Christine Schlonski [0:02]
Hey Gorgeous. This is Episode 205 and we have the amazing Tom Poland back on the show today.

Tom Poland [0:08]
Hi, this is Tom Poland. You are listening to Heart Sells! Podcast with Christine Schlonski. Enjoy.

Christine Schlonski [0:15]
Well, I can’t wait to dive into the next episode with Tom Poland. I hope you had a chance to listen to episode 204 where Tom shared amazing advice about how to get high quality inbound new client inquiries every single week. Tom is a multiple best selling author of Leadsology series which is backed by 39 years of professional sales and marketing experience. He really specializes in helping you to get those high quality inbound new client inquiries right into your inbox. His clients are from all around the world. Currently in 29 cities and 15 time zones. But Tom lives in Castaways Beach right next to the waves in Australia. Let’s tune in and let’s see how we can get endless Leadsology. I’m so excited you are back on the show today, Tom, welcome.

Tom Poland [1:13]
Thank you very much pleasure to be back again. It was fun the first time.

Christine Schlonski [1:17]
It was so much fun. And I still have so many questions. We were talking about creating your own webinar, and then do webinars pops with other people that are in alignment with what you do, so that you can grow your audience, that you get qualified amazing leads, potential clients reaching out to you as inbound, not you doing all the hassle to get them into a call. That’s where we kind of left so I hope people did a little bit of thinking about how they could do it, what they would love to talk about who they could partner up with. And I hope that people have had a look at http://www.leadgendemo.com to get a better understanding of how the whole thing works. If you have not done that, just do it right after the podcast. Don’t stop right now listening because it’s really important information we’re going to carry on with the conversation around how to create your PowerPoint and how to do a call of action that is not weird or sleazy or whatever negative words you can attach to them. And then from there, I also want to talk to Tom about mistakes to avoid because there are so many ideas you can follow up with that don’t get you anywhere beside they bring you a ton of work and they are probably huge time wasters as well. Let’s dive right in. Tom, what do we do now? Now I have somebody who wants to do webinars work with me like and I have an idea about a topic. What do I need to do now?

Tom Poland [2:57]
Well, the first thing is to come up with the title because the title is, if you don’t get the title right, then people won’t be motivated to register for it, they won’t be motivated to attend. So the title has to be benefit-rich, and it has to also contain specifics and it needs to be differentiated. So if, you know, for example, I say come along and learn how to do some marketing. It’s kind of whoa hum. But if I talk about, come and see how my clients in 27 cities and 15 time zones are generating a weekly flow of high-quality inbound leads, I’ve suddenly got a lot more specificity in there. It doesn’t sound like what everyone else is offering. And so I’m more likely to get cuts through and the specificity increases two things desirability and believability. But most importantly, we’ve got to say something different and that title is going to get people’s attention. One of my clients, for example, teaches intuition and if we just talked about how to tap into your intuition to create a bit of lifestyle, to attract the partner of your dreams, etc. That’s okay, that’s kind of been done before. But if we talk about the direct link, and I can’t remember the exact words that we figured out, but between six, power and money, and how you can unlock and enjoy more of all three through tapping into your natural, feminine intuition, we’ve got some cuts through and it’s a classic what I call a Black Jelly Bean title. People you know, people like love about jelly beans or they hate them, the dividers of taste, and people who like them will love them, people who don’t like them will hate them. A title like that, discover the direct link between six, power, and money and your intuitive ability to, etc, etc. It’s like a jelly bean, people will like it, they’re going to be drawn to it magnetically, and the people who don’t like it by reason of whatever legitimate or otherwise belief systems, etc. they have, that’s fine. So the first thing is we’ve got to make that title benefit rich and it’s got to be differentiated.

Christine Schlonski [5:00]
Got it? What’s the next step?

