Got an email from a prospect a couple days ago, with a question that I see fairly often.
My prospect said he was skeptical and confused. He was looking for a way to create an online home based income. He was weary of hearing all the hope-inspiring stories that marketers tell about making significant amounts of money in a relatively short time.
He heard some great success stories about our business as well, but wondered if they represented realistic possibilities for “most people”.
One of his main questions was this:
How many prospects per week/month it takes to get 10-15 new signups per month?
Think about this in terms of your home business.
Is this a question you would feel comfortable answering?
What figures would you throw out?
Here is my response to his email. I hope this helps you answer this question, because sooner or later you will hear it.
I definitely understand your concerns here. When you hear the stories about 10K in six months, they are sometime true, but they are the exception. I know of one guy in a network marketing business who came pretty close to achieving income to that level that quickly, but his true story is that he was very motivated and worked very hard day and night at the business (he was unemployed at the time). He called numbers off real estate signs and made pitches. He was bold and approached everyone he ran into. Again, the exceptional situation but a true story.
You won’t get a definite answer to the question of prospects to signup ratios, because there are too many variables. When you have thousands of people using a set of capture pages and using promotional methods of varying quality, it is very difficult to nail figures that really mean anything.
For example –
- If you learn to prospect properly on Facebook and create relationships with people, you might get one signup from every 15 people who ask you about your business. Just throwing a number out there for one of the higher quality (and more effective) promo methods.
- If you post classified ads to Craigslist (cold leads who don’t know you) it might take 50 prospects to get one signup.
- If you rent an “opportunity seeker” mailing list and send out solicitations, you might get a signup for every 500 emails you send. This is low quality prospecting in a very cold market.
That’s why you can’t get “straight answers” on this, because even if you could average the stats for everyone and every promotional method, it would have little meaning to you personally.
The key is getting involved with something you really like and working to build your credibility and trust with your prospects. You can do things like send follow ups outside the canned autoresponder messages (this is what I did with the email you replied to here).
I know this doesn’t answer your questions completely, because there is no way to say “for x number of signups, you have to get x number of leads” because so much depends on *where* those leads came from (low or high quality) and *how* consistently and well you follow up. The system does a TON of the selling for you, but there is still the *you* factor and it matters.
If you are enthusiastic about it and follow the steps we lay out, you can make it work. I am confident of that.
Did you get some value from this post? If you did, I would really appreciate you sharing it with others! And, your comments are welcome below!
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About Eldon Beard
Eldon, Thanks for sharing your expertise on this matter. So many times you hear about online marketers bragging about how they started making 6 figures within a year and this is not realistic for most people. It takes a lot of hard work and dedication to providing good valuable free content to help people who are interested in your expertise along with prospecting on social media networks and other avenues before you can start to convert prospects into paying customers.
Hi Shelley, appreciate your comments.
There’s a lot of work behind those fast six figure income stories, and too often the stories are told to make it appear that anyone can do it that quickly. I’m a very positive person and believe that anyone can achieve what they truly desire, but you have to be realistic. Someone coming into a business who can leverage a big list + social following can create those “fast rise to prosperity” stories. Someone with a smaller following can do it as well, but it might take a good bit longer.
Hi Eldon,
Interesting post. You mentioned that there is a system that can be used in your company. Can’t you just relate how you have done using it? Obviously, you can’t make promises but, it seems like your numbers could be seen as a guide to what someone else might do.
Hey Richard, we do have a system and one component of that system is a Facebook marketing strategy. Taking that Facebook strategy as an example, I could throw some numbers out there but they wouldn’t mean much to you. There are some variables. When doing relationship building and marketing to your Facebook friends, some people just naturally have a knack for it. Some people are naturals at Facebook and seem to attract a nice following. Others struggle and don’t do nearly as well. This is why we teach the methods but don’t throw out numbers – too many variables.
Great advice Eldon! There is a way to measure ROI, but it’s very specific to our business and our strategy.
Getting involved in the conversation and truly building relationships has worked best for me. Taking an interest in people is always a win-win in my opinion.
Seems to me that’s the secret of most great business builders I know Rebekah – getting in the conversations and building real relationships. Thanks for stopping by! 🙂
Getting new signups id for sure a number game but a number game that is hard to answer. I agree with you totally that it all has to do with the method you are using in addition to how great of a salesperson you are. In the end you will get the highest quality sign ups from building solid relationships with people and earn their trust!
Agreed, Kyle! The best prospects are almost always from a group that you have built some sort of previous relationship with (even if they were just a member of your list).
Hi Eldon,
You’re right, it’s hard to say how many prospects you’ll get. That’s why it’s good to have strategies and do different things. A combination of a few different will yield different results but may lead to more sign-ups…
Diversity in prospecting is good, Lesly, though some people focus almost exclusively on one method. If it works, that’s great! I still think spreading things around with different strategies is a good thing. Find what works for you and keep it in the mix.
Eldon, This is a really tricky subject and one that’s difficult to answer. Every business whether an organisation or individual will have different average rates of conversion and even then it will be very hard to work against these average rates due to wide fluctuation due to time of year, etc. Keeping and working to an average is the best plan, but don’t bet your business on it!