066: How to Find Clients in Your Current Network

You don't need more leads, you need to stop ignoring the ones you already have. Okay? Okay. Okay. Real talk here. If you've told me right now, Renee, I need more clients, and then I opened your LinkedIn or your inbox, or your past contacts and found a hundred plus people you already know. I'm gonna say something a little spicy.

You don't need more leads. You need to stop ignoring the ones you already have, which is what happens time and again with smart, amazing experts. Because what I see is that you don't need more content or to be on more platforms. You don't even need more visibility and maybe not even more strategies as much as it's about connecting with the people you already have.

Because I see a lot of people publishing constantly, and I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna start a Substack, I'm gonna do a YouTube channel, I'm gonna do this. And they spend all this time planning it out. They spend all this time developing it, and still they don't have a plan of what to do with the people who actually show up.

When you get new people on your email list, they don't automatically turn into new clients. No matter how good those emails are. There has to be context because buyers have changed. All this to say as much as you are putting in effort to your marketing, as a sales coach wanna make sure that you're also prepared for what to do when someone is standing in front of you.

I always think of that. That's little segment of Nodding Hill where she's I'm just a girl standing in front of a boy asking to be loved. You have people in your network right now who have the problem you solve. There are people sitting in your world right now who already trust you. They already know you, and you haven't talked to them maybe in years.

So today we're fixing that. Because the fact is, yes, buyers have changed. People are not sitting around thinking, you know what I should do today? I should go book a call with a stranger from LinkedIn. And no, they buy from people They recognize, people they've interacted with people who feel familiar.

'cause it's not about being more visible everywhere. It's about being more present where you already are. That starts with what I call a sales opportunity scan, right? a scan, like an MRI like. Like an x-ray. Yes. Boring. I know I should probably change the name, but it works like magic. And if you are new here, welcome.

This is The Selling Your Expertise Podcast. I'm Renee Rebar sales coach for service providers and consultants who want to help. People, but have never been trained how to package up, sell, and deliver their expertise. In fact, you are probably so good at what you do. You've been able to live off of referrals up until now.

Yeah, because chances are you were giving away advice for free. Somebody said, I should pay you for that. You said, what would that look like? And you developed an offer together, and that might've been your first, second, third. Heck, it might still be how you create. Client work. But whether you've read my book or seen one of my talks like the one I did on TEDx, your brand new here, doesn't matter.

I'm glad you're with me because we're gonna cover some really important stuff today and if you want to talk about different ways to connect beyond the website, beyond the podcast. Go to ask me coach.com for all the freshest new ways that I'm hanging out this week. Alright, so let's dive into this episode.

Here is the core framework I want you to start to embody, and it's simple. It's not easy, but it is simple. So step one, identify your existing pools. We are not starting from scratch here. We are looking at LinkedIn connections or any social media connections, your email inbox, people you've subscribed to.

Past clients, old coworkers, former people that you've met at events or conferences or networking and people you forgot you even knew, right? maybe somewhere. Some. I can't tell you how many times I had people go even through their phone contacts. I'm like, go through your phone contacts. Just start looking, start cleaning it out.

So I did one of these. Free initial sales opportunity scans with a bookkeeper, and she said, I barely have posted, but what I do share on LinkedIn, it's hit or miss. I haven't done it in a while. So I said, all right, let's just start with your LinkedIn. So we opened her LinkedIn. I'll be honest.

The look on her face, she was already feeling defeated. She only, this is her saying, I only have 167 connections. I said, imagine if all those people were in a room listening to you right now. That's a lot of people, right? So what about. Your LinkedIn connections listener, go back on how many you have. Go look and you again, you do not need thousands of them to make this work for you.

And hey, here's my invitation to you. Come over and connect with me on LinkedIn. Send me a private message that you are a podcast listener, and I'll hook you up with something awesome. So bottom line is this, you don't need strangers. Even if you barely ever post, and maybe you had a LinkedIn profile at one point.

