Power VS Force
How would you like to close 68% of the meetings you land?
Sounds insane, right… Yeah, that’s because it is.
The strategies and concepts I’m about to reveal have helped me to land meetings with a $3,5 Billion/year company, an owner of a $2 Billion/year company and even Bose.
When I first started my social media marketing agency, I was clueless on how I could get clients. I started to look for information on YouTube and Google. Most of the results were talking about outreach strategies such as cold calls, cold emails, pretty much they only talked about cold outreach. Of course, I thought that was the only way to go and I tried it. As I was testing these strategies, I found it hard to land meetings. This resulted in me into getting one failure after another.
After doing this for 4 months straight and seeing no results, I felt demotivated, I thought I was doing something wrong. So I got a sales coach. He put together a cold call script and taught me how to act in meetings to close them. Pairing up his knowledge with 4 months of trial & error, I was able to find the sales structures that helped me land meetings. However, when one problem was solved, a new problem arose…
I could land meetings, but it was almost impossible to close them. I remember going into every meeting I had, I would set the frame perfectly but when it came to signing the deal, I would get a ton of objections, a ton of no’s. This meant I was wasting a lot of time, going to the meetings I couldn’t close.
This is a stage a lot of business owners face. It’s what I call the Arctic ocean. You’re surrounded by a ton of unqualified, cold leads that are hard-to-close and most of the time don’t even have the funds to pay for your services.
However, I started mixing things up. Instead of just doing cold calls, I started to leverage my network, build authority and trust. This was the biggest turning points in my agency.
So here are my results now.
After 2 years of consistent grind, I am consistently able to set meetings, that I can close in 5 minutes. (Do I recommend everyone doing that — no — but it just shows that right now I have built a strategy, that not only generates more leads but also generates quality leads.) These people want to work with me and even if they don’t have the budget today, they are willing to do anything to work with me.
A couple of days ago, I picked up my old notebook, with my plans & to-do lists. I started reading it and I saw a couple of my old sales strategies. This got me thinking: why can I close meetings with almost no effort, but when I started I couldn’t even land a single meeting with hours spent doing outreach and sales. So I started researching further, and very quickly I came to a conclusion — not all meetings are equal. When you think about it it’s just obvious, meetings landed from cold calls are less likely to be closed than a meeting from a referral. As a result, you would much rather prefer setting meetings through referrals, rather than cold calls
.Here’s why: in order for someone to buy from you, they should, on average, interact with you a minimum 5–13 times, before they can make a decision. Today, most salespeople are taught to reach out first and then follow-up. All this leads to are hard-to-close meetings that fall into the endless follow-uppitfall. What referrals do, is that they build trust & authority. Since were recommended by another person. This means the other person will research you a bit and watch your content. By doing this, they already have seen you a couple of more times, that makes them trust you more.
However, most of my meetings aren’t referrals. While I do advise getting more referrals, acquiring clients that way might not be the most sustainable way. You don’t have a consistent flow of leads, you could have meetings with. I know, I am not in a situation, where I don’t have enough leads, so I’m at a unique place. I consistently get a lot of high-quality leads, and it’s not from referrals, nor cold outreach. So there’s something else that I’m doing, that gets me high-quality meetings.
Then it hit me — personal awareness.
Before reaching out to anyone, most people already know me. Either because I’ve been referred over, or even better — they’ve seen my content. I found this being a crucial piece of generating high-quality leads. This helps me to flip the table because when I reach out, they’re almost as warm as a referral. They’ve seen my content so they trust me. This reduces a lot of potential friction between us and immediately I have a much larger chance to close the person.
Let me show you why does this work so efficiently. Let me quickly show you 2 very important concepts:
- Power VS Force;
- The Opening
They play a major role in increasing the number of leads you get and the quality of the leads you get. The better you understand and execute these concepts, the more likely are you to win in the game of sales.
1.Power vs. Force
This is a concept by David R.Hawkins. In the book, the author talks about 2 ways anyone can get the desired outcome.
One way is to get the goal with brutal force, and the other one is with power. Pretty obvious so far, right? Let’s dive deeper.
Force
Force is a form of business, where you work with pressure & hard sales. This is when you strictly use cold outreach strategies, where you make the decision maker go on a meeting with you, rather than them wanting to reach out to you with the purpose of meeting you. Force is also when in your meetings, you’re pressuring the potential clients to close the deal. You aren’t allowing them to think about it, you’re putting the pressure on them.
While working with force can be very effective, it drains a lot of energy from you. This means, that in order for you to use force to get clients, you will have to put in a lot of time and energy into each and every close. Also, force works only if you want results today and you are not looking at your long-term goals.
Pros of using force:
- Not much up-front work
- You have a higher chance of closing leads, that don’t know much about you
Cons of using force:
- Lower quality leads
- No long-term ROI
- You come off as extremely pushy
Power
This style, on the other hand, is a style of sales, where people come to you. You leverage your network, your authority to polarize people so much, they come to you.
