There’s one main question that every done-for-you service provider, coach, and practitioner wants to know the answer to: how do I get more clients, more consistently?
A lot of people will tell you that this or that strategy is the answer. That you need to post on social media, or get 1,000 subscribers on YouTube, or guest on podcasts, or run a launch, etc. But the truth is, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach that is right for every single business owner. As I often remind my clients: where there is one strategy, there are hundreds, if not thousands, more. And the thing is, they all work.
What really matters, then, is that you’re choosing the strategies that align with your unique business model, financial goals, desires, priorities, and capacity. And that you’re doing so in a way that empowers a steady stream of clients, rather than relying on fits and bursts of momentum for momentary or fleeting results.
Where a lot of digital-first service providers, coaches, and practitioners go wrong is that they are trying to get clients through siloed strategies rather than building a comprehensive Demand Generation System. I’ve already gone in-depth on what Demand Generation is and how to begin building your own system here on the blog, so do read that if you haven’t yet.
As a brief reminder: your Demand Generation System incorporates your marketing, lead generation, and sales systems into one cohesive ecosystem that all works together to bring a steady stream of clients or customers into your work. There are four foundational components of a Demand Generation System: grow (how you attract new Right Fit people into your audience), nurture (how you ‘warm up’ your audience), identify (how you discern who is and isn’t a Right Fit, purchase-ready client), and invite (how you move Right Fit prospects into a purchase).
You need to have all four of these components of a Demand Generation System in order to bring a steady stream of clients into your paid work. Overfocus on one or a couple and underfocus on others, and you’re going to find yourself consistently having to resort to hustle-y strategies to keep the cashflow coming in.
To give just one example: in recent years, I’ve seen an increase in people publishing videos on YouTube in the hopes that those YouTube videos will bring them Right Fit, ready-to-buy clients. While YouTube videos absolutely can contribute to that steady stream of clients, they’re only ever going to play a part in a system that needs to be much more comprehensive than that. Your YouTube videos, if well optimized for search, can play a part in growing your audience. Most YouTube videos are best at nurturing. But what about identifying prospects and inviting them into your paid work? Sure, you might have a freebie that you put into the video description, and that freebie could even have an automated sequence that follows it that invites people into your paid work! But—and this is why building a comprehensive “ecosystem” of a Demand Generation System is so important, as opposed to building out your marketing, lead generation, and sales strategies as distinct silos of your business—does that freebie feel like a logical next step from the video that this person just watched? Therefore making it natural for the viewer to take that next step and get onto the email list?
Not to mention: does the actual topic of the video and the subsequent lead magnet you’re inviting them to sign up for attract a Right Fit, ready-to-buy client? Or does it attract a totally wrong fit person, who is nowhere near ready to invest in your services? As just one example, I’ve seen a fair amount of done-for-you website designers create YouTube “how to” videos such as, “How to design your own sales page on Squarespace.” To them I ask: is the person searching for guidance on DIYing their sales page on Squarespace actually a Right Fit, ready-to-buy client for done-for-you website design services? In most cases that I can think of, the answer is no. Congratulations, you’ve just grown your audience, but it’s now full of the wrong people. This is how so many business owners end up with an audience they deem to be “freebie seekers” by the way: the content and messages that they’ve shared with the world aren’t attracting Right Fit, ready-to-buy clients. In many cases, they’re attracting people who aren’t even aware they have a problem that your paid work can and will solve.
All that to say: we need to create a comprehensive Demand Generation System in our businesses because it’s not only how we bring that steady stream of clients in, it’s how we make decisions about the strategies we’ll use to bring that steady stream of clients in. Without a comprehensive Demand Generation System, it’s so easy to get caught up in shiny object syndrome, where someone over there says you need to be doing ABC while someone else in that other corner of the internet says you need to do XYZ, and now you’re confused on which voice you should be listening to.
