Salutations, friend! Finding corporate clients can leave you feeling like Lionel Richie singing: "Hello, is it me you're looking for?" I completely understand the frustration. That's why in today's conversation I'm going to walk you through a strategy to help you find your first corporate client. This will help you to be able to easily identify the corporate clients that are best for you and your business. So, hit play and settle in, friend. Let's get started.
šÆ Top Takeaway from Today's Episode
The root of what helped me to be successful were three simple traits.
š Key Points from the Episode
The Alternative Method
The success with the Alternative Methodā¢ is defined by securing a discovery call, not securing a contract.Ā
š” Take Action:Ā
š Links
āš¾ Sign up for the Corporate Coins Training: How to Attract, Sell and Serve Corporate Clients training
š§ Listen to Episode 28: Price Like a Pro Using The Pillars of Pricingā¢ļø Framework
š¾ Get your free guide: The Ultimate Guide To Finding Clients Using The Alternative Methodā¢
š Be a part of our growing email list: Co(i)nversations & Community
šš½ Connect with me on LinkedIn or Instagram!
š Leave us a review and a 5-star rating:Ā The Profit Scale Podcast
0:00:02 Salutations, friend! Welcome to The Profit Scale podcast, where we help independent Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) entrepreneurs earn at their highest levels by learning how to secure corporate contracts.
Iām your host, Ruth-Joy Connell, your Corporate Consultant and Sales Enablement Expert. Iām on a mission to equip you with the systems and strategies youāll need to build a business of generational impact and income.
Around here, we bring culture and coins together ā providing all the learning, community and support youāll need as you scale your business. If youāre ready to step into your next level of income and impact, then you, my friend, are in the right place!Ā
Turn up the volume and lean in, ācause weāre about to get started!
0:00:59 Well, salutations, friend! Welcome back to another episode of The Profit Scale. If you're new around these parts, then welcome for the first time. Right now, I am doing this episode from a friend's house because our power has been out since yesterday.
We had a big thunderstorm here with high-speed winds that brought down a lot of trees and took out power all throughout the city. Thankfully, everyone, including myself and my family are okay, but a good portion of the city is still out of power. While I wait for that to get backed up and running, I'm working from my friend's place. Thank you, Shara, for hosting me.Ā
Good friends are a blessing. Speaking of good friends, me, Ruth-Joy, I'm your good friend. As such, what kind of friend would I be if I didn't give you the play-by-play on how to find your first corporate client? No need to thank me. I'm simply out here doing the Lord's work and His desire is for you to be paid.
0:02:00 In our conversation today, I'm going to walk you through a strategy to help you find your first corporate client. This is the most common challenge our clients face, and it's also the biggest obstacle to them securing their first contract. They just don't know where to look for and how to find these opportunities. I get it. It's not as though there's a designated job board of corporations looking for coaches, consultants and experts to hire, so where do you begin looking and how do you begin looking?
I'm going to give you the step-by-step, the play-by-play, the juice, if you will, and there's even a download that goes along with this episode to make it easier for you to action it. I'm sure you can already guess what today's action item is going to be, but we'll get to that later.Ā
0:02:48 Before we dive in, I want to share with you my own experience around why I'm so passionate about helping you with this. To give you some context, my professional experience working in corporate has been in sales.Ā
I first started off as an Inside Sales Representative. That's where you are kind of behind the scenes making calls, doing the research and reaching out to different prospects. I worked my way up from there to the Sales Training Manager. In that position, I was responsible for developing all the training processes and materials for the sales team.
It was my job to train them on an ongoing basis and to ensure that they had the tools and the expertise and materials that they needed to succeed in their roles. As a result, this helped us meet our organizational revenue goals as a team. That experience moving up the corporate ladder, so to speak, and especially with my position being directly involved in sales, that gave me something that I didn't know I needed.Ā
It gave me exposure to a world where $300,000 contracts were the norm, exposure to the types of conversations that were happening at boardroom tables, exposure to the types of ethnicities who were sitting in these rooms. Let me tell you, more often than not, the only color in that room was coming from me. Equally important was the exposure to the beliefs and actions that gave way to the opportunities and revenue I was seeing.
That exposure was, by far, the best gift I could have ever received from a job, and it changed my world. What it did for me was broaden and deepen my belief in what was possible for me. Once I believed it was possible for myself, I wanted to see it become my reality, which led me to pursue a corporate contract of my own.Ā
My experience landing my first corporate contract did not come easy. I had met an executive at a business event. We got to speaking. We exchanged social media handles. We followed each other online. We saw each other's content. She saw the content I was sharing and had heard from some people in her network about their experience working with me.
