- If you're looking to generate more leads
and you're looking to generate more sales
then this is the most important video
that you'll ever watch.
Today, I'm gonna give you three powerful strategies
that I personally use to prospect without being pushy.
Before I get into the strategies,
I want to share a little bit of my story with you
and how I learned about prospecting
and how some of these things work.
Now, in my early 20s, I was a copywriter,
meaning I was writing copy and sales pages
and marketing literature for companies or entrepreneurs.
Now, in the beginning of my career,
I was trying to just like everybody else,
trying to get leads, trying to get sales,
trying to get these clients.
And I had no way of doing it so a friend of mine,
who is not a successful entrepreneur
told me, hey, you should just cold call people, man,
you gotta prospect, smile and dial,
and I said, okay, well, let's smile and dial.
And he told me to call the people
from the yellow pages and I did.
I opened up the yellow pages,
I looked at all these business,
and I called them and I said, hey,
my name is Dan Lok, I noticed you have an ad
and at the time, I didn't know anything about sales
and closing so I was basically calling them
and saying, hey, I think your ad is not very good.
I think I could do better.
You should hire me and they're like,
you stupid, like, fuck off, and they hung up, right.
So I did about 500 calls
and after about 500 calls, I said to myself,
this kinda sucks, right?
Cold calling people, prospecting,
and getting the phone slammed and people rejecting you
and just shitting on you all day.
I'm like, okay, yeah, if I could even get clients this way,
this is not very pleasant way of getting business.
So I asked myself the question,
what would I need to do so that
I never have to prospect again?
And that question changed my life.
So instead of prospecting, here's what I want you to do.
I want you to thing of positioning instead of prospecting.
You see, most sales people, they go out there
and they wanna prospect.
Let me get the leads, man, let me smile and dial.
I'm telling you, after you dial 500, 1000 calls,
you're not smiling no more.
I wasn't smiling for sure.
Now, for some businesses, maybe that's what you need to do.
You need to do a lot of cold calling, prospecting.
I'm just saying, that's not what I have done
to build my career.
So instead of prospecting, positioning.
Let me give you an example.
I want you to picture this.
Think of prospecting as like you're going out there,
you are fishing, but you're using like a spear,
right, you're hunting.
So you're looking into the water, right,
and water is like this deep,
and you see a little fish and try to like
just stab on it and try to, and the fish gets away,
and you wait and you wait, oh here's another fish,
(grunts) I try to get that, that's prospecting.
Now, positioning is different.
Positioning is how can you have people come to you
instead of you chasing them.
How can you have people wanna do business with you,
call you instead of you calling them?
So you're not chasing them, but you become the chased.
So positioning, I think of that as fishing with a net.
Instead of trying to use this like old school spear,
which from time to time, you do catch some fish.
That's a problem, from time to time, you do catch a fish.
You don't go hungry, but at the same time,
you don't create a lot of wealth either,
you don't make a lot of money.
But positioning, now I'm fishing with a net.
I have my bait, right, out there.
Not with one hook, multiple hooks,
multiple fish boats and I just wait.
When the prospect bites on the bait
and I say, okay, but not, you see,
if you know anything about fishing,
you don't just like roll them in.
No, you wait.
You wait.
This fish bites on the bait and then okay, here we go,
now we can do business.
I don't wanna talk to anybody unless I know
they are properly qualified,
that there's a need, there is a reason
for you and I to do business.
That's how I do it.
Let me give you another example,
how this works in real life, okay.
I have a dentist that I go to,
both Jennie and I, my wife, we go to this dentist,
and he's one of the most expensive dentists in my city.
He actually teaches as a professor
at University of British Columbia.
So he teaches other dentists so like a Ph.D. dentist, right.
Let me tell you about this dentist.
First of all, he's the most expensive.
And every time I have to make an appointment,
I have to do it three months in advance.
Three months in advance, I have to make an appointment
with the dentist.
And when I go to the office, let me tell you this,
I don't dare to show up late
because what happens is he's so booked
and so fully booked, if you're like 15, 20 minutes late,
your appointment is gone.
The next person comes in.
