If you want to get my own Onboarding Email Sequence which is 8 emails with the delays I put in between. Along with instructions on how to use them too, head to rezzz.com/a263 and pick them up.

What is onboarding

Onboarding is a term that's thrown around quite often and it has a few different meanings. In the context of this show I'm referring to when a client becomes a client, how are you bringing them into your world.

What sort of process to you have that helps that client understand what this engagement is going to look like.

When you open up any box, there's a quick start guide right?

Even for things that are commonplace like a TV, headphones, or even a mug that I got from my wife as a gift.

That's what an onboarding sequence is for you and your business.

I've heard it as a "Welcome Package." Whatever you want to call it, I want to share with you the 4 essential parts of it that you must include. Then share with you 2 other bonus tips that will help your marketing and sales.

Go ahead and grab mine, the link is in the show notes or by heading to rezzz.com/a263.

How to use your service

That's the first part, you want to explain all the ways that a customer can utilize your services. This means how they will communicate with you.

Set the boundaries right here. If you want them to use a ticketing system, email, text messaging. This is how you tell them to do so.

Also share with them what they can expect when they do communicate with you. Will you give them a response in 24 hours? Will there be an automated response? What can they expect during off-hours?

Define that process right from the start so that there's no confusion along the way.

What to expect

This maybe should've been the first since it's most important. If the client knows what to expect from you, then there's no way of misinterpreting anything.

This can also be setting the tone. If you want the client to be open to your suggestions, then share that in a nice way. Be humble, but firm too.

If you need the client to accomplish something by a certain date, share that with them.

Don't assume anything. Even by spelling something out that they may know levels that field

When to expect

Share with them when they can expect certain things from you. If you send out weekly emails, then tell them when they can expect them. If you have a timeline of tasks, give them ample time to get the things you need but share with them a date when you need it.

Open the line of communication

Having something that immediately goes out to a new client in this way, allows you to open that line up. They feel comfortable because they know how to talk with you. You feel comfortable knowing that you have set the tone and boundaries.

There is none of this awkwardness like it's the 7th grade winter dance and you are wondering who is going to start the conversation.

Bonus Tips

This is your opportunity as the professional to position yourself here. By doing this you are driving the conversation and because of that, you then can ask questions along the way.

Want to know how someone found you? Ask in the very first email.

Want to know why they hired you? Ask while it's still fresh in their minds.

These are opportunities that you can take advantage of get amazing information that you can then turn into your sales copy and conversations with leads.

The reason for this is so that you can take action. I'm all about that action taking as you know. Having a show each and every single day without a doubt can be overwhelming. You may already have a backlog of shows that you want to listen to. Maybe there's a bunch that you don't have any interest in hearing as well.

With that, the new format will be this.

Every Friday, you'll be a fly on the wall for a one-on-one coaching session with someone. I will have a conversation with someone who's applied to be on the show. They have a specific problem or situation that they want to get some help on.

The objective is for you to hear what they are going through and maybe it'll help you too if you are in a similar situation. As the saying goes "a rising tide raises all boats."

The big benefit of this is you, the audience. You as a Feaster can help and support them through offering encouragement, advice, and accountability. You may even want to work with them if you have such a need.

If you want to be on the show, it's easy, just apply here.

Every Tuesday there will be an actionable show. It will either be what you are familiar with already from the previous 261 episodes where I answer a question. Or I'm going to be introducing a resource or strategy that you can walk away from the show and put right in your business.

For example, how to use Advanced Search on Twitter to find local clients to work with.

Another example could be that I bring on a lawyer to the show to talk about contracts.

Doesn't mean that you may not see the podcast show up in your podcatcher on other days, but this is what I'm committing to you today and what you can expect from the show.

I want to make Ask Rezzz as actionable and valuable to you as possible. If you have any ideas for the show, let me know through Twitter or email.

The Ask Rezzz show is dedicated to being the most accessible and most valuable podcast for freelancers out there.

You can come on and get one-on-one coaching from me along with the support of the audience. Also get resources, strategies, and expert answers to your questions.

Not only that, but if you want to know anything about home automation, he's the guy to talk with.

During a conversation one day, Chris mentioned that if there was ever an opportunity in which I myself could be interviewed, rather than me doing the interviewing, he wanted it.

There's no better day than on this very special, milestone episode of Ask Rezzz.

I'll be honest, I really had no idea what Chris was going to ask me. He could've asked me anything at all. The only constraint was to stay within a certain time, the rest was up to him.

Chris rose above and beyond to the task and asked me 3 amazing questions that I know you'll enjoy.

Are you a Freelancer? Do you identify with the Unemployable?

What advice can you offer to someone to embrace where they are in their freelance career so that they can take that next step?

Where do you see yourself in 2, 3, or 5 years?

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How do I know Chris?

I've heard a few of his shows before in the past and when Joe mentioned that I should reach out to Chris to be on his podcast, Getting Work to Work, for me it was a no brainer.

Chris was a great interviewer, genuinely curious, asking things that to be honest, I hadn't been asked about before.

One topic that we talked about most was personalization and delight. I talk about personalization a lot, it is what I do for clients, right?

In this episode, though, I talked about personalization in regards to leads and client interaction, not doing the wor

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“Solve Problems by using communication and data.”

In case you don’t want to read the rest of this, you can check out the full episode for all the details.

In the episode, I shared a variety of things including:

• How I manage to stay ahead of communication with leads and clients
• How I create the unexpected delight
• The one thing that I realized I was doing wrong in my marketing

Last year I was talking with a coaching client of mine and shared some of the simple things that I do specifically to delight clients.

He sent me this email "I finished a large project with a client and sent a small gift to them based on something you said in the conversation we had a couple week ago. The response I got was insane! I received a message from them thanking me for the gift card. They then followed it up with 'no one ever does that for me, so I really really appreciated it.'"

That small gift was a $10 Starbucks card.

