1726 – Strategies for Attracting and Acquiring Clients with Erin Marcus

0:28Hey there, thoughtful listener. million in revenue. Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high-ticket sales appointments. You can even chat with me live and I'll see and reply to your messages. Also, don't forget, the thoughtful entrepreneur is always looking for guests. Go to upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. We'd love to have you.

0:58with us right now it's my good friend aaron marcus aaron you are the founder and ceo of conquer your business you are a business strategy consultant for driven entrepreneurs and your website is conquer your business.com aaron thank you so much for joining us Thank you, Josh. I'm excited to be here. I would love for your take on the impact that you have in the world today and who you serve and what you do. Oh, my gosh. What do we do? So the fancy title, right, the cultivated curated marketing sentence is that we create business and branding strategies that build multiple six and seven figure businesses.

1:42Well, that doesn't sound so bad. No, it's marketing without being too jargony. I tend to be a little bit direct, right? So let's just put it straight out there. This is how we help people. So where do you find that most businesses, like if they've already achieved some level of success, where are they getting hung up? Where are they getting hung up? The thing that I am seeing happen over and over and over again, and these are really surprisingly into the seven figures, is that they've never created on the front end of their business what they've created on the back end of their business. They don't have a client acquisition system.

2:23And I watch amazing, amazing business owners doing great things who are absolutely exhausted because, right, they're absolutely exhausted. The pressure has never been relieved from that business owner situation because they haven't created a predictable system, not a tactic, not an Insta strategy, right? A system that will help them consistently attract and acquire new clients. So even when they're functioning at a very high level on the back end, They have full teams doing the work. The pressure of where is my next client coming from still exists for them. Yeah. You know, it's hard not to take, Aaron.

3:11It's hard not to take this personally. When we are the founder, we maybe are in a position professionally where we're like, you know, this shouldn't be a problem at my stage in business. Like, why am I having an Aaron? I mean, let's be frank, this is going to impact cash flow and like, you know, bills and payroll may be consistent. And, you know, again, if there's no consistency on the front end for conversations, people look at their cash flow and then they maybe start to blame other things. Maybe it's me. Do I smell bad? Is my offer no good? Am I really bad at sales or something like that? And what you're saying is exactly right.

3:50And unfortunately, people often associate how good am I at what the business does, right, with knowing how to build a system that attracts and nurtures consistently, predictably a growing audience. when truthfully, those things have nothing to do with each other. We think that if we're really, really good at the thing, build it and they will come, right? We all watch the movie, but that's not actually how it works. And then on top of it, on top of it, you have the fact that most business owners are consumers of other business owners' materials because we're playing in that world, right? So you're surrounded by everybody else's highlight reel.

4:36You're surrounded by everybody else's marketing efforts without the truth. Now, consciously, we know nobody's going to put their ugly truth on the internet. Well, that's not true. They all do it all the time. But in their marketing, they're not going to put their challenges in their marketing. And so we know that's not the full story consciously. But subconsciously, we're kind of believing that everyone's got it figured out but me. I must be doing something wrong. I must not be good at the thing. And I also think on top of it, the fact is that the market changes, clients change, the business owner changes.

5:15And unlike doing your taxes, unlike doing the processes that happen on the back end of your business, client acquisition system has to fluctuate and change. You will not solve this problem. You can only temporarily solve this problem. And then the market shifts and you grow as a business owner and your client changes and now your system, quote unquote, doesn't work. So you think you did it wrong. But you actually did it right. You just kind of stopped doing it. And when you put that all together, it creates this bit of a perfect storm. And we are already busy. We already are out of hours in the day and days in the week.

5:58it's already hard enough. So how much time am I really going to spend doing a deep dive into the part that makes me absolutely miserable? Yeah. You know, and this happens for all of us, you know, no matter what you do, if you're responsible for growth or again, I think most people, Erin, just want to do what they do. You know, my wife is a family therapist or couples therapist and sex therapist. She's exceptional at what she does. You know, given the nature of what she does, probably doesn't get a whole lot of word of mouth because, you know, people don't like to talk about the fact that nobody's raising their hand in the big room of networking and saying, yeah, that's me.

6:35I have that problem. No, I don't. Yes. Right. Right. She doesn't get a lot of social media love for the work that she does. Cause again, most people don't want to talk about the problems with their PP or whatever. So she relies on what might feel like in every business owner, right? It's like you want to do what you love. And I think sometimes it can be easy to look at all of the other stuff and say, ew, that's a necessary evil so that I can continue to do what I love to do most, which is teaching piano, mowing people's lawns, high-level leadership consulting, right? Any of these things. How can we maybe look at these two different worlds in a more helpful way?

7:18Well, first of all, you have to reframe how you're thinking about it. Here's the thing. We all have jobs. We all have businesses that we're not going to love every single part of it. So you don't have to absolutely fall in love with marketing and client acquisition and sales if you don't want to be in love with it. However, if you really consider it a necessary evil, how much of your time, money, energy, and effort are you going to put behind it? Your heart's not going to be in it. People will feel that. So find a version that works for you. And this is why I'm so against these one size fits all Insta tactics here.

