Al McBride
Welcome to the latest edition of the dealing with Goliath podcast. The mission with Dealing with Goliath podcast is to sharpen the psychological edge in business leaders with skin in the game, who want to be more effective under pressure, uncover hidden value, and increase profitability.We deliver an espresso shot of insight to boost business performance using our five questions in nine minutes format. Now our guest today is a very special guest indeed Mr. Tom Poland, is a multiple best selling author specializing in the generation of inbound leads for clients in more than 27 cities around the world. He started and sold numerous businesses over the last 39 years, and has led teams of over 100 people generating more than 20 million in revenue. He claims to be voluntarily married and lives and works from his home, which sits on the golden sand next to white waves and blue water at little Castaway beach in Australia. That does sound pretty ideal there. Tom, how’s the weather today? It’s pretty muchTom Poland
perfect blue skies, sun is shining, the birds are singing and above the ground. So it’s another great day.Al McBride
Very glad to hear it. Very glad to hear it. So let’s get straight into the questions. As I said there it is going to be just nine minutes. They’re going to start the clock here on your time, and we’re going to dive straight in. So the clock starts with nine minutes now. So who’s your ideal client and what’s the biggest challenge that they face?Tom Poland
I do client are professionals. These are marketing services, advice or software. So something intangible, and their average transaction is typically thousands of dollars or more. So these are quite often business consultants, business coaches, corporate trainers, SAS developers, perhaps financial planners and so on. But the common denominator is they don’t have something physical they sell. And their average transaction is, you know, on the premium side of things, as I said, thousands 10s of thousands, perhaps hundreds of dollars, very good biggest problem they face is getting a systematic flow of high quality, inbound, new client inquiries. If they do that. There are happy chapees and chapesses and if they don’t do that, they have a lot of anxiety.Al McBride
Very good. So you have just over eight minutes left, what are the common mistakes people make when trying to solve that problem? So trying to get those inbound leads?Tom Poland
Well, I think the biggest one is random acts of marketing. So they You know, they can see that, you know, perhaps a couple of clients are finishing up soon, and they don’t have a replacement for them. So they rush out well before COVID-19 that rushed out to business networking meetings and conferences and kind of hoped to get lucky, you know, when a new client type of away, and maybe they do, and maybe they just run a Facebook Live, or maybe they put some, I don’t know, box fliers out or something. But there’s nothing, there’s nothing rinse and repeatable about what they’re doing. That’s going to give predictable results. So I would say, random acts of marketing or whatever form that might take. It’s just let’s get out there and do something which is better than nothing. But it doesn’t create that predictability, and the scalability and the certainty that really, that really, really wantAl McBride
Outstanding stuff. And you just seven minutes left, plenty of time. What is one valuable Free action that the audience can implement that will help with that issue.

Tom Poland
Well, the big one, I think, is to make sure that marketing message is gonna get cut through, and that it gets noticed. So with the marketing messages, you what people talk about this as a USP, or an elevator pitch or something like that. But whatever we call it is going to go in the title of the presentation, be that a seminar or webinar or on a book or an article or whatever, wherever it is on their website, on a landing page and a video off of wherever they put it. This got to be the succinct expression. That’s benefit rich, that contains specifics. And it’s different to what the competitors are saying, if it’s not different, it’s not going to get noticed. So get the cuts through. It’s got to be different and it’s got to be different in a more desirable way. Hence the benefit rich, there’s got to be believable, and that’s where the specifics come in. So my marketing message is around enjoying a weekly flow of high quality inbound, new client inquiries. It’s very specific this weekend. And it’s been a bit of a rich show, and help people with that because there is a fair bit to this getting it right. I have a little website called fivehourchallenge.com and the word five five hour challenge dot com, and that walks people through over five days, a 10 minute video each day. And if they do a 10 minute video and the action item, a total of one hour over the five days and that should generate them five fresh leads. But in the process of doing that, there’s no charge for that, by the way, but in the process of doing that. They will I will teach them how to create a marketing message that gets cut through and motivates people to want to know more

Al McBride
excellent stuff that someone answers the next question, which is what one valuable free resource Can you direct? Oh,

Tom Poland
no, I’ve got lots more.

