119. This Simple System Will Triple Your Leads (Fast)

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Most fractional CFOs take a completely unstructured, almost willy nilly approach to their sales and prospecting activities. What ends up happening is you put in a ton of time and effort into prospecting, but you don't get the results that your firm needs. I know this because I spent years doing the wrong things and it stunted my firm's growth. What I learned is that you've got to take a metric driven approach to prospecting. In fact, we treat prospecting and sales a lot like a P and L and it's worked out great for us. In today's video, I'm going to show you how you can treat your sales and prospecting activities more like a P and L so that you can get more profit from your prospecting. Let's dive in.

So what do we have on a P and L? What's at the top? We got revenue, right? Where does revenue come from? We got all these different revenue sources, we got all these income streams, right? Revenue comes in the door, then what happens? Shit starts going out the door, right? We got cost of goods.

We got cost of services going out. Then what?

More money goes out? Rent.

Payroll.

Taxes.

Right? All the sg. And as what are we left with? Profit.

And then as we look at all of this, we're looking at it and we're like, all right, so we've got net profit margin, we got some percentage here that's left over at the end. We got gross profit margin over here, right? It's not rocket science, but we tell our clients, our fractional CFO clients, look, you got to understand this stuff. If you want more net profit, then there's only a couple things you can do. You've either got to have less money going out the door, you got to bring more money in the door, some combination thereof, right? There's really no other way to increase your profitability. Is that fair? Okay. And so we tell them, look, your net Profit margin is 20% if you take home another million dollars. We do some simple math and we tell them what their revenue needs to be or what their SGA's got to look like in order for the math to work. And then we send them on their way go do things. Look, we're fractional, CFOs pay us. But prospecting is really the same exact thing if you think about it, right? What's prospecting? We have leads that come in the door.

Where do leads come from? Leads come from LinkedIn, links come from speaking on stage, leads come from referral partners and leads Come from affiliates, all the different revenue streams. And then what happens? Some of them leave. Why do leads leave? Give me some example. Why would a lead leave? Time.

Money.

Values, why else? They don't have the team, their books aren't in order. A million different reasons. They want a new website, lead comes in the door, they're interested, they leave. And then you have some of them hopefully that do what? They stay for a sales call. Right. Like Carol talked about earlier. And what happens on a sales call, it's only one of two things. It's a yes or no. Some of them say no and leave, some of them say yes and they become clients. And so now we start looking at it a whole lot like margins. What's the percentage of them that stay? What's the percentage of our net profit? What percentage of them are leaving throughout the funnel? And we say, okay, I want to close. How many clients was it by the end of the year? 46 more clients. What are our margins? And there's really only two things that we can do along the way. We have two choices. We can either get better at sales.

So we close a higher percentage of people or what? What's the other thing we can do? Get more leads, which we call prospecting.

If you want that half a million dollars or that million dollars take home, all you've got to do is understand what these numbers are and then build in the daily activities to get more prospect, do more prospecting to get more leads, or to close a higher percentage.

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We had all the seven figure firm owners on stage earlier and if you noticed, they all had this kind of common story around what you've got to do to get to seven figures, whether you do it in two or three years, like Jim you, or if it takes you a decade, like it's taken me and Erica and some others to get to that point. There's really only five things you've got to do when it comes to prospecting and sales. It's very straightforward, it's very simple. Number one, just like we tell our clients, you've got to know your numbers.

With a straight face. How many of you in here know that prospecting P and L, your numbers on there, your margins and how many leads you need in order to close the business? How many of you know what those numbers are? Yeah, me neither. It took us a long time to figure that out. But when you understand what the numbers are, the activities you've got to do starts to become really straightforward. And a lot of us, we don't have time to do all the prospecting. So it's like, shit, we need to get better at prospecting and we need to really double down on sales. So you gotta know your numbers. Just like everybody on the stage talked to you about. You've got to do prospecting.

You'Ve got to learn how to prospect. More importantly, you've got to actually do the prospecting. Number three, you got to do sales. Number four, you need an action plan.