You don’t want to keep relying on external voices to define how you do things in business. That’s not sustainable, and it certainly isn’t the smoothest and straightest path to achieving your goals and intended outcomes. You want to know what you need to do and how you want (or need!) to do it, and be able to tune out of any other voices that are ultimately only distracting you away from both of those truths. By the way, this ability to make informed decisions in your business, especially about the strategies you’re choosing to implement, is part of what I call having established a “CEO skillset,” and is one of the outcomes of our comprehensive business training program, EXPAND.
With all of that said, I hope it’s clear why exactly I harp on the necessity of building your own Demand Generation System. Let’s get into the ‘meat’ of this article, then.
Demand Generation for Low Volume, High Touch Business Models (e.g. done-for-you services, 1:1 or group consulting or coaching packages, etc.)
Since we’ve already covered what Demand Generation is previously on the blog, the purposes of this blog post you’re currently reading are to show you what a Demand Generation System needs to accomplish and might look like, practically, in a low volume, high touch business model such as a done-for-you service model, 1:1 or high-ticket group coaching model, or other similar models. (Are you a course or digital product creator, or similar? I have a separate blog post that accomplishes the same aim, but for high volume, low touch business models like yours.)
Unsure what type of business model you have, or feel like your business doesn’t fit neatly into either end of the spectrum? Check out this blog post: How to Choose Your Business Model (plus, does it need to be scalable?)
Why have I separated out these articles based on business model? Because different business models require different things from their Demand Generation System. As just one brief example: high volume, low touch models (like course models) require a large emphasis on audience growth, whereas it would be entirely unnecessary for a low volume, high touch business model to focus the same amount on audience growth, because (it’s in the name!) they don’t need and/or literally cannot accommodate a large volume of clients.
Requirements for Successful Demand Generation in Low Volume, High Touch Business Models
As mentioned above, growth is probably the least important priority in a low volume, high touch business model, though it almost always is still necessary. If we assume that 3-5% of your audience converts into your offer—a typical “benchmark” data point to aim for, if you don’t have any reliable data yet of your own (though it’s often much higher in smaller audiences of newer businesses)—and you can only take on 20 clients per year, you’d need 440-733 people in your audience. That’s assuming you closed 90% of the sales calls you had over the course of the year. Whether you are or aren’t already at that audience size, I would almost certainly recommend that you don’t focus on growing your audience first.
Why? If you weren’t already at that audience size, then we’d want to ensure that you have the other pieces of your Demand Generation System in place to make the most of audience growth. If you were already at that audience size, but weren’t converting at that level, we’d want to look at why that is (typically it’s something within your AOM Alignment). The only time I’d be likely to recommend that we start with growing your audience is if you were already steadily converting from the audience you already have, you were already at the level of clients you want or need (or close to it), and your clients were already reliably getting results in your work. Even then, in a true low volume, high touch business model, we wouldn’t be focusing on huge audience growth, but rather hyper-targeted audience growth, basically with the intention of building up a pipeline of prospective clients who will be ready to take the next open spot you have on your roster.
I somewhat alluded to this in the example I just gave, but because low volume, high touch business models don’t require a ton of leads and therefore aren’t going to have a huge audience, you need to have very strong identify and invite strategies. This is where we’d likely put the vast majority of our focus, especially when initially building your Demand Generation System, because we want to ensure that you make the most of the smaller amount of prospective clients that you’ll have (by ‘make the most of,’ I mean that you’ll convert a large majority of them into your paid work). We’ll talk more about what this might look like below.
Finally, for anything to work in any Demand Generation System for any business model—but especially low volume, high touch models—you absolutely need to have strong AOM Alignment. AOM Alignment is aligning your offers and messaging with the type of client you’re intending to attract, so that you can attract Right Fit prospects into right-for-them work and reliably deliver the results through that work that you say you will. While AOM Alignment is important in any business model, it becomes especially important when you’re selling higher-touch, which are also typically higher-ticket and longer-time-frame offers. There can naturally be a bit more friction in the sales process when you’re selling these types of offers, so the more social proof you have that you’ve reliably delivered the results you say you will to previous clients, the more you’ll mitigate that natural friction and re-add ease to the sales process. (Of course, there’s also the fact that when you’re working in more high touch environments, you want to actually like the clients you’re working with and enjoy working with them—otherwise work you previously loved delivering becomes unsustainable.)
