The Biggest Mistakes People Make With The Lead Product Method
I've been teaching 1- 2 person branding agencies how to successfully close and deliver a Lead Product so that it seamlessly upsells to higher paying clients who love and trust you and want to work with you, for about nine years now.
And so I have seen all kinds of execution when it comes to this strategy.
So today, I want to share the top five mistakes that I see people make when they execute a Lead Product.
In my book ‘Badass your Brand’, I shared this strategy as part of the story of how we built our business, because this was a foundational way that we scaled our agency.
In ‘Badass your Brand’ I didn't explain how to do it, I just explained what it was.
So thousands of people read this book and said, ‘Bam, that's a brilliant idea’ and started trying to implement this process with all kinds of success.
I still get emails from people who tell me that they read the book and tried selling a Lead Product because of it and have been wildly successful with the process.
And I've had people email me and say, ‘I've tried your process, and it never works.’
Now, I haven't seen these people's Lead Products, so I don't really know. But I have read a lot of Lead Product briefs in the last few years.
And so I can tell you that the same mistakes happen over and over again. And I have a feeling a lot of these people who just read about the idea and then execute it on their own make these mistakes too. So let's get into it.
Mistake #1 - Giving too much information
I get it, you charged for this, and you want to make sure that you deliver as much value as possible.
I know you want to be helpful and you want this client to see you as having lots of valuable information, because you believe that that is why they're going to continue working with you.
But there is a difference between giving a valuable piece of information or a valuable brief and writing a research report.
Giving too much information and too many details is not helpful at all.
It's actually asking the client to do a bunch of work - your job is to make things easier for your client not harder.
Who wants to read a 10 or 20 page document, even if it's filled with tons and tons of valuable information?
It is almost always possible to shorten it. And I know it's not just possible, it's harder to shorten a document and make it short and succinct, but still powerful and to have an impact.
But that is your job.
I want to tell you a story about a student of mine a few years ago, who was implementing the Lead Product process in a totally different industry.
She was doing it in economic development, and she was getting hired for these Lead Products. She was interviewing the clients, then writing the briefs. And she was easily selling them, but then none of them were upselling.
She said everybody that did the Lead Product process with her loved it. They told her how valuable the interview was. They told her how much they adored her and found her to be the person who knew everything about this topic.
They loved the brief and would say ‘Thank you so much, this is so valuable.’
And then they would always say, ‘Okay, well, we need to just think about this, because there's a lot here and we've just got, you know, we just have to think about it, we're gonna get back to you…’
And she was saying to me, ‘Why aren't any of these people closing?’ So I finally said, ‘Send it over. Let me see what you're writing in them.’
And it was a friggin research paper.
It was so much information because she has a lot of information to share. And she wanted to show them how much she knew, so that they would want to hire her.
And although I understand the idea of overwhelming your clients with so much information that they just throw up their hands and they say, ‘Well, this is great, but I can't do this, so you do this for me.’
I get that.
But what it actually does is it paralyses your clients.
It makes them feel like they have the information that they need, and now they've just got to sit down and do something with it.
Or it makes them feel like they need to take some time to really sift through it and have a lot of thoughts and make decisions about it before they can move forward.
Either way, it paralyses them and stops them from making a decision.
And it's again giving them too much work to do.
So giving too much information is actually doing a disservice to your clients and it's going to make it harder for them to upsell.
Mistake #2 - Doing any execution
Whether it's writing your client’s homepage copy, or making a mood board for them or sending them websites that you think are a good example of what their brand should be executing inside of brief, is going to also stop your clients and give them more reasons not to hire you.
It's also skipping a step.
When you do the work in the brief, instead of after the brief is approved, you're basically moving into step two, before you have all agreed on step one.
And if you say something in step one, like a plan or a strategy, and it's not perfectly aligned with them, or you missed something important, or you focus on the wrong aspect of it, and then you do some execution based on that assumption or that conclusion, you're going to take it in the wrong direction, and you're going to lose the sale.
Mistake #3 - Giving generic advice
Don't tell people that their brand should be authentic and bold, or luxurious and expensive, without explaining why in more detail, and showing them what that actually means.