A good example of this is referrals, they come to you because they’ve heard good stuff about you. Now, instead of you fighting, trying to get them to sign a deal with you, they want to work with you. You just need to explain the details and they will do anything to work with you.
You’re not chasing the client — the client is chasing you.
The biggest advantage when working with power is that most people already trust you. Therefore you have the power to pick with whom you want to work with. This is extremely powerful when you want to raise your prices since if someone can’t afford your services, you can just go on to the next one.
This is the easiest way to get your business to work with huge clients. Or even better — get huge clients coming to you.
However, most business owners get stuck in the ways of Force only using cold outreach strategies and pressuring potential clients to get on a meeting or to work with them. This takes a lot of energy out of you and it’s a style of sales where you’re always chasing the potential client. You’re seen as an annoying, cheezy salesman.
Unlike force, power is a long-term approach to getting the desired outcome. It takes much more up-front work, however, it results in exponential growth and insane results.
Lack of power results in people working with low-tier clients, while those with power can get “whale” clients and close them easily.
Pros of using power:
- Once you have enough power, people come to you
- You can charge whatever price you want
- You can work with high-level individuals and businesses
- Every door of opportunity is open for you
Cons of using power:
- It takes time to build up your power
- You don’t have immediate results
- A lot of up-front work
Here’s How We Can Help You Build Your Power
When to use Power and when to use Force?
Both power and force, have their own place in business.
When you are starting a new business, nobody will know you. So it makes much more sense to work with force rather than power. That would be your only applicable strategy for client acquisition. However, you do need to follow the evolution of lead generation.
This means that when you’re working with force, you also need to start building power on the side. You need to start working on a website, creating content and expanding your network. You don’t put power as your primary tactic for client acquisition today, but you are preparing for 1,2,3 years down the line when you will be seriously scaling. You must build a strong base for power today if you want to leverage it in 6 months.
Once you acquire a minimum of 2 clients, start to slowly make the shift from force to power. Think about how can you expand your network, build your personal brand, how can you get clients coming to you. Most of the strategies you try in the first week, won’t work. But they do leave an impact for 6,12,36 months down the line.
Every successful person you see is built upon power. Power polarizes success, it gets success and people coming to you.
Here are the 2 most effective ways to build power:
- Strategically creating & distributing content;
- Leveraging your network.
These 2 strategies have allowed me to land meetings & close clients on a day-to-day basis. Leveraging power to acquire & close is a much better long-term strategy than just keep on doing cold outreach 24/7.
Actually, the funny thing is, that when you create content and pair it up with outreach, a lot of people will already know you from your content. Therefore, everything you do becomes more effective.
How they helped me…
A couple of weeks ago I got invited to an event hosted by BNI (Business Network International). The night before the arrival, I remember trying to fall asleep, but I couldn’t since I was thinking about the event. I couldn’t sleep because I was scared & excited at the same time. What’s interesting is the event starts at 6:45 in the morning, so I stayed at my friend’s house, who lives 5 blocks from the location in the attempt to get more sleep.
Back then I had no idea about how do these events happen. What’s the timeline? What to people do there? How do you make new connections? I only knew 1 person there so I was a complete outsider and nobody knew me. A fog of anxiety covered my lens to life so I was very confused about how would it go.
So, I arrive at the event, I take a look around. Everyone seems to have their own group of people, with whom they talk to. So as most people would do, I tried to find the 1 guy I knew in hopes to meet new people with his help. However, he wasn’t there, he texted me telling that he would be late. So I was on my own.
I decided to look for a place to sit, and I saw my perfect spot. I put down my bag and took out my notes and on the table, I noticed a list of all the members of this BNI group. This list had all the members and what do they do, logically I was looking for someone I could help. So I found this one coach. While looking over her profile, I knew she would be my perfect client. However, how could I approach her in a polite manner, so I don’t start selling right away?
I started thinking, but there wasn’t much time left since the main networking event was about to start. I decided to just go with the flow.
Within the event, there’s a section where you have to pitch your own business and what do you do. Everyone had crafted an interesting way for them to present their business and attract attention, it was an interesting experience for me. Then my time comes, I have to pitch myself.
I hadn’t prepared an interesting pitch, so I had to make something up on the spot. I didn’t want to say something like “I help business owners get more customers with social media, that’s boring.”
I decided to present myself as a scientist, a professional human cloner. I pitched myself:“Hello, my name is Reinis and I am a professional human cloner. You see, as I am standing right here in this spot, I have hundreds of my clones selling my products & services online in advertisements and marketing funnels. In other words, I help businesses get more sales with cloning their best salesperson, which is you.”
This pitch wasn’t the best, but it caught the attention of a couple of people. More importantly, it caught the attention of my prospect.
