How to Get Your First Five Customers in 10 Steps

Discover how to get your first five customers in 10 easy steps. This blog post, based on the book ‘100 Million Dollar Leads,’ guides you through the process of compiling a list of potential leads, personalizing your message, creating scarcity, and much more. Start your journey towards successful networking today.

Step 1: Compile a List

The first step is to compile a list of potential leads. This list will be made up of three parts:

1. Email Contacts: Go to your email account and pull all the contacts you have ever messaged or emailed.
2. Social Media Contacts: Visit every single social media profile that you have. Write down every follower that you can direct message.
3. Phone and Personal Contacts: Pull out your phone and export your contacts.

Combining all three of these lists will give you significantly more leads than you initially thought.

Step 2: Choose a Platform

Now that you have all these contacts, you must choose one platform to start messaging or emailing them. Start with the platform where you have the most contacts. This could be Instagram, email, or even your phone contacts.

Step 3: Personalize Your Message

When reaching out to a person or prospect, it’s important to personalize your message. Take 30 seconds to look at someone’s profile and find something you have in common. This could be anything from a recent life event to a shared interest. Use this as your primary message when reaching out.

Step 4: Reach Out

Reach out to 100 people every single day. It may seem daunting at first, but remember, everything must be hard before it can be easy. Just get over the hump and send that first message.

Step 5: Warm Them Up

If they reply, you need to warm them up. I use a framework that I call ACA: Acknowledge, Compliment, and Ask. For example, acknowledge something about them, compliment them on it, and then tie your ask to the compliment you just gave them. This will lead them to the service you sell.

Step 6: Invite Their Friends

While you’re having these conversations, remember, you’re not selling anything yet. You’re just asking a question. They’re going to tell you stuff, and then you’ll casually ask, “By the way, do you know anyone who’s looking for X, Y, and Z? Because I’m opening up a few slots to help people do exactly that.” You’re just asking them if they know anybody. Since you’re friends with them and since you’re contacts, you’re asking them for a favor, not asking them to buy from you.

Step 7: Transition from Lead to Engaged Lead

If they express interest in what you’re selling, they’ve transitioned from a lead to an engaged lead. A lead is someone you can contact. An engaged lead is someone you can contact who has shown interest in what you sell.

Step 8: Make an Offer They Can’t Refuse

To get them to buy from you, you’re going to give them the easiest offer in the world to say yes to – you’re going to make it free. They probably know that you’re not that experienced. Just be honest. The reason we do it for free is you say, “Hey, I’m gonna do all this stuff for free as long as you promise to do three things: one, you use my service; two, you give me feedback on it; and three, leave a killer review if you think it deserves one.”

Step 9: Learn and Improve

The reason I want you to start with that is that one, it’ll get you more reps; two, you probably suck; three, you need to learn how to suck less. And you suck less by doing more. It’s way easier to get more people to work with you if you lower the barrier to free. You’re getting the better end of the deal.

Step 10: Launch Your Product

The launch of my second book, “100 Million Dollar Leads,” is a testament to this process. The event itself, where I’ll be launching it on Saturday, August 19th, will be bananas. I’ve spent over a million dollars on the event itself, and I’m going to be giving away a secret thing that I’ve been working on for over four years to everyone who’s there with me live.

Step 11: Understand the Value of Free

Warren Buffett once offered to work for Ben Graham, the GOAT of investing, for free. Graham responded that Buffett was overpriced. Why? Because Graham knew that he would have to invest more in getting Buffett good enough to work for him. The same principle applies here. Your customers are very much because they are exchanging something for your service – their time and effort. Just because you’re not getting paid doesn’t mean it’s free. But it is monetarily free.

Step 12: Ask for Referrals

Ask your contacts if they know anybody who is struggling with a particular problem and looking to achieve a specific outcome in a certain time frame. You’re taking on five case studies for free because that’s all you can handle. You just want to get some testimonials for your service or product. Be honest, because this is your first business and you have no idea what you’re doing, so you better not take more than five customers.

Step 13: Use Testimonials

Use testimonials to show that your service works across different scenarios. If they say they don’t know anyone, ask them if they know anyone they dislike. That’s when you’ll sometimes get the real response.

Step 14: Simplify Your Pitch

If you don’t have time to say all of those things, just say, “I help the type of customer get dream outcome in a period without effort and sacrifice, and I guarantee XYZ to decrease risk.”

Step 15: Understand the Hidden Costs

If people don’t want to work with you even for free, then ask them why. The reason that someone tells you they don’t want to work with you even for free is because there are hidden costs associated with whatever thing you sell. If you figure out what all those hidden costs are, you can eliminate those hidden costs and then be able to charge significantly more for your solution later compared to the other people who charge for it and still include those hidden costs.

Step 16: Start Charging

Once people start referring, that’s when you know you’re good enough to start charging. When this happens, all you do is go back up to the script and you change “free” to “80% off” and you say that’s for the next five. What do you do after that? Change the 80 to 60 after you get those five, then to 40, then to 20, you’re at full price. But it doesn’t have to stop there. You can go 20% over, you can go 40% over that because there are no rules.

Step 17: Increase Your Value

The value that you deliver has gotten better because you figured out from the feedback that these people who worked with you for free have told you. So, you can make it even better for people who pay you. Once you have those people and you start transitioning, congratulations, you are in business and you are making money.

Step 18: Create Scarcity

You will at some point reach capacity when you fill up all your slots with free people and discounted people. Now you have true scarcity and so you can ethically sell with conviction that you don’t have that much room. They will desire you more because you are scarce from a resource perspective and then they will pay the same or premium to work with you.

Step 19: Transition Free Customers to Paying Customers

Then you turn to your free person and you say, “I am accepting somebody who’s paying full vote to do this. If you would like me to keep doing this for you, you would have to start paying to match them. Are you comfortable with that?” If they’re not, no sweat because all you did is help them for free.

Step 20: Cherish Your Free Customers

Those Free People, you have to love and cherish them more than anyone else in your life because they’re going to get you business in three different ways. One, they’re gonna leave you reviews that are going to get your best. Two, they’re gonna send you people that are going to get your business. And three, they may transition into paying you which will also get you busy.

Step 21: Keep Them Warm

Keep them warm. You’ve got this big list of people, check in like a human being, and provide value to them regularly. When you do that, you continue to reinforce and deposit goodwill in the audience. Because what will happen eventually is you won’t even need to ask them because you’ve provided enough value. You start posting enough testimonials, enough results, talking about some of the insurance stuff that you’re doing right now that people be like, “Hey, that’s pretty cool. Hey, can I find out more about that?” And then they’ll reach out to you.

Remember, the key to success is persistence and personalization. Happy networking!