So many business owners are constantly searching for new/different/better marketing, lead generation, and sales strategies in the hopes of fixing the problem of having little- to no- consistent stream of clients. Yet the most common reason I’ve seen that these business owners are struggling to consistently bring clients in is not actually about their marketing, lead generation, or sales strategies, themselves. It’s that they don’t have strong AOM Alignment, and so all of the strategies they’re trying to implement to bring in more clients simply cannot be as effective as they are hoping for. This is why, in the Sustainable Success System, AOM Alignment comes before Demand Generation! We have to build your Demand Generation System on top of AOM Alignment.
The 4 Components of a Demand Generation System for Low Volume, High Touch Business Models
Now that we understand what a Demand Generation System for a low volume, high touch business model needs to succeed, let’s look at how you might shape each of the four components of your Demand Generation System. Typically when talking about Demand Generation, we talk about the four components starting with growth followed by nurture, identify, and invite since this is the order that a new client moves through. However, when we’re building a Demand Generation System, we actually want to start from the end and work backwards. This is because we need to know what you’re intending to move people toward before deciding how you’re going to move them there.
Invite
The most common strategy for inviting prospective clients into your work in a low volume, high touch business model is to pitch on a sales call and/or to deliver a proposal after a sales call.
Because your invite strategy is particularly important in low volume, high touch business models, you really need to get comfortable with and practiced at pitching and have an effective pitch. Or, if you’re going with the proposal strategy, you not only need to be able to create effective proposals, you also need to be great at setting, communicating, and upholding clear boundaries (e.g. how long do they have to accept the proposal?). In both strategies, you also need to be great at following up.
Identify
If pitching on a sales call or sending a proposal after a sales call is your strategy for “invite,” then the way you’d identify who is or isn’t a Right Fit prospect for your work is through a sales call. There was a period of time where it seemed to me that people were hating on sales calls or writing them off as though they’re “unsustainable.” To that I always wondered: unsustainable for who? And are sales calls themselves, as a strategy, unsustainable, or is some aspect of them unsustainable—which could be remedied without doing away with the entire strategy?
The work you’re doing with clients is going to be high-touch, so it makes a lot of sense to start that work off in a similar way, no? Not to mention, in my own business and in my work with clients, I’ve consistently found sales calls to be one of the absolute best sources of market research and feedback about the efficacy of your Sustainable Success System as a whole. For example, if you’re consistently having sales calls with people who aren’t Right Fits or ready-to-buy, the sales call isn’t the issue, but rather that tells us that you likely need to fix something earlier on in your Sustainable Success System (e.g. your messaging).
Plus, as you continue refining your Demand Generation System and Sustainable Success System as a whole, sales calls are only going to continually become more sustainable. You’re going to get better at exclusively attracting Right Fit, ready-to-buy prospects into them, therefore you’re going to “close” most of them (meaning: they become paying clients), meaning that you’re really only adding a relatively small number of “extra” calls to your calendar, most of which turn into cash in your pocket and a spot on your roster, filled.
Having people book a sales call is the most straightforward “identify” strategy, however you can add all sorts of layers to it if you want to. Things like: having prospects fill out an application to work with you, inviting prospects to a webinar and then inviting them to a sales call, inviting them from a webinar or sales call to a smaller paid offer and then inviting them into your full offer, etc. Keep in mind that with each ‘layer’ you add to your strategy, however, you’re adding more friction to the sales process. Sometimes friction is a good thing, sometimes it’s not. (That’s a big conversation we have when we talk about sales and selling inside of EXPAND, because the “right” amount of friction is different in every business!)
