The Ultimate System For Automatically Scheduling and Preparing New Client Leads

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Wish you could spend more time coaching and less time on leads that are not quite ready to buy? Here is a step-by-step system to automatically qualify, schedule and prepare new client leads.

 

I’ve always been late to the party. I didn’t discover The Killers until their second album. I still haven’t watched Lost. And I didn’t discover my love of nutrition coaching until 12 years into a career in the tech industry.

When I finally completed my Precision Nutrition certification, I was excited and scared at the same time. My fear was a two-headed monster. The fear of starting a new career as a coach combined with the feeling I was late to the party – yet again.  How could I compete with all these coaches with years of experience beyond what I could offer?

Of course, I quickly learned coaches are a unique group of people. Like those in PN’s ProCoach group on Facebook that rush in to answer questions and support each other.

I’ve also learned to focus on my unique strengths instead of the things I don’t have like years of coaching experience. And one of those strengths is a unique background in technical, sales and marketing roles in the tech industry.

So I’ve been able to set up my own website, set up Facebook ads, configure email campaigns and more.

Sure, I could have paid someone to do all this but for me personally, money was more of an issue than time and I enjoy learning this stuff.

Which brings me to the reason I’m creating this article.

I’ve noticed a lot of questions from other coaches about email automation, setting up a marketing funnel and other pieces of running a business online.

So in an effort to pay it forward, I’m sharing what I’ve learned about setting up a marketing funnel. It’s a long article so you might want to grab a coffee and read through it all the way. Then refer back to it when you’re ready to setup your funnel.

You Should Automate As Much Of Your Marketing Funnel As Possible

As an entrepreneur, your most valuable resource is time. Successful business people know this so they’re always looking for ways to automate repetitive tasks.

I’m going to show you how to build an automated marketing funnel. As a coach, you value your time and want to spend it on things that move your business forward, like signing up new clients and helping them get amazing results.

You won’t need any programming experience, but it could cost you $90/month to get up and running. The good news is once you’ve set it up, you’ll have a machine that captures leads, educates them on your process and what you offer, qualifies new leads with a survey and finally books them in your calendar for an initial consultation.

Here’s a look at the final workflow we’ll setup:

entire workflow (part 1).png

entire workflow (part 2).png

What our workflow in Drip will look like when finished. Don't be scared. We'll be walking through it step by step together.

What our workflow in Drip will look like when finished. Don’t be scared. We’ll be walking through it step by step together.

This automated system will let you focus on selling your services by handling the following:

1. Introduce new leads to you and your services

2. Qualify leads so you can focus on those more likely to be ready to take action

3.. Schedule an introductory call with qualified leads

Then you can just show up and get on the phone with prospective clients.

What tools will we be using?

These are my tools of choice. There are plenty of alternative options you can use in your funnel, just be aware the steps I outline will vary slightly across different software and services.

Disclaimer: Some of the links below are affiliate links. This means I may make a commission or get a few free months of usage. This doesn’t affect the price of the product for you at all. I’m a regular user of most of these products I recommend. Purchasing through my affiliate links is a way you can help support me and my business. However, if you would rather not, feel free to google the companies yourself and buy them that way. Whatever is most comfortable to you. My hope is these tools or ones like them help you grow your business.

  • Leadpages for landing page and delivery of lead magnet ($25/mo)
  • Drip for capturing email addresses and email automation (free up to 100 subscribers then $41/mo for 2500 subscribers)
  • Paperform for a survey to qualify leads ($15/mo minus a 10% discount if using my referral link)
  • Calendly for reserving your calendar ($12/mo premium tier is required for integrating with Drip)
  • Zapier to glue some of these services together (free for the “zap” you’ll be making but $20/mo for more advanced requirements)
  • Marketing materials including lead magnet and marketing copy in this example are provided by Precision Nutrition. If you are a ProCoach member you can access this material in the ProCoach Learning Center under “Done For You Marketing Campaigns”. Of course, the setup is the same if using your own lead magnet such as an ebook or infographic and your own copy for the emails and landing page.