Also, what happens is, the whole experience,
when I go to the dental office,
I sit there, I wait for the dentist,
and then the assistant would bring me
to that chair, right, and you lie down
with your teeth like that and I just wait
and then after the assistant does all the pre-work
then the dentist comes in, okay, here's what's going on
and he will do his maybe, whatever procedure
he needs to do, would be cleaning
or maybe he would just instruct
the assistant to do the cleaning
and that is it.
Now let me ask you this.
The dentist, do I dare to just drop in to see the dentist?
No.
Do I dare to miss the appointment?
No.
Do I dare to show up late?
No.
See, that's positioning.
That is positioning.
As a sales professional, you gotta think about,
well, what do I need to do so that my prospects
will come to me so I don't have to keep chasing prospects?
That's the perfect example.
How can you be that dentist in your industry?
Now I'm gonna give you three powerful strategies,
the three P's of positioning.
The first P is Publishing.
You see, in my early 20s, I learned
that prospecting sucks.
I don't wanna cold call people.
I want people to come to me.
So I asked the question, how do I differentiate myself?
What do I need to do?
So the first thing that I noticed,
all my business failures, I started and failed
at 13 businesses before having my first success.
And that cooperating business was my first success.
Previously, every single business that I had,
I had printed business cards.
Yes, you know what I'm talking about.
Business cards.
The ones you meet with people and you collect
and they throw in the trash can.
That's what I'm talking about.
So I thought, you know what,
I'm not gonna have a business card.
Instead, I'm gonna have a book.
Because everyone throws away a business card,
no one throws away a book.
So I feel I'll publish a book
and I'm not proud of the book.
It is a horrible book.
It's like a book that if you can find on Ebay,
please let me know, I will buy it back from you, right.
But I did my first book, I self published,
I did all wrong.
It had grammatical errors, the cover was done all wrong,
it had no graphics, all of that,
it is like my worst book that I've ever written,
but it still positioned me properly.
I remember, I was traveling, I was on a plane,
traveling to U.S.
And sitting next to me was a gentleman
and I was talking with him, he's a businessman,
and we're just talking about what we do
and things like that.
I was telling him a little bit about what I do.
I was a copywriter.
And he said, well, you know, Dan, that sounds very good.
You sound like a very bright young man.
Do you have a business card?
I said, you know what, actually,
I don't have a business card.
However, I reached into my briefcase
and pulled out a book.
I said, I have a book.
And you should see his reaction.
His jaw dropped to the ground.
Wow for such a young guy, you have a book on what you do.
This is cool.
And he was flipping through like this,
he's like, wow this is cool.
And before the plane even landed,
he wrote me a check for $10,000 for a job.
Now, let me ask you this.
Would that have happened if I gave him a business card?
I don't think so.
It's because I wrote a book.
I want you to look at the word authority
Authority.
What positions you as an authority in a society?
I want you to think of the word.
I want you to look at the first part of the word.
You can see, author.
That's right, when you are an author,
you are perceived as an authority in what you do
and in your industry.
And here's the great thing, anybody can publish a book.
You don't need to be a New York Times bestselling author
to write a book.
Anybody, nowadays, you can print on demand,
you can self publish your book for very little money.
And when you have a book, you see in a society,
even talk about that, oh, she wrote the book on the subject,
he wrote the book an that subject.
It means, oh, he or she must be the expert.
They must know what they're talking about.
Simply by having a book.
So I did that in my early 20s and that's why
you can see, I have written now 13 books
and I'm publishing my new book later next year.
Almost every year I publish some kind of a new book.
Why?
Because it is positioning.
When you have a book, when you give people
a copy of your book, you should see people's reaction.
Don't you think it's way more powerful
to give people a book versus like
a flimsy paper business card that people just throw away?
People cherish the book.
This, the book, has staying power.
This lives on their bookshelf, in their living room.
They can flip through it.
I cannot tell you how many times
I hear from people, hey, Dan, I read your book
six months ago, a year ago, two years ago,
and now they call me and they wanna do business.
See, the book is the bait.
It's out there, fishing with a net.
Whenever someone is ready, I can feel, right,
okay, now let's do business.