If you are choosing a sales call as your identify strategy, you’ll need to think specifically about where you’re issuing that invitation to book a sales call. A few recommendations based on my work with clients who have low volume, high ticket business models:
- Make the primary and consistent CTA on your website “book a sales call.” Ideally, if you have multiple offers, all of which could be sold through a sales call, you have that as the only primary CTA on your website (and you’ll only have one sales call calendar). If you have some offers that aren’t high touch (e.g. a course), which would mean you have a hybrid business model, check out the article on building a Demand Generation System for high volume, low touch business models.
- Use all of your nurturing to invite people to book a sales call. (e.g. if you send a weekly email newsletter, use that email newsletter to provide value—of course!—but also ensure the topic is one that positions booking a sales call as the logical next step from the newsletter)
- As a more advanced strategy, you could occasionally run “pattern interruptions” where you invite people to something totally different—e.g. a free live workshop—and then from there, invite them to book that sales call. (Pattern interruptions are a great way to catalyze people who are almost ready-to-buy to become actually ready-to-buy.)
Nurture
In a low volume, high touch business model, you want to eventually get to the point where as soon as you have an open spot on your client roster, you have Right Fit, ready-to-buy prospects ready to fill it. You accomplish that through ongoing and consistent nurturing (and nurturing the correct audience).
One of the most significant “positives” for business owners who have opted for a low volume, high touch business model is that they don’t have to spend nearly as much time marketing as others do in business models on the opposite end of the spectrum. For example, an effective nurturing strategy could look like sending an email newsletter once per week (or other consistent timelines, like twice per month). While that’s probably the simplest nurture strategy, you could also do any number of other things: podcasting, YouTube, blogging, social media, etc.
Ultimately, the important thing isn’t what specific nurturing strategy you choose, it’s that you are nurturing. Especially as most services in low volume, high touch business models sell more based on intrinsic urgency than extrinsic—meaning they sell more based on, “I need or want this right now” than, “ooh there’s a sale/promotion I need to take advantage of!”—nurturing keeps you in contact with prospective clients so that when they become ready-to-buy, you’re the person they think of. Additionally, if you’ve been nurturing correctly, it will have created immense trust with your audience and even position you as the only person they would want to work with in [whatever your field of work is].
Grow
Now that we know where you’re ultimately leading people, we can decide on an audience growth strategy. As a reminder, in low volume, high touch business models, you don’t need a large audience in order to maintain steady inflow of revenue. In your case, five new people on your email list that you met in a networking group that’s filled with your Right Fit clients is way better than five hundred new people that came in through a bundle or ads.
Ideally, your growth strategy gets you in front of a group of people who are likely to be Right Fit clients now or in the near future in a way that allows them to really get to know you and your work. That would look like anything that allows you to spend extended and/or high-value time with them, such as networking (in person or online), podcast guesting, speaking, giving guest workshops or webinars, etc. Referral partnerships are also a really great strategy for low volume, high touch business models, and this strategy can often really effectively be layered on top of others.
Example Demand Generation Systems (inspired by my clients!)
I’ve given some broad ideas of what you might choose to do for each of the four foundational components of a Demand Generation System. For those of you who learn best by seeing real life examples, however, I have three separate client examples to share with you: a Demand Generation System for a consultant, a coach, and a service provider. Note that while the goal of each Demand Generation System is broadly the same—create a steady stream of clients for their primary service or package—they’ve each built their Demand Generation System based around their own unique audience, offers, as well as their personal priorities, needs, and desires.
Demand Generation for a Speaking Consultant
This business owner works with leaders who want to become better speakers, and her goal is to bring in 12-15 clients per year to their 1:1 package. Personally, she likes speaking, and since public speaking is part of what her clients want to become better at, her showcasing her skills serves the dual purpose of being something she enjoys and something for prospective clients to aspire to. The package she is inviting prospective clients into is a year long with the option to continue afterward, so it’s ultra important to this practitioner that her clients are a Right Fit for the work before they sign on the dotted line.
