Brutally Honest Advice If You Struggle To Get Clients

I'm about to drop some brutally honest advice to fractional CFOs that are struggling to get clients. Hands down, the number one problem most fractional CFOs face is getting more leads and closing more clients. But somehow I see way too many CFOs sitting back and waiting for the clients to come to them. They think that if they post a few random things on LinkedIn or use AI to improve SEO, or maybe they think that they can drop 30 grand on a website, that the clients are going to somehow just start to show up. But guess what? They won't. And you know that's true, because those new leads haven't been showing up for you, have they? Today I'm going to give you some harsh truths and some honest advice about what you've got to start doing differently to get more leads and close more clients. Let's dive in. The first and probably most important piece of advice I've got for you is that you've got to start adopting this mindset that you're a marketer and you're a salesperson. You can't survive as a fractional CFO if you only see yourself as a fractional cfo. You've got to evolve beyond that. You have to take on this identity that you're also a marketer. You have to take on this identity that you that you are a salesperson. It doesn't matter how good you are at the CFO stuff if you never have any clients to do that stuff for. And no clients means no impact, but it also means no revenue. A lot of fractional CFOs that I talk to, they'll say, mike, I suck at marketing or I suck at sales. And I'm like, look, that's okay. A lot of marketers and a lot of salespeople suck at what they do. Your job is to shift your mindset to I'm a marketer that isn't great yet, or I'm a salesperson that's still got a few things to figure out. Distinction matters. Because if you keep telling yourself that you're just not good at marketing or that you just don't like sales, you're never going to get any better at it and you're going to stay broke. The second truth, and I know some of you aren't going to love this, but you have to incorporate business development into your daily operating system. Business development has to be something that you're thinking about and talking about and taking action on daily. It can't be something that you address Only when you think you need new clients. You've got to think of your business development machine like a huge ship. It takes time to fire up the engines and get the ship underway. Think about it a little bit like the Titanic. Remember, they saw those huge icebergs. Think about how long it took for the ship to start to be able to move in another direction. Your business development machine is, in fact, the rule of thumb that I go by is the activities that I take today, they typically won't start to pay off for around 60 to 90 days from now. This isn't a game that's fit for instant gratification. Take it from me, I have made this mistake so many times over the past eight years. I'd wait until a couple of clients left and then I realized, oh, shit, I need to get the funnel turned back up. And then what happens? I'm cash tight for a couple months. Panic ensues. Nobody's having any fun. One of the most famous minds in business management, Peter Drucker, once said, only what gets measured gets managed. So today we have this huge battleboard on our wall in the office. We use it to track the daily and weekly activities that we know we need to take to eventually hit our monthly and quarterly sales goals. All it is is a huge piece of butcher paper that we tape to the wall. My friend Jim Emerick said, every time I look up at my battleboard, I'm looking at the scorecard and the scorecard is looking back at me. And that's exactly how I think about the battleboard. It helps keep everything front of mind for me and the entire team. And the best part about it is I think it cost us like 58 cents for the paper and the tape. And it takes less than two minutes a day to keep up to date. But the whole team is looking at it every single time they get up out of their desk. I find this to be way more effective than trying to come up with a big dashboard and ClickUp or asana or even anything inside of Google sheets. It's right there on the wall and it's easy to use and there are no monthly subscriptions required. The third piece of advice that I have is that you've got to have a framework for your sales calls. You can't just go into a sales call and think that your good looks and charm are going to close the prospect. Just like everything else in business, you gotta have a process and you really need a framework for this. The reality is you've gotta start displaying leadership and assertiveness as soon as you get onto the sales call. And if you don't know what you're gonna talk about, you don't know the general direction that you're trying to take things. That doesn't look a lot like leadership or assertiveness. After all, you're interviewing with the prospect to become their fractional cfo. And even though it's fractional, it's still a C suite position. So that prospect is expecting you to have your shit together and expect and to lead them through the conversation. If you show up and go all willy nilly, they're gonna sniff that out really quick and nope. Out. I want you to notice here that I call it a framework and not a script. That's because I believe that a great sales call is actually more of a conversation. Plus, how annoying are scripts? We've all been on the receiving end of a sales call when the other person was clearly using a script. Am I right? It's brutally painful. And I bet you didn't end up buying from them, did you? Framework is different. It's more like guidelines or guardrails that exist to make sure you keep the conversation on point and in the right direction, still allowing you that flexibility to have an actual conversation with another human being. I've put together a free training on the exact framework that I use on my sales calls, which we'll link to in the description below. You can check that out absolutely free. The fourth piece of advice that I have for you today. And in a lot of ways I think that this piece of advice is the thing that's brought me the level of success that I've had in both of my businesses. And that's that you have to become a lifelong learner of sales and marketing. I think we can agree that sales and marketing, they're just skills, which means that nobody was born to be a great salesperson, Nobody was born a great marketer. But it also means that you can learn how to be a salesperson and you can learn how to be a marketer. You've got to invest time and money to learn those skills. You've got to refine those skills and you have to actually practice those skills. I think that as an industry, in a lot of ways we over index on improving our skills in forecasting or getting better on three way financial modeling or finding new ways to leverage AI to do our financial analysis faster. And yeah, those things are important, but I'm willing to bet that you're already pretty proficient at those things or you wouldn't be a fractional CFO in the first place. But more importantly, I think you've got to also invest in improving your skills in sales and marketing. I mean, after all, that's the stuff that enables you to share your models and do your projections. Without new clients, your financial skills are. They're kind of useless. You've got to read books, watch YouTube videos, study the great marketers like Russell Brunson, Brendon Burchard or Alex Hormozi, listen to audiobooks. But more importantly, and this is probably most important, put what you learn into practice. Do the work, be willing to suck, and make the mistakes. This is where I see so many people going wrong. They're these perpetual students and they never become the practitioner and so they never make any progress, which means they don't have any hope of scaling their firm. If you want to scale your firm, if you want to scale your impact, it's going to come from you growing your knowledge and skills at sales and marketing, not from getting more accurate forecast or prettier reports. Look, I know that sales and marketing are hard. It was hard for me and honestly, I still struggled with them at times. That's why I continue to study it and practice it today. But that's also why I'm getting laser focused on sales, marketing and growth. At the 2024 CFO Accelerator Live, happening May 15th through 17th right here in Dallas, Texas, I've got my friend Carol Mahoney. She's a Harvard Business School sales expert and the author of Buyer First. She's going to be joining me to teach you everything that we know about getting more leads, closing more clients and scaling your firm. If you're ready to accelerate your skills at prospecting, marketing and sales, then join me, Carol Mahoney and 300 other fractional CFOs at 2024 CFO Accelerator live, go to the cfoacceleratorlive.com or click the link in the description below to learn more. In the meantime, I can't wait to see you back here next week, my friends. I'll see you then.