Once the networking and pitching part was over, we had to go downstairs for +breakfast. As I was walking down, I saw my prospect smiling and approaching me. So we started talking. During our conversation she mentioned the name of my company, and that she had seen my case study and she knows what we do.
I was confused for a second, thinking he saw the name of my company somewhere, but no — she knew who I was.
She had seen my content and she already knew what I was doing.
We chatted for a bit and we scheduled in a meeting 2 days after.
The weirdest thing was — we scheduled to do the meeting in real life. And if you know me, you know that I never, I repeat, I never do meetings in real life. I always do them online, to save as much time as possible.
Here’s how the meeting went…
Here’s the thing, before even entering the meeting, I knew I would be able to close her without a single problem. This is why I was so confident about doing a meeting in real life — I know I would get the sale and I wouldn’t have wasted any time.
The meeting itself was a piece of cake. We set the meeting at a cafe and upon arrival, she was super excited to find out how could I help her.
This is something, you can only get when leveraging power. If I had tried to set the meeting with force, she would be in a different mood
We talked through a couple of different options on how could we work together and we came to a conclusion, that the best option would be to help her out with content creation. So I signed her for EUR 1,300/Mo (that’s around $1,500/mo)
What’s interesting that the meeting lasted for a total of 10–15 minutes.
Who doesn’t want to close a meeting in 10–15 minutes? Everyone does — it’s stupid simple when you have the power. You leverage it to get clients who want to work with you.
Power wasn’t the only reason I was able to close her so easily. Something extremely important to get a client is not the ‘’close’’ itself. It’s the opening. How do you open the sale…
This leads us to the next point
2.The opening
The Strong opening
The opening is something similar to the first impression. A good impression leads to an easy sale. A good impression gets you quality clients, that are willing to pay you a large sum of money.
Here’s what’s considered a strong opening
- You’re seen as a man of value, not just as a salesman
- The person trusts you
- The person wants to work with you
- They have seen your content
- They have heard good reviews about your work
- They approach you first
A strong opening is when, even before you sell to them, they know & trust you. This is why referrals are so easy to close. They have heard good feedback about you, so they are more likely to be closed.
In the case of my meeting the potential client at BNI, she had seen my case studies. This means she had seen my results and how I achieved them. This meant that she already trusts me. This trust made her approach me when she saw my pitch. So we started talking.
I’ve seen a similar pattern with my latest clients, they seem to know me even before I reach out to them. This is all because of my network and my content. I am creating demand for my name. That way people want to work with me no matter what.
This is what has helped me to land a meeting with a $3,5 Billion / year company, an owner of a $2 Billion/ year company; the marketing manager for Bose.
This is all because they knew & trusted me. I was able to achieve this with strategic content creation and distribution.
Lack of personal brand awareness, trust is what makes most agency owners fail in the business landscape. This is why this strategy is so crucial — it separates the success stories from the failures. Trust and your brand is what helps you close meetings, even if you have a worse service and a higher price than the rest of the market. This is what builds power and makes you real money.
On the other hand, what makes most agency owners lose in the game of sales is a weak opening.
The weak opening
If you have a weak opening — you’re done. There’s almost 0% chance that you will close the client.
Here’s what’s considered to be a weak opening/a bad impression:
- The person doesn’t know you
- You pressure them into doing a meeting with you
- They don’t trust you
These are the 3 main factors that make up a weak opening. This makes it so the person on the other end doesn’t trust you. There is no authority built. Therefore, when you give them a price point of $1,000 or above, there’s no way you can close the sale.
The problem is, you start your relationship on a hard sell, and usually, it doesn’t end well, since your relationship isn’t good. However with me and the client, I was talking about — we opened the sale on a good note — she knew who I was, what I did, why should she trust me. More importantly, when she saw my case study — we started our relationship with value, not just an empty hard-sell.
How to make a strong opening when nobody knows you
This isn’t as hard as most people think. You can have the same sales structure you have now, but the only thing you would have to change is that when you do the first meeting, you provide value instead of just selling directly.
An example of this is showing a live audit to the business owner, so they understand what’s wrong with what they are currently doing and how they are leaving money on the table. This not only helps you create a strong opening with value, but it makes you be an authority figure in the eyes of the business owner.
Now, if you just add this one simple variable to your sales, you are guaranteed to make more sales, simply because you are leveraging your power and you are creating a much more powerful opening.
In conclusion
If you wish to close more meetings, you need to focus on building awareness for your personal brand. Aswell with this, you need to be seen as a man of value, rather than just a salesman. This is going to help you build more power. Therefore you can leverage your power to get clients coming to you and this is going to increase the number of meetings you close.
You can build and leverage power by creating and distributing content online or doing live audits for the business owner before selling.
As a result, you will build more power and create a much stronger opening to the sale, which in return will help you close more meetings.
This post was originally published on SwimInLeads.Com