What's the action plan for us? We call it Prospecting Power Hour. That's what Isaiah talked about earlier. Every single morning, even if there's a big conference coming up, our team's prospecting every single morning. It's the first thing we do. I got the coffee going. We're on LinkedIn, we're on sales Navigator. Isaiah's doing that. I'm doing the follow ups and having the zoom calls and doing those things, coffee, meetings, whatever it might be. So we got the Prospecting Power Hour. Literally five days a week, it's on the calendar every day without fail. It doesn't move. There's nothing more important than prospecting anymore for us. And number five, this has been a big one. You need accountability.

Here's how we do accountability. And this works great. Even if it's just you. And I've got to give credit where credit's due. This one came from Jim Emmerich as well. You guys might have seen my LinkedIn post a couple weeks ago. We got a piece of butcher paper. It's just a piece of paper about this size and some blue painter's Tape and we stuck it up on the wall. It's about this big. And at the top we wrote Battleboard because it sounds cool. I didn't have the term prospecting P and L yet, but we wrote Battleboard up on there. And we said, all right, what do we need to do to get sales? We've got a prospect. We started looking at the numbers we need to reach out to about 100 people a week on LinkedIn. And we broke those down into EOS implementers, bankers, and people in the construction industry. And so we split those up, we divide them up, we test different, you know, between the hundred or 200 a week that we add. Sometimes we'll do more on the bankers, sometimes more on the eos. Just really kind of what we feel like doing. And so every morning, Isaiah knows he's got to go out there and hit 20, 25, 30 of those folks. And Adam, connection request every morning. He knows the ones that accepted our connection request yesterday. He's going to follow up with a dm. He knows the ones that look really interested in us and engaged in a conversation. He's trying to push them to hop on a connection call with me every single day. I know that we need to get so many of those a week. We need two of them a week so that we can get four clients a month. Like, we've just started figuring out our numbers. We didn't know when we started. We just had to get into it for a couple of months to figure out, like, what are those conversion rates, what are our profit margins on that? And so that battle board, though, up on the wall, even if it's just you, even if it's just you right now, having that battleboard up on the wall with those metrics that are showing you your daily activities that you're doing, I literally, I'm doing the little. The little one, two, three, four, fives, right? And we do them big.

So that wherever you are in my office, this is looking at you. I look at it and it looks right back at me because, like Jeb said, I don't want to prospect. It's boring, it sucks, it's monotonous. Most people don't respond to you. Most of the people that respond are yep, yep, yep, yep. And it ends up being a nothing burger. But I know that it's just a game of numbers.

I know that the house will win if I play long enough and consistently enough. And if you think back to yesterday, how many clients do you really need to hit a million dollar run rate? 17 you don't even have to be good at this shit. You don't. And the cool part is the more you do it, the more consistently that you engage in the process. Your margins get better, your close rates go up. The referral partners will be kicking more leads in. It starts to become a little bit more of a flywheel. It starts to work. It starts to require you to work less. You'll be able to hire a team. You'll be able to hire an EA that can come in and take it off your plate. Another thing that we do internally is we report the numbers from our battleboard through Slack every week. We've got our crew in San Diego now. It feels a little baller to say we have a San Diego office now. It's two people, but we're going to still say we've got offices in Dallas and San Diego. We got our crew in Denver. Offices in Denver. It's cool. It's one person. Nobody else outside this room needs to know that. But we report the numbers every single week because of the accountability. I know that if I slack off this week, Greg and Kelsey are counting on me to do my part because they're doing their part. It fires me up to do the work because I don't want to be the asshole that's on stage talking about this stuff. But it's not living it. Okay? You don't have a team. You met some great people this week. We'll DM each other in the inner circle Slack channel once a week. And just tell me, how many people did you reach out to? How many connections did you make? How many coffees did you have? How many sales calls did you have? How many new clients did you land? Once a week you update those numbers. It works great. And you don't need an app. You don't need something fancy, brother. You want your half a million dollar a year job? That's your half a million dollar a year job. Five things. That's all you got to do. But I'm under no illusion that this is easy or this is fast, but it's not complicated. In fact, like I told you guys before, the journey is like this. You work and you have some setbacks and you master level one, and then you realize, oh, shit, I got level two.

It took me eight years because I'm still learning this stuff. I feel like I'm just getting into it. It took me eight years to kind of figure this stuff out.

All right, my friends, I hope you found this episode helpful. If you did, it would mean the world to me if you would leave a five star review on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcast, Spotify, wherever you're listening to this episode. In the meantime, I can't wait to see you back right here next week. I'll see you.