Christine Schlonski [0:02]
Hey Gorgeous. This is episode number 204 with Leadsology, Tom Poland.

Tom Poland [0:09]
Hi, this is Tom Poland. You are listening to Heart Sells! Podcast with Christine Schlonski. Enjoy.

Christine Schlonski [0:15]
Super excited to have Tom Poland on the show today. He is a multiple best selling author of the Leadsology series, which is backed by 39 years of experience in professional sales and marketing. His clients are in 29 cities and 15 time zones currently all around the world. Tom specializes in generating high quality, inbound, new client inquiries. What I really like about Tom, he is voluntarily married to a German and he’s going to share more of that story in the interview which I’m quite sure you will love. He lives next to the waves in Castaways Beach, Australia. So let’s tune in to a wonderful interview with Tom so that you can get really, really nice ideas of how to get new client inquiries. I’m so excited to have you on the show today, Tom, welcome.

Tom Poland [1:14]
Thank you, kind of looking forward to it.

Christine Schlonski [1:16]
Yeah, me too. We have like a common, well, not a common connection, but a really cool connection. You are married to a woman from Germany. So this is always a good conversation starter as well. And it’s beautiful to see because what you are doing in the world has such a huge impact on business owners, especially we talked about that a little bit beforehand. There are so many things out in the marketing world that people sell that do not work. So many heart-centered entrepreneurs who want to make it work. Don’t really know where to start.

Tom Poland [1:59]
Yeah. So true.

Christine Schlonski [2:00]
You studied that material for decades and really came to the point where you developed a method to support people in getting the opportunity to talk to potential clients.

Tom Poland [2:17]
Indeed, and but that was birthed out of years of frustration, disappointment, and I mean literally going, literally going around the world paying money to people who were marketing gurus and joining the programs, the seminars, the workshops, the mastermind groups, reading the books, the seminars and so on, coming back and implementing and finding that actually, nothing changed. So, after years and years and years of wasting countless thousands of dollars and an inordinate amount of time. I just got so annoyed. So for I have to figure this thing out myself, which I did. And so that thing that I figured out myself wasn’t actually teaching marketing that stage, it was just so my own personal, professional development curriculum based business that I needed to figure out the marketing. But then the whole Legion area became so much in demand that I was spending more time sharing with friends and colleagues about how I was doing marketing. I thought, “Well, I might as well make a business out of this.”

Christine Schlonski [3:18]
Yeah, so wonderful. And today, you help thousands of people to kind of get it right. And I hear that over and over again in my coaching clients tell me, “Well, it’s wonderful. I would love to sell something to someone, but I don’t even have a person to talk to.” You bring a solution. So let’s talk about that. What can people do especially if sales feel so uncomfortable, that it becomes easier for them and that they actually have leads coming into the door so they can have conversations?

