Stop Attracting The Wrong Leads

If your business is getting leads but they feel wrong, low-budget, or not ready to commit, that’s not “just how it is.” We’re digging into the real reason it keeps happening: your marketing messages may be training prospects to approach you like you’re a quick fix or a bargain option, even when you deliver deep, high-value results.

We walk through what marketing is supposed to do inside a healthy marketing ecosystem: build visibility with the right people, position you as the go-to expert, increase buyer readiness, and pre-qualify leads before they ever book a call. We get specific about how the topics you choose and the words you repeat shape your audience, including why “affordable” content attracts price shoppers and why focusing on short-term outcomes pulls in short-term clients.

Then we zoom in on marketing psychology and readiness. People buy outcomes, not services, and most audiences sit at different awareness levels (symptom aware, problem aware, solution aware). We talk through the stages of readiness, why we stop spending energy on people in pre-contemplation, and how to create content that helps qualified prospects self-identify and move toward action.

Finally, we add protection on the sales side with simple fail-safes: qualify for readiness, urgency, and fit through better questions on applications and sales calls, and audit the last 30 to 60 days to find where poor-fit leads enter your pipeline. If this hits home, subscribe, share it with a friend, and leave a review so more service providers can stop doing random acts of marketing and start attracting ready-to-buy ideal clients.

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Transcript

Why The Wrong Leads Show Up

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome back to Think Like a CMO, the podcast for entrepreneurs who are ready to stop doing random acts of marketing and to start thinking like the chief marketing officer your business actually needs. I'm your host, Sarah Gimmel. I'm a marketing strategist and consultant helping small business owners build marketing ecosystems that actually create predictable and reliable results. Around here we talk about what it really looks like to step into your role as a CMO, to see the big picture, to lead your marketing with strategy, and stop wasting time on productive busy work that isn't actually getting you anywhere. This is all about no fluff, honest conversations, potent strategies, and practical insights where you can use this right now to make your marketing work smarter. If you're in a season of your business right now where the leads coming in and the people who are raising their hand and showing interest in your service are not the ideal client. You're in the right place. This is exactly what we're talking about in this episode, and we're gonna break it down exactly why this is happening and what you can do starting immediately to start and turn it around. Generating leads is great, but you're in a season of your business where we don't need to just generate leads and we don't need to take just any client. We now need to make sure that the marketing is pre-qualifying those leads coming in. We want to make sure the leads coming in are not only ready to invest, but they are actually the ideal client to receive the transformation, that their mindset is in the right place, right? That they're gonna be the most successful in your program. I've been talking to a lot of service providers recently who have been in business for five, 10, even over 10 years. They're clear experts in their field, but they're like Sarah. The people who we're talking to are not ready to invest, they want a quick fix, they don't understand what we do, they don't understand the value of what we're providing. And the the uncomfortable part about this is it's not them, it's you. And I say that with the most love. But your marketing may actually be training them to think that way when they come to you, right? We can fix all of these things from the front-end marketing, and if we're not training them to see the value and to get into the right mindset and to pre-qualify themselves, then we're training them to do the exact opposite, right? So even though it's not fun to admit that it's actually you and your marketing that's creating this problem, the cool thing is when it's you, you now have control over the change, right? The people coming into your business are not random, it feels that way, but they're not random. They're reacting to the marketing that you're putting out, which means there's a disconnect in what you're putting out. And if we can identify that disconnect and fix it, then we can change the quality of the leads coming in. We don't need to convince people, right? That like, oh, well, this service compared to your $8 latte every single day, or you know, you can't just come one time, you have to come over and over again, and all these things. You don't need to convince them or argue with them, right? Those people are a segment of the market that can be served somewhere else. So we're gonna dive into that and in terms of identifying exactly where that connect, that disconnect is and what you can do to