Now, granted this was going to be my first time pursuing a large multi-five-figure contract, the kind of work I was going to be or I wanted to be doing for her was going to be different from what I had been doing up until that point.
She reached out to me and let me know that they might have a need for my services at her company in the coming months, but that they weren't quite ready to move forward. She made that very clear and that was okay. For me, it was a prospect and an opportunity. I was excited just about that.Ā
For months, that was it ā no discovery call, no proposal, no further conversation, it was just a possibility. During those months, I stayed in contact by checking in, touching base and engaging with her content, so that she would know I was still around without being too pushy or overt. I also continued to share valuable content of my own as frequently as I could. At that time, I was still getting the consistency down, but I was sharing content regularly.
Over a year later, since she initially sent me that message ā 14 months to be exact. She reached back out and we scheduled a discovery call. From there, it took about two and a half months from the time of the initial discovery call to secure and sign the contract.Ā That was my first time signing a corporate contract for multiple five-figures from my own business.Ā
Up until this point, I was helping my employer close six-figure deals on a regular basis, so I was used to seeing those kinds of numbers, but signing a contract with my own name on it, me, Ruth-Joy, a young black solo woman entrepreneur in the frigid corners of Canada, me, that was a stepping stone into a whole new level. It made me realize that the only reason I wasn't securing these contracts for myself was simply because I wasn't trying to. The only person that was standing in my way was me. I was the one who was behind the curtain. It was me.Ā
Once that belief became my reality, I began to believe it for you. It became my mission ā the very mission behind this podcast and the work that we do here at RJCC. I wanted to share this particular story with you because I want you to know that there wasn't any complex sales strategy or in-depth marketing plan behind securing my first corporate client.Ā
0:07:27 At the root of what helped me to be successful were three simple traits.
That was the entire strategy: belief, willingness and commitment. From the time I contacted this prospect to the time they signed the contract, it took me 16.5 months, so it was by no means fast.
In a world where I was watching my peers having five-figure launches and building five-figure funnels, you better believe there were times I wavered in all three of those traits. There were times I didn't believe it was possible for me, times I wasn't committed, times when I wasn't willing, and times where I was downright discouraged and just wanted to give up.Ā
I know how hard it is to keep moving forward when you're not seeing the results of your efforts. I know what it's like to question your entire business and wonder if this is for you. I know what it's like to quietly give up internally, yet show up here and there, just enough to make it seem as though everything is okay. Even reflecting on this makes me emotional.Ā
Friend, I know what it's like. I need to encourage you to know that you are not alone. While I may not physically be there with you, I am linking arms with you to let you know that you can do this. We are walking this journey together. Each podcast episode is me coming alongside you and saying, "You're not alone. You got this!"
Thankfully, the strategy I'm about to go over with you won't take you nearly anywhere as long as it took me, but now that these three traits: belief, willingness and commitment, are still paramount. Without them, it won't matter what strategy you use because you'll become the obstacle to your own success.Ā
At the end of this episode, take a moment to reflect on what each of those traits means to you and what it looks like for you and your business.Ā
All right, friend. Thank you for sitting with me in this reflection. As we move into the tactical part of our conversation, my goal for today is to make the strategy so simple that you feel confident enough to start applying it right away. That means I'm going to use plain language ā no jargon. You won't need a team or paid ads. You don't even need to use social media to apply what you're going to learn here today. Yes, that is true. Zero social media is involved in this strategy, and that means we need to do a little bit of preparation.Ā
Let's jump in.
0:10:17 The strategy I'm walking you through today is a signature process that I created called The Alternative Methodā¢. It is an extremely simplified way to help you identify a company that is actively searching for your solution using job boards. Instead of applying for those positions, you're going to use some tact and strategy to offer your services to them, to secure a corporate contract for your business. There are seven steps to this process.Ā
0:10:53 In this step, the first thing you need to do is identify the basic criteria for what types of companies are a good fit. This means identifying factors like what size do you want the company you work with to be, maybe how many employees they have, or how much revenue they bring in, and where are they geographically located.
You also want to consider things like their industry and more. Your basic criteria should include demographic information like the factors I just mentioned to help you identify, in a simple way, which companies are a good fit and which ones aren't. It's also going to help you narrow down your search once we get to step four.Ā
The last, important piece of information for this step is to identify the Problem, Challenge or Goal (PCG) that you'll be providing a solution for. That's the first step.Ā
If you want to dive a little deeper into creating your basic qualifying criteria, this is essentially Pillar 1: Profile of my Pillars of Pricingā¢ framework. I expanded on this a little bit more in episode 28. I'll link to that in the show notes, so you can go back to listen to that one as well.
0:12:04 Now, one-sheet is exactly what it sounds like. It's a single-page document that summarizes:
When you reach out to potential clients, they likely will never have heard of you before. A one-sheet is a resource to help introduce yourself and your company and to facilitate a connection between the problem they're experiencing and the solution that you're going to be offering. It's extremely common for corporate decision makers to ask for some sort of material they can read or watch before they even agree to a call with you. You want to have this ready ahead of time.
Your one-sheet should include a summary of the following information:Ā
Keep in mind that the information on the sheet should be summarized. You want to keep your sentences short, but engaging. Use visuals to make the documents easy to scan and easy to pull out the key information that those decision makers will need.
Most importantly, make a clear connection between the problem and the solution. The reader should be able to connect the dots between their challenge and how you can help by reviewing this document.Ā
0:13:37 Now, I want to pause here to let you know that I put all of these steps together for you in a downloadable guide on how to find your first corporate client. All the steps of The Alternative Methodā¢ are laid out for you with visuals and examples in the sky, so you can follow along while you listen but also take action afterwards.Ā
For instant access to the guide, click the link in our show notes. Put in your email address. You'll have it emailed to you and you can follow along while you listen to the rest of the episode. Go ahead and get your guide now.
0:14:16 What are the key skills that make up your expertise or the skills that you use when you're working with your clients?Ā
For example, if you're a DEI consultant, some of the skills involved in your work may include strategic planning, policy planning, communications development, hiring or recruiting, and so on. Your list doesn't need to be exhaustive, but try to identify at least five core skills.
0:14:50 In this step, you're going to use the basic criteria that we identified in step one, along with your core skills from step three to search for job postings within your area of expertise.Ā
Continuing with our DEI example, you may already refer to yourself as a DEI Consultant. Some companies may be hiring for exactly that, which is perfect. However, the titles that companies use to describe similar positions can vary widely, and this is where the core skills come into play, you can use these core skills to help you identify various titles that correspond to your expertise and in some cases, you can even plug these skills into your search engine to narrow down your results. The three platforms I recommend using for this step are LinkedIn Jobs, Indeed and ZipRecruiter.
When you plug in your search criteria, you're likely going to get a ton of results using any one of these platforms. I'm going to do an example using LinkedIn Jobs because it will often include the recruiter's LinkedIn profile, which is going to be helpful for us in step six.
I did a search on LinkedIn Jobs for companies who are actively hiring for a DEI consultant. Some of the filters I used to help with this include things like contracts instead of full-time or part-time, remote work, and within the United States. This gave me 31 results.Ā
The same search criteria on Indeed gave me over a thousand results. In my example, I did a search using a very specific title, which is not a bad thing, but keep in mind that each company will refer to the same role using slightly different language. That's why you want to play around with the job titles in your search and bring in those core skills to help you identify positions that are still going to be a good fit for you.
Okay, so I know you're thinking, "Ruth-Joy, why are you making me do the search and look for job postings when I'm not at all interested in being hired for a job?" Great question. Well, I'm asking you to do this because it's going to help you identify three things:
It may seem counterintuitive to search job boards for corporate contracts, but the companies you identify using this process have already acknowledged that they have a need and are willing to invest in finding a solution. This makes it one of the lowest barriers to entry to at least secure a conversation with them.
Don't worry. You're not going to be applying for any jobs, but you will be creating a prospect list using your search results, and that brings us to step number five.Ā
0:17:40 Create a prospect list using your search results. Now, depending on your search criteria, you could have anywhere between 50 to a thousand plus results. The goal for this stage is to wade through the results and simply identify 10 companies that would be a good fit for your solution. From there you're going to begin searching for the best person to contact regarding their needs.
A tip here is that the Hiring Manager or HR recruiter is not always the best point of contact. Sometimes they can even act as a gatekeeper, so instead see who that role reports to and try to find the person within that company that would be the direct report for that role. The direct report will often be in a decision-making position, and at the very least is likely to be a better point of contact than HR.Ā
If you're using LinkedIn Jobs, you may be able to reach out to the Recruiting Manager directly to let them know that you're interested in the position and you may even be able to ask them who the direct report for that role is. That way is a little bit sneaky, and they may or may not volunteer that information to you, but it never hurts to ask.
