The Client Journey Behind My 7-Figure Business

Most marketing plans start with a checklist: post more, grow the list, launch the podcast, chase more leads. I build mine around one person.

In this episode, I walk through the client journey behind my seven-figure business, and how I build it backward: starting from the moment an ideal client says "I want to work with you," all the way back to the first time they discover me.

I share a real example from a recent engagement with a financial advisory firm, and how I'm using what I learned from that one client to design a path for more companies like them. Because just like a party, you don't send the invitations before the venue is ready.

In this episode:

• Why marketing feels like a never-ending checklist, even with a team
• How to build your client journey around one real client instead of a made-up persona
• Why working backward from "I want to hire you" saves you from building marketing you don't need
• How every part of your marketing (content, lead magnet, emails, consultations) has a different job
• How to diagnose where your marketing is breaking down
• The one question that tells you which marketing activities you can stop doing

If you're doing a lot of marketing without seeing proportional growth in clients and revenue, this episode will help you design a more intentional path from "I've never heard of you" to "You're exactly who I've been looking for."

RESOURCES

The Service First Framework (free digital copy)

I break down what each part of your marketing needs to do in the client journey.
https://training.elinatoli.com/f/service-first-framework

Marketing Your Truth Collective.

Hands-on workshops and trainings to strengthen every part of your marketing, from messaging and content to email, client journey, visibility and conversion.
 https://elinatoli.com/collective

Thank you so much for tuning in to Marketing Your Truth™! If you enjoyed today’s episode, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who could benefit from aligning their marketing with their values.

To stay updated on future episodes, visit https://marketingyourtruth.com, and follow me on LinkedIn, @EliNatoli. 

See you next time, where we’ll dive deeper into how to build authentic connections with your audience. 