What is one small way you can delight your leads and clients?

Definitely go checkout Getting Work to Work Episode 227.

If you have a chance too, check out a few of the other episodes as well.

I’d like to thank Chris for being a part of it and including me along amazing folks like Liston Witherill, Tim Kelley, and Ilise Benun

I thought that I'd share an answer to a question that she asked me on the show.

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She asks all her guests this question.

As someone who's watched many zombie movies from a very young age all the way to today with The Walking Dead, this was a welcomed and fun question.

Since I've actually thought about this over the years I had my answer at the ready.

My winter coat, a broom, and my skis.

A broom because you can carve the handle into a point and use it to defend yourself with some level of distance.

That's the obvious item in this list.

Like Janelle, you may be scratching your head a bit at the winter coat and skis.

It's simple, first of all, there's never been a movie, tv show, or anything zombie related where it's taking place in the snow.

So I'm going north when the zombie apocalypse hits.

If you are thinking, "Jason, but you are basing your logic off of movies." Of course, I am, this whole scenario is predicated on a hypothetical movie scenario.

But I'm open to the conversation, so let's look at it this way.

Zombies aren't exactly fleet of foot. They often get caught up on branches, stuck in mud, and even caught up on fences.

It stands to reason that in waist deep snow, they wouldn't fare too well either.

Additionally, snowy regions tend to be less populated which reduces the number of potential zombies.

If I can find a mountainous area, then there could be a natural way in which to protect myself and family as well.

I pose this question to you. If your family is good, and you have 6 minutes to grab 3 items in the zombie apocalypse, what would you grab? Shoot me a tweet and let me know.

If you are wondering how all this relates to your business, it doesn't. I just though that I would have some fun today in answering an oddball question so that you can maybe get a glimpse into other parts of my head.

If you absolutely need it to relate to business, the one thing I can say is to put yourself in a position where the odds swing in your favor.

This is a great question for a lot of people thinking about how to use social media for their business.

Simply put, I don't like saying this, but it applies. The answer is, it depends.

I'm going to put aside the paid ads on the platform because that's a different game altogether and really just stick to answering the question in the context of organic engagement.

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Organic Engagement

You have to remember that it's a social network, the key word here is "social".

So that lends itself to the awareness stage, or visibility as this person puts it.

That doesn't mean you can't use it for sales, but from my experience, sales needs to be at a deeper level on the platform, say in DMs, Lives, IGTV and that sort of thing.

I say "it depends" also because I think the product/service you are selling has to make sense to where the person is on Instagram.

If you are trying to sell full web builds, or branding, I think that's going to be tough to sell on any social platform, even Instagram.

Not saying that it can't be done, because I've done it. Which I'll explain in just a minute.

What I am saying is that the buyer who's scrolling through their feed or viewing stories of people they follow aren't in the buying mode. They could be standing in line waiting to buy milk, or in the back of an Uber.

They are in consumption mode and most likely in some sort of passive state of mind.

Now if you are selling a product, such as t-shirts, jewelry, that certainly works because of the visual elements there.

If you have a lower tier service or product, say that or a similar price as a t-shirt, then that too may work for you too.

Since you are most likely selling services, this could be something like a mini-course or an ebook.

"Selling on social media"

Back to how I sold a higher priced item on social media.

As you know, my social platform of choice is Twitter. I've built up a following over there, from what Twitter tells me, for the past 12 years.

Twitter in my opinion is even harder to sell on than Instagram. Especially higher priced items. Simply because it's a text-based platform. Sure there are images you can attached, but it's text-first and the percentages of selling something for a few hundred dollars or higher with a one or two sentences is pretty low.

My following is not huge but it's an engaged, which means that I've built up trust.

Of those that follow me, many of which I've had conversations with. I personally greet anyone new that follows me. I'm highly engaged there.

Over the 12 years on Twitter, I never once pitched through a tweet "hey everyone, I have this thing to sell, it costs $750, DM me to get it" - just never happened.

Until January 2019, where one of the more popular vendors I work with on a consistent basis changed their pricing, who they were marketing to, and to be honest, changed the direction of the company overall from a good portion of people who had been their customers in the past.

Honestly, it's the free will of any business to do something like that. However, the way in which you do it is a delicate balance with your existing customers. Obviously this pricing change made lots of people upset.

When people get upset, they complain. When people complain, they take it to the social networks.

Twitter was all ablaze with people frustrated, upset, confused, and angry.

In fact, I just wanted to help and so I tweeted this first. Then 4 hours later, I tweeted the pitch (with a typo in there too).

Seeing as I had a service that could help people move from this platform to another, I threw that into a tweet and pushed send.

Because of the trust that I built on the platform, the relationships I have formed, I had many conversations, 10 turned into sales opportunities and 4 actually took me up on the offer.

It can be done, but obviously due to the opportunity that presented itself with the market, on top of the engaged following that I have, the sales were able to happen.

Whether Instagram is your platform of choice or something else, put yourself into the mindset of the buyer and what they could be thinking about when on these platforms.

Are they on line buying milk? Or are they actively in buying mode because of a market change?

Today's episode goes a little deeper into that topic to talk about the context and intent of your client at these watering holes.

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The human behavior part of this equation is what I'm fascinated most with.

I'm not the first, nor the last person who will talk about context when it comes to marketing.

In fact, it's the very first personalization that was done in advertising and marketing.

It's why restaurants put their side dishes next to entrees on their menus. You are going to order a potato and veggies with that steak and they know that. So they aren't going to put sides on the last page, they'll put it directly after that filet mignon that you plan on ordering.

Ad platforms these days put context on steroids. We have more information at our disposal about someone than ever before.

We can target a specific employee at a global company in a certain town that has a hobby of white water kayaking.

But what do you do with that information? Often you will jump all over that by pushing an ad out to come to sign up for your service or book a consult or something of that nature.

While that's all fine to do, they may be looking at the photos of their niece's dance recital.