We could start somewhere. So here with the bookkeeper we started there because she works with the books of people that have businesses and people that have businesses are most likely on LinkedIn. So we started there, but I really want you to look at your network like the gold mine that it is. Okay. Step two, look for signals.

You're not asking, are they my perfect client? Because you can't know that. I don't know that, and I'm good at this. I'm not a, I don't have a crystal ball. I'm not psychic. If you're psychic and you can figure this out, call me. We can do some business together. But the reality is you are not asking are they the perfect client?

Because at this point. You can't now, but you are asking do they probably have a problem myself? So here's the example from the bookkeeper. They're in business but not tracking their profit and loss properly. They are often bank balance accounting, as she called it. I love that. So true. Or even worse, they're losing money to taxes that.

Prepared incorrectly. So she really demarcates herself as, listen, I prepare people's businesses for the accountant who actually does their taxes, but the preparation is everything. So when you look at your connections in your network, whether it's LinkedIn, your past clients, your former colleagues, or even your Facebook friends, I mean there's gold in them, NAR Hills.

So think do any of them probably. Have a problem that you solve. When you approach it like that, lots of opportunities start to become possible. So step number three, start small. Think I don't know, five people, not 50, not, I'll build a system first. I'm talking to you. You know who I'm talking to. Pick five humans.

That's it. Write their names on a sticky note and stick it to your computer monitor so you can look at their names every day. All day long as you're working, their names are your focus. When I wrote my book, I called these people your love list. Are they a prospect list? A lead list? yes. Could they be in your CRM?

sure. At this point, just think about them and start to. Think about where they might be, and this is just a thinking phase. So remember back in middle school, maybe it was just me, where you'd write your first name and then the last name of your crush on your trapper keeper. I did. And then you would just dream about them all day from social studies to math class.

Yeah, that was me too. like that, your love list. This is you making a love list. Five people just from your past connections and just think about them. Now, I am not totally woo, but I do believe, and I've done this way before I understood what I think it's doing. It just allows you to start to see things that you wouldn't see before.

Just like when I was starting to decide what kind of car I wanted to buy, when I decided on the car I wanted to buy, all of a sudden I was just thinking about it. That's all that had happened. I had seen a picture of it and I had just been thinking about it, but what started to happen was. I started to see the car everywhere, all across my newsfeed, all across the highway.

The byways in the parking lots. I'm like, wow, this car's everywhere. It was always everywhere. I just didn't see it. So the starting point the thinking. So don't underestimate that. Okay. Step number four, show up where they already are. Now, there's so many examples here. This is where people mess it up, though I'll be honest.

They think I'll post more and attract them to me. Okay? You could be posting anything you want. They might never see it. Hello, algorithm. We have no control. So no, you don't need to post more to get those five people's attention. You simply. Go to them, you become visible because you've shown up where they are, not because you've tried to get them to see you.

You could have billboards on every corner. They might not get in the car that day or that week. They might not even see the billboards. The billboards could be like white noise to them. So the bottom line is this. You go to them. That's the whole game. I talk about this in my book in chapter one. this is how foundational, it's where the girl who wanted the guy to ask her out was already talking in a group of friends with a, you know about the golf outing?

They were just in, so I want, if you haven't read it, go check it again, or if you have it, chapter one, how does she get him to the dartboard and asking her to brunch the next week? This is how meet them where they're at. Okay. Step five, warm the room without being weird. We are not pitching, we are not dropping links.

We are replying to emails they send to their broadcast list because you took the time to join their newsletter and look for opportunities to respond in kind, you are commenting on the content that they are publishing. With something meaningful, you are asking a follow-up question to them about what they already are talking about.

So again, putting on your journalist cap, being curious, even position it as research for something you're working on, which is true because you're always evolving and working on bits of your business, right? I have a client who's a data analyst and she's I am not. A journalist. I'm not a writer, I don't think like that.