7:53Just do this one thing because they don't work. Because if that tactic doesn't align with where your heart is and where your head is and what your goals are and what you're good at and what you suck at and want to avoid like the plague, then that tactic won't work for you. I'll give you a personal example. I didn't like social media. It was very weird for me. I grew up, first of all, I didn't grow up with it at all. So it wasn't my natural inclination. The second thing is I grew up in Chicago public schools in the 70s and 80s, and I spent the first 20 years of my life making sure nobody knew what I was doing, right?

8:28Like we weren't good kids, so nobody knew what we were doing. So the idea of screaming from the rooftops everything you're doing felt very weird to me. However, the business that I'm in, Thought Leader Content Creation, I have to have the credentials that my prospects and clients expect me to have, I have to figure out how to play in that world because that's just the world we live in right now. So what I did was I reframed how I felt about it. I have a very educational approach to my marketing. And now I look at social media platforms as this amazing free, free people. It's free, amazing free platform where I get to share my message, what I think is important and help people.

9:15I get to help the people that I want to have an impact on for free. And a certain amount of those people will continue their relationship with me on a deeper level and become clients. So I had to rethink about how I felt about the platform and how I thought about the platform in order to make it work for me. All right. So tell Tell me more, Erin, about the folks that you get to work with. What does that look like? My big approach, my whole thing, and this is the concept of reverse engineering. Everything we do is about reverse engineering, which means figuring out exactly what it is that that business owner is trying to build, right?

9:58If you want a million dollar business, there's a million different ways to grow that. So if you haven't reverse engineered what it actually looks like for you, you're going to become susceptible to basically anything that's out there and saying, try this, try that, try that and never get any momentum. So we reverse engineer the entire process by saying, OK, what are we trying to build? And once we've nailed that down, what does this look like? What does this look like a year from now, three years from now, maybe five years from now? And I'm not a big fan on anything farther than that because the world is just changing way too fast.

10:33You almost can't predict. And then we reverse engineer. Okay, what do we have to do to put the foundation in place, whether the team, the offers, the processes, the backend, are there any gaps on that foundation of unique value proposition? Like, what do we do and how do we talk about it? Then we go into the second step, which is really about audience growth. What are we doing to put your business out there to attract the people that you want? The third step is nurture. You watch this fall apart in so many different places. Either someone does all growth and no nurture or all nurture and no growth, or they're out there trying to nurture the pants off of everybody, but they don't have their foundation in place.

11:16So nobody knows what it is that they're actually trying to do. So we put that system together for them, assure that they have that foundation so that the strategies they employ are building the thing that they want. And then create that client acquisition system on the front end, all about, because I work with people who are really trying to scale, leveraging, leveraging, leveraging their resources, their time, their team. You know, I'll put it to you this way. How do, what do we do? We help solopreneurs and entrepreneurs get over the bridge into business ownership, because it really is like trying to get over a bridge, except so many times people think that the journey is this cute little garden bridge made of stone and there's a creek underneath it and a nice grassy knoll.

12:02And the truth is it's the Indiana Jones bridge, right? It's being held together by twine and planks and it's on fire. And there's a guy with a sword. We help people get over the bridge very tactically and strategically instead of starting at square one, where they're doing random acts of business and random acts of marketing that they don't know what it leads to. They just know they're supposed to be out there doing something. Yeah. All right. Your website is conqueryourbusiness.com. By the way, I should point out you're a podcaster and I love, I mean, we're, listen, our friends listen to a podcast right now.

12:40This is easy. They can find you. So my podcast came out of the way that I was closing sales and I would have these conversations with people and then I'd say, well, are you ready? Are you ready yet? You ready to change how you feel? You ready to change the frustration? And so the podcast is called Ready Yet. And the concept is you'll never do what it takes until you become the person it takes to do it. Because I want to share not just other entrepreneur subject matter expertise, but I want to share the truth about what this process and this journey looks like, because it really isn't easy for anybody to get through it.

13:18And you got Gary Vee, you got Tony Robbins, you got, you know, all the big names out there And that's great. Go be motivated by them. But they're often too far removed from us, you know, regular folk to learn from anymore. So I want to share the people who are just a couple steps ahead, even if it's just in one lane, so that other people can get motivated, learn something from their subject matter expertise and be inspired by their resilience and persistence. Yeah. Aaron, if I were to just maybe have you, and again, I know that this is difficult to give a one-size-fits-all answer, but when someone comes to you and the complaint is, like, I know, like, I'm not getting enough people through the front door.

14:02I mean, they're going to have to create more visibility, more opportunities. I see some tactics out there not working very well. I see some tactics that, you know, from an integrity standpoint, I would never do, I could never do, you know, just the spammy spray and pray stuff that just annoys people because I get annoyed by it. Like, and I would, you know, and maybe I care about it too much, but I would certainly, you know, not enjoy being on the receiving end of someone saying, you know, calling me out as a spammer or something like that. So any thoughts on kind of trying to walk this in a classy way that's an integrity with who we are?