Transcript

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When we think about growing our business, we normally tend to think about all the marketing boxes that we need to check off our list. We need to post consistently. We need to grow our email list. We need to launch that newsletter or get on podcasts or create more videos or build partnerships, right? You get the point. There's a list that goes on and on and it never ends. And even if you have a your team, you eventually hit the same problem. There's always going to be more than what you could be doing that you have time, people, or money to do. But after building my own business to seven figures, I don't think that's actually how we should be building our marketing in the first place. I don't build my marketing around the list of things that I need to be doing on a daily or weekly or a monthly basis. I build it around one person. And I'm going to show you exactly what I mean, including how I'm using this right now to build an entire marketing ecosystem and a marketing path based on one client that I just finished working with. In the beginning, when we're trying to get our business off the ground, the checklist actually makes sense. Because when you're first getting your business off the ground, there's certain things that you need to have in place before you quote unquote open up doors to do business. You need to, for example, have a website. You need to turn your expertise into a solution or multiple offers. You need to figure out how to get in front of your ideal buyers. Um, is it a social media platform or platforms and which ones they are and how you can set up shop on those platforms? Maybe you need to start thinking about well, do I need a community? Do I need a newsletter? Like building my audience. Like, where do I do that? How do I drive traffic? The point being is that there are things that need to exist in order for the business to get off the ground. So naturally, it makes sense at that point for us to create a list and start checking things off. But eventually, when the business is off the ground and now you're in the place of just running the business, day-to-day of the business, especially around the marketing engine part of things, then we are confronted with this whole new list that again is just keeps on growing. And it seems like we're never, like no matter how much of it we do, we never get to the end of it. So we need to consistently post on those social media platforms. We need to grow that email list. We need to nurture those people on the list. We then keep on adding other stuff, right? Well, maybe I should be inside networking events, or maybe I need to start building strategic partnerships or be speaking on stages or summits or on different podcasts. And then the internet people tell us, well, videos outperform posts. So then we think, well, maybe I should add video production to that list as well. And so eventually we get to this point where marketing starts to feel like this giant game of whack-a-mole. Because no matter how many things you check off that list, there's always something else you haven't gotten to. There's always going to be the list of things that you just haven't been able to give it attention or time for the last whatever many months. And by the way, this isn't just a solopreneur problem. Maybe you have people helping you with your marketing, or maybe you have an actual marketing your team. You're not immune to this either. Let's say that your your team finally gets consistent on those five different platforms that you want to be posting on. And now you decide that it's time to launch that newsletter. Wonderful. But at the same time, you're also looking at what's happening with video and thinking we really should be doing more videos because it's outperforming our regular posts. And then somebody also on the your team says we should really launch that podcast that we've been talking about for the last four months. So my point is there's always more things that we think that we should be doing. I'm gonna come back to that in a minute because there's actually a bigger issue underneath all of this, underneath this type of approach or thinking. But for now, my point is that even with a your team, you don't have unlimited people, unlimited time, or unlimited budget. So whether you're doing all of your marketing yourself, outsourcing part of it, or have a marketing your team, you eventually arrive at some version of the same conclusion, which is we need more capacity, we need better systems, we need to become more efficient, or somehow we need to figure out how to get more of the things on this list done. And that's where I believe we make the wrong diagnosis. Because the way we've been taught to think about marketing is creating this problem in the first place. We've been taught to think about marketing as a collection of activities. And underneath all of this is this assumption that the more boxes that we're able to check, the more marketing we're doing. And if we're doing more marketing, that means our business should be growing. Our revenue should be growing more. Except that's not necessarily what happens. You can be posting, emailing, podcasting, running ads, creating videos, spending a lot of money doing all types of marketing initiatives and still look at your revenue and think, why don't the result match all this effort that we're putting into this? That's the question I think we should be asking. After building my own business to seven figures and working with hundreds of business owners over the years, I've come to think about marketing really differently. Marketing done well to me is one client's journey built deeply and deliberately for one real person. And then when it's working, repeat it for more people like that. So, what I'm asking you is forget about your 5,000 LinkedIn followers for a minute. Forget about that 10,000 people on your email list, forget about how many people saw your last social media post or entered your funnel. Imagine there's only one person sitting across from you, one person you would genuinely love to work with. Maybe you've already worked with this person. In fact, that's one of the easiest places to start. Think about