I see a lot of people do those "how would you sign a client in 1 week" type posts on social.
A few of my favourites recently are...
- "I need to make $10k by EoD tomorrow to pay bills"
- "Gun to your head, you have to sign a client in a week. How do you do it?"
- How can I hit $10k / months in the next month?
I'm not sure why $10k months has become the go-to number, but that's beside the point.
I'm also not sure if theyr'e in desperate need of cash, or it's just engagement bait.
Anyway, I'd had enough and decided to respond to one of the posts. I've added a slightly edited (for your lovely email inbox) version of my response below.
The mistake most people make
Most of the comments on these posts and the people who ar looking to make quick money do the cold outreach at scale thing.
They’ll hit up hundreds of people and go straight in with something that’s high threat.
Something like…
This rarely works.
You’ve gotta be doing mad scale and be insanely lucky for this to hit it off.
Do you want to jump on the phone with someone who you don’t know but just slid in your DMs?
Nope.
Do you want to pay that same person thousands of dollars without knowing them?
Nope.
This is a fast way to being busy but not profitable.
A better way…
The issue here is that the threat is too high.
You’re going straight for the jugular on the first contact, and it puts people off.
What you need to do is propose a lower threat offer, and then build up to the high ticket offer.
Yeah, you could do this with a freebie lead magnet, but I’ve found that people who come in through freebies rarely end up paying. And if they do, it’s a long sales cycle.
If you need better cashflow quick, this ain’t the way.
Here’s what I did that helped me close ~25 customers and 1 ongoing client in 10 days.
Create a product that’s worth ~$100.Sell that thing for $1.Add a couple of bumps and upsells into the mix to generate a better AoV.
With my 25 customers I had an average order value of about $40.
That meant I closed $1000 from those initial sales alone.
At the end of that funnel I had 2 things.
- A thank you page with a “book a call” Calendly link
- A simple 3 email follow-up pushing the call
I got 2 calls from the 25 people, 1 of whom converted at $1000 / month for 3 months.
The engagement was 1 phone call per week.
So effectively $250 / hour for me.
Why does this work?
A couple of reasons.
First, a $1 offer is basically zero threat for anyone.
It’s well within the whole impulse purchase area. However, people who are not serious about solving the problem are not gonna spend even a dollar.
Well done, you’ve just cut out the complete time wasters and identified the serious buyers.
Cause here’s the thing. People who pay once, will pay again.
One of the people in my community tested this with a large audience and discovered that people who bought her $1 offer converted to her high ticket offers 12X more.
And doing it this way, you’re providing value for basement bargain prices (assuming your front end is good), meaning that they’re more comfortable spending cash or jumping on a call with you.
And, as I said, the people who are on your calls then are serious buyers and tyre-kicking time wasters.
How to promote this?
I would not recommend doing cold DMs to people for a paid offer.
Again, it’s too big of a jump in threat.
I would take to social, communities etc and pose a simple question and/or solution.
You’ve seen the things I mean. Something like…“If you’re struggling with X, drop a comment with a link and I’ll offer some advice”.
Something that gets the person with the problem to respond.
Offer public group assistance, and then follow up in DMs where you say “I’ve got a thing for $1 if you’re interested”.
This is how I sold those initial 25 people on my offer.
I did it specifically in groups and communities and a niche where I had zero rep or connections to see if it works from cold.
It does.If you need cash quick, this is the best way I’ve found.
And once it’s working, you have the basics to build a self-liquidating front end campaign.
Any Qs, hit reply.
Pete "$1" Boyle
