Grow Without Hiring

[00:00:00] Ken: You want leads? No, you need leads, but what are you doing about it? Are you doing this? Are you waiting for the magical lead fairy to show up for you despite what you've been told? If you put a LinkedIn post under your pillow, it will not get you leads. Because I don't want you to just get a lead or two.
[00:00:20] Ken: I want you to know how to get your next hundred leads, and there's a specific set of systems and frameworks I use for myself and with my clients that makes hitting your next 100 leads not feel impossible, but you move from feeling impossible to inevitable.
[00:00:40] Ken: and in today's conversation, I'm gonna walk you through it step by step. If you've been listening for more than a minute, you know that we're in a new age, we're in a new time, and it's no longer about having conversations leading to more sales.
[00:00:56] Ken: It's about needing to have [00:01:00] conversations in order to have any sales. In the past, I would say more conversations, more sales. Today it's you need to do this or you have no sales. If you wanna be that 2030 company instead of going to zero, you have to start being more proactive. It's time to have a clear go-to market strategy.
[00:01:20] Ken: It's time to finally have optionality in your business. Now having helped thousands of entrepreneurs over the years with sales and marketings across different kinds of businesses, I can tell you this confidently. People like yourself wanna work on what they have in control and generating new business, having to start conversations with someone possibly that you don't know well, you'd rather scratch nails on a chalkboard.
[00:01:48] Ken: Or work on any number of things in the business besides that
[00:01:51] Ken: yet, you'll still say that you want to grow the business and you need more leads. And as you might've heard, if you listened to last week's episode, which was an interview, the [00:02:00] market is saturated and how you find resonance when there are possibly hundreds or thousands of other people that do what you do.
[00:02:07] Ken: Now, how do you get leads? How do you get over that noise? How do you beat someone that has a quote unquote bigger audience or more resources? How can you be more known or the only choice in the market that your lighthouse clients actually consider? So let's get into it. Let's talk about it tactically on how to generate not just a lead or a couple of leads, but.
[00:02:34] Ken: Your next 100 leads that become your next 100 clients, all without you being stuck in delivery hell,
[00:02:42] Ken: and where we need to start is a foundation in my mentorship with solopreneurs, consultants and agency founders who want to take control. Of their business and want to have the ability to generate leads on demand. Not I [00:03:00] got a client one time or I had a referral, but I know how to do this with consistency.
[00:03:05] Ken: It doesn't mean it always works, but I have a plan. I have a go to market strategy because what you try to do, and I've seen it time and time again, is go to 27 different places to try to get new clients.
[00:03:17] Ken: You don't have a discipline way to think through where are those lighthouse clients. And you think because you see large people on the internet that have entire teams. Running all of their channels. You think you also need to be everywhere, but you only need to do this. You just need to be in front of the ones who are ready to pay you as an expert advisor versus another freelancer or doer of all the things.
[00:03:43] Ken: That's why people who work with me are not listing themselves on directories. That's why people who work with me are establishing authority. In a respective channel, which we call channel optimization. So to get you not just a lead, but your next 100 leads [00:04:00] and your next 100 clients, you need to know where they are and how do you get in front of them consistently.
[00:04:06] Ken: At the highest level, this is about inbound versus outbound. Put in another way, and a lot of, you'll be familiar with those terms, but not everyone will. Are the prospects coming to you or are you having to go to them? And I can assure you, even as you're listening to this, that you want inbound leads. You want people coming to you because if they're coming to you.
[00:04:29] Ken: They are thinking about you in a different way than you going to them and having to introduce yourself when they don't know you from a hole in the wall. And I've built inbound engines throughout my career, and I'll talk more about that, and you've heard some of it in the past as well, but I can say this, that inbound is not something that happens overnight and in some cases it never happens.
[00:04:53] Ken: As we've been talking about being that 2030 company, we are in a time, especially at the [00:05:00] time of this recording specifically where inbound has largely stopped. So many examples come to my head, but I have a fractional client who has been in business for more than a decade, had lots of businesses just like I have, and went from living off referrals in a very expensive area.
[00:05:17] Ken: This person happens to live in New York City, one of the most expensive places to live on earth. And you think they go out and have a cup of coffee or get a bagel or a deli sandwich, and I am a New Yorker, so I'm allowed to make these references, and they would find a new prospect or a new lead, but all of those referrals that used to drop into their lap and all that business.