Tom Poland [5:02]
The next thing is, we need to understand that there’s a broad objective with the webinar, which is to have the right people reaching out to wanting to talk about becoming a client. But there are a lot of sub-objectives in wanting to achieve that. First of all, we need to make sure, objective number one is always the most important one is the demonstration of your ability to deliver on the promise that’s inherent in the title. In other words, whatever you told them, that they will benefit from in that title, generating a weekly flow of high-quality leads, my number one objective is to demonstrate that I’m capable of showing them how to do that. Somewhere in that —

Christine Schlonski [5:39]
You should not have tied like 100 X your sales in 90 days. If you can’t show how it works.

Tom Poland [5:48]
Even if I could deliver on that promise, which, frankly, unless they start with one sale, I can’t. Then it’s not believable. We’ve got to hit that sweet spot. We’ve got to hit the sweet spot between believability and desirability. You can have something as highly desirable but something not believable. You could have something as believable like how to get an extra sale in the next 10 years, I believe you could show me that, but it’s not desirable. So the sweet spot between deceit, believability, and desirability, number one objectives a demonstration of your ability to deliver on the promise and the title. Second is elimination. You want to, as soon as, you mentioned a 100-meter track, I explained this way. You can see your prospect at the start line and there’s a pot of gold over the finish line. The pot of gold represents your value proposition, how you can help your client. In this metaphor, we see the hundred-meter track, we see our pot of gold, we see the prospective client at the start line, and we wonder why they’re not sprinting down the track to get the pot of gold because it’s incredibly beneficial. The reason I’m not is that the prospect has a different perspective. They see hurdles between them, and the pot of gold and the hurdles that things like cost, hurdles and things like a potential disappointment. What if I invest in this one that doesn’t work either. So we’ve got to remove the hurdles away out of the hundred-meter track in the client’s mind. But the other thing is, as soon as you remove the hurdles and you show people that they won’t risk any money, perhaps you’ve got a risk-averse or a guarantee and you show them why it will actually make a difference in your life, they will consider their other options. And so off this hundred-meter track, we’ve taken all the hurdles away, but suddenly there are detours. What if I could do this myself? What if there’s someone else apart from Tom, who’s for the next webinar that I could get the same value from but maybe for less the price? So another thing we need to do is in addition to the removal of those hurdles, the barriers in their mind that they’re thinking that this may not be for them because. We’ve also got to ethically, rationally, eliminate other options they’re might be thinking about that as such attractive options. So, demonstration, removal of the barriers, elimination of other options, that’s all gonna be put into this PowerPoint in a way that’s interesting and engaging and that they find is valuable. Motivations, obviously another objective, we want them to the right people to feel motivated. qualification as another objective. We want them to understand what the qualifications are for working with us. Often that’s a price. Before you speak with anyone that’s reached out to you, they should know what your fees are. It should not be the last thing and it often is in a consult or a strategy. Consult as people told us our amateur worth, and you say it and they go, “Oh, gosh, I had no idea You’re so expensive.” And that should all be done before they make the inquiry. So they are I think they’re the big ones. Oh, education, so they should have, before they speak with you before they book a time to speak with you about potentially becoming a client they should have an education about how you work with your clients. That’s one of the beauties about doing a webinar, which is a demonstration because you’ve told them that you were going to show them how you work with the clients. So the only people reaching out at the end of that webinar are people who understand that you are most likely their best option, that you are very different, that you have the ability to deliver on the promise and the title. They know how you work, they know your fees. So we’re talking about exceedingly highly qualified new client inquiries.

Christine Schlonski [9:33]
Awesome. So how can I let, coming back to your example, this, the intuitive person or the person that teaches that, how can they show an example of their work?

Tom Poland [9:47]
Case studies are an excellent way of doing that. Very often they start, they can talk about their own experience and in this case, how did she go from being a banker to a teacher of intuition. Her own story about realizing there was this thing called intuition or learning how to tap into it, and the transformations that made in her life. That can be a case study, which is obviously very personal, very powerful.

