3 steps for landing more clients 🤝

Welcome back to The Agency CEO (by me, Jesse Gilmore at Niche in Control).

Every Thursday, I’m going to send you a quick 10-minute read on the tools, tactics, and systems that the top 1% of agency owners have used to scale their businesses to 8-figures and beyond.

This week, we’re talking through the three categories of prospects and the specific approaches for engaging each of them with outbound.

Let’s dive in 👇

The 3 Degrees of Separation

When it comes to outbound prospecting, different degrees of connection require different approaches (and skill sets!). 

Building a reliable outbound system often requires nurturing prospects from a cold to a strong connection before moving them further down the appointment/sales funnel.

Here’s a simple framework for categorizing and engaging prospects:

1st Degree Connections (The People You Know)

A lot of agency operators will hear the word “outbound” and their mind will jump immediately to building high-volume cold email campaigns.

It may seem obvious, but it’s worth engaging the people that you already have an existing relationship with before moving to colder prospects.

The approach here is simply fostering and maintaining genuine, authentic relationships. 

Block off time in your calendar just for engaging your network. Comment on social posts and reach out via DMs. Offer value wherever you can.

It sounds straightforward, but SO many agency owners will skip this step and go straight into prospecting colder opportunities. It’s worth starting within your own network.

SKILLS TO MASTER: Authenticity, time-blocking, and building a genuine interest in the people you’re connecting with.

2nd Degree Connections (Mutual Connections)

Moving out of our network by one degree, we have the 2nd Degree Connections.

These are the people that you haven’t interacted with directly, but you see through proximity on social networks or through a mutual connection.

This is the next easiest group of prospects to engage, as you can either request an intro through a mutual connection or reach out directly and lead with that shared network.

Whether reaching out through LinkedIn, X, or via email, one of the best ways that you can move a prospect in this category down your appointment funnel is by maintaining and optimizing your social profiles.

Posting regularly and building a demonstrated history of expertise that new connections can immediately access upon introduction is a HUGE advantage (this is key to our Client Attraction System - to be discussed in future newsletters 😉).

Upon that first connection, we nurture the relationship exactly as described for our 1st Degree Connections - regular engagement and value adds wherever we can.

SKILLS TO MASTER: Building an optimized social media presence, and regularly posting valuable content that demonstrates expertise in your offer area.

3rd Degree Connections (Cold Prospects)

Finally, we reach the point that a lot of agency owners will typically equate to “outbound.”

3rd degree connections are prospects that you have no real connection to, and, as such, it may take a high-volume of outreach before you find success in moving them further down the sales pipeline. It’s safe to say that around 97% of responses to your cold emails will be a “no” (or, more likely, no response at all). 

Our goal here is to craft personalized emails to form an initial connection and, through a question, determine the prospect’s awareness of the problem that you solve and whether or not it’s relevant to them.

The call-to-action, especially in a first email to these prospects, is going to be very soft.

Once we’ve made contact and formed an initial connection? You guessed it. We engage regularly, and provide value as we move them further down the appointment funnel.

SKILLS TO MASTER: Problem identification, copywriting, and learning how to craft a personal compliment.

Next week, we’ll talk more about the steps from engagement -> appointment, but here’s one final pro-tip for all of the above workflows:

Once you’ve mastered an approach manually, AUTOMATE IT.

Engagement, regular outreach, your cold email systems - automate them all to the furthest extent that you can. 

Outbound is often a game of volume. 

Quality is paramount, but the ability of these systems to reliably provide you with leads is highly dependent on the quantity/volume of outreach (and I’m sure that we’ll talk through the mechanics of building those automations in a future edition, so keep an eye out).

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