Winning SEO Sales Strategies
Table of Contents
If you want to be a successful SEO professional, you need a sustainable method of acquiring clients. Here are some sales strategies that will help you generate leads and close deals.
While SEO expertise helps you retain clients, you need a whole different skill set to acquire them in the first place. Learning how to close the deal is essential if you want to expand your client base, increase your profits, and scale up your marketing business.
Lead generation isn’t an easy task, especially since the SEO industry is extremely competitive. This guide will teach you how to penetrate a niche market, identify prospects, craft a convincing pitch, and get them to sign on the dotted line.
Niching Down to Build a Seven-Figure Agency
Many marketers try to cast as wide a net as possible.
They’re in need of clients, and they’ll take projects from any business in any niche. This strategy might work in situations where you already have an established network of contacts to get your leads from. If this is the case for you, then, by all means, go big and take those markets. But by limiting your scope to a specific niche you can position yourself and your agency as an industry expert.
Pick a niche, then attack it. Whatever niche you pick, aim for “sophisticated professionals” (e.g. dentists, doctors, lawyers, etc.) or high ROI service-based businesses (e.g. epoxy sellers, ceramic coating, etc.) with a respectable lifetime value.
Of course, you can still build liquid capital in low ROI niches with $15-20 leads, but you can’t get stuck in that market for too long. If you want to make big bucks and eventually bring in seven figures, you have to target clients that are willing to spend on big contracts.
Before settling on a niche, however, you need to get to know it. Spend at least 15-45 minutes every day researching and reading up so that you’re not sinking time and money into a dead-end niche. One of the best ways to learn about an industry is by interviewing business owners. Write them an email, then offer to buy them coffee or lunch in exchange for a meeting. That’s a very small price to pay to get insight from someone on the inside.
Once you are comfortable with the industry, the terminology (you can “talk the talk”), and the major problems and pain points faced by businesses you are ready to begin generating leads for the sales pipeline.
Creating a Niche Resource List
The niche resource list is a great way to identify traffic opportunities for your offer.
Create a niche ecosystem of every potential business that isn’t a competitor in your chosen niche. For example, if you’re working in the auto dealer space, you can take a look at auto directories, car blogs, software providers, equipment suppliers, financiers, and industry platforms.
No matter what niche you choose, there will always be an online community catering to that niche. Scrape the forums and online blogs to find out more about the niche you’re working in as well as who the major players are.
This resource list can help you determine paid ad placements, potential JV opportunities, ad-buying targets, interest targeting, and many other tactics and mediums to get your offer in front of your target niche.
The process is simple and you can use scrapers, list brokers, and Google boolean search strings to identify relevant traffic channels to contact.
This list is different from an actual outreach list, you won’t be sending cold emails to these resources trying to sell your offer, you, or your team, will be reaching out to foster joint ventures, targeted ad buys, and even reseller/affiliate relationships. The niche resource list is going to help you present and even sell your offer to interested businesses.
Generating Leads for the Sales Pipeline
Prospecting is one of the most tedious aspects of the sales process, but the success of your business hinges on how many clients you can bring in.
In this section, we’ll discuss the different ways you can generate leads.
Getting New Clients Using Other People’s Contacts
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- Consultants, web designers, social media marketers, PPC agency
- Manufacturers, Sales Reps, Industry Marketing Conference Hosts
- Talking at Industry Conferences – present case study (value first)
The Value-First Approach
But how do you get other people to give you their contacts in the first place? How do you convince them that partnering up with you is a profitable idea?
If you want someone to generate leads for you, you need to emphasize value above all else. Instead of telling a web designer, “Let me sell to your clients”, you say, “You build great websites, but I could help you rank better.” Or “I’ll give you X percent, increase your leads, and close more deals for the both of us.” It’s all about what you can do for the other person in exchange for their network. And, as a bonus, you can use their site/s as case studies to rope in new clients.
We secured a B2B ceramic coating sales contact from this tactic alone. This rep got a kickback from every lead they gave us, and bundling their product with our SEO services helped them close more deals. From this contact alone, we were generating 50-60 leads per month, with the best-performing shops closing about 20 per month. In the next 20-30 months, we expect to close around 100-150 deals.
Just keep this in mind: if you keep providing value in your partnerships, they will continue pulling in leads for you.
Networking At Events
Conferences and events are a seriously untapped resource. If there’s a conference that caters to your chosen niche, strike up a deal with the organizers. Get a sponsored talk or panel at the conference where you can pitch your case studies. This strategy is so effective that some agencies thrive on referrals and conferences alone.
Be creative when trying to attract clients at conferences. We like to offer a free audit using Local Viking’s GeoGrid tool. They come to our booth, and we show them how their competition is ranking above them. In one conference with 35 attendees, we pulled in 12 leads and closed over 30 percent.
Having a booth and speaking at the conference is highly preferred, but even walking around and networking with other attendees can be an extremely effective lead generation tactic. This is especially true at smaller conferences where there’s less competition in the marketing space – you can be the SEO authority there rather than trying to compete with million-dollar agencies at large cons.
Creating Case Studies for Cold Outreach
Once you are focused on a niche you’ll want to create a few case studies. Case studies are a great marketing tool. When you have proof of performance and quality, it’s a lot easier to sell your services to potential clients.
If you already have clients, use one of your more successful campaigns for your case study. Even better, ask them if they’d be willing to act as a reference for future clients. Incentivize this with discounts or additional services for every prospect that reaches out to them – chances are, they’ll bite.
If you don’t have clients yet, or if you can’t use any of them for your case study, you can still provide proof of your work.
Generate dummy leads through a Facebook campaign, or present your own self-ranked website as evidence that you can rank sites. Additionally, we have a few white-labeled case studies we send in the follow-up emails when you download your free Brandable Agency Sales Materials.
Now that you have the case studies, you’ll need to determine exactly how to get them in front of your target niche business owners and decision-makers.
Creating Your Offer and Stating the Benefit
Your offer is not the $2,500 monthly SEO campaign, nor the $10,000 media buying campaign.
Your offer is the benefit those services deliver to the client.
Your offer is the promise of increased visibility, more traffic, more leads, phone calls in as little as 72 hours, more sales, and more revenue that your services generate for your business partners. Your offer should be a short statement about the benefit your services can be expected to deliver for their business.
Your offer is the benefit shown in your case study and your case study is proof of performance for your offer. Your offer will be the centerpiece of your outreach, ads, and sales activity.
Creating Cold Outreach Touchpoints
Our cold outreach strategy using the case study and offer created above involves a combination of proven traffic and lead generation methods.
- Media buying and traffic buying from the Niche Resource List
- Video and Image Ads on Facebook
- Taboola, YouTube, and Google Display Network
- Cold Email Sequences
- LinkedIn Ads
- Appointment Setters and Call Centers
- Lumpy Mail
We create multiple cold touchpoints that feature your offer. These are the ads, the cold emails, the lumpy mail letter, the paid banners that spell out the benefit of your service.
These cold touchpoints have call-to-actions to learn more by downloading your case study after they complete a micro-conversion such as subscribing to your list or messenger bot; other CTA’s may include scheduling a strategy call or competitor analysis.
You get them to engage with your content and your brand.
And then you set up a retargeting system and create multiple touchpoints for users to see your content, which in this case, will be the offer and case study you created earlier.
A case study tells potential leads “Hey, look at what we did for this other business in your niche. We can do this for you, too.”
Push your case study on Facebook, YouTube, Tabula, LinkedIn, and the other traffic channels you’ve identified.
Pro tip: Add in some client testimonial videos to the retargeting mix on Facebook and Youtube. Potential leads in your funnel will see this social proof while in the sales cycle.
You’ll need to create 5-12 touchpoints to close a deal. For example, users should see your Facebook ad alongside your other outreach efforts. The more you do this, the more you build the brand in their minds.
Eventually, they’ll start recognizing your brand and associating you with your niche. By keeping yourself at the front of their minds, these users are more likely to trust your brand when they’re looking for marketing solutions.
Although cold outreach is an effective way to get leads, you should also work on inbound marketing. For more information about a proven inbound system check out our guide on creating a sustainable inbound client acquisition funnel.
Case Study Lead Generation Process
Depending on the traffic channels you are using you may need to develop and build a list of prospective businesses.
Some of the methods that may require you to create prospect lists include appointment setters, call centers, lumpy mail, and cold email.
InfoUSA is a particularly useful list building tool with specific search parameters – you can filter out leads based on niche, revenue, location, and many other factors.
You can also pay a virtual assistant to find businesses on page 2+ and build a list from there. This is a lot more tedious than using a scraping tool, but you can still get some great leads this way.
You’ll use this information in your cold outreach campaign.
- Cold approach -> retargeting -> case study -> form appointment and pre-qualification
- Cold approach -> pre-qualification -> phone appointment
- Form appointment -> pre-qualification -> phone appointment
Outsourcing the Outreach
Doing lead generation on your own saves you money, but it can be a major waste of time.
Outsourcing, when possible, brings in high-quality leads while also freeing you up to focus on your job. If you want to scale up, outsourcing is practically inevitable.
Consider outsourcing a lot of touchpoints to third-party providers, from lumpy mail to cold calling in order to free up your team’s time to focus on closing sales, establishing strategic partnerships, and developing other traffic assets.
Pre-Sale Follow-Up
As your leads filter through the sales pipeline and turn into interested prospects who schedule sales and discovery calls it’s important to continue your touchpoints.
You can use a tool like HighLevel to easily launch multi-channel follow up campaigns that allow you to automate engaging follow-ups and capture engaged responses from your leads.
Send them appointment reminders through Phone Connect, Voicemail Drops, SMS/MMS, Emails, and even Facebook Messenger integrations.
Finally, remember to add a link to your recent testimonial videos on YouTube or Facebook inside your follow-up reminders so the warm prospects can see this social proof prior to the sales and discovery call.
Pitching To The Prospect
You have to build pitching strategies with a marketing mindset. Look at every micro-moment as an opportunity for a sale. With SEO client acquisition, there are two “sales points”: getting them on the phone and actually closing the deal. Both are equally important but require very different strategies – we’ll break down our approaches here.
Our top 4 strategies for crafting the pitch include
- Focus on the offer
- Refer back to the case study
- Frame the win for their business
- Show them how much you can grow their calls/leads
Getting On The Phone
Getting a prospect on the phone is the first step to closing a sale. Here’s our #1 advice for setting up calls: do not set appointments too far out. You want to set the appointment as close as possible to right now.
Waiting for too long before a call can significantly increase your drop-off rate. By scheduling a call in the immediate future, you move the lead further down the sales funnel.
Even though you’re trying to get the lead to lock down an appointment as soon as possible, you should still offer them options. Just keep them limited – for example, offer a 3 p.m. time slot as well as a 5 p.m. time slot. If you can do same-day appointments, then great. But if that’s not possible, next-day calls are the next best thing.
When you’re finally on the call, it’s time to do some discovery. Not every lead will result in a sale, so the goal of this part of the process is to identify which leads are a) the best fit for your business, and b) most likely to convert.
The discovery phase is all about gathering as much info as you can about the lead. Don’t be scared to use unconventional or even aggressive tactics. Asking for their budget upfront may seem too straight-to-the-point, but finding out their spending capability early on will save you a lot of time and energy. After all, you don’t want to waste resources pursuing a low-quality lead.
Ask the prospect how much they’re currently spending on marketing per month and where they want to be in the future. If you scrape for annual revenue during the lead generation phase, it will be easier to pre-qualify leads since you can skip over those that simply can’t afford your services.
You should also ask if they can handle the customers you’ll be bringing in. You don’t want to go through an hour of presentation only to find out that, while they’re interested, they’re not ready to scale up just yet.
Appointment Setters
Appointment setters are people who make your sales calls for you. Their job is to get your foot in the door and do the initial pitch. There are appointment setting services that will charge you for every appointment they book, which means that you’re getting qualified leads before you even get on the phone.
The process starts with an interview where the appointment setter gets to know your business and what you’re selling. Then, you submit your list of leads, and they’ll call each one to try and set up an appointment. They can even assist you with your discovery by extracting caller needs. This ensures that you’re getting clients with a good lifetime value and decently-sized contracts instead of wasting time on low ROI leads.
Guaranteed Risk-Reversal
In many ways, client acquisition is a long game. You spend time generating and pre-qualifying leads, then spend even more time cultivating those relationships until they result in a sale.
One-call closes are extremely rare and not always feasible…but there is a simple sales trick that could shorten the pipeline and encourage prospects to sign on immediately.
During your pitch, offer a guaranteed risk-reversal. Here’s an actual script that we’ve used too much success:
“We respect your time. Your time is valuable to us, and we don’t want to waste it. Give us 20 minutes to show how much success we’ve had in your niche, and how we can replicate that for you. If you’re not impressed at the end of 20 minutes, bill me for a full hour of your time at your maximum rate. I will pay you out of pocket.”