14:46I'll frame it this way. Don't do anything, meaning make an offer, pitch. Don't do anything online you wouldn't do in person. You would never walk up to me in a networking event and say, oh, Josh, nice to meet you. And then go on a five-minute tirade about your program and how it's the best thing since sliced bread and how could I not want to join right now. Don't forget, it's not advertising, it's social media. So don't forget the social on the platform. Don't do online what you wouldn't do out in the world. And then the other piece of advice is don't try to do something you haven't earned the social capital to do.

15:31You haven't earned the right to ask me for my money yet because we have no relationship. If you just avoid, right? And the other thing, and this is where I have the empathy for people. A lot of people just don't know better. Somebody is still teaching people that as soon as you connect on LinkedIn, you should have an Autobot send them basically a DM the length of your sales page. Like somebody is teaching people this because they're all still doing it. Yeah. It sounds good, but it's a lie. You're believing the lie. You're believing the lie that, well, you're just offering to help somebody. So here I am being this really good person offering to help you.

16:12That's a lie. You're asking for something. We all know you're asking for something. The marketplace is way, that might've used to work, but we all get it now. That used to work. The novelty is worn off. The marketplace is much smarter now. and we're not going to fall for the tactics that worked two, three years ago. Cause we know everybody knows we're not fooling anybody. And if you just stop pretending that here, come to my free event means let me give you something. I just had an event. I use all these strategies, but earn the right to invite people to it. Right? Like come to my free event and I'll give you so much information.

16:56Well, yeah, but you all, let's face it. You also know, I'm going to ask you, you know, I'm going to sell something to you. So did I earn that right before I pretend that I'm just here to help you? Right. I mean, we're not talking about a hard sell with, you know, fake scarcity and all that other stuff, which again, that's not what we're talking about, but certainly like, listen, so here's all the value. Hopefully you're really inspired and motivated. And let's talk about where we go from here. That appeals to me. Like, I love that vibe And to treat your audience like adults. Yes. I think it's so important.

17:27And the idea to me, the definition of sales, the definition of a sales conversation is a mutually agreed upon conversation. We both know that we're having a conversation about whether or not we want to exchange money for services. If you just send me a DM offering me things, I didn't agree to that conversation. Clicking, yes, I'm willing to connect with you because we know 75 of the same people, it doesn't give you permission to enter into a sales conversation with me. I agreed to connect with you. I didn't agree that we were having a sales conversation. So a sales conversation is a mutually agreed upon, mutually beneficial scenario.

18:17Does it make sense for us where we are in the relationship to discuss this as an option, right? I love it. Yeah. And this is so, so critical. And unfortunately, like I said, I think historically, there've been a lot of gurus who have enriched themselves by selling this plan of easy, automatic, passive riches, and it's done a lot of damage. I think in many cases, it worked at one point, but then kind of like the adage, right? Marketers flock to all good ideas until they ruin them. Totally. But the one area I think that, you know, again, the cheap kind of bro-y for lack of a better term, marketer is almost always going to try to find more efficient, cheap, faster, easy ways.

18:59Whereas the heart-centered leader doesn't mind kind of doubling down on the relationship. And so I think that's where you win. Well, and also there's a lot of bro-y personas out there who are actually really good at marketing. There's a lot of personas out there who will talk to you about the tactics they use and are very transparent about that's not where they started. It's not where they started. So yes, you can get to a point where you might know enough about your audience and you have a big enough following and a big enough brand awareness and you've built your social capital up over time, over years.

19:48And now when you make an offer, the social capital you're leveraging has been created over 10 years. The mistake is when someone thinks they're going to create in six months what took Gary Vee decades to earn the right to do. Yeah. So they're not wrong. We're just thinking we can do instantly what they've struggled at for decades. Oh my gosh, yeah. Yep. And wasted tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. Easily. No, they wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions of dollars. Millions of dollars, because that's what it takes. Yes. If you want multi-million dollar businesses, it costs multi-million dollars to figure it out.

20:36Hmm. Yeah. There's no shortcuts to this. Yeah, agreed. Yeah, your website, conqueryourbusiness.com. Someone that's enjoyed our conversation and like, I like Aaron. We talked about your podcast, but where else would you recommend they go if they've really enjoyed our conversation? What's next for them? What's next for them? So go to conqueryourbusiness.com because we put everything in one place for you to find. And I'll give you a little extra. I do a live show every Tuesday on LinkedIn and it's just giving away content. So if you like what I have to say and you want to learn more about how I do what I do, join me on LinkedIn.

21:13Love to connect and hear from people. Always looking for great conversations. Awesome. All right. Erin Marcus, again, Disney Business Strategy Consultant for Driven Entrepreneurs and founder and CEO of Conquer Your Business on the web at conqueryourbusiness.com. Erin, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, Josh.

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