Al McBride
Well, that’s it. Do you have another I’m gonna go for I do your job.

Tom Poland
folks can can by all means consume that but also can to dub dub dub dot lead gen demo dot live. Excellent. So that’s where they can register for an online event, a live online event out where they can, they can see exactly how I generate leads in around about 90 minutes every month how I generate high quality inbound, new client inquiries and they flow in through pretty much every week of every month of every year. So, again, it’s something free, but if they want to get beyond just the marketing message and look at an actual exercise, that’s rinse and repeat a bill that brings in a predictable flow of high quality new client inquiries on a regular basis. Then lead gen demo dot live is where they want to go.

Al McBride
Outstanding stuff Tom and Stanley. So just coming up with four minutes left, plenty of time. Last question. Question number five. What’s the one question I should have asked you That would be great value to our audience.

Tom Poland
Probably what, what’s the biggest mistake people make when they write a book when they present when they do a pitch when they’re in a sales conversation with someone. And the biggest mistake that people make is making the thing too complicated. We’ve got to present how we work with our clients, once we’ve got a prospect in a way that is so simple, that literally a 12 year old would get it. But the default position for most people when they’re starting out and even actually, for some people that have more experience, is they feel a compulsion to make the thing so frickin complicated that will people will think they’re a genius, and that they may achieve that end but the enemy of motivation is complication. If we give people a lot of complex information that might actually be a comprehensive treatment of our subject of how we work with our clients, but nevertheless, if we burden them with Anything that’s complicated, then they won’t make a decision they’ll go away and want to think about it, which basically means they’re going to chase someone else’s shiny thing and not yours. So I would say that the biggest mistake people make in their marketing is a complicated description of how they work with their clients. And so we’ve got to keep it simple, no more than three parts to the process. When you define when you describe to a client that on a webinar or seminar or sales pitch, whatever it is, this is how it all works. three parts. That’s it nice and simple. Mm hmm.

Al McBride
Excellent stuff. So have just two minutes left. What would be some of those other big common misinterpretations because you must see you’re an expert at marketing. You’ve been doing it in all sorts of different areas for so long at this stage. So as you see you spot the patterns and you’ve mentioned some of them, but let’s go for let’s go for a third block here. Why not other mistakes? Yeah. One of the some of those big ones that you always say,

Tom Poland
one of the big ones is to think that Facebook is going to be the answer to your prayers in terms of leads, you know, setting up split ads and Facebook funnels and landing pages. And I’ve been I did it for five years and made good money out of it, it’s become incredibly expensive. And as the as the cost per click is increased, we used to get an email subscriber through a free PDF book for $1 pop. Now it’s $12 a pop, and I know what I’m doing with marketing. It’s complicated, it’s expensive, a lot of people fall into the idea of saying, Well, if I put 100 bucks a month or I can see if I can make it work or not, it’s not worth $1 a month is gonna suck so much of your time. So setting up this utopian idea of having an online funnel that’s just gonna feed me with all these new client inquiries and I just sit back kind of, you know, on the beach and little money washed over my beautiful body while all of the clients flood my bank account with money. It’s BS and the only people making money out of that other people are telling you it’s going to work and you should buy their program or their course. So that’s that’s a big mistake is thinking that you can use Facebook to generate high quality leads. If you’re selling a $27 widget, you probably can, that if you’re a consultant or a business coach, are you offering software as a service, which involves an ongoing relationship with a potential client That is not the place to be

Al McBride
Standing stuff, Tom, you’re a very timely man. You have just 20 seconds left. So we will pause it there add stunning stuff, and thank you for being a guest on the show today.

Tom Poland
Oh, been a pleasure. Thanks for having me out. And it’s

Al McBride
wonderful. Thank you very much.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai