Episode 65:How to Fill Your Client Pipeline (and What to Focus on This Month)
In this episode, we answer a listener question: If you woke up and had 0 clients and wanted to start filling your pipeline, what do you do?
Summary
Nick and Kai answer the question of how to fill a client pipeline in one day starting from zero clients. Nick walks through what he actually did after losing two clients: building a product flowchart to find gaps, launching a new $250 service, and doing outreach. Kai adds the case for tight positioning, reactivating past relationships, and generating ‘referable moments’ to get deal flow moving.
Highlights
- Nick mapped his entire product line as a flowchart: products are nodes, inbound sources are the entry points, and each connecting edge is a specific tactic to move a customer from one offering to the next. Building it exposed what he called ‘a lot of weaknesses’ in his business.
- The highest-return move Nick experienced was a past client posting about his open slot to a private group of store owners. That one post generated 9 applications, more than all his other outreach efforts combined.
- Nick launched a new $250 entry-point service called Draft Analysis: 24 videos tearing down client sites. It was one of the few concrete new actions he took during the pipeline-building push.
- Nick traces the referral back through a multi-year chain: productized consulting → A-B testing positioning → podcast appearance → client win → the cabal post. His point: the relationship tree takes roughly a full presidential term to grow, and there is no way to compress it.
- Kai recommends a simple reactivation email to past clients, just checking in and asking if there’s anything to help with. He’s had a client reply ‘we forgot you were a human’ and immediately offer a new project.
- Kai’s ‘referable moments’ idea: specific positioning like ‘I help dentists get more repeat patients’ lets a third party instantly recognize a match and send a referral without being asked. Vague positioning kills this.
- Nick’s follow-up rule: send the initial ask, wait 48 hours, then email every 24 hours until you get a reply.
Read the transcript
Okay, so this is an amazing question, but I also want to like kind of focus the question a little bit, and I’m just going to place the question here. You wake up and you have zero clients. You want to fill up your pipeline for the next month. You have one day to make a plan and then get started implementing that plan. What do you do? Now, this depends strongly on what resources you already have at your disposal. Fair point. Far easier to do this if you have like a forty two thousand person mailing list. That if you have like, you know, if you have no audience and you just quit your job, right? And I get the sense that there’s going to be a plurality of people who are listening to this and are asking this question having just quit their job. I’m in an interesting position because I have clients, but I want clients bad right now. Oh my God. And so, okay, well now I have this system that I get to put into place, but I also have like five productized consulting offerings, a bunch of retainers, and like At a fairly sizable mailing list, and I’m verified on Twitter for some fucking reason. And I, you know, like I have a lot of relationships that are built that I’ve invested in over the course of five years of being in business. I’ve been in business for five years. And so I know what I would do in this situation. I know pretty well. Should I answer this? Like, I don’t know if that’s helpful.
I think it is helpful. I think it’d be helpful for us to answer it from the positions we’re in right now, but then to also tackle it from the, you just quit your job or you’re at like, You know, level 100 in consulting. What do you do to build that pipeline? Since looking back, we’ll be able to identify what we did. Do like I know what I did when I got started consulting, and it was run into the wall 10 times in the wrong direction. Looking back now, I’m like, oh, here’s a plan that might have worked a little better than running face first into a wall. So I think answering it from the perspective of where we are right now as business owners. Or somebody at our similar level, and then, okay, so you’re at level 100, you just quit the job, and you’re like, how do I make the clients appear? I think that would be a valuable exercise.