I'm like, yeah, but you're working on a huge case study right now. She's yeah. I'm like, what about this person? And you could ask them questions to help deepen or support what you're finding and what you're doing, and working out with that case study. She's oh yeah, I guess I could do that.

Ding, ding. I'm telling you, it's easier than you think. Here's an example. So if you see somebody who's like marketing a lot, on a summit, right? when people get on summits, they always are doing all this Marketing. They typically don't do it all. And you could say something like, I love what you're doing with this summit.

when is the next time? Or do you have any other summits that you're looking at to be a part of this year? Again, it's a very easy question based on what they're already sharing or what do you love most about this, or what are you sharing, or what other talk topics do you have?

You're just being curious, so love what you're doing. Ask a simple question about it. See how simple this can be. I know it's so easy. All right. Then of course, I want you to invite to a free specific outcome call, right? This is not a discovery call, and if you wanna go deep into this, go to episode 46, why no one is booking your discovery calls and what to do about it.

But it is a 20 minute call where you give them. Specific outcome. So for the bookkeeper, she offered a 20 minute QuickBooks analysis wherein 20 minutes, the business owner walked away with one way to create reports that they could use to know that they weren't losing out on tax write-offs, for example.

So she came up with that. It's a little bit wordy, but we're working on it. She came up with it because with one of her construction company clients, she found a $56,000 savings. In their books because they forgot to write off a new vehicle they had purchased. Bob thought Jane did it. Jane thought Bob did it.

Nobody did it, and it didn't show up. And therefore. She saved them 56 K. So that was one of the supporting details that she would give people when she invited them. And I just wanna reinforce that this particular bookkeeper was not on LinkedIn that often, many of her 167 connections had been from like local BNI meetings that she had attended the previous year in our first session working together through this exact process.

When she opened LinkedIn, she's, she showed me those connections. She's I don't even know most of these people. Cool. Those are your favorite people. Why? Because you're connected, right? You're already connected. So low barrier to entry. You don't have to get connected, but there's no baggage. You're like, Hey, I met you at a B and I meeting, I think.

Or, Hey, are you a part of a such and such BNI? Did we meet there? And there's also no awkward history, right? there are some. Resistance. Some real reasons why you would have resistance around reaching out to former colleagues. Maybe there was a weird situation at work, which is why you left, and you don't know how that's being handled now.

So there's no baggage here. This is no awkward history. So for her, with her 167 LinkedIn connections, which by standards would be quite low, I'm saying that's enough. That is all you need to get started. Because here's what she did. She chose three of them. She felt fine with three of them. And the results.

Two conversations, one paid session booked and. From, these are mostly people that she almost deleted, right? If you think about it, she had written them off and she started the process. So like Bravo. And if you're still wondering if this only works for bookkeepers, 'cause I know that I know you. I know you, I know what you're thinking.

I wanna walk you through. Some other examples because you're like, I'm not a bookkeeper. This won't work for me. Bookkeepers, everybody buys from bookkeepers. I know what you're saying 'cause I hear it every single time. So I walked this same process with a marketing agency owner. And so we took her through the sales opportunities.

I say we, me, myself, and I took her through the sales opportunity scan and we found what I call the junk email goldmine. Yeah. She had a separate inbox. So smart. If you don't have one, do it. Get a separate email address. You're allowed, how many email addresses do you have? I have 12, just p ps. Okay, so she had a separate inbox where she would.

You know over the, I don't even know how long, maybe a year or two, she was using that separate email to opt in for things like summits, random subscriptions, and her words, not mine. She's it's a scary place. Same. But here's what we did. Instead of ignoring it or just making it pile up, we asked these questions.

