Hey folks and welcome to another episode of Builders Business Success Podcast!

If you’ve never participated in this podcast before, if you’ve never heard it before, watched it, listen to it, it’s all about addressing the common and often costly issues that pretty much every builder has running a building business.

So we’re about giving you a whole bunch of suggestions. And I can tell you for sure and certain none of this stuff is theory.

In Builders Business Blackbelt we talk about this.

In fact, we meet with the members pretty much every day of the week for an hour talking about new strategies, new ways of overcoming the common issues in building businesses. Ideas are put forward on how to overcome those issues.

They’re put into practice and we get feedback the very next day so we can be implementing, testing, measuring what works, what doesn’t on a day by day basis.

And what we find is going to be shared with you through this podcast. Now, the last number of episodes, and this one included, is all part of unpacking everything that we talk about from end to end in Builders Business Blackbelt because we’re creating a new book.

We’re writing a new book and how we’re writing it is using the podcast to deliver the content of the each chapter and the sub chapters. And so everything that you’re hearing in the podcast is going to be going into a book.

So if you want to influence what goes into the book, what you can do is jump on the Facebook group which is Builders Business Success Forum or you can just find me on Facebook and ask questions and ask for content that you would like covered in the podcast and that will end up being in the book as well.

One thing I would like you to do right at the start if you’re watching this live in the Builders Business Success Forum, I’d like you to hit hashtag live. I’ll put that in the comment section.

If you’re watching it via replay, I’d like you to put hashtag replay in the comment section. Just do us that favor.

So the agenda for this particular episode is all about creating a successful, a reliable lead generation strategy.

In Builders Business Blackbelt we call it an attract strategy.

If you watch the previous episodes, we’ve unpacked why we use the word attract instead of marketing or instead of lead generation because it completely changes your focus and your priority as to where you put your effort and what becomes important than other things to be able to attract the right type of projects and the right type of people to your building business.

We’ll also be covering the Q and A.

We always get a question asked that we want to answer through the podcast questions that’s asked during the week. And as usual I’ll be sharing with you a personal productivity hack.

One of the challenges that every builder has is they seem to be strapped for time. And the cool thing is I’ve been in this space for over three decades.

So I’ve got a whole lot to share with you on how you can become more personally productive, get more freedom, time freedom.

*Transcription of the show*

So what we’re talking about is creating an effective, reliable attract strategy. In the introduction I called it a lead generation strategy.

It could be a marketing strategy but we just don’t use those words because it gives the wrong focus.

So I do encourage you to go back and learn about why it should be called an attract strategy rather than a marketing strategy or lead generation.

But the word strategy is also really important. There is strategy and there are tactics. And what is the difference? Strategy is like you’re overarching 35,000 foot overview of the whole process. The tactics are down in the detail.

So what would be the content and what platforms would be used. With the overall strategy gives you like a mud map of this part of the process gets people to go to the next part, that part gets people to go to the next part. And it’s really important to have that big overview of what you’re doing.

A reason for that is most people or most builders, particularly with their, and I’m going to use the words that we don’t normally use so you can sort of follow along what I’m talking about.

In their marketing strategy, it’s generally, from my observations, it’s random acts of marketing. It really is random.

Nothing seems to join together. And it’s like having a whole lot of links to a chain but they’re not actually connected to each other.

They are spread all about. And so you haven’t got any strength. You haven’t got anything to be able to tow with, if you like.

You need to be able to join those links together so each link creates a longer chain. And obviously the strength of the links give you the strength of that chain as well.

So by putting them together and seeing how they all work together, you can also find the weak links in your chain. So it’s really important to get away from this random acts of marketing and join all of your links together.

So the real key to this is knowing the purpose of each part.

Now, I think I’ve mentioned that a number of times before. I’ve got a business coach. His name’s Taki Moore.

He’s an absolute legend and he’s a business coach that coaches business, coaches internationally, like there’s three, I don’t know, three, 400 top level business coaches in this group all over the globe.