Christine Schlonski [10:13]
It’s not actually demonstrating how you do it at that moment, it’s more like describing how you work —

Tom Poland [10:22]
Exactly, yes, indeed. So, with my webinars that people go to one of those webinars, they’ll see I talk about the three elements to generate the high-quality inbound flow of new call inquiries. One is the audience. We’ve got to get an audience. The second is the asset. Why is the online seminar or webinar the best asset for which people can get to know about services and the call to action. So we have the audience, the asset, and the action. And so that’s what I’m putting on the PowerPoint. I’m explaining to them, why other people’s networks OPN is the best audience because it’s free and exhaustible high quality. Explain why the best asset to get your message out to the marketplaces is a webinar because it combines the oldest most successful marketing myth in the world by speaking to groups of people with the newest marketing medium. Lots of benefits from there and what the best call to action is. So I’m showing them how I work with my clients, which was the promise in the title. Come along, see how my clients generate weekly five inbound clients. So when tuition clients can do exactly the same thing, come along and discover how my clients are realizing the direct link between power, money, and sex by tapping into their intuition. I’ll show you how I work with my clients to do that.

Christine Schlonski [11:33]
Hmm, okay, wonderful. That should be doable for people. Is there anything else you should be including when they craft their PowerPoints?

Tom Poland [11:46]
Yeah, well, I think we’ve got we’ve covered off the title. The next thing is we’ve got some piece, the construction, the PowerPoint, appropriately with a series of peers. One is the person so that’s about you, and a little bit about the relevant parts of your bio. When I say relevant, the parts that support the idea that you can deliver on the promise in the title. Which college you went to is probably not relevant. If you have qualifications that are outside of your current focus, that are probably not relevant.

Christine Schlonski [12:17]
For example, that I love traveling, it’s not really relevant. But I did over 80,000 cold calls and close contracts in millions is probably irrelevant, right?

Tom Poland [12:29]
Relevant, very relevant. Assuming you’re not talking about travel blogging.

Christine Schlonski [12:33]
Yeah, no, I don’t.

Tom Poland [12:36]
So yeah, so relevant, relevant. That’s around the person. So what are your experiences and qualifications that would convince people you know what you’re talking about. And the next one is the promise. So this is a repetition with the title, a different form and what we use for the promises. Imagine, you wake up on a Monday morning, and you open up your calendar, Outlook, Google account, whatever. You see, five bookings from people making an inquiry about working with you, and they know your fees, and they’re confirmed, it’s a good time for them to start. And they know how you work with your clients and they like that already. That slice and time is what we call a promise. So we create, it’s an NLP technique, you know, Neuro-Linguistic Programming, we get the audience to imagine, in one slice in time the transformation that has occurred in their life as a result of implementing the information about learning. So we’ve got the title, we’ve got the person, we’ve got the promise. Then we go to the proof. When we talked about case studies before the before and after scenario of the presenter or of their clients. If it’s a commercial presentation, I mean, we talk about sales. We talk about the number of new client inquiries. So these are metrics. If it’s not commercial, then we use case studies. So that’s the person, the promise, the proof. Now we go into the principal. The principles are what almost everyone doesn’t do on the webinar. What are the keys or the foundation principles that make this whole thing work before I show you the prescription. In my case, the audience, the asset, and the action. I’m going to tell you why this works so well. And the three principles I designed to give audience members three lightbulb moments when they go, “Ah, yes, of course.” So one of my principles is you’re not Hugh Jackman. And I tell that story about asking my wife if Hugh Jackman knocked on the door and proposed marriage, what were you doing? She said, “I probably run away with him.” I tell that story. Everyone has a little bit of a laugh, and I explain I probably would have gone as well, even though I’m not gay. It’s Hugh Jackman, you know, but it illustrates the point that we’re not Hugh Jackman. That’s the lifeboat and that says that’s why it doesn’t work. If you go to a networking meeting, and you put your business cards in the hands of perfect strangers and hoping that they might reach out to you, it doesn’t work because you’re not Hugh Jackman. I’m sorry. Nice. So we go through frequency,

Christine Schlonski [15:03]
You need to have like an attraction factor, right?