Until they're ready, I just have my bait out there
in the ocean.
I don't want to fish with a spear.
Here's what I want.
I wanna big massive fishing boat.
I want 10 of these fishing boats
with so many different nets out there in the ocean.
That's what I wanna do.
So that's first P, publishing.
The second P is Public Speaking.
One thing I've learned is by being the person
in front of the stage,
by being the person holding the clicker,
by being the person holding the marker,
immediately, it positions you as the authority,
as the expert in what you do.
Now, keep in mind, I came to this country
without a word of English.
I couldn't speak a word of English when I first came here.
So I know that public speaking is a skill
that you can master.
'Cause you may be saying, but Dan,
I'm not a public speaker.
Neither was I.
You could learn this.
Because I could see, you know what, just by being on stage,
when I go to a business function,
when I go to a networking function,
I could try to be like everybody else,
try to shake hands, meet with,
try to meet with as many people as possible.
Hey, what do you do?
Here's what I do.
And you gotta pretend that you're interested
in what they do.
They're gonna pretend that you're interested
in what they do.
And you talk and you exchange business cards
and nothing happens.
What I notice is, in my early 20s, very early on,
if I am the speaker, if I am the man in front of the stage,
before I even say a single word,
I have been positioned properly.
And by the end of my speech, by the end of my talk,
I don't need to go meet with anybody.
If I have 100 people in the room,
100 people of them walk away knowing who I am.
And after my speech, people who wanna do business,
they will come and talk to me.
They introduce themselves.
I don't need to go talk to them.
So public speaking is extremely powerful way
to position yourself.
I don't need a prospect.
Why prospect 101 when I got prospect one to 100?
One to 500, one to 1000, right?
Number three is Publicity.
Now we're talking about being interviewed,
being featured in newspapers, magazines,
podcasts, websites, like Inc., Huffington Post, Forbes,
all depends on your industry.
Now, you don't have to go that big and that mainstream.
Maybe there are associations, maybe there are newsletters,
maybe there are websites in your vertical, in your niche.
You just need to be the expert in that particular niche.
You don't need to be Dan Lok.
You just need to be the best person
to be seen as authority in your niche.
Then business would come to you.
When people call you, now you can interview,
and you can qualify them.
Now you can charge the price that you want.
Now, you may be saying, but Dan,
well does that mean I gotta write a book?
I gotta do speaking?
I gotta be interviewed?
That's a lot of work.
Can I just prospect?
You could.
But my question to you is,
isn't prospecting also a lot of work?
Isn't getting rejected also a lot of work?
Isn't it easier to build some of these things in place
so people come to you instead of you going to them?
So when people come to you, it's easy
because they want to do business with you.
You are seen as the expert, you are seen as authority,
they are happy, your prospect, listen to this,
they are happy to even get to you,
that you are replying to them.
By that time, you're on the phone,
you're face to face, business is done,
you can dictate whatever price that you want.
And that's what I've done my whole life.
I do positioning, not prospecting,
because I wanna get to a place
where I never, ever have to prospect again.
I don't have to prospect for leads,
I have more leads than I could handle.
All the time, just with my now social media.
I don't need to prospect.
I can cherry pick who I wanna work with
and I have this constant stream of leads
and an infinite amount of leads.
Not one or two or three, like I'm talking
an infinite amount of leads, from Facebook,
from YouTube, from referrals, from LinkedIn,
from all over the world.
I don't need to prospect.
My problem is keeping up with the demand.
So then, when I have a lot of demand
and very little supply because my time is limited,
guess what, then you can charge whatever you want,
you can dictate the terms that you want,
how you wanna do business and that's power.
So those are the three P's.
Publishing, public speaking, and publicity.
Those three.
So if you never wanna prospect again,
if you wanna in transition,
you're still doing prospecting right now,
you need to get money coming in,
but you wanna start transitioning
into positioning yourself so you never, ever
have to do that again.
Be the dentist in your industry, right,
fishing with a fucking net
instead of like fishing with like a fucking spear.
That's old school.
Get to a place where you never, ever have to prospect again.
And that's they key to positioning.