The cool thing is I get to hang out with them on a very regular basis and get taught some amazing things. A number of years ago, Taki talked about the marketing funnel. And he broke the funnel down into ToF, MoF, and BoF.

And what that stands for is top of funnel, middle of funnel, and bottom of funnel. And so if you could imagine a funnel, something that you pour water into your radiator or what have you, it is a funnel, it’s wide at the top and narrow as it gets toward the bottom.

And you need to understand that the three different parts have three different purposes. Top of funnel is getting leads into the funnel to begin with. And what that means is that people who aren’t aware of you need to become aware of you.

And so the only purpose of top of funnel content, so these are your, it could be email posts, but potentially they might be middle of funnel. I’ll get to that in the middle, in a moment.

But your LinkedIn posts or whatever social media platform you use whether it be Facebook, or Instagram, or any of the new ones that seem to be coming out every week.

If you’re using any of those platforms, your top of funnel content is simply to have the appropriate people, the ideal people for your business become aware of your existence.

And the best way to do that is to be talking about what is important to them. And so the simple formula for that is identifying who your ideal prospect is. And we talked about that in a previous episode.

If you wanna learn more about that, go back to that previous episode. I’m not sure what, I think this is 44. It might’ve been episode 43 or thereabouts.

And when you understand who your ideal avatar, your ideal prospect is you start to ask yourself questions about what are their fears, frustrations, wants, and desires or aspiration. And if you can create content that resonates with their fears, or their priorities, or their concerns, it cuts through the noise.

Like there’s just a massive amount of messaging going on out there. And the one thing that people want to pay attention to is you talking about you. They’re not on the interwebs looking for information about you. They are on the interwebs looking for information on how they can solve the problems, the concerns, or accomplish what they want to accomplish, their desires. That’s what they’re looking for.

If you can create content around what they’re looking for, you will be discovered. You will cut through the noise. If you have a look at most builders’ websites, okay? Builders’ websites aren’t necessarily top of funnel.

They’re probably more middle of funnel. We’ll talk about that in a minute as I said. But that top of funnel stuff so that’s the stuff that they’ve searching for on Google.

So your search engine optimization information, that would be top of funnel, is generally talking about themselves because that information comes from the website. The search information comes from your website.

And go and have a look at pretty much any builders’ website you like. Have a look at your own and count how many times on the website it talks about us, we, I’ll.

How many times it mentions your business name versus how much information is on there talking about your ideal prospects, fears, frustrations, wants, and aspirations, right?

Their concerns and their priorities. What is on your website talking about that? What is on your Facebook posts talking about that? So that becomes this awareness. That’s the top of the funnel. So they jump into your funnel.

They become aware of you. And each of those top of funnel pieces of content needs to have a call to action to get your prospects into the middle of your funnel. The purpose of the middle of the funnel is now to create authority. So you need to be able to stand out.

They need to think by looking at your information, absorbing your information is I think we need to speak to this person because they really know about our specific problems, our issues. And that’s what you need to do. You need to make them feel that you understand from their perspective.

If you do that, they will assume that you have the solution. You don’t have to state it. You don’t have to tell people you have the solution. All you need to do is talk about unpack, examine, and analyze the impacts that their problems and their desires are having on their day-to-day life.

If you can do that as well if not better than they can to themselves, they will assume that you have the solution. Then when I come into the middle of funnel, you should be asking questions that elevate your status as an authority.

So by asking questions or posing ideas that get them to think, “Holy crap, if we hadn’t been made aware of that, “we could have made a massive mistake. “It could have cost us time. “It could have cost us money.”

So that middle of funnel stuff is all about building authority. So where does middle of funnel content go? Well, that can be the emails that you send out to people.

Your top of funnel call to action could be, hey, download this thing or, you know, give us your information we’ll post, email you at this, whatever, you know, I call it lead magnets.

But you can get people on your database so they are getting something of value then you can start to email them even more value. And it’s really important to stay right away from salesy crap.

