Calling all sales leaders to help me check my math about lead gen services for coaches and fractional executives.
As a coach, I get four to five DMs each week from services promising, “I can get you eleventy billion booked meetings yesterday.”
I always ask the same two questions:
1) How are you different from the last dude who reached out to me this week?
2) What do you know about generating leads that nobody else does.
Everybody taps out. And then I laugh at them.
I had an epiphany last night that I think lays bare the complete fiction around lead gen for coaching and other service businesses.
Lead gen services exist because the universe of business is extremely heterogenous.
The way you get leads for a SaaS company selling retention tools to HR execs is different than the way you get leads for a D2C company selling diapers to families with special needs children.
Because each market has a different pain, you need to understand the right way to establish trust with them.
Coaching is an extremely homogeneous market. There are submarkets, yes, but not that many. Coaching for early stage startups, coaching for scaling CEOs, career development, etc.
Here’s where I need you to check my work:
1) Lead generation is fundamentally about building trust with the buyer, and that means talking about the buyer’s problem, not your solution.
2) All early stage startups have basically the same handful of needs: make sales, raise capital, deal with random bullshit.
3) If a lead generation service actually figured this market out, they’d be running the same exact playbook over and over again. Like, the. Exact. Same. Playbook.
There is no “target your ideal customers.”
There is no “language that sets you apart.”
It would simply be, “we DM these magic words to early stage startup CEOs on LinkedIn and they book meetings.”
This is probably true for any services business. There’s a handful of different submarkets with professional cleaning (residential and commercial), for instance, but within those submarkets, it’s fairly uniform.
And nobody has figured it out because there is no solution.
There are no DM-length magic words that make someone think “even though I’ve never considered getting a coach, I’m going to book a meeting.”
There is no cold email that makes someone think, “holy crap, a fractional people exec WOULD change everything for me.”
It’s all just blasting out messages and hoping the timing is right.
Sales execs, does this sound right?
Is the killer sales hook for all these people reaching out to coaches as simple as:
“There is no special sauce. Everyone else is selling snake oil. This is fundamentally a numbers game and you have better things to do with your time than manage this shit.”
Scott Schnaars Jim Hirshfield Simon Whitcombe An Bui Tessa Horehled Jessica Kahn