Step 1: Acquire Leads

Choose a free lead magnet to entice people to hand over their email address. Here are a few kinds of offers – each have their own pro’s and con’s. Whichever you select, it needs to be easy for your audience to see the value. The days of people freely handing out their email address are gone. (Think about how protective you are of your own inbox.)

1. Email Course

2. PDF / Report / Whitepaper

3. Seminar / Webinar:

4. Video Series

For this article, I’m using a PDF infographic provided to Precision Nutrition ProCoach members.

Get Leadpages for your landing page

You need a landing page people can “land on” where they will learn about your offer. In this case, an offer to learn a better alternative to counting calories.

Leadpages has a drag and drop builder that makes it easy to create landing pages to capture leads. I’ve made it even easier because Leadpages allows templates to be shared.

So you can use the landing and thank you pages I created for Precision Nutrition’s “Counting Calories Debunked” marketing campaign. All you need is a Leadpages account and then you can install the templates I’ve shared below.

Grab the landing page and thank you page when you’re ready.

Get a Drip account

We’ll be using Drip at the centre of this automated marketing funnel. Even if you plan on using another email marketing platform, you might want to create a free Drip account to follow along with this guide. Then you can always create a similar workflow in your preferred email platform.

Now you’re going to connect your Leadpages and Drip accounts. Go into Leadpages and click on your profile in the top right corner, then “Integrations” and choose Drip. Enter your Drip account information and you’re all set.

You’ll also need to configure the landing page and thank you page templates but we’ll come back to that step once we have our Drip workflow created.

Step 2: Send Welcome Email Series with Survey

Once a lead signs up on your landing page, you want to use an email marketing automation service to send out a series of emails to your leads (they’re also referred to as subscribers in email marketing).  These emails will introduce leads to your services and hopefully convince them to book an initial call with you.

Let’s look at how this will appear in Drip’s Workflow tool:

Step 2 - beginning of workflow explained.png

Create your Drip Workflow

Drip has some powerful features that make automation easy and we’ll explore a couple of them in this article. But the first one I’l show you might be the best.

You know that long picture at the beginning of this article showing our Drip Workflow? You don’t have to build it yourself! Drip recently added the ability to share workflows.

So you could create this workflow yourself following the steps outlined in this article.

OR…

Install a copy of my Drip workflow in a few clicks.

Point your landing page to your Drip workflow

Now that you have a Drip workflow, let’s go back into Leadpages and finish setting up your landing and thank you pages.

First let’s point your landing page to your new workflow in Drip:

1 - Leadpages add drip account here.png

Then set the follow up action (after a lead fills out the form) to go to the appropriate thank you page:

2 - Leadpage thank you page.png

Understanding your Drip workflow

Now let’s walk through your Drip workflow. It starts with a trigger – that’s the action the workflow uses to pull in a subscriber / lead. The most basic trigger is a pop-up form on your website that asks a user for their email address. (Drip may have asked you to set this up when initially creating your account.) For this workflow, your trigger is a Leadpages landing page.

If you click on the trigger in your workflow, you’ll see this:

Drip trigger.png

Note the name of the Leadpages form above. If you’ve changed the name of your form in Leadpages, make sure to update it here in your Drip workflow.

The next workflow step applies the tag “Downloaded Calorie Counting PDF” to your new lead. Tags attach a visual representation of what a subscriber has done and provide an easy way to group your subscribers. For example, let’s say your list of subscribers grows to 1000 people through various lead magnets and marketing campaigns over time. You could easily tell which ones downloaded your Calorie Counting Guide with this tag. I believe you can never know too much about your subscribers so I do a lot of tagging. A general rule for me is to add a tag whenever a subscriber takes action or makes a choice so I can track subscriber behaviour and interests.

Next the workflow is sending the Calorie Counting Campaign. A campaign in drip is an email series or autoresponder sent out over a series of days. This campaign contains a series of 4 emails provided by Precision Nutrition as part of this marketing package for ProCoach customers.