You just need to deliver value. Think about their fears, frustrations, wants, and aspirations and continue to deliver value in that space so they look forward to your email.

The other thing you can do is ask them to join the Facebook group. We ask you to join the Builders Business Success Forum.

That’s our free Facebook group. In that free Facebook group, my job is to elevate my status as an authority to prove to you that I know what I’m talking about and deliver value to you so you can get that information and put it into your business and it makes a difference.

Now, the bottom of funnel is simply giving people a pathway to the front door of your business whether that is jumping on the phone or if you’ve got an office walking through the door.

That call to action in all of your middle of funnel stuff is to get people to take that first step to have some sort of interaction with you personally, whether it be on the phone or face to face or it could even be chat, or email, or something like that.

You need to decide what is the best way of doing it for you. So the key with this is understanding that there is a pathway.

So this is a prospect pathway which might be a better metaphor than a funnel really because it’s a pathway that takes them from not knowing you to knowing you.

Then getting a sense that you’re an authority so it’s been valuable finding you.

And then a pathway to get to you to start to tap into your knowledge, and your experience, and your support, and guidance to solve their problems.

So that’s top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel. The problem that most builders have is that with their top of funnel stuff, so the messaging that they put out there that is the first time that anybody becomes aware of you is that you’re selling, you’re telling them about how good you are, and how long you’ve been around, and how good your skills are.

All of the stuff, unfortunately, they don’t care about. They don’t give a stuff about you or your business.

So there’s no point talking about it. And even if you’re giving them offers, you know, to buy this and when you get a, you know, a house built by us you get a free car, you know, a car for you, a car for you, a car for you. You sound like Oprah.

What you need to do is stop asking people to marry you on the first date because that’s the marketing equivalent. People put information out there, people aren’t aware of you, they can’t get to know you personally, they don’t trust you.

But if you can create a pathway where they become aware of you, they feel that you understand them, they then discover you’re an authority. And then there is a pathway to get your support, guidance, experience, and knowledge to help them. It is a very frictionless pathway to have that very first conversation.

And in Builders Business Blackbelt, the feedback that we’re always getting is by doing this properly when you have that first conversation, more often than not our members say that their prospects are saying, “I feel like I already know you.”

Because they have gotten onto that pathway, discovered them, found that they are an authority, found that they had knowledge and they understood from the clients or the prospects perspective, and they feel comfortable with them right from the get-go.

So it’s a very important and powerful process for you to build in your business. Another point with this is make sure that you have a database that is yours. And what that is is some sort of customer relationship management software.

That could be something like ActiveCampaign is the one that we use but there are plenty around there. We really like ActiveCampaign because it does all sorts of automations and reminders.

And it’s just an amazing bit of kit. But the reason that you’ve got to get people’s details onto your database rather than using your LinkedIn, or your Facebook, or anything like that is when, not if, when that changes all of those, all of the connections that you’ve made with all of those people can disappear overnight.

Social media platforms change. I know you think that Facebook’s been here for a long time and it will be here forever. It will not. It will change.

The way that they run Facebook, and your access, and your abilities to use Facebook, it changes almost day by day. So you need to make sure you’re getting people away from those social media platforms onto your own database.

And if you think about everything that I’m talking about, it exists with Builders Business Blackbelt. You will see our ads, our top of funnel ads. And it just talks about the problems that you guys are having.

That’s all it talks about. And you know, not being paid for quotes, and having your time wasted, and all of that sort of stuff.

One of the major problems.

And then you get the opportunity to jump into the free Facebook group, or you get the opportunity to join a mini webinar, or you get the opportunity to download a quality client pathway or whatever, and you end up on our database, and you receive some emails that promote to our podcast, all of these sorts of things.

And we put as much value as we can think of into our Facebook group.

And we create conversations in the Facebook group, people reach out to us, have a conversation with us, and some of them end up on our blueprint program and away we go.

But all the way along that process, we’re trying to make sure that we’re delivering you value and that’s what you need to do as well.