0:18:51 At this stage you've identified that the company has both a need they're actively seeking to address and a vacancy that they're actively seeking to fill. Now, you're going to reach out and pitch an alternative solution than the one that they're looking for. See why I call it The Alternative Methodā¢? Did you see what I did there?Ā
At this point, you're going to introduce yourself and your company and tell them how your company can help address this need and invite them to have a conversation with you, not a sale. Right now, you are not trying to secure a sale. You are just trying to secure a conversation. The language around how you frame this is extremely important since you want to make the connection clear and you also want to be genuine in both your curiosity and your invitation.
To help you with this, I created a sample script that you can use, which is available in the downloadable guide that I mentioned earlier. In the guide, you're going to find both a script and an example for you to reference, and that you can follow word for word if you choose, or you can adjust it, whichever one works best for you.Ā
Since the script is available for you, I'm not going to go too deep into how to craft this message, so I do encourage you to download the guide using the link in the show notes, it has everything you need, including all the steps.Ā
0:20:10 Last but not least, step seven is to repeat. Even when you're doing everything right, success takes time. That is especially true when you're selling B2B or business to business.Ā
A research study conducted by Implicit analyzed hundreds of companies' pipelines and found that the average B2B sales cycle is 102 days. That's over three months. That's a very different process than when you're selling directly to your consumer.Ā
When you're selling B2C, you could post on social media today or even send out an email to your list and have made a sale within the next five minutes, but B2B doesn't work like that. It's a completely different ball game. That's why commitment is a required trait. It's important to adjust your mindset, and to have appropriate expectations to set yourself up for success.Ā
Speaking of success, one important thing I want to point out here is that success with this process is defined by securing a discovery call, not securing a contract. There are multiple stages to go from finding a prospect to signing a contract. Today we're just focusing on stage one, which is finding your first corporate client.
Once you secure that discovery call, we then enter into an active sales process, and that's a whole other stage that we're not going to be getting into today. As you apply these steps, I just want you to keep that definition in mind to help you frame your expectations around what success should look like using The Alternative Methodā¢.
0:21:45 All right, friend. Let's recap our conversation today and talk about how we can convert this conversation to coins. I started off today's conversation, sharing my journey to my first corporate contract with you and grounding the conversation in the traits that are most foundational to your success. The traits that I mentioned earlier were:
From there, I walked you through my signature process, The Alternative Methodā¢, for finding corporate clients. Keeping in mind that, again, success in this process is defined by securing a discovery call with one of those prospects.
The seven steps we discussed as part of The Alternative Methodā¢ are:
As you know, our conversation is never complete without talking about how to take action on our conversations, and today is no different.Ā
Your action item for today has two parts.
The link to download the guide is in the show notes.
0:23:25 Friend, if serving corporate clients is the next step for you in your business, you want more strategies like what we just discussed today, and most importantly, the support and guidance to see you all the way through, I hold a free monthly training, Corporate Coins: How to Attract, Sell and Serve Corporate Clients. This free training is going to give you an idea of what it would look like to work together within Systems that Scaleā¢.Ā
At the very least, you're going to walk away with some tips and strategies to get started on your Corporate Coin journey, much like in today's episode. I want to personally invite you to attend our next training by registering using the link in the show notes. It's completely free, and I would love to see it there.
Friend, if you're not subscribed already, go ahead and do that now because in the next episode, we're going to be discussing the different types of client journeys and how you can use your marketing to keep each prospect engaged at every stage. To make sure you don't miss it, subscribe to the podcast now, so you'll be notified in two weeks when the next episode is released. While you're at it, go ahead and be a good Samaritan and share this podcast episode with a fellow business owner.
This episode is a great actionable episode that you can share with friends to help them maybe find their next corporate contract or their first corporate contract. Go ahead and share this episode as well.
As always, friend, I'm so grateful that you chose to spend this time with me. My hope is that each episode plays a small part in moving you one step closer to building a business that will have a generational impact.
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On behalf of myself and the team, thank you so much for supporting us in doing so! Thank you for being here. I'll be here, at the same time and in the same place in two weeks. Until then, I wish you coins, confidence, and all the bags! Talk to you soon, friend.