Tom Poland [3:53]
Well, first of all, there’s some really good news because selling is what you have to do when your marketing sucks. So if you don’t like selling, there’s an opportunity to get your marketing right so you don’t need to do any selling. No reduction to the ridiculous closes. No alternative choice price points. No asking, “Well, what’s your plan B?” No scarcity bonuses. No, “Can I follow you up?” None of that. If you do your marketing right then what happens is you wake up every Monday morning, let’s say virtually every Monday morning, and you open up your calendar, and there are bookings for people who want to talk with you about becoming a client. And they know how you work with your clients already. They know what your price point is, and they’ve actually confirmed literally, they’ve confirmed that they can afford to work with you. They’ve also confirmed that the timing is right to start, should you agree it’s a good idea to work together. So we’re talking about highly qualified, inbound, new client inquiries. And that’s what good marketing produces this regular, relentless flow of new client inquiries that are highly qualified and when you meet with them, it’s not going to be a strategy session or a brainstorming session or any sort of it’s just a conversation between two adults to see if you’ve got a fit. So there is no selling required because you’ve, it’s all about inbound lead generation, isn’t it? So, everyone’s probably heard of advertising and direct response marketing, which essentially is what you do is you go to the marketplace, say, “Here’s an offer, please register your interest or buy it.” And you can do it with golf clubs. You can do it with cars. You can do it with houses, yachts, planes, but you can’t do it with advisory based businesses or service-based businesses. Direct response marketing or advertising does not work with our style of business because we’re not selling a commodity. We’re selling a relationship. As soon as, it’s far more like actually, we’re proposing marriage than it is selling a washing machine. So if you’re going to propose marriage, and you’ve mentioned my beautiful barbarian, my little barbarian bulldozer that I’m married to. I actually literally fell in love with her at first sight. I mean, it’s I know it’s a cliche, but I was at, I was at a retreat for the weekend doing a meditation retreat and was just before the first session started. There’s like 80 people in the room, and I saw across the other side of the room. And, I mean, I literally felt, I just, I mean, the whole of the room went out of focus, except for her head and shoulders. I literally could not see anyone else in that room. Anyway, long story short, I could have gone up to her and said, “Excuse me? Would you be okay if we got married?” And she’d probably slapped me down when she could. So I had to add some dates, right? I had to, you know, ask her out for a date and we had coffee, I mean, literally had coffee and went to a bushwalk then it’s the most serious dates and so on and so on. And a year later I proposed to her and, you know, the rest of them say is history. So, when you’re marketing advice or services, it’s more like you’re proposing marriage. That means that people have to get to know you to an ISO establishing four levels. And I can drill down on how you do this. But in big picture terms, we need to establish rapport, which is that clip, clip, clip thing, I can go down with this person. We need to establish respect for listeners’ professional integrity and ability. We need to establish relatability, which means that your prospects feel that you can relate to where they’re at and where they want to get to. And finally, we need to establish the most powerful force in marketing, which is not persons in selling, which is called reciprocity, where we’re doing something for someone and making a difference in their business or their life prior to even suggesting that they talk to us about becoming a client. Let’s talk about, that’s should say is talking about the difference between traditional direct response marketing which is register you’re interested in this thing or it was sent out 10,000 direct mail letters already would benefit. But of course, if you’re interested, we’ll go ahead and buy it versus generating inbound, which is more like two-step marketing. Let’s give this prospect and experience what it’s like to work with us before we even suggest they talk to us about becoming a client. And that’s what Leadsology is all about. It’s about generating those inquiries having first given people an experience of our brand.

Christine Schlonski [8:24]
Yeah, it’s so important, especially for all these coaches, consultants, healers, creatives who don’t offer the washing machine, but I also think it’s important for those people in multi-level marketing, even though they have the product, they are creating relationships to add people to their teams to grow their business. And so many people just do it wrong. They jump as you write with a proposal. They reach out, you say hello back and the moment you said hello they think that can pitch you.

Tom Poland [9:01]
Yeah, exactly.

Christine Schlonski [9:02]
I think it’s really important. Yeah, let’s dive in into those steps and, and maybe you can share what people can do. Obviously the heart-centered entrepreneur will know that they want that relationship. But sometimes they just don’t know where to get it from, where to start.