[00:05:39] Ken: Has disappeared largely over the last year to now more legitimately having no business prior to working with me and being in a very difficult situation because it was much more about letting things happen versus having built a go-to-market strategy that didn't rely on things falling into your lap and [00:06:00] occasionally getting referrals, which as
[00:06:01] Ken: I can also speak to this personally because this has been something that bit me in the butt in the past as well. Especially in my last agency business, I went from inbound leads that grew me to multiple millions a year to algorithm shifts that made me stress out about my 300 k a month payroll. So when you are in your channel optimization, I want you to have a channel that in some ways allows you to have both inbound and outbound.
[00:06:31] Ken: I'm not saying I don't like inbound, and I just talked about the fact that I've been an inbound guy. I had someone last year tell me, oh yeah, you're just an outbound guy. And I'm like, I have never done outbound period, but I saw this change happening even last year and told this person, I don't care that you're trending and getting viral posts on LinkedIn.
[00:06:50] Ken: A lot of that will not convert into conversations and sales if you don't do what I'm talking about here. So the channel optimization. That I want you to have, [00:07:00] I want your primary channel to allow you to do both of those in a lot of ways, because as one example, and I have people that do this for a living, but cold email as a primary channel doesn't give you the option to have both of those motions.
[00:07:15] Ken: So choosing the right platform where your lighthouse clients are, versus being everywhere and finding a place that allows you to do both inbound and outbound is gonna be a competitive advantage for you. And I made the case for LinkedIn as the unusual case for it in episode nine. Great conversation. One of my favorite ones because it is a place that people think about as just a channel, but it actually has arguably more than this, but at least three channels.
[00:07:45] Ken: You can have organic content, which will allow you to have, in certain cases, some amount of inbound interest. Doesn't mean that someone's shipping you the money because they liked your post. But they can come inbound. You can also go outbound [00:08:00] through dms. You can also run paid ads, and you could argue to say that there's a few other things like having a newsletter and some things there that would expand the number of channels, but let's just keep it three for today.
[00:08:12] Ken: And really the two that I care about most is the fact that you can create content and that you can also send proactive outreach that gives us the inbound and outbound. It also has. These really good signals that we've talked about, which I'll get into more in a minute, related to knowing more about what people are thinking, what's interesting to them, and so forth.
[00:08:32] Ken: So you wanna have a channel, and I understand by the way, that some people will listen to this and say, oh, my target clients aren't on LinkedIn. You could still use LinkedIn, as we talked about in that conversation. To identify contacts and possibly also hit them in other channels and allow LinkedIn to be a way to warm them up more.
[00:08:52] Ken: The point here though, it is a unique thing when you can have inbound and outbound for your channel optimization and there aren't many things [00:09:00] out there that allow you to do that.
[00:09:01] Ken: So ensuring that you have a primary channel. A channel that you can win in. a channel that your lighthouse clients are in regularly, that they hang out at, and allows you to not overnight figure out how to attract them or get in front of them, but at least gives you the opportunity to do so.
[00:09:20] Ken: So what does that look like for you? Take a second, hit pause if you need to and really think about. What channel is that for you? And it might be something different today than it has been in the past.
[00:09:31] Ken: Once you've locked that in, the next piece is what most people completely overlook. And it's the difference between your prospects remembering you or forgetting you five seconds later. Independent of whether you are going inbound, outbound, or a combination of the two like I just suggested, you have to have a way to engage those who have shown you signals and what I call go to market signals 2.0 that we covered in episode eight when I talked about [00:10:00] you needing to stop waiting for growth.
[00:10:01] Ken: And how to engage those who are absolutely a lighthouse client, who may only understand you on the periphery in certain cases, which is more on the cold or outbound side, but that when you introduce yourself to them, they immediately are captured because of all the work that you've done. And you can build some initial resonance.
[00:10:21] Ken: So again, you need to hear about this as something that could be relevant for both inbound and or outbound, possibly warm and or cold contacts. It's just the way that we introduce ourselves or reconnect with someone that changes, but a lot of it is actually very similar. If we were to get into the specifics around messages that we send out, posts that we create, so on and so forth.
[00:10:44] Ken: And this is again, what I talked about as the sonar in episode eight and relying on a lot of different tooling and platforms that give us an understanding of how to find our lighthouse clients
[00:10:57] Ken: and using signals. So that they are willing [00:11:00] to hear from us a lot sooner and reply to us faster, and then having, because of the technology that we're using, a clear understanding of how engaged and listen to this next part, not engaged they may be in order to prioritize where we spend our attention with our prospecting and our sales.
[00:11:17] Ken: And I call this whole thing the ultimate outreach stack, which combines tooling. With frameworks and systems and proven things that I've built and also curated from this worldwide web that is still out there today and full of lots of noise. I can't go over this entire ultimate outreach stack here, but I will give you a piece, just one piece of the stack that you can use today, and if you want the rest, I'll tell you where you can get that towards the end.