Okay, so I’ll tell you my story where we got to where I’m at right now. In November, December, I. Had a huge win for a client. I already told everybody in the podcast about this, but I had a huge win for a client that got fired due to circumstances outside basically anyone’s control. Sucked. Then the holidays hit, then my birthday hit, and then I went to Hong Kong and I came back and I’m like, well, now it’s time to get my hands dirty. And I started working on this process to replace that client. And about three days into that, I get a DM from somebody else on the team for another one of my clients. And they’re like, you should talk to the PM right now. I’m like, why? They’re like, you should talk to the PM right now. And I know when that happens. It’s like Nick D was supposed to have gotten fired two days ago for circumstances outside of his control. And that actually turned out to be a great thing because I got on this call and I basically sat there and nodded and looked really concerned for about 50 minutes. And listened to the client as a lot of very genuine and significant concerns were vented about about what was happening with the business, which was not in my purview at all, but it’s also like, this was all news to me and it’s scary. And then I get to deal with the scary news. And then it went from like DEF CON 5 I believe w is the lower number the higher DEF CON, like the worst DEF CON? DEF CON 1 is like we just got nuked, right?
I think DEF CON 1 is terrible and DEF CON By viz Let’s work with that.
So we went from DEF CON 5 to DEF CON 2 in the span of that hour, right? Like it went from. Yeah, I kind of need another client, and it’s you know, there’s the looming specter of horror on the horizon, as there always is, and it’s not a huge deal, too. I need a client now. Right? And I haven’t been fired yet. Spoiler alert, I got fired. Which is fine. We parted on great terms. I’m sure he’s listening to this podcast. I love you. This is great. And a handful of things had been happening by that point. So now I’m actually going to answer the question. The first thing is I laid out my entire product map because I hadn’t done this before, but I did a new thing where it was not just like, here’s the product ladder and here are all of my offerings, because that’s really easy and simplistic to do. What I did was I built a flowchart, and the nodes of the flowchart were each product that I have, and the beginnings of the flowchart were each outreach source that I have flowing in. And then the branches, the connections between each of those were very specific tactical things that I am doing to get people who have purchased X product to purchase Y product.
This would be a crossover, like a bridge email sequence. I buy your book. Okay, I’m added to a specific campaign to pitch me on this additional course or this productized service you have, connecting these two. Connecting the two together.
That’s exactly right. But it’s only one example of it, right? So I have Revised Weekly. Revised Weekly is often trialled in as, you know. an upsell from the A-B testing manual or draft analysis or whatever have you. So that exists as a branch. The trial is there, right? And in a sense, the trial is its own drip campaign. I wrote that on my letter today on my mailing list. But that’s those are different ways that I’m trying to do it. And some of it is like client like it moves from like Automated dumb stuff to more hands-on drip campaign-y type stuff where I’m encouraging people to reply so that I can use it as grist to improve the drip campaigns. And then the final layer is me one-on-one emailing you every few months, being like, how is your business going? And that’s if you’ve already paid me like $1,000 for something. So the full course of the A-B testing manual or a custom draft analysis or whatever. And at that point, like you’re in my CRM and replies go directly to my real email address and not my assistant. Because the next step is to get you into the higher touch like productized consulting offerings like DraftRevise or Revise Express or something like that. Something where you’re paying me $3,000 and up. So I like marked all of that up, right? I put together all of the branches. And holy God, that exposed a lot of weaknesses in my business. It was really scary, really scary. The next thing I did was started building outreach campaigns to actually get people into the bottom of the funnel because I realized that I have a huge problem with like I’m not working. In a way that gets a continuous inflow very well. And in the absence of advertising, because I don’t have accounts on Facebook and Google, and I probably never will. Basically, the only thing that you can do is outreach. So then I work with like podcast creators and guest blogs, that sort of stuff. So I try and get those into my free courses. And then at the end of the free course, I talk about the thing. And then the last thing that I did was I launched a new service called Draft Analysis, which is $250 for twenty four videos where I tear down a bunch of sites. And that’s it. That’s all I’ve done so far. The number one thing that got me referrals is that one client who, again, is gracious and wonderful and kind, and circumstances outside of our control. posting to like a private cabal of store owners being like, there’s an open slot and Nick hasn’t publicized it yet, apply. It worked well for us. And then I got nine applications. That was more than all of the other stupid things I did combined. So, like, my recommendation for you, dear listener, is. Have someone post to a private cabal of store owners that you made $100,000 for them.
Ask Scrooge McDuck to phone up his friends and.
Yeah, get the like Rolodex of Warren Buffett or something, right? Like, like, that’s so unhelpful. It’s so unhelpful. It’s not at all something that I can like recommend anybody, and it doesn’t even work for my business because I can’t even ask other people I’ve worked with to do that. I am so lucky and grateful for this, and I owe that guy a Zingerman’s gift box, and I haven’t done it yet. So now I owe you one because I’m saying this in public. But, like, that’s So the thing I would do first is start building the system. But if you expect high value, like five figure clients to come in In that first month, doing that. Everything I just described is meant to get clients applying in July You know? And I’m doing it in a way that gets that durably and stably. And so this is why it works for me because Frankly, I have the runway to do this, and I have the resources to do this, and I’m probably going to float myself pretty easily between now and then. So I can have the luxury of abundance and build something You are trading off between either get a lot of clients quickly and maybe like pay down on some of your personal and social capital. or do it in a way that doesn’t scale effectively, or do the long, stupid route that gets you a lot of clients in the long run. I usually take the long, stupid run because it results in my business being more likely to be a nerd against major fluctuations in the market. We’ve talked previously about like Operating in a down market. So, should the apocalypse come, I’m more weathered against it with the strategy that I’m putting together right now. And like the first thing I would recommend doing in the first day is build a flowchart and find all of the weak points. That’s a day’s work, right? But then you end up building out your business development schedule for the next five months based on that. I have a business development to do that is four times longer than my current weeks to do. Of all the work I have to do this week. And I don’t know when I’m going to fit it in, right? So that’s not even that it’s four weeks of work. It’s that it’s like I’m
It’s slow and incremental, and it’s additive, where it’s not that there might be holes in your funnel or holes in your business’s process or holes in a listener’s business’s process, but Identifying them doesn’t mean, oh shit, I need to fix all of these today. It means these are the things that I could slowly and incrementally improve in my business. I need a campaign to bridge these two things. I need to pitch this better. I need to have an outreach. Process. I need to do A, B, or C. You could slot them in over time and it will add on and improve your business. It’s not necessarily broken without them. You just now see, oh, here’s an area of improvement. Here’s an opportunity to improve my business.
Yeah, yeah, I think there’s that. You know, there’s and there are a lot of ways to develop business, which I think is why we’re talking around this point, right? Like And some of those result in like the equivalent of a sugar high. And that’s what you do when you’re operating from a poverty mindset and you got fired by all of your clients and you have two weeks of runway. I parted amicably with both of my clients and have six months of runway, right? I’m fine. I mean, maybe in six months I’m not fine, but as of today, in the year of our Lord 2017, I’m fine. And. God, like your shoulders relax and you feel okay about earth, and you just kind of approach it with some calmness. You know, I had a client, a prospective client, no-show me on a call today. You know what I did? I wrote an email asking when they can give it the time and attention that it deserves, providing my Calendly link again, took a deep breath and continued tearing down one of my clients’ sites.
No, and I think that strength of action comes from, first and foremost, having that strategic plan. Like you said, you found yourself in this situation that the first thing you did was outline: what does my product funnel look like? What does my service ladder look like? How do these connect together? And we have the spectrum of different businesses where we have more early stage and more late stage consulting businesses. And it might be for somebody listening: well, your funnel is somebody contacts me, and then we work together. Okay, like that’s a fine place to be identified and say, okay, so step one is people contacting me. How do I increase that top of funnel? Or you might look at it and say, Well, I don’t really have a service to offer because I don’t understand what market positioning that I’m going after. Okay, well, here’s a fundamental question you need to answer. Who is my target market? Who is my ideal client? What problem do they need solved that I could solve for them? And that tells you what service offering you have. And now it then becomes a top-of-funnel question again: how do we get the service offering in front of the right people?
Yeah, I mean all of this is easy for me to talk about because I already have a positioning together, right? I spent, you know, a year, two years ago doing that. And so I, once I came to that end of the question, it was like, okay, well, I clearly know whom I’m serving, right? And so. How do I put myself in front of them? And if you don’t if you don’t have the most foundational component of business, which is positioning, you need to have positioning, and it needs to be specific. And if that scares you, turn off this podcast and get a job. That’s it. So with that in mind, um
What would you do? In the current stage of my business, I’d say, well, jumping to a thing you said, you called out the referrals as being incredibly, incredibly valuable and something that This client did in this situation, and that hasn’t happened before, might not be possible with other clients. I’d say that making the referral ask is something that can and should be incorporated into any consultant’s business. Either at the start of a project, middle of a project, or during that separation, who else do you know that I should work with? Who else do you know that I should not work with? Who are the competitors that you do not want me to work with? And who do you want to refer me to instead? That could be something valuable and turn every relationship you start or end into a referral to other potential businesses to work with. So I think that’s something that Any consultant can take advantage of, any business owner can take advantage of the power of referrals to build that pipeline.
Oh, yeah. Yeah. And I mean, I emailed a bunch of people. But that wasn’t a core part of my strategy, right? Like, this is something that you would probably do, and that probably everybody listening to this podcast who can breathe should do. And it’s something that I did, but honestly, like, I think it’s telling that I didn’t even think about to mention until now. Right? Like, I would prefer to focus my time and attention on building the system. That generates this sort of stuff organically, right? Because you’re not going to get to like organic $15,000 client wins overnight. It does not happen. This is something that You know, honestly, let’s look at the tree of it, right? So this private message, the cabal, right? That wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t had a success with this client. I wouldn’t have had a success with this client if I hadn’t been on the podcast of actually a friend of mine who then talked about A-B testing for e-commerce because he found out about me through that. I wouldn’t have been on that podcast and talked about A-B testing for e-commerce if I hadn’t niched down on my positioning for A-B testing. I wouldn’t have niched down on positioning for A-B testing if I Hadn’t gotten a mastermind of people together. Three and a half years ago, I believe, something two and a half years ago, a long time ago, about productized consulting. And I wouldn’t have done that if I hadn’t created a productized consulting service definitely three and a half years ago. And I wouldn’t have done that if I hadn’t spent a lot of time sitting in front of bootstrappers and figuring out what their expensive problems are. And so the recommendation is Put yourself in front of the right people and think about how you can solve expensive problems and then wait an entire presidential term. It works. It works. You know, like, right? Like, but there’s something true to that where you are a. your a result of the relationships that you build and the system that you build based on the the people that you trust. You know, and this is getting very far afield from the whole like one day question, but it’s it’s not It never unfolds in a day, and it’s so contingent on your context and your resources that you have. Start now. If you haven’t done this yet, start building those relationships with other consultants and with other clients now. That’s what I would recommend. If you have one day to do that, like pause this podcast, take a deep breath and think about how you’re going to rework a lot of crap in your life. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Yeah, the way I think about it is if I’m in that situation of, okay, I have one day to create this plan and then start implementing it to fill up my pipeline. It comes down to relationships. It comes down to outreach. It comes down to referrals. And it comes down to, again, the fundamental business question of Who is your target market and what problem do you solve for them? Because I wrote this article a couple months ago on my site about creating referable moments. Difference positioning adds to a business when you’re able to say, I help target markets solve expensive problems. I help dentists get more repeat patients. Some listener just said, Oh, wow, I know a dentist who needs more repeat patients. They should email Kai. Because they are able to identify the target market in that expensive problem, the power of positioning. But beyond that, I think if I was put in that situation, It comes down to sparking those referable moments as much as possible. Doing things that don’t necessarily scale long term