Tom Poland [9:19]
This is the hundred hungry bears. So let’s imagine a forest. Again, this is a concept based, we got to drill down and give you more specifics on what this actually looks like from a tactical point of view. But imagine a forest there are 100 sleeping bears, and we know magically somehow that three of them are hungry for our honey, we’ve got only we want the bears to eat the honey but we know only three of them are hungry. So what are our choices here if we want the beer sweeter honey, we could grab a big pole shopping it and go running through the forest, find a beer, jab it in the ass. Remember, they’re all at the bottom, I’m sorry. Remember, they’re all asleep, wake the bear up and then we wave our honeypot in front of their nose. They’re hungry, if you’ve got one of those three hungry bears, their hunger will exceed their anger. And they’ll eat the honey and not us. But if it’s not one of the hungry bears, we’re going to jab in the bum is going to wake up and be really annoyed. And that’s exactly what it’s like when someone reaches out to you on LinkedIn or wherever. And you respond to suddenly their going, “Boy, I got a deal for you. You should join my team because you could make a million”, that’s jabbing the sleeping bears not actually hungry. So instead of net selling, and it’s cold calling, and it’s telemarketing, and it’s direct email response, and it’s basically it’s saying, “We’ve got this amazing thing you should reach out and do something about that.” But instead of running through the forest for that pointy stick, the other alternative is that we find the same forest with the same hundred bears, we still know there’s three of them angry, we just generally put the honeypot outside the forest. Now the three bears that are hungry will probably start dreaming that they’re swimming in honey or something, but then they’ll wake up and they’ll go, “Oh, there’s no honey, damn. I can still smell the honey.” They come out of the forest and they find the honey. So what is the honey look like? Okay, the best honey is a webinar. Because if you think about the oldest, most successful marketing method in the world, it’s speaking to groups of people. If anyone has any doubt about that, just think about the number of clients that Christ, Buddha, and Muhammad have. All those three men did was speak groups of people, generally small groups, people and boom, billions of clients, quote-unquote. If you can take that oldest most direct marketing method in the world and you combine it with the newest marketing medium in the world, which is the internet. What you end up with are webinars. Speaking to groups of people on webinars. Now, the webinar is the honeypot in my little metaphor. So when I run a webinar, my honey pot is, “Come along and see how my clients and 27 cities in 15 different time zones are generating a weekly flow, a high quality inbound.” New client inquiries, that’s the title of the webinar. It’s a bit long, but it works. So that’s the honeypot. Because I know if someone’s interested in that little honeypot that webinar that’s talking about how to generate leads, we have an alignment between the generation of their establishment of the interest in that subject and my program, which is showing them how to implement the material from that webinar. So drilling down from this list give people an opportunity to get to know you establish rapport, respect relatability, reciprocity, drilling down from that, drill down from the hundred bears in the forest and three of them are hungry and we don’t know which three are. We do is, we have other people who have an email list with your ideal clients and then promote your webinar. The hungry bears metaphorically speaking on their email list will register and attend your webinar. You then give them 30 to 45 minutes of really valuable information about how you work with your clients. It’s not a free training webinar. It’s a demonstration of how you work with your clients. So that’s a very honest and open direct value proposition. “If you want to know how I work with my clients, come along”, that’s a honeypot. So there’s no, what Michael called Bait and Switch. I will tell them about your training webinar but it’s really a sales trap. We don’t do that because it’s disingenuous and the very first experience of someone of our brand is we told them; a.) we’re going to give them a but we gave them B. So we just tell them what it is plainly, doesn’t dress it up. To say, “This is a demonstration if you were the sort of result. Whether it’s a weight loss result or relationship improvement result or business result. Come along and see how we’re getting this result for our clients.”

Christine Schlonski [13:44]
So what do people do who are starting out or who have like a tiny email list?

Tom Poland [13:49]
They do webinars with other people are in that email list. Webinars are the fastest way that I know of, to build a quality email list, there are faster ways such as summit or JV giveaways. Some people refer them to me this is where you get a bunch of people who have email lists and they all come along and start this stuff in a virtual summit or they give away products, it’s a really fast way to build a list, but it’s not a very high-quality list. If you want to, my KPI for my clients is one webinar swap a week. They do all webinar with someone, they find someone who’s got good quality content and there are literally thousands of thousands of thousands of people out there with good quality content that don’t quite know how to market it. There’s another person to promote my client’s webinar, my client will promote this other person’s webinar. They both grow each other’s email lists and they typically will both pickups some clients, not always but mostly they will. The biggest —

Christine Schlonski [14:51]
Are you seeing its live webinars or is it recording?

Tom Poland [14:54]
Absolutely, live. Yep, live. Definitely live. Why? Because of engagement levels. I mean it’s hard enough to keep people engaged in a webinar when they can’t see your face and they’re not in the physical Hall and they’ve got Facebook open and emails open. It’s hard enough to keep engagement up in that context alone when everyone realizes which they should be told if it’s not live. Because again, we were just bullshitting people. Otherwise, we’re saying, “Come along to our training webinar.” and there’s no mention whether it’s a replay or as live, people figure it out, but I’m not stupid. So it’s got to be live. It’s got to add real value and give people take home ideas, whether they work with you or not, that’s going to be beneficial for them. The smart ones who can afford to work with you will reach out and want to work with you because we don’t want to have to implement all this stuff ourselves. We have somebody to guide us through this that has been there before. So don’t worry about giving away too much. Too many ideas, too much content. Because the smart ones who have the money will reach out and they’ll talk to you about becoming a client.

