Sales teams grow faster with a focused Dream 100 list of ideal prospects instead of massive unfocused lists full of stale contacts. Using Chet Holmes' method, you research 100 high-value targets by revenue and employee count, then hit them across multiple channels—email, direct mail, social media, phone—until they know you exist. Sustained presence moves them from stranger to client to referrer.
Chapters
Alright, so here's a great question for you today. Would you rather have a big list or a targeted list? Now this was a topic that came up in our mastermind sessions over the last couple days. We've been meeting with our mastermind members and kind of looking at what's working, what's not working, who's kind of propelling forward and who's not. And we found that the ones that are moving really quickly, adding clients on a consistent basis, growing their top-line revenue, are the ones that have really culled their list down and started working with a very targeted list. Now, when you think about this question, you think, well, obviously bigger would be better, right? If I've got more contacts, then the numbers work in my favor. I send more emails, I make more calls, I do more drop-ins, I get more, more leads, and I wind up with more sales. But here's the problem with that, that theory or that hypothesis. When you deal with a big list, we've got like— I'm talking about within your niche, right? You've got thousands of contacts and that feels good, but the reality is oftentimes you have bad contact details. Businesses that aren't in business anymore, phone numbers that don't ring through, email addresses that are like info@ at best and aren't really accessed by anybody, right? And in addition to that, you wind up doing scattershot marketing. So you're just kind of like, well, I'll just send hundreds and hundreds of emails and hopefully I'll get an open rate and hopefully some of them will respond back and I'll wind up with some momentum. Well, after months of watching people try the whole big list, you know, approach with very little success, I went back to this whole concept of really targeting your list, right? Jeff and I spent a lot of time thinking about, you know, how can we make sure our members are getting results? How can we make sure that this stuff is actually working? And when you're dealing with a targeted list, you have known information, right? You know exactly what the prospect's annual revenue is, you know how many employees they have, if that's something of relevance inside your database, years that they've been in business, and you've done some type of review of their website. This is a concept that Chet Holmes referred to in his book The Ultimate Sales Machine as the Dream 100 list, right? Taking rather than thousands of prospects and culling it down to 100 that you know something about. You know how much money they make, you know that they're the kind of company that you wanna work with. And when you go from this massive ocean of prospects to a small pool, like a stocked pond of fish, that's like, okay, these are the people I wanna work with. If I can get their attention and they give me the opportunity, I know I can do something good for them, and I know that they'll be the kind of client that I wanna deal with. So they're worth extra energy, right? So getting down to a list of 100, you know, gives you the opportunity to do a lot of things that you wouldn't do otherwise. Direct mail, right, actually sending them stuff in the mail to get their attention. Email, of course, right, but more strategic email, email written about their specific situation and how you can help them as opposed to canned, spammy, over-the-top type messaging. Social messenger, because it's a small list, you can spend the time to have an assistant go look them up, find out what their Facebook profile is, find out what their LinkedIn profile is, press the like button and try and engage with them in that way. There's options and tools out there where you can find their, their cell phone number and try to connect with them via cell phone. Because we all know if we, if we're calling a cell phone, we have a much higher probability of getting through. The office number, you get the receptionist, you get screened out, and you can call 100 times and never make a true connection. And then you can even as deep as going to a custom audience, right, where you custom create a custom audience, you upload that to Facebook, And now with that dream list, you can become omnipresent relatively quickly, right? Because you're in their mailbox, you're on their email, you're in their social messenger, and you're really touching them in a lot of different ways. Chet Holmes refers to it as you want this group of people to go from never heard of you, right? Oh, he's just some random dude, to yeah, I've heard of that person, I think, to yeah, I've heard about that guy or gal and they're contacting me all the time, I feel like they're on my social feed, they're in my inbox, to, you know what, so persistent with their marketing, I think I should at least give them the opportunity to do something together, all the way through to, all the way through to, yeah, I'm a client, yeah, I'm a client, these guys are awesome, and I'm happy to refer them to others. And you can't do that with a big list, or you can't get that omnipresence going, but you can with a small list. And so I really believe in this Dream 100, initiative. Now I've developed some unique tools and strategies to help you cull your list. Because it's like, yeah, I get the idea, Josh, but how do I do it? How do I go from like my big list to like a Dream 100? And so if you're interested in having those tactics, type in comments, um, Dream 100. Just type in comment Dream 100 and I'll share a secondary video with you that really walks through the exact steps to develop that list. And how to approach it. So hopefully this is useful. I'd love to hear from your comments. You know, are you, you know, do you feel like there's obvious value in going targeted list versus big list? And then type Dream 100 and I'll hook you up with some additional details on how to build that out. Talk to you soon.
