The way this strategy works is pretty cut and dry…
- Interview your prospective client.
- Use the interview as your bouncing point to establish a relationship with them.
- Uncover opportunities of collaboration while in the entire process of organizing the interview with them.
- Pitch your services strategically.
- Ask for referrals.
I’d like to share with you how I go about selecting which person to interview. But before that, I’d like to emphasize how when choosing, you need to make sure that he or she is within your buyer persona. Otherwise, you’ll just be missing the point.
You shouldn’t interview people whom you can’t close as clients or get referrals from, it just doesn’t make sense to do that – you’ll just end-up wasting your time if you interview people whom you can’t even close as clients.
Now that we have that squared away, here are the key things that I look into when choosing which person to interview.
- Relevancy – Are they in my buyer persona?
- Good number of followers – I usually go for 2,000+ followers.
- Someone that’s been publishing posts in Linkedin regularly.
- Someone that’s been publishing posts that are engaged upon.
Let’s say we’re looking for a real estate broker. Here’s what I’d do.
a. I’d go to Linkedin’s search engine then set the filters to a) 1st connections, b) People, and c) The place you’re targeting, then enter my keyword on the search box.
* Note – Customize the filters as much as you can to get targeted results. The customizations I shared above are just the basics that I use.
b. I’ll then click the person’s profile to view his number of followers, whether he publishes posts regularly, and view his overall profile to see if he’s a perfect fit (check out the prospect’s recommendations, background, etc…).
c. I then check 2 – 3 of my prospect’s published posts to see if there’s engagement on it.
This is how the engagement on the first article looks like.
This is the second post.
As you can see, this prospect has a good amount of people engaging on his posts so that’s a very good sign.
Based on everything that we’ve uncovered up until this point, I’ll give this prospect a green light and send him a pitch for an interview.
During the entire process, you should already know their needs and how you can best solve their problems using their services. If for whatever reason you still haven’t CLEARLY uncover their needs/problems, then you can add that on your list of questions in the interview.