In the many years that we’ve used this spiel, we’ve never had to pay once, not even to those who ended up not signing on.
It’s an unusual proposition, but it’s an effective one – you take the risk out of them taking the call, you incentivize them getting on the phone.
Most people will jump at this chance because they’ll either get reimbursed for their time, or they’ll learn about something that will change their life.
Even if you do end up having to pay, it’s a drop in the bucket compared to what you can earn back with your new and improved close rate. If you want to avoid paying anything at all, just make sure that your case study and pitch are killer.
Closing The Deal
Getting someone on the phone is one thing, but closing the deal is another thing entirely. In this section, we’ll share some of our top tips and tricks for converting clients.
Listen To The Buyer
One of the biggest mistakes you could make in sales is not listening to the person you’re talking to. You’ll step into every sales situation with a cognitive bias, but you can’t sell solutions for what you think their problems are. You need to listen to them first so that you can address their concerns and push solutions that make sense for their business.
Offer A Guaranteed Risk-Reversal
Not only does the guaranteed risk-reversal tactic work when you’re trying to get them on the phone, but it also works when you’re trying to close a sale. Be creative, and offer them a deal where they can’t lose. For example, you can say that if you don’t give them qualified leads within seven days, they can get all of their money back.
Risk reversal makes it so that there’s nothing to lose but so much to gain, which makes them more likely to sign with you even with just one phone call.
Keep Them On The Phone
How many times have you heard “I’m interested, send me a proposal” from a client, only to send the proposal and never hear back from them ever again? If you want to increase your close rate, you need to be in it for the long haul – try to keep them on the phone until they’ve signed and paid.
Here’s how we do it.
We get the presentation together, then invite the lead for a Zoom meeting. There are always two people from our side on the call: one person to present the case study and do most of the sales talk, and another person to modify the proposal as you go along. When the lead is showing signs of heavy interest, offer to send them the proposal via email while still on the call. Then, look over the proposal together.
Verbal commitments are not sales, so if you let them end the call without a signed contract, the chances of you actually securing that client go down. You must always be ready to send the proposal at a moment’s notice – use a template, if you have to. Then, when they sign, move into billing immediately. It might be awkward for some to ask for payment info so quickly, but you can frame it as the final step to getting them set up.
When you’re signing clients this way, you have to make sure that your contracts are relatively flexible. Give them a money-back “grace period” or a risk-reversal so that they can pull out of the contract if they’re not happy with your services.
You may need to get a little creative when trying to keep them on the phone, but you also have to know when you’re pushing it too far. If they’re ready to buy but they need time to sort out financing, pushing too hard might lose you the deal completely. If they need to get off the phone for whatever reason, be sure to reschedule the appointment before you end the call. Again, keep it somewhat close (like the next day) so that you don’t have to constantly nurture that relationship to land a sale.
Handle Objections
Many sales guides have a section on how to handle client objections, so we’ve included a couple of tips for the most common concerns below.
If they’re not the right person to talk to: Lead generation isn’t perfect. Sometimes you’ll end up talking to someone who doesn’t make the marketing decisions. In this case, have them dial the correct point person in. You don’t want to let go of the original conversation until you are connected with the person you should be talking to.
If they’re concerned about the price: Dig deeper into why the price is an issue. Then, push it from an investment perspective. Show them a case study of a client in the same niche that’s gotten an insane ROI from your SEO efforts.
If they’re still hesitant: Try to create a positive mindset by asking leading questions that generate a positive response. For example, you can say, “We have a client in your niche who is now getting X additional sales every month. If we bring you those many sales, don’t you think you’ll get the same (or better) ROI?” They’ll reply with “Yes, we’ll probably get that ROI.” Making them articulate your services’ value is much more effective than spoon-feeding that information yourself.
Impress Bigger Clients
For huge clients that could bring it a ton of business, you want to pull out all the stops. A good way to impress them and demonstrate your commitment is by offering to fly them in (or fly out) for the appointment. This shows that you’re ready to provide value and invest in the clients that matter the most to you. And this strategy isn’t just effective for client acquisition, it’s also great for reactivating clients who’ve pulled out of contracts.
Conclusion
With these client acquisition strategies, you’ll have no trouble generating leads, setting appointments, and closing sales. Acquiring new clients is a lot of work, but keep in mind that it’s just the beginning. If you want to make money and scale up your marketing business, you have to provide value and good results.
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