Ask Aleks Vitkin (Part 2) : Bigger Clients, Start With No Ad Budget, B2B Lead Gen.

In this article I will answer all of your questions about marketing, video marketing, sales and entrepreneurship. I have a bunch of questions prepared from my audience so lets dive in.

Different strategies to land bigger budget clients.

Let’s use business to business (B2B), selling for an example. The best strategy I know is to go to networking events, talk to every single person who is there, get their business cards and screen them. Find out what their current issues are, where they’re going, what they’re goals are and what their pain points in their business are. See if you have something of value to offer them. If you do, write it down on their business card and take a picture of it with your phone. At the end of the networking event, say you met 200 people, you now have 200 notes. Scroll through it, sync it to your PC or evernote and find the best guys. Call them and email them but don’t forget to follow up . Contact the higher valued ones and try to close the sale. You of course need to establish that you are going to sell to them during the meet up. Make sure you provide lots of value in your area of expertise at your event. My favorite way apart from just networking is to actually present on stage. If you present on stage you have mass social proof that people want to talk to you. I did that and the whole room wanted to talk to me. I talked in front of 40 people and closed the sale. I made a lot of money with a long term recurring client. You can do the same! So these are a couple ways you can get higher paying clients. The most important thing is to be sure to give lots of value on the spot. Follow up and be cool about it don’t be needy, no one cares that you need money. Be sure they actually need what you are offering before you contact them. I hope you have some skills to offer because these higher end guys know what they are talking about. They know if you are full of shit or  actually know what you are talking about. If you do have a skill, don’t worry about it, it wont be a problem. In my experience you don’t even need to put in more effort for the higher paying clients, you just put the same amount of effort as your lower paying ones. Don’t even take low paying clients to be honest. Take the highest end clients you can get.

How to raise capital for producing a product before you can start selling it?

After talking to some guys who were in this industry I can tell you that you don’t need capital early on to start producing the product. You can actually make a shitty prototype and go to companies to try to sell them the prototype. You tell them we’re not producing it we are researching to see if it is viable. Every big company does this! They don’t just create a thousand products and hope it’s going to work. They do research, go to companies and try to sell it. I hope you have marketing and sales skills because you’re going to need it! No ones going to do that shit for you. If you are going to create a real life product you’re going to have to market it and sell it. You’re going to have to spend a lot of time on it. This is not a get rich quick scheme, I hope you know that, considering you are a 17 year old high school student. I’m not saying it’s impossible but do your research. Take a look at Dragons Den. That’s a really good show where people come up with random products and try to get an investment. That’s what you are up against.

How do you start out Advertising with no massive budget?

I started with no budget. I didn’t really advertise anything. I just started creating content on YouTube and my blog. I promoted it on my Facebook and other social media and people just came to me. I just made sure that I talked to the little audience that I had in the beginning and created content targeted specifically to what they needed. That attracted even more people and it really resonated with them because obviously i’m giving them content they want. I just simply asked and gave them the content. I’m doing the same thing with these questions. I asked what you wanted and i’m giving you the answers. What i’m doing requires no investment. I already had the camera and laptop. All I had to do was purchase a cheap microphone, you don’t need much of anything. These days YouTube is basically free air on TV giving you access to limitless possibilities. You can partner up with other YouTube owners , have your stuff featured on their channels and have blog owners feature your content. I do that all the time and it works really well. You can build your audience just like that, you don’t need to invest. Just make sure you can deliver to a small audience before you are even thinking about a big audience. What’s the point right?

What is your general way of doing lead generation? I sell animated explainer videos and I ran out of start ups to contact. I spent 1-2 full days to create a list of 30-50 people to contact. Its becoming more and more of a struggle. I wish I had a list of 500 leads that i could easily cold call and sell to.

Now I like what you are doing here. One of my favorite things to do in the world is to cold call. You get right to the point and right to the decision maker. If you have nothing right now this is the fastest way to start a business in my opinion. So you are on to something good here. You spent a lot of time looking for people. You can just pay someone to go into the yellow pages to gather all the possible companies in a certain niche. Lawyers in Adelaide for example. Create an offer specifically for them. You can pay someone on Odesk $3 an hour to create that list. You don’t have to spend two days of your own time, your time is supposed to be worth more than that. You’re job is to make the calls of course. So who would need the explanation videos? Well people who already have a website or don’t have an explanation video on there yet. It’s obvious that they are making money if they have a website as a lawyer, especially if they are ranked on YouTube. So you can call them and use your previously completed projects to show them a look at how their competitors and people in bigger markets are obviously making this work. You tell them they can have this video and that they have to invest only a little bit of their time and that you will make this happen. You say we are going to have a call to action below the video and we’re going to get you more leads. Be sure to connect what they want, more leads and clients for their business, to your videos. That’s what people in our mastermind are doing. They are connecting the needs of their customers to what service they are offering, be it their website, eCommerce platform, videos or even info-graphics to the needs of the customer. This works really, really well. Let’s recap. Get a VA(virtual assistant) or do it yourself, gather a list of local companies, specifically ones you can visit by foot, call them, set up appointments, go there and sell to them. It works super well.

That’s all for today! Ask me your most complicated questions! Make use of my 6 years of marketing experience and knowledge to get your business moving forward. See you next time!