a client where you finished the engagement and thought, I would really love 10 more clients exactly like that one. That's exactly where you should be starting. Like if I wanted to get in front of one more person like that, where would I find them? Maybe they're listening to a certain podcast, maybe they're on LinkedIn, maybe they are a part of an organization, or maybe somebody else already has a relationship with them and a strategic partnership could put you in front of them. Now, for the sake of this example, let's say that they're on LinkedIn. Wonderful. Now, most people immediately go, okay, what should I be posting on LinkedIn this week or this month? Or how often should I be posting on LinkedIn? Or what format is it video? Is it carousel? Is it regular post? Is it image or no image? I want you to start with a different set of questions. Questions like, what does this person need to hear from me to understand that I really get their situation? What do they need to understand about themselves and their own situations and why they're stuck and unable to get to where they need to get? What have I noticed about their situation that perhaps nobody else in my industry is actually talking about it or overlooking? What do they need to understand about the path that it would take them to get out of this stuck point and get them to the outcome that they're trying to reach? Or what do they need to understand about my approach, my methodology, my solution to know that this solution makes sense for them? Essentially, what I'm asking is ask the type of questions that the answer ends up being the type of content that this person would read and think to themselves, this is exactly what's happening to me. Nobody else has explained it this way. And this person really gets me. And eventually the accumulation of all those interactions adds up to them saying, I really trust the way this person thinks. That's the job of your content when you show up on LinkedIn. Do you see that? That's a different starting point than asking how many times a week I should be posting or what format or what time of a day. Now, let's follow through that example. So now let's assume that this person is seeing your content and interacting with your content. Wonderful. Now what? What do you want this person to do next? Do you want them to book The a consultation with you? Do you want them to enroll in an offer directly? Do you want them to join your community? Do you want them on your email list because you know that they need more time with you before they're ready for that consultation? Whatever the answer is, once you figure out what that next step is, what you need to ask yourself is how do I make that next step happen? Now, let's say for the sake of this example, I want this person to be on my email list. And I'm going to use a lead magnet, a free resource, to get them there. Now, notice how differently I would think about that lead magnet. I'm not going to ask what's something valuable or free that I can put together to give to this person so I can get them on my email list. I'm going to ask, what could I create for this particular person that would help them understand their situation better and at the same time help them understand something important about the way that I approach solving their specific problem and getting them to that specific solution? Because I don't just want them to download something and get on my list. I want the experience of that resource, of that lead magnet, to make them think this person really understands what I'm dealing with. And I want to hear more from them. So do you see that's a different job that I'm asking my lead magnet to do? So when my first email shows up in their inbox, they're not thinking, who's this person again? Or what did I download? They are interested in opening it. That first experience has already set up the next experience, right? So now follow this path through. Now they grab the lead magnet, they're on my email list. You're going to continue following just that one person. Now what? You don't all of a sudden forget about the human being and start thinking about, okay, then I need to have a newsletter going out every Tuesday. What am I going to write about for the next four Tuesdays? I want you to stay with that same person. And essentially, you want to see how each experience is adding up over time, right? The experience of them interacting with your initial content on LinkedIn, the experience of them when they grab that lead magnet, the experience of them when they're reading your newsletter or your emails. What is this adding up to in terms of understanding their situation better? Understanding how you help and your approach better, and how you are the right guide, the right person, and your solution is the right solution to get them to there. And by the way, it is worth pausing for a second and highlight or underline something here. And that is this. As you can tell, every part of your marketing has a different job. So your posts have a different job, your lead magnet has a different job, your emails have a different job. If you get that person on a consultation, it has a different job. And this is how you create the path or the ecosystem or the flywheel that eventually the experiences are adding up. So it's not just about I need to post valuable content on LinkedIn and I need to put together something valuable for my lead magnet or I need to send more valuable information for my emails. Every single one of them has a job. I go more deeper into what those jobs are inside my book The Service First framework. And of course, I have specific trainings inside my Marketing Your Truth collective where I pull apart what each of these parts of your marketing should be doing and what you need to be communicating to build that experience. So over time, as they're interacting with your content, with your lead magnet, with your emails, or any other initiatives that you're doing, that collection of interactions, those experiences add up to them connecting with you deeply, understanding why you're the right person, trusting that working with you or enrolling with you is the only best option for them. All right. So I just wanted to underline that