Here is an overview of the email series in this campaign:

campaign emails.png

Campaigns in Drip give you more statistics than sending one-off emails in a workflow. It also makes a long workflow easier to manage by grouping a series of emails, designed to go together, into a campaign. Then use workflows to decide when those campaigns are sent to subscribers.

Step 3: Qualify New Leads

After the campaign emails are sent out over the course of a week (4 emails with a 2 day wait between emails), you’ll send another email asking the lead to fill out a survey.

Let’s look at this part of the workflow:

Step 3 - Drip workflow showing where Zapier applies tag.png

Create a survey in Paperform

Paperform let’s you create online surveys that look great and make it easy to send out a copy of the survey answers to you and the lead. You can sign up for a free trial and if you choose to use my referral link you’ll get 10% off the regular price for life. Typeform is a similar option but it costs more for the same set of features.

Once you have your Paperform account setup, create a form with the appropriate questions to qualify your leads. Here’s the example I created:

Paperform survey.png

Of course, you can change the questions to fit your business needs. Just make sure you keep the first field called “Your email” the same. We will be inputing the users email address from Drip so you need this field in your survey.

When editing your form, you’ll see a “Share” button at the top of the screen. Click on it and copy the form link because you’re going to need it soon.

Add your survey to a Drip email

Go to your Drip workflow, click on the “Send Follow up survey” step.

In the body of this email, you’ll see the word “Survey” as a link. Click on this word and then the “Insert Call To Action” button. It will look like this:

Step 2 - Create CTA button.png

This will turn the highlighted text (in this case the word “Survey”) into a button.

Click on the “Insert Call To Action” button, then on the pop-up window click on “Regular Link” and you should see this:

Step 2 - update survey link with email .png

Replace the first part of the web address above with the Paperform survey URL you copied earlier.

The second part of the link in this field (highlighted above) is Drip code that will input the subscribers email address automatically when they open the Paperform survey. So you need to add ?email={{ subscriber.email }} to the end of your unique Paperform survey URL so Drip knows to add the subscribers email address.

Click the “Insert” button to save your changes, then “Save Email” on the next screen to take you back to the workflow.

How to use a Goal in Drip

The next step in the workflow is to apply a tag to leads that complete your survey. You’ll notice in the screenshot below this step has a “break” in the line:

Step 3 - goal.png

In Drip, this step is called a Goal – which is used as a milestone that you want subscribers to achieve. Here our milestone is for a lead to complete the survey. If they don’t complete the survey, they don’t go any further in this workflow. This is one way to qualify leads. If they’re not at a level of interest to complete your survey, you may want to move them into another workflow that sends more informational emails until they are more familiar with your services. For the purposes of this article, we’re focusing on the leads that do fill out the survey.

Update Drip automatically whenever someone completes your Paperform survey

One thing is missing for this goal to work properly. We need Paperform and Drip to talk to each other. Drip doesn’t have it’s own integration for Paperform similar to what we used for Leadpages – so we need to find a way to connect the two apps.

This is where the magic of Zapier comes in to make this step relatively easy – in other words no coding skills required. When a lead fills out your survey in Paperform, you can ask Zapier to update that leads information in Drip. In this case, we want to add a tag to the subscriber called “Completed Survey – Calorie Counting”.

First you’ll need to create a free Zapier account here. Then click on the big orange “Make a Zap” button. You will see a screen like the one below.

Step 3 - Use Zapier to setup trigger in Paperform.png

Choose “Paperform” as your trigger app, then “New Form Submission” as the trigger. Next you’ll be asked to enter your Paperform account information and test the connection. Then select the appropriate form in the drop down list. I’ve named it “Follow up survey” in the example above. The last step in configuring your trigger is to test that Zapier can connect to the form.

Note: the test will fail if you have not completed the survey at least once because Zapier needs data to test against.

Now you need to tell Zapier what to do with the form data it grabs from Paperform. In this case you want to add a tag in Drip to the subscriber / lead that filled out the form. This will achieve the goal so they move to the next stage of your funnel.

Here’s how to set this up:

Step 3 - Setup Zapier to add tag to Drip .png

So there you have it. A Paperform survey form is submitted and a tag is applied in Drip, which moves the lead to the next stage of the workflow.