Who is actively, consistently emailing? In other words, like who clearly has offers? Already trying to do some marketing. 'cause as a marketing agency, she does not wanna make two sales at once. She doesn't wanna have to convince somebody they need better marketing and that she's the one to help them. So

She chose five right away emails, and she didn't pitch anything. She just said, Hey, this was a super helpful email. Is there an offer you have that can help with this? Because what is, as a marketing agency, she wants to be able to prove ROI, and so she needs to see a business that is trying to market and also trying to get traffic to a certain offer that she can then say.

We're showing you this offer and we're running traffic to it, and here's the return on your investment. 'cause she's really smart and great at what she does. Another thing she said was, Hey, love this idea. Are you launching anything around this soon? Great questions. So she replied to five emails that, again, she was their email audience.

She just replied to an email that they had already been sending from a broadcast basis. From those five emails, three people replied. One person brought her in to come speak to their mastermind about what she does, and then she got a new client all within 30 days. Hello Goldmine? Yeah. Okay. Now I love doing these.

So when I did one for a book editor who fell into what I call the, I'll just keep posting trap. I had to share it with you. So here's the thing. She's great at what she does. She was doing everything. She was posting daily, she was trying new platforms. She started a substack. She was participating in summits and bundles and getting.

Nothing, crickets. So what I had her do instead was look in her comments of her posts. She had totally been ignoring them. yeah. So if nothing else, if you take away one thing from this podcast, comment on the comments. Don't ignore the comments if you're posting. Comment on the comments. Look for comments.

Okay. So the first thing I had her do was look in her comments of her posts. She had at least five people in there. She commented on their content and then she sent a thoughtful question privately in response to their content. So she had a post. She chose five people that were already commenting on her content.

So these are not strangers. They are. People that follow her, they recognize her, she's familiar to them. She goes to their content, finds their content. So of course not everybody's publishing content. So it wasn't like everybody, but she chose five people that fit this mold. Okay. They commented on my content.

They know who I am. I'm gonna go look them up and find five people that are publishing so I can comment on. Their content. And then based on what they're sharing publicly, she commented on their content and then sent them a private message to them about what they posted. Do you see this for here? So she invited them to, Hey, I'd like to quote you in an article I'm working on which tracks.

'cause she's a freaking book editor, right? She's a writer. Results two said yes. Both booked follow-up calls. One became a long-term client. Same offer, new front door, boom. Sales opportunity scan. I freaking love them. And so you can do this on your own. I've just walked you through what to look for, where to look for them, what to do first, second, and third.

It's simple, but it's not easy because you get in your head about it. So here's your weekly challenge, no overthinking. Step one. Just pick one person. I've given you a lot of examples of different businesses and how many people they chose, but just start small. Start with one, one look in your social media connections, that stack of business cards on your desk.

Yeah, I see it. I know from that one networking event you attended last year. I got 'em too. Don't worry about it. I got 'em. That's how I know they're there. Or your inbox. think about how many emails you get on a regular basis. That's step one. Pick one person I told you where to look. Step two, join their email list or freebie or newsletter.

Reply to one of their emails, and if they're publishing content, of course you can follow that path and just reply, compliment them and ask a question. See where it goes. These people are right now in your world. They're literally right now in your world. They know who you are. They've been around, they've seen you, and you have a direct inroad.

You have the exact. Solution that can solve one of their problems probably, right? I bet you probably solve a lot of problems, but you don't have to worry about whether you're gonna get married or not. This is just you seeing them asking a question. You're just a girl standing in front of a boy asking her to love him.

Thank you. Nodding hill. But again, they're not waking up thinking, I need to hire you. So we help them. We show up, we become familiar. We make it easy to say yes because the worst case scenario, now they know what you're doing. They could refer you best case scenario, they become your next client. And if this episode hit home, I want you to know that there is a lot of opportunity for you in your own context.

So if you wanna talk about your sales process, your client journey, your offers, so they actually support your revenue goals, go to ask me coach.com. That's A-S-K-M-E-C-O-A-C h.com. Have a beautiful week and I'll talk to you soon.