I just landed a HUGE client. (Here's how!)

I'm about to try something literally brand new. I've never done anything like this before, but I know that most fractional CFOs, especially those of you that are just getting started, the number one challenge that you've got to solve for is how to get more leads and how to turn those leads into clients. And so I'm going to start documenting the behind the scenes on the things that I'm doing to prospect and what I'm doing to convert those prospects into new sales. And so starting today, I'm going to just start vlogging. I have no idea how this is going to go. You might see me get a lead in the door and it absolutely fizzle out fast. But I'm going to show you the good, the bad and the ugly. That said, I just got a lead in the door. I'm going to sit down, go through the email and see what the story is on this lead and then I'll come back in and let you know exactly where it's at and what I'm doing next.

All right, so it turns out this lead is actually a referral from somebody that I met about a year ago. I was speaking on stage at a relatively small workshop and one of the other speakers at that workshop is actually kind of an influencer, a very respected person in my niche inside of my ica. He and I have stayed in touch over the last year and now it's been a full year ago since we met. He actually has just teed up the very first referral for me. And so what I'm seeing here in the email is that this company is perfectly in my niche. It's a mid eight figure company in the heavily heavy civil construction space. There's not a lot of details, it's just saying that they need some help with some strategic financial decisions. And he's asking if I'd like an introduction. And so of course I want an introduction. And so I'm going to shoot this, this back off and then we'll come back and see if anything comes of it. Truth be told, a lot of times these referrals come in and they don't go anywhere. Somebody says, hey, I know somebody that wants to work with you. You respond right away and then you don't hear back. So I'm hoping this isn't one of those cases where it feels like a hot lead, but I don't hear anything back. So let's see what happens. All right, so as soon as I put the camera down just a few minutes ago, I Shot off an email to the CEO, told him that I would love to hear a little bit more about some of their challenges and to see if my firm might be a good fit to help. Responded nearly immediately. And we've already got a discovery call set for first thing tomorrow morning. It's really encouraging when prospects respond quickly because it normally means they're serious. So let me give you just a 30,000 foot view about how I'm approaching sales calls in the latter half of this year. This is actually a new approach that I've adopted over the last six months or so. And it's, you know, if you think to some of the trainings that I've done, I've talked about doing a one call close before and I've actually shifted that to a two sales call, sometimes a three sales call approach these days. And it's working really, really well. So what is that two to three call approach looking like at a high level? Well, the first call is what I call a discovery call or a qualification call. And that's where I'm working with the prospect to figure out if we're a good fit to work together. So some of the things that I'm trying to suss out on that discovery call are things like are they in the right industry, Are they big enough to, for us to work with? You know, we're working with larger clients these days, also want to make sure that they're not too big. You know, if a 100, $200 million company comes in, that's probably too big for us. But this particular client is mid eight figures. So that's kind of in our sweet spot. Perfectly in our wheelhouse, the industries. Right. So that looks really good. I'm also making sure that on this qualification call that the issues they have are issues that my firm is able to help them solve. So as an example, if they're talking about needing help with taxes or bookkeeping or things like that, that's not a good fit for us. They're not qualified to work with us. So we're trying to suss out some of those things on that call. Along the way I'm dropping in some telling statements about us and some, some clients that we've with with similar problems in the past. But it's primarily about them and the problems that they have in determining if we're a good fit to work together. At the end of that call, if it seems like there's a good mutual fit, then we're going to schedule a sales call like what would traditionally be thought of as the sales call. And I try to get those scheduled on that call and I try to get them scheduled within the next few days or the next week at the absolute latest on that sales call. We're working together to come up with a scope of work that's going to help them solve their problems. This is an approach that I adopted from Carol Mahoney. She's the of a book called Irfirst. We'll link to that down in the description below. But the thesis of that book and the process that I'm using is that clients don't want a solution prescribed to them. They actually want a solution that they were part of coming up with. They want to feel like it's more of a custom solution rather than a cookie cutter solution. And it really just helps the buy in from the client. And ultimately what I found is I'm closing more deals for it from that process and I'm closing bigger deals at a higher revenue as well. So. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. The first thing we got to do is have this discovery call first thing tomorrow morning. And so I will be back with you tomorrow right after that. I'll let you know how it goes. Cross your fingers. Wish me luck. We'll see you then. Okay, so I just finished up that sales call and I got to tell you, it went really, really well. I'm so excited about next steps with these guys. But before I get into that, let me just give you kind of the 30,000 foot view. Okay, so this is a great client for us. Everything that I'm seeing so far, they're fitting right into our ICA or our ideal CL avatar. Sometimes people refer to them as ideal client profile. At the end of the day, this looks like they could be an ideal client for us. So as I mentioned, this is a multiple eight figure business. It's been in the family for several generations now. There's a new layer of leadership or ownership coming in. So the youngest generation is getting positioned to take over for the previous generation. And frankly, the owner said that he is in this place where he knows the operational side of the business really well. He's been doing it for 12, 13 years now. He just doesn't understand the financial side nearly as well as he would like to. He wants to be a CEO when he takes over. It has forecast and projections in place and he just wants somebody alongside him for the next two to three years as they get into that buyout to help teach him how to think differently. This company has what they're calling an amazing controller? I have no idea. They're saying they've got a great controller who's also learning to learn how to think more strategically over the next two to three years as they go into buying out the previous generation. He's eager and hungry to have a more seasoned CFO walk beside him and help get him coached up along the way. Tactically, one of their big issues is that the CEO has the WIP report inside his head. So again, this is a mid eight figure company with no documented WIP report. He knows that that's got to come out of his head and get into a more processed approach where they're looking at it weekly, if not more frequently. So that's in place. It looks like they're running on a pretty standard ERP for their industry. They're cool with that mention that they'd like to find some inefficiencies that might be resulting in some losses on the bottom line, but they said that is not their request from a fractional cfo. They are looking for inefficiencies when it comes to accounting and finance processes and procedures. So they're going to be looking for help there as well. This looks like a really solid company with a clean balance sheet. Nothing really flags me as far as problems. They don't have any big lawsuits pending anything like that and so all went really well. So what are next steps? Well, this is a. This isn't the largest client we've ever worked with, but it's a larger client for us. And I've just found time and time again that with larger clients for us anyway, I think it's a really wise idea to do the actual sales meeting in person. This is something I've just started doing in the last few months and it's paying off so well, but it's a very risky proposition. And so at the end of the discovery call, I asked the CEO if he would be opposed to me flying out and meeting him and his controller. So sometime next week, just for like 90 minutes, I could have some time to put together some ideas based on what he shared with me today and share those ideas with him on how we might work together. They were on board with that. And so I'm going to get off of this little vlogging camera here and I'm going to go book travel halfway across the country, hopefully sometime in the next week or hopefully less. Like I said, it's risky because I've got flights, I've got rental cars, I've got hotels, I've Got food and all the things that go along with travel. But more importantly, it's going to take about a day and a half, if not two full days. Out of a really dense work schedule, I honestly don't have a lot of free time to just blow on a, on a sales call or a sales meeting that might not go anywhere. So I'm guessing all in. I'm probably $3,000 and somewhere between 36 and 48 hours of my time. But for a client this size, I think it might be worth it if I can close them. And so I'm going to roll the dice. I'm going to book a flight and head out there. So continue wishing me luck. I'm going to take this camera with me and kind of continue this journey along the way with you guys. So let's just see what happens. See you. See you at the airport.