That's not the most opportune time to pitch your abilities to build them a new website.

To make this even more concrete, in the case yesterday where we spoke about the medical industry, you wouldn't walk up to 10 doctors sitting around a table ordering a steak and pitch them even though that's where they all are at the moment, right?

If the content is king, then context is queen.

As in the last episode, getting into the head of your client and then understanding the context and the intent of them in a specific setting can increase the likelihood of success of your strategy.

In the context of my former employer, they bought booths at events that specifically spoke to marketing, technology, and business growth in the industry.

At events that were smaller or not specific to the mindset where the doctors and organizations would be thinking about their website or marketing, my former employer would be there anyway, but in a different way. The sales team would be there to build relationships, set meetings up with clients and leads and of course network, but there wasn't a big push for sales.

Ariel, The Urbanist, on a podcast, shared some insights in his strategy on this. His objective was to land gigs with big travel brands and online publications. Instead of creating ads pitching what he did. Instead, he created content as he normally would, then targeted those key individuals of the companies he wanted to work with so that he was sure that his content would be seen by them.

Then when those individuals were looking for content that he does, he would be front of mind.

He admitted that he couldn't directly connect a job to a specific ad this way, but he did admit that he got work from some of the brands and companies he targeted.

In your case, if you are looking to inject some personality into your brand, how about creating a piece of content that's centered around you and your family, or your mission as a business to help a charity, or why you are in business for yourself, and then put that piece of content as an ad in front of your ideal clients while they are looking at those recital photos.

It may not get that click, but if you do it consistently, when that person who is extremely family oriented, is looking to redo their website, best be sure that they'll remember that they saw "something about some designer who was playing with their kids talking about websites" and go look for you. Not Wix or GoDaddy.

I held an open door session inside the Sustainable Freelancer FB Group last Friday where I put the webcam on and anyone could pop in to talk about anything they want.

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Resulting from that was a conversation around location of potential clients. Not necessarily any strategy about getting them, but more of where to look for places, online, offline, etc, where they may be.

Amy Hoy calls these watering holes in the context of her Sales Safari exercise in they course 30x500.

A watering hole is where all the animals in an ecosystem come together because they need water to survive.

The idea fits perfectly because you want to find places where you clients come together to talk about business with other people in a similar market.

These are events, meetups, conferences, online forums, trade shows, and the list goes on.

You are a developer or designer and live online, so it's safe to assume that you know your way around the web.

Because of that, you may want to find your clients on the web. You try Facebook Groups, Twitter, Instagram, and even online forum sites. While you may find them here, maybe it's not THE watering holes best suited for your clients.

When I was working for an agency that focused on the medical industry, the sales team would regularly attend trade shows and conferences and buy booth space at these events.

Sure they ran Google Ads and such, but a great portion of sales and revenue for the business came from these events. There were months of the year where the sales team would attend 10-15 events in one month, all over the country.

The thing is that doctors and the medical industry doesn't spend the entire day on the computer and the web. They still don't.

What they do is attend conferences and events to learn about new technology and studies, to meet up with colleagues and build relationships, and play golf (let's be honest).

The sales team knew this, the business knew this, which is why they were so invested in putting effort into going to these watering holes and finding their clients.

Understanding the behavior of your client will help you figure out where to find them.

Pay close attention to your existing clients. Just because you found them in one spot, doesn't mean that's where they all are.

Follow them, talk with them. Ask them about their weekend and what they did. If they tell you that they can't make a meeting because they are going to a conference, ask them what conference.

Where you find your clients isn't about you. It's about them.

Be curious, ask questions, pay attention. Get into the head of your clients and they'll lead you to more.

This is the no-nonsense series of lessons that work in today's market to find clients you want to be working with on a consistent basis.

Group coaching for leads. WHAT?!? 🤔

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You've heard about group coaching before in the context for your business.

I met Lauren Pawell, founder of BixaMedia, a marketing strategy firm, a couple of years ago.

In fact, she was the very first guest on Live In The Feast Season 1 Episode 3.

She inspired this idea of bringing your leads together in one space so that you can then vet the good fit en masse.

Let me explain how this works.

You get a lead as you normally would, but instead of getting on a one-on-one call with them, you get them to an educational webinar.

Get them to sign up and as a group, you run through some educational material for them, provide ridiculous value in a way that allows all the leads to walk away with something beneficial to them.

They also know and understand the type of work that you do, who you help, and if you may be a good fit for them.

Then towards the end of that webinar, you present them with an application for them to be able to work with you.

Lauren shared some of her KPIs that she aims for with registration, attendance, and applications.

The part of this I like the most is that you are spending one hour of time with say 5-10, maybe 20 people and weed out those that aren't a good fit. Rather than one hour with each individual to weed them out.

As a result, you are only spending time on those that raise their hand to want to work with you. But those that don't still walk away with value from you, something that's helpful to them in that moment to move them forward.

Lauren said that of those who fill out the application, she'll close 80% of them.

That's such an amazing use of time.

In fact, she sent me an email just last week that as of January 2nd, she's booked solid for 2019.

The only work that they are taking on is Strategy Sessions.

Since I heard about this idea, I've looked for ways in which I can leverage this in my own business. Because as I said, it's such effective use of time and provides the same amount of value as you would if you continued the sales process as you do today.

A good place to start with this is with past clients. You already know who they are and that you'll want to work with them again.

Remember in lesson 7 we talked about those up level skills? Take the skills that you've learned since working with them and package up something to sell.

Send an email with some registration link and get them all on a call. Practice your delivery and then pitch with that application.

It's as simple as that.

This is the no-nonsense series of lessons that work in today's market to find clients you want to be working with on a consistent basis.

Who are you surrounding yourself with? Who do you hang with?

And I'm not talking about your family and friends either. That you are on your own (although support matters so choose wisely).

What I mean is the group of business colleagues and friends you can trust. That you can bounce ideas off around with. That you can be frank and give them the real you.

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There are different communities and groups you can join obviously.

I'm going to share something very important with you in a minute here on why all this matters.

Masterminds

High level masterminds can be both paid and free. Maybe, like myself, you have been a part of one or both kinds already.

What I've found from them is that you really have to connect with them like no other group. At first, find a common aspect that you can appreciate in the others. Find a common element within the group that makes the group stronger than the individuals combined. This could be something like a goal each of you have. It could be that each of you work online or have a store. It could be location too.

That element will spark the idea to join but also be able to carry you through. Because once that initial euphoria and emotion and excitement dies down after a few meetings, you'll need that something to carry you through.

Paid Memberships & Closed Groups

These are very similar. From my experience though the closed groups are usually those that are ran by someone in business who you've become close with and then start up.

Whereas paid memberships and communities, like Feast for example, are built on the specificity of the transformation of those who join.

These are often built on the back of courses, but the community is often where bonds are formed and relationships are built because you want to accomplish similar things in your business.

In those relationships too is gold. I have friends that have grown out of those communities that I paid to be in.

I've received lots of work from inside those communities directly or indirectly through referrals.

When you joined a mastermind or closed community, you know that the people in there are willing to invest into their growth. Whether that's time and/or money.

They are also amazing avenues for warm leads too because they are running a business, understand what you do, and then can refer you work when the opportunity arises.

Here's the biggest, most important reason why who you hang with is important though. Accountability.

You don't want to disappoint someone who you respect.

When you tell that someone you will do something, you'll want to rise up no matter what and do it.

If you don't respect someone, then you won't care whether you disappoint someone or not.

Who you hang with is vital to your business growth, finding clients, because it's your reputation and reputation matters in business now more than ever.

This is the no-nonsense series of lessons that work in today's market to find clients you want to be working with on a consistent basis.

Today's lesson will introduce the phrase "You get what you're paid for."

Yes, I said "you're paid" not "you pay".

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I walked to the office every single day back in 1999-2001 from Penn Station up to 37nd Street.

Most days, usually if there wasn't terrible weather, there were the same vendors on the street selling their wares. Scarfs, souvenirs, jewelry, music, and handbags.

Of course all for the "best price."

People would be lined up to haggle, especially during the holidays or on nice days.

A "Rolex" for $10, a "Louis Vuitton" bag for $25 - people would be there buying these things.

Sure they knew they weren't getting the real thing, so why did they buy it still?

Well one day, I saw a pair of "Oakley" sunglasses for $8 and I always liked the style of them, I just didn't want to pay the $250 for them at the time. So I picked them up.

I didn't care so much for them in the end, but I only paid $8 for them.

Had I lost them, sat on them, or they broke after a month of use, it was only $8.

Like myself, the other people felt much in the same way when buying from these vendors.

It was the cheap knockoff that looked like the real deal. Ultimately there wasn't any respect for the product, because it was the "best price".

We, as the customers buying these knock-offs were paying for something that we had already come to accept certain flaws and imperfections and were willing to pay the "best price" for.

Is your price worthy of respect?

You want your clients to value what you do. You want them to respect your suggestions and experience.

When was the last time you looked at your pricing?

Are you charging by the hour or by the project?

Is what you are charging positioned with other vendors in the market or positioned based on the ROI to the customer?

Charging $1000 for a full website design and build is not a price that's worthy of respect.

Charging $50 per hour for full-stack development is a price that's not worth of respect.

These are the "best price".

If your platform for getting work is something like Upwork or one of these freelance job boards, have a listen to how other business owners talk about their use for these boards. They are looking for "best price", first.

There's nothing wrong with selling something at the "best price". But then don't expect that your clients will look at what you do for them in any other way.

They will want it a certain way and want to get a specific use out of it and looking for that bottom basement price.

Attracting clients that respect your value, respect your experience and expertise comes with respecting yourself and what value you put on your work through your prices.

Someone who is looking to buy the real Rolex or Louis Vuitton handbag isn't going to be worried about the price. They want the quality, the luxury, the experience that product brings to the table.

The price of these products attract the kind of customer that respects and desires those things.

If you ask yourself why clients micromanage you.

If you want your clients to respect your suggestions.

If you want to have clients stop haggling you on price.

Then think about your pricing and what how it's attracting the type of customer you are getting.

You get what you're paid for.

This is the no-nonsense series of lessons that work in today's market to find clients you want to be working with on a consistent basis.

Today's lesson will help leads relate to your existing clients. It will also give your clients a boost. Can I share with you 2 ways to do this so easily and so effectively that doesn't require you to build out a new page on your site or take hours to put together?

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Testimonials, social proof, and portfolios are all bits of proof for our track record.

They are the curated elements of your business that showcase what it is that you do and prove that you've done it.

However, there's a piece missing to the puzzle that's most often overlooked.

The reason the track record needs to be there is not for you, but for the leads.

Someone who may be looking at your services wants to see that you've done it, but also that you've solved their specific problem, maybe with a business that's just like theirs.

Replace a social share

No doubt you are shooting out links or resources into the social media firehose.

I encourage you over the course of a week, replace one of those shares with a quick win you gave to your client.

If you wrapped up a project recently with a client, put out a tweet sharing that. But not saying you completed a project with Company X. Simply share what the benefit was to your client by completing the project together and then tagging your client's Twitter account.

This can be as simple as something like "Stoked to be able to help Client A save 10 hours a week by building them automation that no longer requires hand copying and pasting."

Or could be a share on Facebook or Instagram where you can dive a bit more into the design decisions of a project and share a nice visual.

Write about your clients to your leads

I hear it time and time again that you don't have an email list.

You have had someone write you an email to do work for them, right?

Well, that's your email list.

Next month, in your monthly newsletter, highlight a client of yours and the benefits that the client got out of the project and working with you.

Doesn't have to be some elaborate write-up. Touch upon 3 items and the benefits of each one.

The reason this is effective is leads don't know all the corners of everything that you can do. They also don't know the full benefits of what they can get by working on their project with you.

Often I'll hear something like "Oh really, I didn't realize that was a part of that" or "Oh! That's pretty sweet. Didn't even think of that"

Keep it simple, but put it out there into the world and you'll get these types of reactions because your track record is now about them, not you.

This is the no-nonsense series of lessons that work in today's market to find clients you want to be working with on a consistent basis.

Today's lesson will help you work with clients you had in the past with things that you now know because it's the future.

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In lesson #4, you learned about the Sneak Peek. You are on this constant cycle of learning.

You improve your craft each and every day because it's that practice that refines the skills you have and allows you to learn new things.

You solve problems every single day whether you realize it or not.

If you are a developer, you learn that a new library will help you build out something that once you would've had to build yourself from scratch.

If you are a designer, you learn that there is a new technique or trend that's making sites perform better on mobile because it makes the UX better.

We gloss over these in our every day because they happen quite often.

Our clients though, they don't stay on top of the things we do. They get what they paid for, they love it and then move forward.

3 months ago you no doubt had a project where there was a challenge that you had to overcome in some way that due to time, budget, or both, you and the client agreed on a particular path for solving that problem.

Today, that problem is solved by a new piece of software you found, a step-by-step how-to on YouTube, or that you merely learned a better way because the client you are working with today gave the breathing room for you to explore the better path to the solution.

Go back to that client from 3 months ago, open the door of the conversation by refreshing their memory on the conversation you both had. Then share with them how you solved it today and why it would benefit them.

If what you did today is the same recipe, the same solution for your past client. You've put in the time and effort and already have had the solution paid for. Offer that solution for a price that makes it a complete no-brainer to your past client.

They'll say "yes" and here's why. You already know that they wanted it because you did something already with them that was a solution. They see the benefit and value in it. But there were sacrifices to be made there because of costs or time or both that prohibited the full solution to be implemented.

Second, they trust you. If you did a good job with them, they'll be receptive to you and understand that you are coming to them with something that will help them.

Lastly, say this 100%, A+ solution was an investment of $1,000 for your client on this project and took you 10 hours to get done. It cost your client last time $250 and took 3 hours for the B solution.

Offer your past client the A+ solution for $500, get it done for them in an hour or 2. It's a win-win for the both of you.

Your client gets the full benefit they want, but didn't have to pay the full-price, and you've built something you can now offer, that does a great job at solving a problem that 2 clients had. So you know there are others out there with a similar issue.

That's the beginnings of a productized service.

This is the no nonsense series of lessons that work in today's market to find clients you want to be working with on a consistent basis.

Today's lesson is something that will have you stand out above all others to your market by going onto a podcast that has the ears of your potential clients.

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Podcasting is HUGE and growing every day.

You are listening to (reading the show notes from) one right now in fact, right?

With Spotify kicking the door of Apple's podcast castle a couple of weeks ago, it's a medium that's firmly planting itself into the mainstream.

Ask your clients what podcasts they listen to.

If your clients don't listen to podcasts, then pull up Apple Podcasts and search for the industry that you work in.

Non-Profits, E-Commerce, Manufacturing, Drone Photography, Sports, etc there is a podcast out there.

Go listen to a few episodes of a podcast that has more than 35 episodes and their most recent episode is in the past few weeks.

This is so that you know that they do have an audience they are broadcasting to.

You can also look at the number of ratings and reviews too. If they have some, then you know that the audience is engaged too.

Look at the episodes, see the kinds of topics they talk about, but also pay attention to some of the gaps that are missing that you can help fill.

This is the important part to remember.

If you are just adding to the firehose, the host won't pay attention

However if you do reach out, you want to make your ask super relevant and focused.

Bonus points if you go ahead and share some episodes and tag the host. You'll pop on their radar and when you go ahead and contact the host, they'll at least recognize you a little bit.

Every host knows that when they receive an email or DM asking to be on the show that it's self-serving, so don't try and beat around the bush too much.

Keep it short, super relevant and focused on adding value to their audience and you'll be positioned to land that guest spot.

If you know another guest that's already been on the show, ask that person for the introduction.

And finally, when you do make contact, keep it about their audience and not of yourself. The only time you should mention anything about you is where you fill in a gap.

"Hi Pete - I loved Ep 27 when you were speaking about how important it is for marketability of the business to leverage local Google search. Then in Ep 34, you shared a few tools that you use to do some comparative analysis.

My name is Jason and I provide a service to my clients for marketing comparative analysis. If you think that it would resonate with your audience, I'd love to share all that I know and the process that I walk through with my clients with your audience."

This is the no-nonsense series of lessons that work in today's market to find clients you want to be working with on a consistent basis.

Today's lesson will help you stay front of mind 2 different ways.

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We are all busy and there's only so much time in any given day.

Business though is all about the people. Whether you are a running a solo owned and operated business like myself or running an agency, you have to be out there not just seen to sell, but also to provide value.

If you are always out there every day pushing ads, pushing leads, asking 9 out of 10 times, then you'll be put on the top of the pile. Just like all that junk mail you get both in your inbox on your phone and the thing that's hanging off the front of your house.

What I want you to do in the next 24 hours is this. Goto Starbucks and send an e-gift card to all of your clients.

Just to say "Thank you!"

It's nothing overly difficult to do, right? The gesture goes a long way though.

Expect nothing from them either. What you are doing is creating a memorable moment in their minds.

Do this once or twice a year and switch up the gift. Since you did an e-giftcard this time, go ahead and send some customized gift next time.

The second way is to answer a question.

I've built half of my business in 6 months with this lesson alone.

The social web is full with questions, pick out a topic or problem that your clients have and then monitor the web for those types of questions and keywords. Then when one hits, jump into that thread and share a link, resource, or helpful answer.

I do this with my Drip and ConvertKit services. And early on in my business, I did this with WooCommerce as well.

It doesn't have to be a specific platform or tool either, although that makes it someone what easier.

Look at the questions your clients are asking you, and then pull out those keywords. "get more phone calls from my site", "install X", "what's the best way to Y", etc are all easy to jump into those conversations.

As you continue to do that, you'll be in a much better and more referable spot to get work.

This is the no-nonsense series of lessons that work in today's market to find clients you want to be working with on a consistent basis.

Today's lesson will help you position yourself and share insight into what problems you are solving.

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You are smart and I know that you are constantly learning and evolving your skills and business whether it's on a project you are working on, or in passing as you read articles online when sitting on the couch.

When you come across something new that you've learned, don't hold it back like it's the One Ring. Share that knowledge either in a tweet, Facebook share, or a blog post or video for YouTube even.

When you share your knowledge online, there will be someone who will search for it who doesn't know.

My friend Val Geisler shares teardowns of Saas business' onboarding emails on her blog.

She stated in her 2018 review "I honed my voice and writing skills and got to build a nice little portfolio of spec work while I worked on moving more firmly into this specialization." And she was able to break the 6-figure mark too.

I can also attribute a few clients to one specific article on my site where I break down a number of well-known brands and how they should improve their checkout process. But in there I share how it could be improved as well.

This gives potential clients a sneak peek into what you can do and how you do it.

But it also gives the web the ability to have a piece of content to serve questions like "how do I improve my checkout process?" or "how do I improve my email onboarding sequence?"

By sharing what you know instead of holding it back will position you and your expertise in the world.

Instead of spending a tremendous amount of time figuring out an algorithm on how you can get your profile to outrank other freelancers on a platform, spend that time pushing out a piece of content that gives a sneak peek into your brain.

This is the no-nonsense series of lessons that work in today's market to find clients you want to be working with on a consistent basis.

Today's lesson will help you build a pipeline of high quality leads into the business of people and businesses that you want to work with.

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You know I'm not a fan of discounting your services. However, this is more like buying highly qualified leads.

I can't take credit for this lesson all on my own, and to be honest, I haven't yet implemented it (yet). So I'd like to thank Ryan Bowles who runs the Create or Die Tribe FB Group for this.

I think it's a smart way to leverage your services and the relationship that you have built up with the client. But also be able to have built in a testimonial and referral system in one.

I'm changing it slightly from Ryan's original.

When you onboard a client, maybe a touch after you've been working together for a little bit, ask them this.

"Would you like $X off on the final invoice, simply by referring 5 business colleagues or friends that would be a good fit, if I've done a great job?"

When they say yes, reply with "Awesome, we'll talk about it when we get there."

Then after you've gone ahead and done a great job, remind them about your offer.

Ask them to create a quick 30-second video about how it was working with you, or better yet, ask them to answer this on the video.

"What challenges did you have prior to us working together and how did I solve those challenges for you?"

Then have them send that video and the 5 referrals to you.

Send those folks the video testimonial and ask if you can help them in any way.

Not only do you have a great, relatable testimonial, but you'll also have a built-in system to continuously generate new, targeted leads based on clients that you want to be working with.

That's the important part of this lesson and where I modified this idea from Ryan slightly.

Ask them if they would like this offer after you have got to know them a little bit better. This will further your chances to get better leads that you actually want to work with.

You'll also be in a better position to make sure that the client is sending you leads that are legit as well.

This is the no-nonsense series of lessons that work in today's market to find clients you want to be working with on a consistent basis.

Today's lesson is solely targeted toward getting repeat clients by you adding in a built-in opportunity in your existing projects.
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With any project you have, no doubt you'll either be asked to do something the client wants that isn't in the scope or want to throw something in just because it is quick.

We all do it. We are humans after all. But we are also running a business. So when you do these one-off add-ons you should keep track of them and make your client aware of them too.

When you do one, whether you are doing hourly work or on retainer, add the task to the invoice. Along with that, add how much it would cost normally and then zero it out. Meaning make it no charge.

Even if it's something that takes 15 or 30-minutes to do, mark that down, describe the task in the line item and then put the $50, $100, or $200 down.

When you do this, you are putting value into the project that may or may not be perceived by your client.

Ever have a client ask you "is there anything you can do better on price?" Especially when scoping out a project?

This is where all that added value comes into play. If you give $500 worth of zero line items in Project A, there's no way that a client will ask for a discount on project B.

Here is where you get the repeat work though.

By adding in all the zero line items into the work, you are keeping track of all the possibilities to add-on repeat work.

For example, say you are designing blog images for your client and they ask you to create a few Facebook images for those blog posts along the way. Say you have the bandwidth and did 2 of them.

You now have an opportunity to re-visit those blog posts and do a comparison on the images you did vs what they did otherwise. If the shares that had your images performed better, guess what?

There's your opportunity to pitch additional work.

Here's another example.

Say you are a developer and your client asked to add in an additional feature to their app that allows their users to log in via Facebook or Twitter.

You obviously know that those APIs change pretty regularly, right?

Well when they do, go back to your client when it does happen and sell them on the update.

The Zero-Line Item is your best friend when it comes to positioning yourself, but also leaving a built-in opportunity for yourself to them go ahead and get additional work later.

Today I'm going to share with you a process that I've developed and used based on business practices that have been in the wild for decades, if not longer.

Whether you are just starting out or been in business for a little while, you have a network.

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A network of trusted colleagues, friends, family, and individuals who you look to for advice.

You also have a network online if you are on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube, etc.

Why is it that you hear time and time again, to attend chamber of commerce meetings or local business events? It's because it's networking. Though in those meetings it's often hard to really get what you do and who your serve out there in an effective way. Most people are there to hand their own business cards out.

But those networking events have worked for a long time helping local businesses connect and find new business.

By taking that concept and turning it into something you can do for the 21st century, I present you with targeted referrals.