point, but let's keep moving and follow this person. So let's say that person has interacted with my LinkedIn post. Now they've grabbed my lead magnet. Now they're on my email list, getting my emails. And now the question is what's the next step that I want this person to take with me? Is it a consultation? Do I want them at a free training where they can experience me and see the human behind the solution? Do I want them listening to my podcast? Do I want them inside my community? In other words, what is the next experience in this journey that I'm creating for them? And every step that you're taking them, you are following the same person step by step by step. Now, you might be listening to this and thinking, well, Eli, but we've done this. We have a client journey. We know how someone finds us. We have content that brings them into our ecosystem. We have a lead magnet. We nurture them inside our email campaign. And eventually we invite them to a consultation. We have all those pieces in place. So if that is you, I want you to pay really close attention to this next part. Because one of the things that I see, even with businesses that have intentionally built a client journey, is that they often build that journey in the wrong direction. So what I mean by that is they start with how do we get in front of more of our ideal buyers? How do we get more traffic? How do we get more visibility? And then after that, is how do we turn that visibility to people on our email lists? How do we keep growing those leads on our lists? And then how do we keep on nurturing those people? How do we eventually get them to a consultation? And so as a result, they end up building everything that happens after someone enters their side of the world. But I start at the very end. I start with a moment where the person is sitting right across me and saying, I want to work with you. And then I work backwards. And in a minute, I'm going to show you exactly how I worked backwards from someone saying, I want to hire you, all the way to figuring out what I should be talking about on LinkedIn. Because working backwards is going to save you from building a whole lot of marketing that you don't need in the first place. But first, before we do that, I want to explain why I keep emphasizing the one person. Because one of the things that makes marketing so confusing and in a lot of cases so overwhelming is that we've been trained to think about marketing as a numbers game. How do I grow my audience? How do I get more followers? How do I get more leads? How do I get more people on a sales call, right? We're almost always thinking about hundreds or thousands of people at the same time. But the issue is that when you're thinking about thousands of people, it's really easy to start thinking about marketing in terms of channels and tactics. Should I be on LinkedIn or on Instagram? Should I start a YouTube channel or a podcast? Should I run ads? Should I start a newsletter or should I be speaking on stages? You get the point, right? But when you shrink all of that down to one person, you start thinking about the human being, not what you should be doing. You start thinking about what does this person need right now? What are they dealing with? What do they already understand about their own situation? What haven't they understood and no one else is explaining to them? What are they experiencing? What would make them trust the way that I think or my methodology or my approach or my solution? You've probably heard the saying if you're marketing to everyone, you're marketing to no one. I think that we can actually take that further. We don't just create your messaging and your copy for one person. You should actually be building your entire marketing experience for that one person too. Because if you can build the right journey for one person, you can create the infrastructure to take hundreds or thousands of people just like that one person through that same experience, through that same journey. And that's exactly what I'm doing right now. I recently wrapped up an engagement with a financial advisor who leads a your team of 23 people. So we're talking about an established company that is already doing marketing. They have leads coming through, they have a your team behind their marketing, they're running ads, like all those things exist. And what we did together was uncover their differentiation. We figured out what was actually unique about the way they help their ideal clients and what gives our ideal prospects a reason to choose their company when they're comparing them to other companies that are just as qualified and just as experienced. Then we worked all of that into their messaging, rewrote their website, we looked at the larger marketing ecosystem. How does that differentiation carry from their website into their social media, to their emails, into their ads, and all the way down to the conversations that the sales your team is having. Now, when we finished the project, I thought, wow, I really enjoyed this. I loved working with a company at this level of maturity. I love the complexity of their situation. I love the kind of problems we were solving. And I thought, I would love more clients just like this one. Now, I could have immediately said, wonderful, let me get on LinkedIn and use my LinkedIn navigator to target more financial advisors and start like this DM strategy and connect with them and start conversations and ring them into my email list or maybe run ads. And again, none of those things are wrong. But if I had started there, I would have been right back at creating a checklist. So instead, I ask if I wanted another client just like this one, what would that person's journey look like? And because I had just spent all this time with this person inside his company, I wasn't guessing. I knew where things were getting stuck, I knew what they were frustrated by, I knew where marketing and sales had become disconnected, I knew where their differentiation could get lost between the website, the emails, the social media, the marketing your team, the sales your team. And I knew some of the things they thought the problem was before we got inside the business. And what we discovered the