibly value because, number 1, it helps you work out that content. It helps you create a really powerful talk that will get you invited in. Number 2, all you need is one person in that audience to connect with you and say, “I need you to come down to where I work and talk to the folks who work there because I think you have something valuable.” You don’t have to get in front of hundreds and hundreds of people to start; 10 people, 15 people, 20 people at a local association is a great place to deliver your educational talk for the first time. That’s action item number 1.

Action item number 2 is to determine what your ideal client reads, what your ideal suspects are reading, and then offer free educational content in the form of articles or videos that they can put on their website to deliver value to the people who read it. There’s a very good chance. In fact, there’s a great chance that the people who reading that website or viewing those videos are your ideal clients, at least some of them anyway. Putting up that content is a great way for you to leverage the opportunity to be invited in by giving them great educational content.

Make fantastic videos, write excellent articles, and offer them to the people who are the editors of these websites or these blogs.

Even in old fashioned trade journals, which are paper and delivered to people via print media in direct mail, you can offer great articles and send them to the editors each and every single month. In fact, if you like, you should just send out these articles to the editor or send out the article to the web publisher and follow up with a phone call and an email. The key component in this is the follow-up. You send this content out. You follow up with a phone call, follow up with an email, and determine whether or not it’s of interest. Most of the time, you’re not going to hear back, but 1 time out of every 10 that you do or 1 time out of every 20 that you do, your articles will be published and you’ll be targeting your ideal audience.

A great way to get inside when it comes to these websites is to interview the editor or the publisher. This is particularly true of trade journals or other publications. Interview the editor or the publisher and write up an article on that and put it on your own website. Then you’ve developed a relationship and you’ll be able to continue to send articles to that person because you’ll already have a relationship with them.

Action item number 3 in this step is to identify the groups and associations that your ideal Evangelists belong to. Identifying these groups is critically important because you want to be able to attend these groups, you want to be able to network in that setting. Interview your ideal Evangelists, find out where they go, what groups they attend, and the value those groups provide, and then attend 1 or 2 meetings on your own. Then maybe there’s an opportunity for you to either join or sponsor these groups so that you can become a part of them because if your ideal Evangelist hangs out there, there is a very good chance a number of other ideal Evangelist will be there, as well.

Those are the three action items in this step. I’ll see you in the next step, step 4, where we move on to the qualification process for identifying who’s qualified to work with you.