[00:11:44] Ken: But one of the most important pieces of the ultimate outreach stack is having signal based conversation openers that work regardless if someone is completely cold, AKA possibly outbound or warm [00:12:00] AKA past contacts or potentially inbound prospects. When I work with clients on this issue, they often will think about doing this work solely for cold people and they'll jump straight to cold people.
[00:12:13] Ken: And I start to say, why would you not start with your connections and your network and using signals within that network? And how we reach out to those people again, is actually not that different if it's cold versus warm.
[00:12:25] Ken: It's more about the connective tissue and how we intro whatever it is that we're doing, because ultimately they both care only about one or two things. And I talk about this much more deeply in my client work, but they only really care about what are they challenged with and what do they want on the other side.
[00:12:42] Ken: If you know those things. Any kind of message you write independent of the kind of channel it is, is going to resonate with, people that you haven't spoken to in years, or someone that maybe has looked at a post or read an email and that ultimately still wants the same thing and still struggles with the same thing.
[00:12:59] Ken: So what are [00:13:00] those signals for you? What. Openers do you need in order to convert interest or take someone who's not engaged and begin to have a conversation with them? It's not a long, long message. They are very short and you should not be sending 10, 15, 20, 25 things to them. It's a quick way to get blocked and or put
[00:13:23] Ken: into spam filters.
[00:13:24] Ken: So once you find this opener, it will feel hard to get it. Obviously, people who work with me get there faster. Had someone who I'm working with right now who has never done this period. I didn't have to really encourage this person to start to do outreach. I basically showed them the ultimate outreach stack.
[00:13:41] Ken: They ran with it and they started almost overnight getting something like a 20 plus acceptance rate, which for someone that doesn't have a super optimized LinkedIn profile is off the charts high, you can get way higher. I have had ones in the 70 to 80% knowing that the connection request acceptance, [00:14:00] the way that we do it, begins the sales process.
[00:14:03] Ken: Because we're actually putting something in front of them that's relevant doesn't mean that they're ready to buy from us. It just means that they potentially are open to hearing more. So someone who's never done this before, getting that out of the gate, very impressive.
[00:14:16] Ken: And that is the thing that then we have to learn. How do we get them to further engage? Of course. But just the fact that you can find something like this that works consistently in your channel optimization. Is the most important part. Yes. There's a lot of tooling. I use AI buying archetypes.
[00:14:33] Ken: I run people through different app scripts that I've written and I can get to understanding if they actually truly are a lighthouse client much faster than others. And there's also an art to this. I'm talking about the science mostly, but there is an art to this, and this ultimately is what's important for your ultimate outreach stack.
[00:14:51] Ken: The tip of what I say is the spear,
[00:14:54] Ken: and that's actually a perfect transition because I've talked about this fishing metaphor in the past, what I [00:15:00] call the net and the spear in past conversations. And in some ways, your channel optimization is a combination of both of those, especially if you follow the advice I'm giving of can you be in a channel that allows both inbound and outbound.
[00:15:13] Ken: So if we think about the spear, allowing you to be proactive with prospects who have some intent and have some signals that they want to engage you, or at least are willing to hear from you. Once we do this consistently and once we do this reliably, we need to also think about what we should be doing next to further diversify and risk mitigate our ability to get more clients.
[00:15:38] Ken: Oh wow, Ken, we're talking about big words here. Yes. I'm talking about how to ensure you have a business in 2030 because our ability to get more clients, and especially to help you get your next a hundred clients You have to have a philosophy that starts by dominating and saturating one channel, but then doing this risk mitigation of having two other channels warming up, including one [00:16:00] that you own.
[00:16:00] Ken: The first channel is your channel optimization. This is almost like I have a system here that I'm outlining for you, but when you work on these other two, you begin to build out what I call the growth trident. Consider it like this, leveling up your rinky dink wooden spear, which is starting to work, but you're going from being Tom Hanks in the Castaway who finally caught something.
[00:16:23] Ken: To Neptune Lord of the Seas.
[00:16:27] Ken: And the idea here is that when you have that traction and you're dominating and you're saturating that first channel, you've done something that we haven't talked about explicitly so far in this conversation, which is that you've actually validated your lighthouse client.
[00:16:41] Ken: Validation comes by dollars and cents or your respective currency. You've validated your scalable service offer, and now you have the capacity because you've built a scalable offer to work on other parts of the business, not just in the business, but on the business. So you've built in scalability to move to [00:17:00] other channels.