All right. I'm about an hour outside of Detroit, ready to go into, to see this prospect. Got up this morning about 5 o', clock, went downstairs, had a great breakfast, looked over all my notes from the discovery call and the qualification call. Kind of recaptured everything that I heard the prospect say. I've got a really good list of a recap of things that we talked about on the discovery call. I've got a list of questions that I need to get resolved this morning before I'm able to work with the prospect to put a proposal together. Honestly, I feel like I'm ready. But you know, there's still this question in my mind. You know, I flew all the way across the country. It's, it's about a day and a half worth of travel all in because of flight times and everything. You know, flights, flights are expensive, rental cars are expensive, hotels are expensive, meals on the road are expensive. And I don't even know if this is going to pay off. I don't know if it's worth it or not. So we'll see how it happens.

Wish me luck.

All right, so I just wrapped it up. Everything went pretty well. So I had a meeting with the, the owner of the company and then didn't even know this, but they decided to have their control controller join the sit down as well. So that made it a little bit more nerve wracking because I wasn't necessarily anticipating on, on the controller being there, but I think it actually worked out really well because one of the goals of this particular prospect was that the, the CEO wanted to understand how to make smarter financial decisions in the business. But ultimately they also want the controller to get Leveled up so that in the next two to three years, the controller can potentially take over as the cfo. So I think it was really good that I got a chance to controller and figure out exactly who we'd be working with. But back to the conversation itself. So this is kind of how the flow of the conversation went. This was kind of the behind the scenes we got in there. I started by recapping the kind of the profile data points of the company that I had learned about them in the discovery and qualification call. And then I went through and recapped the concerns that the CEO had listed during our qualification call. And then I also asked the controller if there was anything that he had that were, like, kind of on his to do list or the list of things that he would hope to get help with. And he added a couple of little things in there. The CEO clarified a few things, added a couple of his thoughts in there, and then we got into that collaborative process of coming up with a scope of work. Now, I already have a pretty good scope of work. We've been working with clients for, you know, almost nine years now. We kind of know what we're doing at this point. But what I've learned is when you go in there and you prescribe to the client what they need, then a lot of times you feel more like a consultant. The sales process is a little bit harder. It's like they don't really feel nearly as involved and invested in everything. And so I've been really disciplined about taking that time to say, hey, here are my thoughts on what our scope could look like. But I want to hear from you as well. What things am I forgetting? What questions do you have? What concerns do you have? Maybe what's. What's missing out of this? Is there anything that you would hope that we would talk about that maybe wasn't in here? I guess the overall meeting was about 90 minutes. We spent a good 35, maybe 40 minutes just kind of going through the scope. The scope both in terms of what onboarding would look like, but then also what the month to month would look like as well. One of the other benefits of doing this is because we're working on it together, it helps set better expectations around timelines and deliverables. We're able to have a fluid conversation about how long things will take. And so sometimes when. When I get into these kind of conversations, you've learned that the timelines and their expectations around results might be unrealistic or unreasonable. And if you're not deliberate about working through that in the sales process, then clients can end up becoming pretty jaded or unhappy not too long after you get into working month to month. And that's never a good thing. It's really good to get these things ironed out right during the sales process. So as an example, one of the things that they want help with is getting their cost accounting dialed in and getting their WIP reporting processes dialed in. And so if we just take the WIP report as an example, you know, I told them that, you know, getting the WIP report from where it's at today, which is 100% inside the CEO's head, that's, that's not a good thing. To a point where the controller was really owning the WIP report. It was being updated weekly to get to the point that their project managers were actively involved in updating the WIP report and really having it be team driven effort led by the controller. I said it's probably going to be six months before that's really dialed in. Well, nobody's perfect. I just realized that my fat finger hit stop on the recording before I was done. But I think you get the idea of what I was trying to accomplish through that sales meeting. Now I am back to the airport to fly back home to get the proposal sent off. Let's see what happens next.

All right, I just got the proposal sent over. I have no idea what, what's, what's going to come of this, but I'll.

Give you a little bit of insight.

On how I think about proposals. This is something I've done a little bit differently over the last six months. So one of the things that my sales coach had talked to me about was is I use the proposal. While it is true that I have a pretty standardized scope of work and pretty standardized language, what I'm doing now is going in and making small tweaks to the proposal to make sure that a lot of the deliverables use the exact language that the buyer uses during the sales process. It makes it feel a little bit more customized. It makes it feel a little bit more again, like on that collaborative kind of sales approach that I talked about earlier. And I think that's really helpful. Another thing that I'm doing is after I finish the language and the body of the proposal, draft up that like an email that kind of recaps thanking them for their time, hits on one.

Or two of the specific outcomes and.

Goals that they had mentioned. That was kind of at the basis for why they wanted to work with a fractional cfo and then I take it one step further. I actually record a loom video. And all I'm doing in that loom video is essentially reading the, reading the email that I'm writing to them. I'm attaching that like embedding it right into the email and then sending them off. So I shot the proposal off. I then emailed the, the buyer to let him know that the, the proposal was in his inbox, let him know to ask me any questions. Excited to work with them. He immediately responded back and said that he would have an answer within the next 24 hours. So we'll see what happens.

All right. It's been just about 24 hours since I sent the proposal to the prospect. And I just got an alert that inside our proposal platform I've got a new message and that there's been activity. I'm not sure what I'm going to see, but I'm logging in right now to figure out what's happened, what's the latest activity. So let's see here. Yes, the client has accepted the proposal. We have a brand new client. So this, this is amazing. We're going to be moving to do our orientation call here in about a week and then we're doing an in onboarding in about three weeks. This is great. So what's next with my team? Well, now that we've completed the sales process, it's time to shift to the onboarding process. And in fact, I just did a deep dive on some of the onboarding best practices I've learned. You can click the link above or look down in the description below to see that. But, you know, from here my team's gonna reach out to let them know that we've received everything and to start setting expectations for next steps. And then we're gonna start getting our ducks in a row to get this new client onboarded. So what are my lessons learned from. From closing this deal? I think the big one for me is having the sales process and the prospecting process really documented out, knowing that when I get on a qualification call, I have a set of questions and some specific objectives that I'm trying to accomplish so that I know that the client or the potential client that I'm talking to is even qualified to work with us, that we're going to be able to help them out and to make sure that they have all the checks in the box that we need to know that there's a high likelihood that they're going to be a client, then, you know, going to meet that prospect in person, having that processed out, having a really clear understanding of what my questions are, what my strategy is. And again, like that, that really defined process to work everything through, it really just sets me up to know exactly how to lead those conversations. And I do think that that builds trust with the client, that our firm has our act together and that we know exactly what they're doing. So if you're somebody that's. That's still trying to figure out the sales process, I would say the big takeaway from you is do, do your research to figure out how to process out sales experience, know what questions you need to ask, know what things are going to qualify or disqualify the client, and come prepared with notes to have those conversations. And it will build trust that you are legitimate, that you've got your act together. And I think it's going to drastically increase the likelihood of you closing that client. I'm about to go have a little celebration dinner. I love landing a new client. I can't wait to get started serving them. I hope this was helpful. Can't wait to see you back here next time, my friend.

Sam.