Christine Schlonski [15:59]
Awesome. Yeah, I’m trying to figure out like, what how would you sum it up for somebody who’s listening right now on things, well, that sounds like a good idea. I haven’t done that before. What are the steps they need to do to have the first webinar? Obviously, they need an idea, a hotkey webinar title.

Tom Poland [16:20]
Are we talking about putting together the webinar itself?

Christine Schlonski [16:25]
No, just like, how do they even get there if they’ve never done it before? Because you see people doing webinars on the internet, but let’s say you have not done a webinar before because you’re just starting out or you have done a little bit of business, you do one on one, coaching, maybe or coaching group programs, but you have not really figured out the way to grow your list to get those leads on a regular base.

Tom Poland [16:54]
Right. So there are three parts to it. There’s the audience, how do you get the audience’s, the asset, which is how to put the PowerPoint together and then there’s the action. If you think of the audience, asset, action. The audience comes from other people’s email lists. The asset is the creation of the PowerPoint and the delivery of that. The call to action is for people to book a consult to do that no manner in which they qualified pre-qualified themselves.

Christine Schlonski [17:22]
Let’s do the first one, we still have a couple of minutes for this wonderful episode. So let’s give people a starting point so they can put their brains to work. In the next interview, we could cover some more steps of how to actually do it.

Tom Poland [17:40]
Do you want to start with the audience?

Christine Schlonski [17:43]
Yes. How do I find people who want to share my webinar?

Tom Poland [17:47]
So three is really easy. That’s one of the easiest parts of the whole thing is, you go to Google, and you open up the search and you type in the word webinar. Then you type in a description of your target market and you’ll have about a million hits or more. For mine, I’d go small business marketing webinar, boom and there’ll be a list of thousands of people who run webinars on small business marketing. Some of those will be likely prospects. The ones I’m looking for have quality content that doesn’t have BS offers on the website like you can earn a million dollars a month and just sit on the beach for half an hour with the laptop, a little money washer. So forget all the hype merchants have the BS. I am also looking for people to feature themselves heavily on their own website. I’m looking for people who offer a service or advice, not a physical product. Now if you’re selling physical products, you are looking for people who are selling physical products as well. If you’re looking for people, if you’re offering advice or a service or program, look for people who are offering service or program. We’ve got to have that alignment in what I call an OPM partner, OPM being, Other People’s Networks partner. We can identify very quickly whether people are doing webinars if targeting the same target market is as simple Google search. That’s the easiest thing in the world to do these days. It didn’t used to be that easy, but it is now. You then need to have, as I’ve already alluded to a qualification checklist. So you can filter out the ones that would not make suitable partners, the BS merchants, the hype merchants, the people who don’t have any personality, a website won’t make a good webinar swap partner because they don’t have much of an email list. If they have no options on their email, on their website, sorry, then they’re probably not gonna have an email list. So there are lots of different tricks that you can put a checklist together and then quickly eliminate people that are probably not going to be very good prospects for you.

Christine Schlonski [19:47]
Awesome, so and then from there, I can reach out and ask them to cooperate.

Tom Poland [19:53]
No.

Christine Schlonski [19:54]
No?

Tom Poland [19:55]
It’s like proposing marriage at first sight. What you do is you reach out to them and ask them if that appears on your podcast show. Or you reach out to them and ask them if they’ve got a great blog if you could if they’d be okay if you repost their blog, or you reach out to them, ask him, would it be okay if you promote their upcoming seminar or so that’s the reciprocation part of.

Christine Schlonski [20:21]
So it’s giving first.