What Marketing Is Really For

SPEAKER_00 3:25

change it. The first part of this is understanding what the job of your marketing actually is, right? So it seems like, well, duh, Sarah, like I've had the job of my marketing, and marketing it serves a lot of purposes, right? It's not just there to build visibility or brand awareness. It's not there just to generate the leads. It's also there to increase buyer readiness, to make sure that your offer is being positioned with value, to make sure you are being positioned as the thought leader, expert, go-to person in your industry, right? Your marketing is also there to filter and pre-qualify leads before they ever raise their hand. And something that I think is so easy to forget, even for small business owners who have been in the game for a little while, is that whatever you talk about the most in your marketing is what you are going to attract. So, for example, if you are a fitness coach who does workouts and nutrition, but you only talk about workouts, you're gonna get people who are coming to you for workouts and they might not value nutrition the same way or they might not think about nutrition the way that you need them to in order to get them to say yes to a program. If you are a chiropractor who does like traditional adjustments, but you also offer, say, laser therapy, or there's a massage therapist in your office, but you only talk about adjustments for an acute short-term pain, that's what you're going to attract. If you're a website designer and you only talk about the short-term affordable solutions, then of course you're gonna get people who are price shopping and just want you to build a quote unquote quick landing page, right? And they downplay the amount of work that actually goes into it because that's what your marketing is doing. The other piece of this is not just about the service that you talk about, it's how you talk about it. If you talk about short-term problems and short-term solutions, you are going to get people that are coming here for a short time, right? Think about marketing, for example. When I talk about marketing, I lead all of my marketing, all of my sales conversations with I am looking for long-term marketing strategic partnerships with my clients, right? We want to work with our clients for a minimum of six months. We incorporate that into all the front-end marketing, networking intros, uh, social media content, emails, sales calls forms. How you talk about the service is how it's positioned, right? That's the positioning. And we don't want to position you on accident and not even realize you're doing it, but we don't want to position your service as a short-term solution if we want people who are planning to stay for a long time. Now, on this same token, right, if we're talking about like how it's positioned and we're talking about short-term versus long-term, also how you talk about investment. If you lead with being affordable, you are going to get people who are price shopping. If you make a lot of content on social media that's constantly talking about, well, you buy this $8 latte and don't call me for free work, and you're constantly bringing attention to the fact that you have an audience who doesn't want to invest, you're going to attract more of that. High-end, ready to buy quality leads, don't want to see your content that speaks to the people who are low budget, right? Honestly, your marketing should just ignore those people. The people who want to pick your brain for free, the people who want a discount all the time. We don't even need to address them in your marketing at all. So, in talking about this messaging and topics and what we're talking about, how we're talking about it, the things that we decide to address in our marketing, right?