Here’s what her Demand Generation System looks like:
- Grow: Give a webinar to audiences at aligned organizations (she’s working toward having multiple “standard” webinars to pitch and deliver, based on the organization, that she can slightly customize as needed)
- Nurture: Weekly email newsletter
- Identify: Attendees from webinar are invited to a second, privately hosted workshop (this gets them on her email list—thereby also contributing to “growth”—while showing her who from the original audience is potentially a Right Fit, ready-to-buy prospect). At this workshop, she invites attendees to book a sales call to go further with the work.
- Invite: On the sales call, she pitches an introductory service. At the end of the introductory service, she pitches the full package (assuming they are a Right Fit client for the work).
Demand Generation for a Life Coach
This business owner is a life coach, and their goal is to bring in 6-10 clients per year. Personally, they have fluctuating capacity and need relatively “low lift” strategies that accommodate that. They also prefer having conversations rather than delivering long soliloquies (which plays into their chosen growth strategy).
Here’s what their Demand Generation System looks like:
- Grow: Guest podcasting (still working to determine the right-for-them goal number of podcasts to appear on per quarter/year)
- Nurture: Once or twice monthly email, depending on capacity
- Identify: During the podcast interview, invite listeners to sign up for a free course. The free course (and accompanying email sequence) is delivered and includes various invitations to book a sales call as the next step.
- Invite: Pitch full package on the sales call
Demand Generation for a Bookkeeper
This business owner provides full service bookkeeping support for business owners, and her goal is to maintain 10 clients at a time. Her clients typically come into her work and stay for years, so she needs even less ongoing audience growth each year. She also enjoys writing, but doesn’t have a ton of extra time to do so between client delivery and personal responsibilities.
Here’s what her Demand Generation System looks like:
- Grow: Referrals. To support that, she’s worked especially to ensure that the messaging she’s using across her website copy is tailored specifically and explicitly to her Right Fit, ready-to-buy client, as well as that past and current clients are clear on how to refer and who to refer.
- Nurture: Once monthly to once quarterly blog post sent out to email list
- Identify: CTA on website is “book a discovery call,” and referral partners know to send people there
- Invite: Send custom, time-limited proposal, and follow up on a designated schedule
Get Started Building Your Demand Generation System as a Coach, Consultant, or Service Provider
No matter where you are in business, whether you’ve never had a single client or you’ve been booked out for years now, you want to begin building your Demand Generation System. However, how much of it you build and how systematized and automated you make each part is going to differ depending on how solid your offer suite and messaging already are.
Either way, you’ll want to start by outlining your whole Demand Generation System. Note that the choices you make about your Demand Generation System at this initial stage are, at best, an informed hypothesis about what might work. The further you are in your business journey, and the more established your business is, and the more business-building acumen you have, the more informed that hypothesis is going to be. If you’re pre-revenue, hopefully you’ve at least built up some business-building acumen, but naturally, you’re going to know less about what strategies are going to be right for you. That’s ok! My reminder to you would be: we all start somewhere, and we all have to take the journey to learn the things that we need to learn to accomplish the things we want to accomplish.
Choose one primary strategy for grow, nurture, identify, and invite, remembering that everything needs to ultimately lead toward that final step. It’s likely that if you’ve already been working to get clients, you are already doing things that fall within each component of the system. You may wish to jot down each of those and then assess how effective they are, and choose one primary strategy for each based on that (while ensuring that your chosen steps naturally work in tandem with one another!).
Then, once you’ve chosen those strategies, you’ll want to begin implementing each strategy (which may look like refining what you’re already doing or doing something completely new to you!) one at a time. “One at a time” is going to look different depending on all sorts of factors—including your experience using that strategy, your current capacity, etc.—but the real key is that you’re not trying to instantaneously implement an entire optimized system overnight. Not only is that impossible, attempting to do so would almost certainly make everything you’re doing less effective in the short term (because you’re not giving each piece the attention it needs to be successful) and in the long term (because you’re not gaining the intel and data that comes from an incremental implementation plan).
“Did I choose the right strategy? What if it doesn’t work?”