problem actually was once we started working together. And I know for a fact, this is true also for you, that if one client, one company at this stage is experiencing those things, there are almost certainly other companies, other clients dealing with some version of that same problem. So now I have something much more useful than a buyer persona that I made up on a piece of paper. I have a real person's experience. And that gives me the raw material to build the journey, to build that experience. Now, let's go back to what I promised earlier. Remember how I said I built this journey backward? Think about throwing a party. If you're inviting 100 people, you're not gonna send out invitations first. And then as people start walking through the door thinking, wait a second, is this venue big enough for 100 people? Do you have enough chairs? Who's feeding these people? You prepare the experience first. You find a venue, you arrange the food, you set up tables and chairs. In other words, you make sure everything's ready before you start inviting the guests. But when it comes to marketing, most businesses often start with the invitation. We need more followers, we need more leads, we need more podcast appearances, we need more visibility. Wonderful. Let's assume all of that works out. But what happens if 10,000 of your perfect prospects show up tomorrow? Where are you taking them? What experience have you built for them? That is why I start at the very end. So let's use this financial advisor example I gave you earlier. Imagine six months from now, somebody who runs a company. Is similar to that one client is sitting in a consultation call with me and says, Eli, I want to work with you. What I would ask myself is, what would have needed to happen before that moment for that decision to make sense for that person? So they would probably need to understand their own problem differently than they do right now. And they also need to understand why my approach, my methodology, my way of solving the problem is the right choice for them. They also need to understand why I'm the right guide behind that solution that would once and for all get them to that solution that they've been looking for, which means they need enough exposure to my thinking, to my methodology, to the way that I approach the solution and solving the problem, that the consultation isn't our first meaningful interaction. Because when they're on that consultation, I'm not working hard trying to convince them that my solution is the right solution. It's really just coming together so we can dot the I's and cross the T's and for them to really understand is this the right fit or did I understand everything correctly? And ask any questions they might have. And that is how you take the stress off you and your team. Or if you're the one who's running those consultations, that's how you do less consultation calls because you're converting more. All right. So for me, email is one of the primary ways that I do that. Wonderful. Now I know that I need to build an email experience. So the question is what conversations does this particular person need to have with me? Okay. Again, the goal is that these conversations there are accumulating to giving this person the experience that I need them to have. So then eventually the accumulation of those conversations and experiences adds up to this person thinking this approach is the best approach for us to get to that solution. And this person is the right person to guide us there. Okay. So that changes the conversation from what valuable resource do I need to send them so they know that I'm credible or that I'm experienced, that I know I'm what I'm talking about, to things that help them understand again, themselves, me, my solution, my approach better. So if I go back to that example that I just gave you for this particular client, it'll be things like, are you spending more money generating leads without paying enough attention to what happens after those leads arrive? Or helping them understand like, are your marketing and sales your team communicating the same differentiation that gives your ideal buyers a reason to choose you? Or are you marketing to your peers instead of speaking to the questions your actual buyers are asking? These are the conversations, by the way, that I know matters to this person because I've just spent months working inside this business. I'm working with this person. All right. And again, these are just some examples just to illustrate the points. All right, so let's move on and move backwards. Okay. So now the email experience is in place. I need to step backwards and ask myself, how does this person get on my email list in the first place? Maybe I need a lead magnet. But again, I'm not going to ask, should it be a PDF, a video, or a checklist? The question I'm asking is based on everything I learned working with this company and this client, what's one of the most important things another person like this or like them needs to understand? That becomes the entry point. That becomes the lead magnet. So then now I go backwards again. Where do I find this person so I can put this lead magnet in front of them? Are they on LinkedIn? Are there strategic partners who already have these people in their audience? Are they listening to a certain podcast? So when I ask that question, those activities, whether I'm going to be on LinkedIn or decide to pitch to podcasts to be on as a guest, or I go to do a joint venture partnership, those activities have a reason to exist. I'm not going to get on podcasts because internet people told me that podcast guesting is a great marketing strategy. I'm getting on those specific podcasts because this person is listening to these podcasts. And I've already built somewhere meaningful for them to go after they hear me. Build a party first, then send the invitations. And again, in order for us to make this practical, you have to start with a real client, real person, someone you think that I would happily work with 10 more people like them. Not because they paid you the most, but because the fit was right. You understood them, they valued the work, you were able to do your best work, and you got them strong results. And