Tom Poland [15:06]
That’s a good one, attraction factor. Yeah. Then we go into what I call, prove it. This is the heart and soul of the presentation. So we don’t just jump straight into that this is how I do, we go through the person, the promise, the proof the principles. And so by the time we get to prove it, which is, in my case, this is how we physically, digitally do. Find the audiences to build the asset and have the call to action. People then go, “That’s why it’s so powerful because of everything that’s gone before.” Finally, it’s the proposal or calls to action. We finish off with this is how you can reach out and book a time to have a chat with me.

Christine Schlonski [15:49]
As simple as that, right?

Tom Poland [15:51]
Simple but not always easy to put together. But the sequence

Christine Schlonski [15:54]
Oh, totally, yes. The call to action just makes that invitation. If this is, here’s how you can reach out.

Tom Poland [16:05]
What I teach my clients is, give them one slide on what your service looks like and the features. How many times are you meeting weekly? Is that a program? Is that face to face? Just give them one slide on that. The price, point options or range of fees. And then on the next slide, give them the call to action which was maids it’s bookachatwith tom.com. If my team says he might be booking chatwithtravis.com but it’s the booking length. They can go to that page and actually that’s a good thing for people to have a look at because there’s something they can take away and swipe and deploy without paying any money. They go to bookachatwithtom.com. They’ll see, that’s the page we direct people to at the end of the webinar and it says, “This is what will happen when we meet. This is what will not happen when we meet. It won’t be a sales ambush. It won’t be a free ideas session. Here’s why it won’t be a salesperson. Here’s why it won’t be a freeze idea session. Please check the boxes below to say you agree with the terms and conditions you can afford to work within, here are the fees. The time is good for you to start if we agree it’s a good idea. And that you understand it’s not just a free idea session, and neither will be a sales trap. So check those boxes. Once you’ve checked those boxes, the booking link comes live. And you can find a time in my calendar for us to have a conversation.”

Christine Schlonski [17:26]
I love that. It’s so geared towards what you want to achieve, to get the right people, to have that conversation.

Tom Poland [17:34]
And it’s honest.

Christine Schlonski [17:36]
Yes.

Tom Poland [17:37]
And it’s open, and it doesn’t disappoint people because they don’t have booked this conversational time with me hoping that I’m the answer only to find that can’t afford it. That’s what I’ve wasted their time. I might feel frustrated with that. But that’s up to me because I never did close the fees before they bought the time.

Christine Schlonski [17:55]
What would you say when people say, “Well, you know if somebody really, really wants something and that’s a perfect solution, they will find the money.”

Tom Poland [18:05]
I’d say sometimes it’s true and sometimes it’s not true. Some people genuinely broke, some people are struggling to pay their rent or the mortgage, they shouldn’t join my program. They should get a job maybe and get some financial security and then come back. I heard one person who sure and then remain nameless got Marketer of the Year award because she proudly stood up and said that people were joining her mastermind group and paying $70,000 and taking a second mortgage on the house to do that. How proud she was that her marketing was so good that people would do it. I just about vomited. This is not something that people should be doing. I don’t buy it for a moment. I don’t believe for a moment that they’re, that everyone can find the money because they can’t, not without putting rent payments at risk, food on the table for the family at risk. In my program, they need to be able to fund at least the first two or three months payments. After that, they put it in place. It should be more than self-funding, but they need to be comfortable that they can find that money, whether it’s a credit card or whether it’s some savings, but they shouldn’t be putting the basic financial needs at risk in order to join my program. I couldn’t sleep well at night if I do that.

Christine Schlonski [19:24]
Yeah, I agree with that. I was just thinking like, if you have like a discovery session, and people don’t know your fees, they are open to the conversation and you have a really, really good conversation at the end they come to find out that it’s not at a price range that they can afford.

Tom Poland [19:47]
Then what?

Christine Schlonski [19:48]
Well, at least they have that conversation that helped them to get to the old side.