I want you to reach out to your network. Reach out to folks who do similar work as you, who are your trusted colleagues and friends.

Also, reach out to those people who you look up to as well.

Create a list of people.

Don't confuse this. This is a relationship building exercise.

Once you have the list, grab 5-10 people from that list.

What I encourage you to do is to reach out to them asking them about their weekend. Ask how their latest project went. Congratulate them on a job well done that you noticed them doing online.

This can either be done via phone, text message, even your social media platform of choice.

Create engagement with no expectation of anything else.

When they respond, continue that conversation and see where it takes you both. There will a natural point of the conversation where they will ask you what you are up to.

This is where you want to share exactly what you are doing.

Share with them a couple of sentences about a successful project or client problem you solved this week that you are excited about.

Don't bore them, keep it short. Then follow up with your positioning statement of who you help and the problem that you solve for them.

So this could sound like "This week I was able to help a client of mine land 10 new customers under their new pricing, which was double the number and twice the price than what they had last week. I love helping online business build better relationships with their customers through email marketing."

Again, expect nothing from this conversation. You are building the relationship, but more importantly, you are creating a circle of trust, a tribe if you will, of folks who truly understand who you help and the problem that you solve for them.

On the flipside, you should also be mindful of what they are doing, being curious about what they do and problems they solve for their customers.

Building a relationship that will continue to grow, but also when they encounter someone with a problem that you solve, they will think of you.

I've done a form of this for building my email list as well as with trusted colleagues and folks I look up to so that I stay top of mind when they encounter people who can become a client of mine.

It doesn't take long to do, but it's something that if you do it regularly, and keep track of your connections, you'll build a nice consistent flow of referrals into your business.

Can I share with you 11 of my top lessons to do so?

These aren't tips and strategies that are overplayed. These are pretty unique and work amazingly well.

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As you know we are coming up on the magical episode 261 here on Ask Rezzz. And as such, over the next 11 shows I want to share with you 11 of my top "getting clients" lessons.

Thanks to my good friend Mark Asquith for inspiring this series of shows.

Mark, is currently running a series of podcasts on his show The 7-Minute Mentor called 11 Podcasting Lessons To Help You To Become An Audio Influencer in Your Niche.

So how do you get more clients? I thought I'd create a series that does just that.

Over the next 11 episodes, I'm going to share with you my top lessons that are tactful, repeatable, and help you establish yourself as an expert so that you not only clients, but get your clients on a consistent basis to build that pipeline.

There are more freelancers and competition out there in the world than ever before and tactics that you see out there that worked last year, 3 and certainly 5 years ago, just won't work anymore.

Platforms like Upwork and Toptal and others are a race to the bottom. They force you to try and manipulate algorithms and compete with other people on the wrong thing. That's price.

And while these platforms have many companies and opportunities coming to them every single day, those companies are looking for one thing, the cheapest price possible.

What I believe, and with great reason since I did it myself, is that you can build a sustainable business providing services for clients without selling to hundreds and thousands of people.

You certainly do not need to be dropping your prices, racing to the bottom and spend tons of time trying to figure out an algorithm to stand out.

You can build a business that's built around your life and your dreams with a small number of carefully selected clients.

Then you can build a system that continually feeds into your pipeline so that you can build a predictable income.

When I say recurring income, most people, and maybe you as well, think that means providing a monthly service. It's not.

It means that you are selling a service or product that continuously attracts clients and customers in a predictable way.

So that's what I'm going to share with you over the next 11 episodes.

Lessons to build your business with a core type of client and attract those types of clients that you want to have more of.

They are all based on strategies and tactics that have worked for decades in business that I myself still use to this very day that has allowed me to build a profitable and sustainable client services business for close to a decade here in NY.

If you want more, then head on over to rezzz.com and subscribe. No one taught me when I started out, which is why I failed quite often, but I stayed persistent and share with you over at rezzz.com those tips and strategies that work in today's market.

Simply because you don't have that experience yet. No doubt you have the skills, but to differentiate yourself as a consultant rather than a developer or designer comes with a proven track record of success.

I'm not saying that you can't sell strategy, in fact, I would suggest selling discovery phases which are strategy sessions of a different sort.

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What I'm saying is that if you want to be a consultant selling strategy to a client, you have to be positioned as an expert in a particular space, understand the hurdles on the track and how to get over them, and most importantly, you have to be sure of certain outcomes of the project.

With that caveat out of the way, let's dive into how to sell strategy

1. Understand the problem

An absolute must to selling strategy is a full understanding of the problem. This means that you have to be able to notice a lead that has this particular problem and then have the solution to that problem.

The most important piece of this is to then connect all the dots in between. You do this by walking through the problem, then the process with milestones attached and then what the dream is on the other side.

2. Your process

The process you use here is important. It needs to illustrate progress to the end goal. The dream of what the client has at the end of the project.

Imagine building a house and as the days and months go by and you don't see the blueprints, plans, permits, foundation being poured, walls going up and so on, you'd no doubt be disappointed.

By explaining during the sales process what the process of getting to the solution will be, you help the client visualize their journey through the strategy and then getting to that implementation.

Illustrating your process will establish that you've been down this road before. Allowing your client to feel that they made the right decision.

3. What's next?

Whether or not you are doing the implementation, that's what will come from your strategy sessions.

To be honest, doing the implementation yourself will further establish you as an expert. You'll simply be able to speak to obstacles that may come up, and you'll be able to fully understand what the next steps in the dream are.

This is the best opportunity to hand off the deliverable as a proposal/contract to your client. Obviously, you've gone through and walked them on every step of the process of the service that is to be implemented, what better person for the job than you, right?

If the strategy and deliverable were outstanding, you should have no problem in closing the deal for the next phase of that project which is the implementation.

Custom work is often times a big ask. It's a big investment for someone to not just pay, but also to spend time on.

Here's why I like having a smaller, more productized option.