Remember, everyone has a different definition of these words. If I say I want something cool and modern, you might have a very different idea of what cool and modern is.
So when we make sweeping statements, like ‘Oh, this needs to be a cool modern brand’ and then we don't say anything else, and we just assume that the client knows what we mean, not only is that going to come off as thin, but it's not going to connect with the client, especially if they already kind of knew that and send that to you - it's usually going to come off as not that valuable.
Instead, what we want to do is we want to give some specifics, some examples, some details, and we want to explain why this is.
So if you're telling a client that they need to be luxurious and expensive, and they may already kind of know that, then your job is not to just reiterate that to them, because they will come back to you and say what did I pay for exactly?
For you to tell me what I already knew, what you need to do is take it a step further. So explain what you mean by luxurious and expensive, what kind of luxurious? There's a lot of different versions of luxury, there's a lot of different versions of expensive, some of that expensive, is unattainable.
Some of that expensive is actually very approachable, right?
All of these words can be sliced and diced in a million different ways. And your job as the person giving the strategy is to give that nuance to them, and to get them to see it so that they understand not only the vision of what you have for their business, but once they see that nuanced vision, there's not going to be anybody else that's going to deliver this value for them.
Because once they see that you get it, and once you're the person who shows them that vision, you're the only person who can help them with this project.
And that's really what we want to get.
Mistake #4 - Pitching in the brief
So remember, the Lead Product is a standalone product.
By definition, it has value all on its own.
Sometimes when people hear about this method online, through my reels or my posts, they think that we're just charging people for proposals, and we're charging people for something that everyone else is giving away for free.
Some people even think that it's like a scam to do that. Well, if you're just charging for the proposal you would normally give away for free, you're right, that is pretty scammy, you shouldn't do that. You aren't giving them any value. And I agree you shouldn't be charging for it.
This is not a proposal that you charge for.
The brief itself should actually be kept separate from the pitch. And it should stand alone as a valuable brief.
If you find yourself talking about what you will do or how you can do this or using yourself in any of the brief then you are turning your brief into more of a pitch and a proposal and it's going to take value away from it.
Mistake #5 - Focusing on the ‘what’ instead of the ‘why’
This is probably the biggest mistake I see the most.
If you are somebody who gets way too caught up in all the details of the deliverables, without constantly connecting those deliverables back to why these are so important to get the client and where they want to go in the first place, then you are going to lose the sale.
Because people do not buy logos, or websites or social media posts, or at least they don't pay a premium for these things. They buy whatever those things are actually going to get them in the end - a successful business, more clients, more freedom, a better lifestyle.
So if your brief is focused on all of the things that they said they needed (because they probably did come to you and say ‘I need a five page website’, right?) and you just focus on that without showing them why the way you're going to do it is going to help them achieve their goals, then it's really not going to do the thing that we want it to do, which is to connect with them and get them excited to say yes to working With you at a premium price.
So those are the top five mistakes that I see people make inside the Lead Product, but there are so many more, and they're more nuanced.
And that's why there's a whole program about it, because nailing this is the key to unlocking more premium-priced, profitable services in your small branding agency.
If that is a process that sounds like something you would love to implement, because you're sick of clients not following your lead, questioning things, bringing scope creep into your projects with never ending projects and you’re constantly chasing those clients, but you really want to take the lead in your business, be confident about how you deliver the value that you have to offer, go to nobsagencies.com/apply.
Book a call with my team to create your plan to scale up your agency without employees and let's see if now is the time to change how you run your business so that you have more freedom, more profit and more ease.
Here’s what you need to get…
Lead Products are a game changer if you’re a small branding agency, but you need to do them the right way. Don’t get caught up in trying to overdeliver, be too generic or pitch too soon - that’s just what every other branding agency would typically do. Instead, see it as an opportunity to demonstrate your understanding of what the client wants, so that you are the obvious choice to deliver the full project.
P.S. You can always jump on a call with my team if you want to master your Lead Product process, and learn all my other tools and strategies to scale up your agency - just go here to get started!