Tom Poland [19:55]
Yeah, the old sales paradigm is let’s get them on a call. Let’s get them all excited about how amazing this is and then it’s basically twist around get the credit card number off and whether they can afford it or not. Because if they say, “Well, I can’t really afford it”, then you’ll say, “Well, what’s Plan B?”, and you realize that we can actually get this money back by our super triple bonus and we’ll give these extra things and value-added blah…blah…blah and it’s just twisting, manipulative bullshit.

Christine Schlonski [20:24]
I think it depends on how you do it if you then would do the arm twisted thing, yeah, that wouldn’t feel good.

Tom Poland [20:30]
Yeah, but it’s you know, it’s commission. I mean, I earn good money when people someone buys it’s like commission selling. But I also have enough leads not to feel tempted to tell someone they should be buying when I don’t think there should be buying.

Christine Schlonski [20:44]
Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah, I totally agree. But sometimes, you know, when you have the conversation, you have the opportunity to talk about a payment plan or something —

Tom Poland [20:53]
I know they know that information beforehand. So we give them the upfront fee, or the payment plan fee and that’s before they book the call. I want people coming into the size wide open. I don’t want to be talking to people who really can’t afford it and mature adults. My client is 30 years plus. So they tend to be mature adults and they can figure out whether they can afford it. I agree that some people will convince themselves they can’t afford it when they actually can. I’ve heard people say they can’t afford to fly to Europe and back and I know they’ve got 10 million bucks in their bank account.

Christine Schlonski [21:30]
Yeah, totally like that.

Tom Poland [21:32]
So thinking like that, maybe because they don’t engage as a client anyway.

Christine Schlonski [21:36]
Totally. You should be clear about to your soulmate client, that’s how I call them. Where you are really in alignment and where it’s clear, you will do everything. You will be so committed to helping them to be successful. At the same time, it’s such an alignment that they could come over for dinner and you would be having the best time of your life.

Tom Poland [22:01]
Yeah, I’m such an anti-social bastard that wouldn’t have. Oh, look, I’ll go a step further. So none of my clients pay me a cent upfront. Every single one, I say to them, “I think I’ve got something I can help you. I don’t want you to trust me.” And they go, “Hang on, I’m gonna work with you and I don’t have to trust you?” I said, “Well, let me ask you this. Have you heard someone else in the past? Perhaps say, Oh, yeah, I can show you how to get new clients to trust me, give me your money. And I’ll show you how it all works. Like a year I have. It was like a webinar training program or a Facebook marketing thing or a tripwire funnel bs thing or whatever else. And so you gave him the money? Yep. And what happened? Well, I didn’t really get much out of it. Hmm. So you a lot of people have said to you in the past just may give me money and I’ll show you to get clients. So that hasn’t worked well for you, hasn’t.?” I go, “I suppose it hasn’t really.” I said, “Well, let’s stop doing that. So instead of you trust me, I’ll trust you. I’ll work with you for a month, I’ll turn up to meetings with you personally, every single week and I hope you implement for the whole month, I’ll give you full access to every single part of our IP. I will hold nothing back. I will respond to your questions and your requests for those 30 days, you can attend meetings every single week. So I’ll help you implement full access, don’t pay me a cent. If at the end of that 30 days, you believe that I’m different, that I am the real deal and what I have can actually help you and you can implement it, then yes, I’d like you to start paying please, but whether you pay one lump sum or whether you pay every month, don’t pay me anything for 30 days.” That’s how you send a signal to someone that you’re different from the others that they’ve worked within the past where they’ve lost their money.

Christine Schlonski [23:51]
Yeah, that’s super powerful. One thing because we kind of need to wrap up, but I do have a couple more questions. One I really, really want to get to you is, what was the very, very first thing you ever sold in your life?

Tom Poland [24:07]
Well, I’m afraid it’s not particularly sexy, but it was a ham slicing machine.

Christine Schlonski [24:14]
Like ever, not as a kid, nothing else.