[00:17:00] Ken: You're not stuck in delivery hell, and you can layer on these other efforts. and I can get up on a soapbox a little bit here. Do not think about one of these other channels before you have the first one working and before you have that validation with your Lighthouse client and your offers,
[00:17:19] Ken: Here's what I see over and over again. In fact, I just led a session yesterday with. My mentoring group where I bring together a bunch of really smart consultants, founders, solopreneurs, and so forth, and I go deep on these topics and we were thinking about moving from the first channel, the channel optimization, to beginning to build out the growth.
[00:17:37] Ken: Trident, and everyone wants to jump straight to having the Trident. They're not willing to work on the spear. They're not willing to patch the holes in the net, but they want to have the trident. I get it. As I said before, I know that you want inbound leads. But you have to earn the right, as I've said in other conversations to get there.
[00:17:54] Ken: So don't try to build out a long form channel, like an email [00:18:00] newsletter or do long form YouTube videos or anything like that before you have your first channel working. That allows you to move much more quickly. The danger of the social channels is the fact that they have distribution. They have algorithms.
[00:18:15] Ken: I talked about that and I got bit, as I said on that because of algorithm shifts in my last agency. So you have to make sure you can kind of move through the current, so to speak, in those channels, but they allow you to move quickly and long form doesn't. So don't spend a lot of time creating a podcast like I'm doing, and this is still very, very new, but don't spend all this time investing into this until you know deeply.
[00:18:40] Ken: Precisely who your lighthouse client is, why it is that they're gonna buy from you, what they are struggling with, how you're gonna deliver that work at scale. Does it seem like, I'm guessing about what you're struggling with in this conversation? No, it doesn't. I've talked about these things hundreds, if not thousands of times.
[00:18:57] Ken: So you're not ready to build out the growth [00:19:00] Trident. You're not ready to consider other channels until that's locked in. But if you feel like you're on a yacht and all of a sudden you take a huge hit and you feel like you're sinking and you didn't work on these other channels, you are in trouble. And I was in trouble overly relying on Google, SEO when they changed this.
[00:19:18] Ken: And I talked about these in other conversations, so I won't go deeply on it today, but I already mentioned those other episodes and I made a mistake there and it cost me a lot of pain, stress, and agony. So I want you to sort of think about it this way as well. While we're gonna build out the growth Trident, it's also giving you a sort of raft.
[00:19:35] Ken: If something happens to the yacht, because you've actually built up to having the yacht, I want you to have a raft to step onto if the primary channel goes to zero, or the algorithm shifts are so drastic that you can't navigate them. I've talked about how I've changed the way I think about LinkedIn. In the past, I really did have a lot of inbound and then I had to adapt to using a little bit more outbound.
[00:19:58] Ken: And today it works so well [00:20:00] together. It's actually hard to say is it inbound or outbound, but that's why I like places like LinkedIn. But I also had a newsletter that really was the main conversion channel for me for the last year. And now I've also layered on my other channel here, which is called the podcast.
[00:20:16] Ken: And I'd love giving this information. I know a lot of you will listen and you'll never reach out, which is your own mistake. Hint, hint, but it is another place that people are gonna discover me, and it's a deeper place where people would actually put me in their ears and then want to have a conversation.
[00:20:30] Ken: So I've earned the right to get there. I have multiple places to step into if I really do have zero and I mean zero reach, which I'm almost there now in a lot of ways anyways, with the current algorithm. But that's okay because of how I've built out the growth trident.
[00:20:46] Ken: And this is really also key for future proofing relative to the 2030 company. We talked about speed to market and iterating to win in episode 12. Super important. The fact that I actually saw this [00:21:00] happening a lot in my primary channel was able to adapt overnight, and I did this way earlier than a lot of people.
[00:21:06] Ken: Actually been doing it for multiple years ahead of this because of my experience before, which is why, again, I'm always here trying to help you out. I don't want you to go through the same stress that I did. Do I sound as stressed today? I'm not saying you're not working hard. I am working hard, but I love what I'm doing and the stress is different than it was when I had to make sure payroll was covered, all the bills were covered, and projecting out late nights, early mornings, and constantly thinking about firefighting.
[00:21:33] Ken: In the 2030 company, we also talked about, again, episode 12, building systems that can survive algorithm changes and market shifts.
[00:21:42] Ken: So when you have gotten to that spot where you. Have the channel optimization rolling. You know how to open up conversations. And by the way, it goes beyond that, obviously with the ultimate outreach stack, but at least the conversation opener is important for inbound or outbound.
[00:21:58] Ken: And then you have that [00:22:00] validation that allows you to say, okay, I've used this one channel for a long time and it's worked pretty well, but it's time for me to diversify. It's time for me to have risk mitigation. And it's time for me to go from having some clients and prospects and leads in this one channel to multiplying that in other places.