Messaging That Signals Value

SPEAKER_00 7:15

We have to remember the marketing psychology behind what's happening in your audience. Your audience is not buying a service, they're buying an outcome, right? So this kind of ties back to what we were just talking about. If you're selling the outcome of I'll have your, you know, one-page landing page done in two days, then you're going to get people who want a two-day relationship. The second piece of this marketing psychology that's really important is that people need to see what you do, right? How you do it, your beliefs, your values, your thought leadership in this service that you provide within your industry. They need to see it over and over and over and over again in order to remember you, to see you as the go-to expert in your field, and to also just simply remember what you do when it's time for them to make a buying decision when they decide they're ready for that solution. So there's this frequency piece of it, but there's also this third piece of the marketing psychology that I want you to remember is that not everyone in your audience is going to be problem aware. They are symptom aware, but they might not necessarily know what their problem is, or they think they know what their problem is, and you're coming and you're saying, that's not your problem, this actually is, right? So there's symptom awareness, there's problem awareness, and then there's solution awareness. We need to create marketing for all three of those people, but most of your audience is going to be symptom aware and problem aware. So there's this like element of education in your marketing, right? Teaching people if you're experiencing this, your problem actually might be this and not that. And once you realize that your problem is this, right? Here are the solutions that you have. Here are the solutions that you've tried that haven't worked. Here's a solution that you haven't tried. Tied into this symptom awareness and problem awareness is also their level of readiness to change. We don't need to waste marketing efforts talking to an audience that doesn't even know they have a problem, right? So the people who are like symptom aware, but they're actively seeking a solution, they might be seeking a solution for the wrong problem, and you can change their perspective on that. But the people who are completely unaware of the problem and not at all seeking a solution, this is all pre-contemplation. You can look this up on Google. It's the stages of readiness. This is something I used all the time when I was an addictions counselor. And this pre-contemplation stage is a stage of readiness that we do not need to even spend any time, energy, or money on in your marketing. An example of this pre-contemplation stage, if we go like back to the fitness example, if I'm a personal trainer and I'm talking to the audience who is not working out, they're not eating healthy, and they're the ones who are like, Well, I don't have time to work out, but I have time to watch Netflix. I don't have money to eat healthy, but I have money to eat out four days a week. This is an audience that is probably in pre-contemplation. They're not at all ready, right? They're not aware or they're in denial about the problem. We don't really want to talk to them. The next stage of readiness is contemplation. They're getting ready, they're aware, they're considering, right? They're kind of weighing if they're really actively seeking a solution. Some of your marketing is going to speak to this audience to try and get them over that hump to being ready, but just a small segment of your marketing. Most of your marketing should be dedicated to the people who are in the preparation stage, the action stage, and anything past there. Once they move into the preparation stage of readiness, they are ready to act quickly, right? This is where they actually begin seeking solutions, gathering information, downloading freebies, signing up for sales calls, right? And then action is actively being in a plan to modify their behavior. Modify their behaviors kind of like counseling speak, right? But this, and this is just by definition. But if you think about something like if you're a copywriter, right, they are actively ready to get it off their plate and hire someone to do their copywriting. The stages of readiness are very much related to uh like addictions and counseling, but we are making it work for marketing. So when you look this up, you're gonna see in maintenance, it's like they're preventing relapse, right? But even with your particular audience, when they are in a maintenance stage, this is something that they have prioritized already, right? They already knew they had a problem, they were seeking a solution, they invested time, energy, or money into that solution, and now what they're looking for is a little bit different. They might be looking for optimization, they might be looking for delegation, right? They may be looking for something a little bit different in this stage, but there's still an offer for them. But just speaking in in terms of marketing specifically, I want you to not at all speak to the people who don't know they have a problem. We're not here to convince people that they have a problem or that they need to seek a solution. And this is one of the most important parts about attracting the wrong type of people. Your marketing needs to speak so specifically to the person who knows that there's a problem. They're open to hearing that there this perspective shift of like you think your problem, you know, might be your nutrition, but you actually just need to regulate your nervous system, right? You might think that you need more exercise, but what you need is more stretching. You might think you need a copywriter, but what you really need is a virtual assistant to implement it for you, right? You might think you need a social media manager, but really you need a marketing consultant. You get where I'm going with this? And then we want to speak to the person, really, a lot of the marketing should be to the person who knows they have a problem, they've identified the problem, and now they are looking at what are my options to solve this problem. If your marketing is not doing this, this is where you're gonna notice a major disconnect of who's coming in. So by now you've probably gotten your wheels turning, right? Is it the type of marketing that you're doing? Is it the topics you're choosing to talk about? Is it how you're talking about your service or your product? Is it who you're talking to? Where is the most glaring gap just kind of in your brain as you're noodling on this and listening to this episode? And I want you to think about how you can really start to turn this around.

Add Filters To Your Sales Process

SPEAKER_00 14:01

Where can you make adjustments in the type of content you're creating, your messaging, right? And then when we look at all these things, it's all the front-facing things. Now, once the lead raises their hand and says, yes, I'm interested, there needs to be fail-safes in place to check the qualifications of these leads. So, for example, if you have an application, we need to be asking really strategic questions about readiness and fit and urgency, right? Same thing if you're going directly to a sales call, we can still be asking questions about these things. We need to identify, once someone raises their hand and said, Yes, I'm interested, I want more information, I want to talk to you about this. We need to identify three major things: readiness, urgency, and fit. Are they ready to commit to a program, a service, and are they ready to invest in said commitment? Is this urgent for them where they're looking for a solution immediately? And are they actually truly a good fit for you, right? You want to make sure that you're gonna drive with this person, that you guys are going to be able to work well together, and that you're actually gonna be able to get them the transformation that they're looking for. Your marketing does so much more than just entertaining and giving value and all these things. And now that you're moving into this season of your business, you're really noticing like this growing pain where you've done really well in the past by just getting visible and doing random things and kind of just throwing spaghetti at the wall. And now you're moving into this season where your marketing requires more from you, right? The rec the marketing requires more strategy, stronger, more intentional messaging, better expert positioning and value positioning, a clearer customer journey, better pre-qualification at the sales