So if you want to see how this works, all you need to do is follow our process. So I hope that makes sense. And this is what you need to be doing.

What I’m doing right now, I’m giving you what’s called a CTA or a call to action. If what I just talked about made sense and you’ve got questions and you want to figure out how to implement this into your business, all you need to do is reach out to us. Like it’s that simple. I’m giving you a pathway to have a conversation with us.

Under this video, there’s a button, you just press it, fill out some information tells us a little bit about your business, we jump on a call.

There’s nothing to buy. It’s just a conversation to find out what are the roadblocks to your business, what’s the best pathway forward.

Sometimes, in fact, a lot of times, people aren’t ready for what we do. Which is cool. We’ve still got a pathway for you so it’s worth having the conversation.

You jump on the call and we can give you directions on how to get to the information you need and it costs you nothing. So it’s an absolutely worthwhile call to make. So hit the button.

I’m also gonna put a link in the comment section when I’m done with the livestream into the Builders Business Success Forum. You’ll be able to click the link there as well.

And I just want to remind you if you’re watching live, put in hashtag live into the comments.

If you’re watching the replay, just put hashtag replay into the comments. That would be really helpful.

Q & A

So let’s get into the Q and A.

The question, what’s the best platform for lead generation? It was a good question ’cause it made sense with what we’re talking about in this particular episode.

What’s the best platform for lead generation? It’s a bizarre question because there is no best platform for lead generation.

There is but I can’t tell you that until and unless you can tell me more about your ideal prospect. And I’m using my words carefully here. I didn’t say ideal customer.

I said ideal prospect because you’ve got to get your mind around that what you’re doing is you’re putting top of funnel information out there.

So they’re not a customer yet. They are potentially a prospect. In fact, they’re not even a prospect. They’re what we call a suspect.

You go from suspect, to prospect, to client. That’s the pathway. But the bottom line with all of this, fortunately, and unfortunately. Unfortunately because it’s a bit of work.

Fortunately because it’s a bit of work. And what that means is that you know, people, your competitors, your opposition, will give up. If you’re prepared to put the work in, and do some tests, and measure, you will find out something.

But everyone else who’s not prepared to do that will still be back at that random acts of marketing, spending money, spending time, getting frustrated not making any headway.

So number one, you’ve got to find out who your avatar is. And again, go back and watch the episode where we talked about the avatar, how to build your avatar.

Once you know about this ideal prospect, you can start to ask where are they most likely to hang out?

Are they most likely to hang out on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn?

Where would they most likely hangout? And that would be the best platform for you. So there’s a few steps you need to go through to get the answer to this question.

Then the question still might not be relevant because of what I just talked about as well in relation to the focus of your messaging. Is your messaging on point?

Because it doesn’t matter which platform you use. If you find the right platform and your messaging isn’t on point, you’re still not going to get the results.

So you’ve got to really get in touch with who your avatar is and what are their fears, frustrations, wants, and aspirations, their passions, their interests, their problems, their concerns, their priorities.

All of that, the more you can find out about them, the more insight you’ll have into the content, the focus of your content, but also the platform where you put that content.

So it’s not the platform’s fault if your messaging isn’t on point.

And you can have the best messaging on the wrong platform. So you really need to know about your avatar to find out those two things. So I hope that answers your question.

Just again, a real quick reminder. If you’re watching this live, put in hashtag live. If you’re watching the replay, put in hashtag replay. That would be much appreciated.

Personal Productivity Hack

Now, personal productivity hack time. This is a real quick one.

But I think when most people are looking for help with efficiency and effectiveness, they look for new systems, new processes, all of this sort of thing.

And I found over the years of my 30, you know, creeping up to 40 years into doing this, particularly in this sort of personal effectiveness space, is everything that people learn things to be an exercise in addition.

Meaning I now need to add this to my list, I now need to add this to my list of behaviors and actions I need to take.

So everything that we learn seems to be an exercise in addition.