[00:22:17] Ken: This is how you have a force multiplier to get those next a hundred clients, because now the same thing starts working in other channels. And I did just kind of allude to this a minute ago. Where at some point it may all start to blend together a little bit. Did someone buy from me because they read a LinkedIn post or they saw a testimonial, or they possibly listened to a podcast episode, then Googled my name.
[00:22:42] Ken: You can't wake up tomorrow and have all of that working, especially if you were early on in figuring out the lighthouse client, the offer, your positioning. But once you have these things rolling, I'm going to challenge you to think through the growth Trident, because that is gonna be what [00:23:00] goes from a trickle to having significant lead flow regardless of how it actually comes in or works.
[00:23:07] Ken: I have a client right now who has really worked on her positioning. She has a true blue ocean service. In fact, sometimes that can work against you when it's too good and it has been a struggle. For her over time to get leads and stressful. And when she gets a client, it's worth a lot of money, like a six figure amount of money in a lot of cases, even within that current calendar year.
[00:23:30] Ken: but if you get two or three or four of those, it becomes a good amount of money. It becomes a good amount of revenue. And over the years we've worked on positioning, we've worked on trying to make it clear in the market. What that Blue Ocean Service actually is so that it's also understandable.
[00:23:45] Ken: And now there are so many different things that are happening, including her being challenged to build this more clear go to market strategy using signals, having some tooling behind the scenes that supports that, and finding a way now [00:24:00] to consistently get this thing moving.
[00:24:02] Ken: Where, let's say a month ago, and I've worked with this person for a very long time. It was a, oh my gosh, how am I gonna get more clients and get more leads to taking up a mission, a challenge that I issued to her and my other clients pursuing that building, rebuilding essentially this overnight. And now within the last week, she went from sending out a handful of messages across her different channel optimization.
[00:24:27] Ken: And really now her growth trident, and she's getting, I would argue, more lead flow with 10 plus different conversations. That happened within a few days. And guess what she's also doing? She's investing into her personal authority. Again, a 2030 concept on LinkedIn. Does she get a lot of reactions?
[00:24:46] Ken: No. But then when she talks to a prospect, they go through and watch all of her videos. They read all of her content.
[00:24:51] Ken: So the point here being that it all starts to play together and to kind of tie this concept in with the growth Trident, in some ways it becomes [00:25:00] okay, does the Trident have like one pointy tip, or are they all actually serving each other really well? So, no, I apologize, I don't have the leads Fair for you, but I do have these proven systems and frameworks like the ultimate outreach stack.
[00:25:15] Ken: And a whole bunch of things that we talked about that have worked by the way across different businesses in the past. I used them to land multi six and seven figure deals. Today my clients are generating pipeline. They are building their next 100 clients to sell fractional coaching, consulting, other expert services, and they're doing it without waiting for leads to magically show up under their pillow.
[00:25:38] Ken: So if today's conversation resonated with you, go back to the episode where I talked about using the sonar to find lighthouse clients. Go back through what it means to be a 2030 company. I've already mentioned the episodes a couple times here, and it pairs perfectly well with our conversation. Or if you're actually ready to get help and you just don't want to guess on this anymore, you [00:26:00] can get tactical help from me.
[00:26:01] Ken: Obviously, I'm happy to just for you to show up and listen. Because I love helping people, but I can help you at another level than you just hearing me while you're on a run, taking the kids somewhere, working in the background and so forth.
[00:26:14] Ken: The best place to get connected is to hit me up on LinkedIn. Send me a connection request, and mention. The podcast. You can even, if you want, say Ken, I want you to be my lead fairy, and we'll laugh about that.
[00:26:24] Ken: Or you can get onto my weekly briefing where I talk about this stuff at another level. It gives you another way to engage, digest the information. Those are both available down in the show notes. I keep the show notes very tight and look at so many show notes out there, and they are 17 miles long. I just wanna get you the information.
[00:26:42] Ken: I want you to know why you should listen to the episode.
[00:26:45] Ken: Thanks as always, if you're learning something, please do this still early on. And the only way for me to grow this and, and help other people like you is to get ratings and reviews. So if you've learned something today, please share that. Please leave a rating.
[00:26:58] Ken: Leave a review. [00:27:00] It's super appreciated and again, encourages me to keep doing this. So I'm not thinking about this as speaking into the void. I'm thinking about it as a dialogue. It gives me feedback on what I should talk about more. So that is it for today. As always, appreciate the opportunity to have these conversations and to help you grow without hiring.
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