once you know who that person is, you want to start at the very end. Where do you ultimately want the next person like them to go? Is it on a consultation? Do you want them inside a workshop? Do you want them in your community? You want to start at the very end and work backwards. And you want to ask yourself, what do they need to understand, believe, or experience before they're ready for that step? And then you want to build that experience. And then you ask yourself, how do they need to get into that experience? And then you build that experience. And you keep going backwards all the way to where do I find this person? That's when you decide whether LinkedIn, YouTube, podcasts, partnerships, ads, speaking, or whatever that is would make sense for you. And as you are going backwards and building each of these experiences, every single step, you want to ask yourself two questions. What do I want this person to do next? And what do they need to understand, believe or experience in order to want to take the next step? Those two questions can organize almost your entire marketing ecosystem. When I look back at the last 15 years of running my own business and the different offers that I've built, this is essentially what I've done over and over and over again. Sometimes the experience was content, sometimes it was email, sometimes it was a live event, sometimes was my podcast, sometimes it was consultation. But every single one of these have jobs. And the goal, as I said earlier, is that as this person interacts with each of these pieces of your marketing pieces, the experiences accumulate to them reaching the conclusion that your solution is the right solution and you're the right person behind this solution. And that's what gives you continuity. One experience leads naturally to the next. And now I'm doing only one or two things. I'm either bringing more of the right people into the journey that I've already built, or I'm strengthening what happens inside that journey. And this is also what makes diagnosing the problem inside your marketing engine a lot easier. It's easier for you to diagnose what's actually broken in your marketing or what's missing in your marketing. Because let's say that I realize not enough of the right fit clients are entering the journey with me. Okay, I know now where to look. I would be asking, like, am I showing up in the right places to get in front of this person? And if it is, then the question is, am I communicating what I need to communicate for this person to understand that I'm the right person and to enter into this journey with me? But then if I notice that yes, enough of the right ideal fit clients are coming into this journey with me, they are on my email list, but they're not grabbing consultation with me. Well, that's a different problem, right? Now I need to look at the email experience. Am I giving them enough reasons for them to understand that I need to grab a consult because this is the right person and this solution is the right solution, right? I'm not going to focus on I need to bring more leads so I can get more consultation. I need to fix that part of the experience. But now let's say that I'm getting enough people booking calls and I'm having those sales conversations, but I'm not converting as many people as I like to become clients. So again, I'm not going to automatically think about, well, I need to run ads to bring more people into this funnel. So then, you know, the numbers game will work itself out. It's that's not very efficient. That's not very practical. The better way of solving this is to ask myself, what's happening before they arrive at the consultation? It's clear that these people either don't know why I'm different or why I'm the right choice or why my solution is the right solution. So I need to strengthen everything that happened upstream before they even got on that consultation. So, in other words, the journey tells you where to look. And one of my favorite consequences of building your marketing this way is that you can finally let go of some of the things that probably you shouldn't be doing in the first place because so much of the marketing is driven by fear of missing out. We're just told like we have to be on five platforms, or we need to be on YouTube, or we need to launch a podcast, or we need to, I don't know, be posting five times a week. But nobody stops to ask, like, why? Right? There's a much simpler question that needs to be answered, which is does this thing that I want to do, does it have a job in this journey that I'm building for this person? If the answer is yes, do it and do it well. But if it's no, let it go. That's how you get focused. That's how your your team gets focused. That's how you stop scattering your time, money, and effort across 17 different marketing activities and wondering why your revenue doesn't seem proportionate to everything that you're putting into it. So, as we're wrapping up this episode, here's what I want to leave you with. Starting today or this week, pick one client that you would happily work with 10 more times. Then I want you to work backwards. Imagine that person eventually becoming a client. What would need to happen immediately before they said yes? What would they need to understand, believe, or experience for that yes to make sense to them? And then I want you to ask what needs to happen before that, and then build that experience. Then what needs to happen before that? Keep going backwards until you arrive at the very first moment that they discover you. Then look at what you've built. That's your marketing plan. You have a person, you have a path, and you have a series of experiences intentionally designed to take that person from I've never heard of you, to you're exactly who I've been looking for. That's your client journey. And that's the client journey behind my seven-figure business. The offers have changed, the audience has changed, the platforms have changed. But this way of thinking has stayed consistent throughout all these years. And if I had to rebuild my business from scratch tomorrow, this is exactly where I would start. One person, one journey, build it intentionally and well, and bring more people like them into it.