for the business, but Work for short-term client acquisition. And again, short-term, you aren’t going to be closing four-figure engagements. It’s much more likely that you’ll be able to close three-figure Initial consulting engagements or discovery type sessions that then ladder up to larger engagements. But outreach to your friends, family, acquaintances, colleagues, other consultants you know, and say, hey, I’ve got a slot open. My ideal client is this. The problem I’m great at solving is this. Do you know somebody who matches those criteria? If so, I deeply appreciate that introduction, or I deeply appreciate that referral. If you have had clients in the past as a consultant, reaching out to those past clients and just almost knocking on the door and saying, hey, we haven’t talked in a while. I just wanted to check in, see how your business is going and see if there’s anything I could do to continue to help you grow. Working together on that last project was great. What could I do to help you continue forward? Nine out of 10 people might say, ah, there’s nothing right now where we don’t have a need. But one out of 10 might say, you know what? There is a project coming up that you’d be perfect for. And thank you so much for reaching out. We forgot you had existed. I’ve had that exact experience where I’ve reached out to a past client. Just following up a couple months after a project, they were like, Oh, we have something you’d be perfect for. We didn’t remember you were actually a human. It was great working with you on that last thing. Can we please work together again on this thing? So I think narrowing down that positioning. is important if you haven’t already done it. Building out that roadmap of what exactly your service offerings are and what that funnel looks like. What’s top of funnel for you and your business? Is it Going to local meetups? Is it hosting events? Is it doing a podcast? Is it doing outreach to appear on other people’s podcasts? Is it advertising? Whatever it is, where do these people originally come from? Is it referrals? And where do they move to as they enter into your funnel? Just mapping out as it currently is and what you want it to eventually be. Well, then you’re able to see what the change needs to be in your business. Oh, I have steps one and two done, or I have steps one and five done. I need to figure out 2, 3, and 4 and this nebulous 6 over here sometime the next month, but at least I know where the holes are in my business. Let me move forward and figure out how I could get more people flowing into this funnel. And for me, that always breaks down to outreach, reaching out to reactivate old relationships, reaching out to ask for referrals. I don’t necessarily think that completely cold sales outreach works in the short term to get projects unless you’re doing it at volume, but I do think Outreach to semi-warm relationships or previous relationships where you’re able to build off of a previous contact or a previous conversation or a previous project and say, hey, can I help you grow your business somehow? Those can generate referable moments where they say, Well, you can’t help us right now, but with your new positioning or your current positioning, here’s somebody who I think you’d be perfect to help. And you’re able to start getting those referrals flowing in. And those referrals are a form of what I think of as trust marketing, where you’re building off of, or as you had said earlier, spending some of that social capital. To turn it into client flow, and in the short term, that might be what is necessary to build up that pipeline for the current month. But if you have that strategic plan, if you have that outline of what you want your product ladder to look like. In the future and what it looks like currently, then you’re able to spend a little bit of social capital to get some deal flow started and then work on improving those fundamental business systems that attract people in. Okay, great. We’ve got this month full. I know I’m going to have enough to make rent and buy food and take care of my necessities. Let me figure out what I could do to start. I think You need a budget, says it wonderfully. Start spending from last month instead of this month when it comes to budgeting. What can I do to start Booking projects a month or two months out. So I don’t need to worry about the deal flow for this month as much as I’m worrying about the deal flow for two, three. Four months out from now, I think that’s the position we want to aspire to get to. Where we’re booking so far out that if a deal collapses, it doesn’t necessarily affect this month’s cash flow, it affects our future month.
Yeah, yeah. And all of this is contingent on who you know, right? Like, so You have to work that, right? So asking for introductions is another one that I don’t know if I heard, but is worth doing. Another thing to add on. Follow up. You are sending the least important email for them ever, right? It is so easy to ignore that email. asking if they have any business. So 48 hours later, follow up. Then every 24 until they reply. Good luck. I hope you have a huge runway. If you don’t, find a job.