Audit The Last 60 Days

SPEAKER_00 16:03

process. So, what I want you to do with this episode, what I want you to do with this information, I have a little bit of homework, if you will. I want you to think back over the last 30 to 60 days, and you can go a little bit further back if you need a bigger data pool. But I want you to really think about who are the leads that have come across your desk in that time frame. And obviously, if you made it this far in the episode, a lot of those people coming in are not the ideal quality leads that we're looking for, right? They're not the ready-to-buy people, they're not the people we really want to be focused on serving. So we don't necessarily need to focus on that aspect of it. We need to focus on the aspect of where did you attract this person? How did they enter the pipeline? What type of content were they seeing that made them think, yes, this is what I need, that I'm a good fit for this program or this service or this person, right? Where did we attract them? Where did they enter the pipeline? And how can we make changes to those pieces and assets of marketing first to better call in a different audience, right? So your marketing is gonna is gonna serve two purposes. It's gonna call in the audience you want, it's also gonna repel the audience you don't want. I'll give you a great example. Work with a doctor in Arizona and we're looking at her marketing. She's moving away from insurance and she's gonna uh only accept self-pay. So in the marketing, we have to do two things. We need to talk to the people who are prepared to self-pay for treatment, and we need to essentially scare off the people that are only looking for something that is 100% covered by their insurance, right? And there's ways to do that subtly and directly. You can do both, right? But that's where you have to really think about where are they entering? Where could we have caught this person? So they're entering the pipeline through some type of front-facing marketing, social media, networking, ads, things like that, right? Then they might come into the pipeline, they might see the emails, the blogs, they might listen to the podcasts, whatever that is. And then once they actually get completely down the pipeline into this conversion phase, now they're at the sales process. Where can we ask better questions to catch the people who have made it this far, but they're not quality leads, right? Going back to this idea of readiness, urgency, and fit. How can we identify if you're not ready, if this is not urgent for you, or if you're potentially not a good fit? Where can we add those fail-safes into the sales process before we spend time on a sales call, before they come in for a consult, right? Before we spend all this time pitching them a service that they're not looking to invest in.

Get Support And Share The Show

SPEAKER_00 18:47

And per usual, you already know who you can call if you need help, okay? This is my this is my jail. This is what I do every day. We're figuring out how we can improve the the funnel, the messaging, the positioning, the overall strategy behind your marketing so that we are attracting quality, ready-to-buy clients, right? We want the marketing to not only get you visible, we want it to get you visible to the right people. We want your marketing to increase buyer readiness, to nurture them, to teach them that you are the obvious go-to choice in your industry and that what you have is so valuable that when you drop the price point on them, they're like, great, that's all. That's all I have to pay. Wonderful, where do I sign up? They might need a payment plan. Who gives a shit? Right? We want the marketing to get them through that entire process. And in that entire process, they are self-qualifying before you have to qualify them. By the time they come across your desk for you to qualify them, right? We want to make sure that they have self-qualified to where more often than not we are getting the dreamiest clients who see the value in what you do, they're ready for the solution, they're ready to invest, and more importantly, they're ready to commit to the type of relationship that you are looking to build with your clients. If you want short-term relationships and turn people around and give them quick wins, that's great. There's nothing wrong with that. We just want to make sure your marketing speaks to that. But if you're a service provider who wants your people to stick around for six or even 12, 18, you know, 3700 months, we need to speak to that in your marketing. So anyway, you know who to call, okay? If you need a little bit of help, if you need expert guidance, feedback, troubleshooting, strategizing, implementation support. I'll put all of my information in the show notes per usual. You can access uh a free clarity call with me. I'll drop you some resources that you can get started on with for yourself, some uh different places I can send you for resources. Go ahead and check out the show notes. And per usual, we're gonna skip them, skip the outro on this episode. But per usual, if you loved this episode, please share it with a friend. Make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss anything else. And if you haven't already, go ahead and leave us a review on whatever platform it is that you're listening on. This show is completely free. I absolutely love doing this podcast, and the greatest thank you that you could give us is that share or that review. So we'll catch you in the next episode.