One question I see online business owners asking a lot is, “How do I tell if I’ve chosen the right strategy/ies for each component of my Demand Generation System?” or “How long do I give something before I determine it isn’t going to work and I try something different?” The answer to this is multifaceted.
First, my biggest recommendation to all of my clients is to start with what they actually want to do. I know, I know, that goes against most advice in this online business world, but you have to remember: I’m in the business of equipping you to build real, lasting Sustainable Success. The vast majority of my clients are going to be solopreneurs or business owners with very small (<5 people) teams, and they plan to be in business for the long-haul. This means that ultimately, they have to actually enjoy—or at least be able to tolerate—what they’re doing for a very long time.
At the same time, we have to recognize that nothing in business is going to be something you enjoy doing all of the time. Every single strategy you could choose is going to have tradeoffs, so the question becomes more of: what tradeoffs are you willing to make? Not only that, but there might be things that you could genuinely enjoy, but you need to do some inner work around it first. The biggest example of this is social media: so many people claim to hate being on social media for their business, and yet, when we really dig into what’s happening to make them hate it, it’s not social media they hate, it’s some aspect of what social media represents to them (which brings up a fear response, and therefore very intense resistance to using social media for their business).
From there, we ask the question, “Now how do I make this work?” This is where things get fun! (If they weren’t already!) You take whatever strategy it is that you’ve chosen, and you begin bringing it to life using all of the business-building acumen you’ve hopefully already established. You’ll then implement your first iteration of it, through the process taking note of what you like and dislike about it, as well as what is working and isn’t!
Finally, you make adjustments to the strategy based on what you’ve learnt, and you go implement it again! Each time you implement it, you learn from it, and with each thing that you learn, you refine your strategy to make it even more enjoyable and effective the next time.
This is why I often feel that questions like the ones I posed above—”How long do I give something before I determine it isn’t going to work and I try something different?”—aren’t always the right question to be asking. Typically people are asking these types of questions because they’re doing the exact same thing, over and over, and not seeing any results from it. Or, on the other side of things, they tried doing something once and it didn’t work (sending one email inviting people to book a discovery call is not “trying something”!). If you’ve been doing the same thing over and over, without checking in with what you like/dislike about it and what seems to be driving results or not, then you’re not really implementing correctly. You’re implementing to check a thing off your to do list, not implementing to actually experiment and figure out what works.
The classic example of this is posting on social media. Let’s say that you have a low volume, high touch business model and you’ve decided to post on social media 5 times per week as your nurture-leading-to-identify strategy (meaning: you’re using social media to nurture, but you’re also using each post to invite people to book a sales call). We’re also going to assume that you’ve already built out AOM Alignment, and know how to create messaging for your offers that speaks directly to your Right Fit client. If you don’t already have that, then you need to start there before you really dive into Demand Generation, because any Demand Generation can only be effective when done on top of strong AOM Alignment.
With every single post you create, you’re ideally also taking note of how you feel about the content you’re creating and whether you feel you’re successfully speaking to a Right Fit client. From that intel alone, you’ll begin to make your content even better, because you’ll be learning with every single post about how to better talk to your Right Fit client/s. After a month or so of consistently doing this, maybe you still haven’t booked a single sales call. However, because of how much you’ve practiced, you feel even more confident in your ability to speak to your Right Fit, ready-to-buy client. That would tell me that it’s probably worth it to keep trying with this same strategy, because it’s likely that that first month of you really focusing on implementing this strategy was you “finding your sea legs” and you’ll now more consistently be better at speaking to your intended target audience.
Over the next month, you’re going to continue refining based on the results you are (or aren’t!) seeing. Remember that those results are both internal results—like your confidence that your content is speaking to the Right Fit person—and external results—like how many sales calls you book, but also taking note of other data points as you’ve determined are relevant (which you’ll decide when you initially design your Demand Generation System). Be mindful of the data that you watch and question what you initially assume it mean. For example, you could be losing followers during this process, which you might initially assume to mean that you’re doing something wrong. And you don’t want to rely on this one data point—”I’m losing followers”—you want to look at multiple before you make decisions. Namely: if you’re feeling more confident in your ability to speak directly to your Right Fit, ready-to-buy client, that could mean that the followers you’re losing are actually your content working because it’s filtering out wrong fits from your audience.