Tom Poland [24:18]
The first thing I remember selling for like money was, I finished college and I thought it’d be really cool to have a job with a car that was paid for by a company. So I applied for every job in the paper. We didn’t have the internet back then. And I wrote off and I got a job selling catering machinery. On my first day on the job, the salesman just said, “I’ll put this slicer on the car. This hotel wants a demonstration of this ham slicer, put it in your car. I’ll meet you there at one o’clock.” So I got there one o’clock. He wasn’t there. Turns out there were two hotels of the same name in the same city. So I went into the hotel and said, “Look, the first day on the job, someone wants to see the slicer. Can I show you how it works?” They get, “Yep, looks great, we’ll buy it”, walked out with the order. It was the first thing I remember selling for money in my life.

Christine Schlonski [25:06]
How did you feel?

Tom Poland [25:07]
I felt like Superman. I felt like, with no training, I just sold my first pieces of equipment. The reality was it was probably always gonna be bought didn’t matter who walked in with the thing. It was a good machine. But then that is also the difference. You can’t just walk in somewhere and sell consulting or coaching services into a hotel. But that was the first thing I sold.

Christine Schlonski [25:30]
You were in the right place at the right time with the right equipment.

Tom Poland [25:37]
In front of the right person, exactly right, yeah and they had the right budget. My sales manager thought I was pretty good also, and —

Christine Schlonski [25:45]
That’s a good start for a new drop.

Tom Poland [25:48]
Yeah, it was. Yeah.

Christine Schlonski [25:50]
Awesome. So two minutes. What needs people to avoid when they go on the lead?

Tom Poland [25:59]
Anything they instinctively, inherently don’t want to do. I’ve been doing this for over 40 years now, but my estimate, 97% of marketing efforts fail for one simple reason is that the person doesn’t want to do that sort of marketing. So if you don’t like the idea of stalking people on LinkedIn, don’t do it because you want to stick it up. If you don’t like the idea of complicated online funnels with tripwires, and autoresponders, and those charts that people show you with all the different arrows and things that just freaked you out, don’t do it because you’ll either never start it, or if you start it, you won’t keep doing it. So now one tip I can give anyone is to find a marketing medium that you actually want to do. Because then you’ll do it. And you might not do it very well to start with but because you want to do it, you keep doing it, you’ll get better at it. Virtually all my clients like presenting to groups of people. We just show them how to do that very effectively.

Christine Schlonski [26:56]
Wonderful. Thank you so, so much for again, this wonderful episode. People can get a really good demonstration at http://www.leadgendemo.com I highly recommend you to hop on over there and check that out. All the links that lead to Tom will be on the show notes page, including the show notes, and the transcript and the wonderful resources. Thank you so much for yeah, investing your time with us today to teach us about amazing lead generation.

Tom Poland [27:30]
Thanks for the opportunity, Christine. It’s been fun. Cheers.

Christine Schlonski [27:33]
Thank you. What an amazing episode. So if you have listened to Episode 204, and 205, you basically have Tom system of how you create webinars, partner up with people, how you do a call to action or the mistakes you need to avoid and I think that’s very generous of him sharing all of this knowledge. Hop on over to https://christineschlonski.com/. Find the podcast tab and Tom’s episodes 204 and 205. With all the show notes, the key points, the takeaways, the resources and also the transcripts. So you can get really what you need at your fingertips to put this system into action. All the links to connect with Tom are there as well. And once you’re over there, make sure you sign up for the empowerment notes. That’s empowerment right into your inbox where I not only share amazing ideas, tips, empowerment, but also where you get an update on Heart Sells! Podcasts, where you are invited to amazing opportunities. And yeah, where I do share content that I usually do not share on social media. So hop on over to https://christineschlonski.com/. Find the podcast tab and enjoy the page. Looking forward to you to tune into the next episode with another amazing guest where we are going to talk about planning which is so crucial for every business as well. So I hope you are tuning in. For right now, I am wishing you a wonderful day, wherever you are in this beautiful world and bye for now.