What I’d like for you to do is stop for a moment and go through an exercise in subtraction. And what that means is look at all of the things that show up on your list every day.

If you don’t have a list of actions that you implement every day, you better have one. You just better start writing down what you need to do every day.

That will make you more organized just straight out of the gate. But by doing that, you’ll start to see what shows up on your list of things to do every day or at least weekly.

So it repeats itself weekly, something you need to do every week. And you need to ask the question, what would happen if I never did this again? And you might think, well, everything I do is important.

That is total bullshit. Not everything you do is important. In fact, there’ll be a ton of stuff that’s a complete waste of time and you’ve just hypnotized yourself into believing that it’s important.

So if you ask yourself the question and genuinely ask the question and look into the future, what would happen if I never did this again, you’ll find a whole lot of stuff that won’t matter at all.

And you’ll find some stuff that will sort of have a small impact. But if you can understand what those things are, stop doing them.

It opens up space to do the stuff that you know you should be doing that you never get around to because you’re so busy doing this other stuff you’ve hypnotized yourself into believing is important. So get into an exercise in subtraction.

So I hope that makes sense. And again, if you want some guidance on the how you might be able to do that because that is something we can help you with real fast and you will get some super amazing wins with these ideas we can share with you real quick.

All you need to do is, again, hit the button under this video or get to the website, buildersbusinessblackbelt.com.au to schedule a call.

Buttons are all over there or I’m gonna put a link underneath the video in the comment section here in the Builders Business Success Forum.

In the comment section you’ll be able to click that and book a conversation with us.

You will be really glad that you did. No matter what happens we’ll point you in the right direction.

Takeaway & Jump On A Call

So what’s the takeaway for this particular episode of Builders Business Success Podcast?

I think the takeaway, for me, is don’t do what everybody else does. That makes sense with your website, with your attract strategy.

Most builders do random acts of marketing and get pissed off because they don’t get work, or they get the wrong kind of work, or they attract tire kickers, and price shoppers, and all of that sort of stuff.

Don’t do what everybody else does. Do it differently. Start to implement what we’re talking about in this podcast.

Decide on your direction and become the master of your destiny.

So rather than letting the business, and the environment, and the market push you around, decide what sort of customers you want, what sort of projects you want and start to build an attract strategy that will attract those people that have those projects and all you then need to do is become attractive to those people with those projects.

And we’ve given you a fair bit of detail on how to do that just in this episode but there’s a bunch on previous episodes as well.

So I hope you have enjoyed this episode and got some value out of this episode of “Builders Business Success Podcast”.

Again, if you’re watching it live, put in hashtag live. If you’re watching the replay, put in hashtag replay in the comments.

And if you haven’t heard at all through this podcast, we’d love to talk to you. We’d love to find out how we can help you. There is a gazillion ways that we can help you.

All you need to do is reach out. And so you can book a call by hitting the button underneath this video here or you can go to buildersbusinessblackbelt.com.au, this.

Schedule a call buttons on the page there. Or you can hit the link in the comments section in this replay of the “Builders Business Success Podcast” in the Facebook group. Fill out the form. Just tells us a little bit about your business.

So it can be a bit prepared for the conversation, get on a phone call, we just schedule that call. You can do that. Pick a time, pick a date that suits you. Make it soon. Don’t put it three weeks from now. It’s like a seven to 10 minute phone call.

Point you in the right direction. I guarantee you’ll get value out of that phone call. And then off we go. So love to talk to you. I hope this podcast has been enjoyable.

I hope it’s been that inspirational to get you to start to think about how you are going to put together your attract strategy. And then you can start to look at the tactics once you’ve got the strategy done. Again, if you want to talk to us about it, you know what to do.

I’ve said it a gazillion times through this podcast.

I’m Mick Hawes from Builders Business Blackbelt. I hope you enjoyed the podcast.

We’ll be back again at 10:00 a.m. live in the Builders Business Success Forum next week. And that is it for this episode. Bye for now.