Tom Poland [20:23]
It’s the giving first with the express intent of receiving. A lot of people will say, “We just got to give without”, well, not with an expectation or demand of receiving back, but that’s reciprocal. So you think back to what we’re talking about with prospects, we’re talking about potential JV partners here, but we say with prospects, we can’t just go up to them and say you want to buy this thing or do you want to talk about becoming a client, you’ve got to establish rapport respect, relatability, and reciprocity. It’s exactly the same as a JV partner. Before we start talking about doing a webinar swap or some sort of cross-promotional JV, we’ve got to allow them, for us give the opportunity so we can establish rapport, respect for what we do. Relatability, we understand where they’re at, where they want to get to, and the reciprocity. The reciprocity part actually enables all four levels because we do something cool for them, there’s probably going to be a conversation tour around how we do that. They get to know us. They can get to whether they click, click with us or not, and not everyone clicks with me for lots of different reasons, but they’ll get that opportunity. So the process begins. But this is the big difference between cold calling selling, direct marketing, etc, versus what I teach, which is two-step this, give the opportunity for people to get to know us rapport respect, relatability reciprocity before we approach them for a decision on working together.

Christine Schlonski [21:52]
Yeah, so it’s building the relationship.

Tom Poland [21:55]
Exactly, take him out on the date. I tell the story of, the true story of me asking my wife, who she thought the world’s most irresistible man was, and she came up with Hugh Jackman and I said, “Well, what if there was a knock on the front door right now and you went open the front door it was Hugh Jackman, he proposed to you. What would you say?” She said, “Well, you know I love you, Tom, do you?” and I said, “Well, yeah, but I kind of think I know where you’re coming next.” She said, “Well, I’m sorry. It’s Hugh Jackman. I could probably run away with him.” I thought about it. And I thought, you know, you probably don’t need to apologize because if I’d answered the front door, and Hugh Jackman proposed to me, I’d probably go as well and I’m not even gay. It’s a huge freakin Jackman. I tell the story because we are not the commercial equivalent of Hugh Jackman. We can’t get away with that. Only Hugh Jackman can get away with that. We need to ask people for a date first, whether it’s a potential JV partner or a prospect. We got to take them out of it and get to know each other before we pop the question.

Christine Schlonski [22:56]
Yeah, I just love it and it’s so people can go to http://www.leadgendemo.com where they actually can experience how you work.

Tom Poland [23:07]
That would be a great opportunity because it shows them how I present a webinar. On the webinar will be people from your list and from other people’s email lists. There won’t be many from my list there. We only do that four times a year. So it would be really, to bring the whole thing to life.

Christine Schlonski [23:26]
Yeah, all of your links are together as a show notes, on the podcast page. So people can hop on over there. But if you want to check it out right now, go to http://www.leadgendemo.com and get a glimpse of it. I’m so happy we’re having a second interview because I have so many more questions for you. This has been so valuable and I think people get a ton of good information out, that they can actually work with, that they can put into practice. So thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us today.

Tom Poland [24:01]
Thanks for the opportunity, Christine.

Christine Schlonski [24:03]
Well, I just love Tom’s story falling in love at first sight with his beautiful wife who happens to be a German. I just think it’s so romantic. Yeah, well, maybe I’m a bit of a romantic type. But I also love that he took that example in explaining how you can actually create a relationship with your client by following certain steps so that you can create a relationship. And even though you might fall in love for sight, you’re not gonna run off and ask the person to marry you. So that is what I really, really loved about this interview. I hope you learned a ton because Tom went through so many frustrations, spending a lot of money, a lot of time to then figuring it out himself. He has spent almost four decades into the art of lead generation so that everyone that follows his advice can generate high-quality, inbound new client inquiries. This gets every business to the next level. I hope you took a ton of notes, make sure you tune in to the next episode, 205 Endless Leadsology , where we are going deeper and where Tom shares more of his amazing wisdom advice and you can tune in. Hop on over to https://christineschlonski.com/ Find the podcast tab, and Tom’s episode number 204 with the show notes, the resources, the transcript and all the links to Tom are just one click away. Once you’re over there, make sure you sign up for the empowerment notes. That’s empowerment right into your inbox. With all the updates to Heart Sells! Podcast, amazing content I usually don’t share on social and then once in a while you get amazing opportunities to join my tribe in a different way to get amazing offers and to just help you grow your business. Thank you so much for tuning in, have a wonderful day wherever you are in this beautiful world and I’m saying bye for now.