Many business owners jump to the conclusion that their leads who don’t come on board, simply weren’t ready or qualified.

Then they say: “I just need more leads.”

This then spurs them to launch into time-consuming marketing projects, like building out complex email series, hiring LinkedIn consultants, starting social media campaigns, and buying expensive CRM systems.

But those can ultimately prove to be rabbit holes which can lead you away from the real issue.

In a low volume/high margin business model — where one new client can easily be worth a large amount — a lack of clients is not a lead generation problem.

It’s a sales conversion problem.

The truth is that most of your prospects have some kind of problem or issue, otherwise, they wouldn’t agree to meet with you.

Their lack of commitment to you at the end of your process is not necessarily because they’re an unqualified lead (there will of course be some of those).

The lack of commitment is most likely because they didn’t trust you enough to open up to you and tell you the truth of what is really going on behind the original challenge they shared with you.

If you’re getting say, ten qualified leads per month, that’s plenty of leads from which you should be converting at least eight new clients per month.

An inbound lead agrees to a phone call or a Zoom meeting with you.

You have the meeting to discuss what they need help with that they haven’t been able to solve on their own.

You onboard them as a client in that meeting.

That’s it.

That’s what we teach with our “One Call Sale” trust-based selling process.

The only question at the end of the meeting is whether or not they want you to solve their problem.

There should be no emailing, phone calling, or chasing after that.

A lack of new clients is not solved by continuing to create a high volume of new leads.

It’s caused by a lack of trust, from not going below the surface in the initial meeting with your prospect, to truly address their underlying core issues.

The question that you need to come clean with yourself on is:

“What am I doing, that’s causing these leads not to trust me, to make their decision in our first meeting?”

Stop using “fact-finding” and “relationship-building” questions, and a long complex sales process, where you try to prove your credibility.

That puts the spotlight on you to perform, which forces you to prove your value.

Shift to a trust-based sales conversation with the goal of understanding and addressing your prospect’s core problem, shifting the spotlight off of you and on to them.

You don’t have to prove your value or sell yourself to make the sale — you just have to prove that you can be trusted.

And with the right approach, you can do that in the first meeting, without any follow-up or chasing.

To learn more about trust-based selling, watch our best-selling “Mastering The Trust Mindset” quick-start course for free in our Selling With Trust – Learning Hub & Community app.