Ok, we’re now at the end of month two. You’re still watching yourself and taking note of the internal and external results. But what if you still haven’t booked a single sales call, even though you can feel the difference in how effectively you’re speaking to your Right Fit, ready-to-buy people? This is where we might start to look more deeply at the strategy itself, though not in the sense of, “Is it time to get rid of this?” but more in the sense of, “How can I set this strategy up to be best-positioned to succeed?” The answers to that question are going to be different in each business, but it could mean that you need to revisit your messaging for your offer/s, or audit your content to ensure it actually is speaking to who you intend it to be speaking to, or even that your audience on this platform is presently too small and you’d need to rely on a different—typically less sustainable over the long-term—strategy to bring clients in sooner, while building this audience up. We’d also want to double check that your implementation of the strategy isn’t suffering because of you spreading yourself too thin in your business or out of it, and, if we find that you are, we’d want to address that by looking at where we can simplify things across your business and/or within this strategy, as well.
Now, if you were to hate implementing this strategy more and more every day—independent of the external results it is or isn’t bringing—that’s when we might look at a different strategy for you. But as long as it’s something tolerable or even enjoyable—again, not influenced by the external results it is or isn’t bringing—it’s often worth it to keep going there, but to continually refine what you’re doing based on what you’re learning at each step.
The key in all of this is to remember: every strategy can work. There is no “one right strategy” to choose. Flitting from one strategy to the next is often what makes it seem like no strategy will work. You simply need to continue experimenting, learning, and refining based on what you’ve learnt to make your implementation of the strategy even more effective.
An Invitation to Go Deeper
When I lead clients through the process of designing their own Demand Generation System—like I do inside of our comprehensive business training program, EXPAND—we typically start by outlining their entire Demand Generation System. As part of that, we audit what they’ve already been doing and make immediate decisions about how to simplify and streamline their current efforts. During this initial stage, we’ll also decide what KPIs (key performance indicators) we can watch to track the efficacy of your chosen strategies.
From there, we’ll typically do a tune up of their current nurturing strategy, for the simple fact that we’ll want them to continue nurturing as they later build and implement their identify and invite strategies. But also, often by fixing their nurturing strategy to ensure that it’s speaking directly to Right Fit, ready-to-buy clients, they see a quick influx of new prospective clients into their work (mostly people who have been in their audience for a while, love what they’re doing, but only now feel like the business owner is speaking directly to them).
That momentum helps to then sustain the business owner as they begin building out and implementing their identify and invite strategies. I encourage my clients to implement both several times before we go back to their nurturing strategy and begin systematizing it. I make this recommendation because you learn so much from your identify and invite strategy that you can then use to make your nurturing approach even more effective. Finally, we end with their growth strategy. We end here for the fact that when you start growing your audience, you want to be able to have systems set up for those people to go into so that the people who are already ready-to-buy can jump straight in, and the people who aren’t quite there also have that ongoing nurturing system that primes them for that purchase later on.
I’m so excited to be running a 9-month live cohort of EXPAND starting February 2025. Building out and implementing your unique Demand Generation System—on top of effective AOM Alignment, of course!—is one of the core outcomes you can expect when you join the cohort. Applications are open now, so head over and apply today. Let’s set your business up for real, lasting Sustainable Success in 2025!
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I’m Carly Jo Bell.
(Though you can just call me Carly.)
Carly Jo Bell is a business strategist and mentor, and fonder of Whole Co media. Through her courses and programs, podcast, and one on one coaching, Carly helps pulled-in-every-direction entrepreneurs create a business that brings in as much joy as it does revenue — by cultivating deep self trust, and solid foundations as the first step.
For more from Carly, and to learn about her signature “looking external for inspiration, and internal for answers” approach, join the conversation by signing up for her weekly email series, Carly's Couch.