Step 4: Schedule Initial Consultation With Qualified Leads

Now it’s time to get the qualified lead into your schedule. What you don’t want to do is exchange a bunch of emails or text back and forth to figure out the best time to have a call with every lead. Instead, you want to allow qualified leads to automatically book a time on your calendar that is convenient for both of you.

Let’s take a look at the next part of your Drip workflow:

Step 4 - Drip workflow overview with explanation.png

Now let’s build it.

Get a Calendly account

First you’ll need to sign up for a Calendly account here if you don’t already have one.

Calendly makes it easy to configure a shareable calendar with your available times. Once you have it setup, under your account name in the upper right corner you’ll find your sharing link. When you share your schedule with leads it will look similar to this:

Calendly - days available.png

Calendly - times available.png

Link to your calendar within your Drip Workflow emails

Calendly has an integration with Drip which you’ll use in your workflow.  But first you need to configure your Calendly account in Drip. In Calendly, click on your account in the top right corner and go to “Integrations”. Highlight the API key and copy it.

Next go to Drip, click on the gear icon in the top right corner and choose “Integrations”. From the list of apps click on Calendly, paste your copied API key and click “Save Token”. Calendly is now connected to Drip.

Now you’ll share a link to your Calendly schedule in the email that’s sent after a lead has completed the survey.

Here is the “Let’s talk!” email from the workflow:

Step 4 - Setup calendar link in Drip email.png

And the next screen where you’ll paste your unique Calendly URL:

Step 4 - Setup calendar link in Drip email (part 2).png

Then you’ll want to add the same link to your follow up “nudge” email called “Are you still available to discuss your health goals?” in your workflow.

Setup a new Goal in Drip

It’s time for another goal in Drip.  When a lead books a time in your calendar, they jump to the next step in your Drip workflow. (This will already exist if you’re using my shared workflow.)

If you need to create this goal (or are just curious) this is how to do it. Create a new step in your Drip workflow by clicking the “+” symbol below the “nudge” email. You should see this screen:

Drip steps.png

Select “Goal” then on the next screen choose Calendly and “Invitee created event”. Leave the event name blank:

Drip Goal for Calendly.png

Add another Tag

Next up in the workflow is to add a tag to the lead / subscriber profile in Drip called “Scheduled Call – Calorie Counting”. This isn’t a necessary step but I like to add tags to important actions that subscribers take. For example, if you decide to reach out to all subscribers that have ever scheduled calls with you, it will be easy since you have this tag in place.

Step 5: Prepare People To Talk With You

We’re almost there. Now it’s time to prepare the lead to meet with you.

Let’s take a look at the final part of your Drip workflow:

Step 5 - record conversion.png

This is done by simply sending a follow up email with instructions on what they can expect during your initial call together. I’ve included a template in the shared workflow but you’ll want to update it to fit your business approach.

The final step in the workflow is to record a conversion. Conversions let you track key milestones that your leads achieve. I’ve created a conversion called “Scheduled Call – Initial Consultation” to keep track of leads that make it all the way through the funnel. This step isn’t necessary but it’s helpful to give you a dashboard overview of leads that come into your funnel and convert into a sales call.

Imagine how this could help your business…

Can you see the possibilities automation brings to your sales and marketing efforts?

Here are a couple of examples you could try next:

  • Once you have a lead’s email address (ie. they’re a subscriber in Drip) you can track when they visited your sales page and follow up in a few days with an email asking if they have any questions.
  • Expand the workflow in this article to do more with the leads that didn’t qualify by completing the survey. You could send them into a newsletter workflow or an email course to show them more value and raise their level of awareness about your services.

Hopefully this guide has given you a valuable system you can implement right away in your coaching business. And at least, it’s provided a overview of how useful Drip’s workflows and Zapier can be for automating some of your marketing and sales systems.

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Scott Goldie

Scott Goldie

I'm revel nutrition's founder, marketing geek and introvert at heart. When I'm not busy with nutrition coaching, I'm helping other coaches grow their business.