• Reduces the risk for the lead
• Reduces the risk for you
• Allows both you and the client to get quick results

This especially works nicely if you are just starting out.
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Are you thinking...

What this solution could be, starts by listening and observing opportunities.

During a sales conversation simply ask the lead "What would be a quick win for you?"

As you start to hear answers, watch for a pattern. What sort of quick wins are you hearing?

Write them down.

In Ask Rezzz A233 I share with you 3 other questions that you can explore in order to start building out a productized service

In this episode: 

• Who will buy my productized service?
• How to do market research for a productized service
• Land that first client
• Are you going to give this a try

There are many more steps in this process, but I wanted to spark some inspiration and direction for you to take if this is something you are considering.

This year, I created themes for myself and the business. The reasoning behind this is simple. If I have a project, decision, or question where I'm suddenly faced with the option to go one way or another, the theme will highlight the right choice.

I've created each theme based on who I want to be and the purpose and value of the business.

I've created 3 themes for the year and they are "intentional community", "commitment to my marriage," and "ship new products".

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Let me address the middle one since that is the easiest.

There is nothing wrong with our marriage at all, in fact we have our second child on the way at the time of this recording in Feb.

When I say commitment to my marriage I mean doing the little things and enjoying time with my wife as a couple. Any parent knows that with a little one, or even 2 little ones, time together just the two of us becomes harder and harder to come by.

I don't want to lose that identity and what made us, "us".

Doing some of the little things together. Like grabbing an hour here and there whether that's going out on a date night, staying in and watching a movie, or grabbing a quick cup of tea together in the morning.

Intentional community is about creating a close-knit community of like-minded business owners who are real, genuine, and want to create a business that's designed around their lives.

There are so many products and programs out there that are a bit dime-a-dozen. Where they promote to you over and over and over again and then when you buy, you are left wondering where everyone went. I've been subject to them and I know you have too.

I don't want that for anyone that comes across me or my business. If you download something free like the client onboarding sequence or get 1-on-1 business coaching you will get an experience that is a bit unique and I will genuinely care about your results.

The final one, ship new products, is pretty self-explanatory. Though it aligns with "intentional community" theme. By learning a bit about everyone that comes into my world and listening to their wants, needs, and desires, I want to be able to easily create products to help you succeed.

Now when I'm faced with any sort of difficult decision, I can't go wrong if the choice aligns with any of the themes.

I'm trying this for the first time this year, because like Sara mentioned in her video. Often when setting goals for the year, by June some of those goals are not relevant anymore.

No matter what happens, these themes will be relevant because these are things I value.

Yes, I have some [e-commerce clients](https://rezzz.com/services) who may fit better with Drip as their platform, but I have other clients who are non-profits, service-based businesses, coach, and other individuals who are selling only a handful of products that ConvertKit is a perfect fit for.

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I can easily geek out about many things that I like about ConvertKit and some of the ideas that I have, which I dive in head first in this episode

Most certainly I'll be diving into more discoveries and how I'm solving interesting problems as I continue to flex the ConvertKit muscle and boundaries.

If you have any specific questions about my move, ConvertKit, or your business and how ConvertKit may or may not work for you, I'd be happy to chat.

I'll share with you some of what I like and what I'd love to see:

• UI Features
• API + Support
• Feel valued as a customer
• Cleaning up the house
• Handling various integrations
• How I think about and categorize integrations
• ConvertKit excels at
• Sequences and managing those emails within
• Segments
• THE #1 thing...folks get the emails

"Why did you switch?"

"What happened with X that made the decision for you?"

"Did you switch because of Y?"

For myself and my clients, I try and look at platforms as a tool.

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This is part 1 where I share with you:

• Why I started with Drip
• My reaction when Drip sold to Leadpages
• My thoughts at a personal level
• My thoughts at a professional level
• What the tipping point was

In the next episode, I'll share with you why ConvertKit was the easy choice, what I like about it, what I'd love to see, and some things to be aware of.

Now whether that's the fault of my neighbor or the landscaper, in the end, the landscaper is sending the wrong message here.

Before it gets to 14 months, let's see if we can nip this in the bud as quickly as possible, shall we?

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Benefit of the doubt

This is obvious for some, yet not so much for others. When a client is late once it's often not malicious or with bad intentions. It's often more like they saw the notification and it slipped their minds.

Or if you are taking recurring payments through a credit card and the card fails, it's often due to the card being expired.

The point I'm trying to convey is that you want to remove your emotion from the equation when it happens for the first time. Come at it with the perspective that it is likely a mistake and can easily be remedied with a simple email asking them for the payment.

What to do when a late payment is more than a mistake

If the same client happens to do it again or more than usual, then a more in-depth conversation needs to happen.

Paul Jarvis, author of Company of One, when he was on [Live In The Feast](https://rezzz.com/podcast/paul-jarvis-on-keeping-things-simple-freelancing-and-being-a-business-owner/) shared a time when he had a client stiff him of close to $30,000.

The mistake was that he continued to do the work, thinking that he would get paid eventually.

He shared a great point on the show when he said, "what I was saying to my client was that it's ok to not pay me because the work gets done anyway."

You want to have your clients respect the payment structure of your business and the contract of the project.

If they miss a payment, work stops. End of story.

Simply tell your client either in a phone conversation or email that since payment has not been received, the work will be suspended.

Also in that conversation, you want to share the consequences of this. Could mean a missed launch date, marketing plans, or something else.

If time continues to pass without resolution, say for a couple of weeks, the conversation should transition from a payment conversation to an end of project conversation.

Explain what that would look like and how if/when the project became a priority again how they could ramp the project back up with you.

Over the decade of being in business myself, I've never had it go this far, but have heard of cases where this happens so you'll want to cover your bases.

A client relationship is two-sided. You agreed to provide a service in exchange for being compensated. Don't let time slip away on being compensated because that is sending your client the wrong message.

To be honest, it's actually better for you to refer the project off than to spend the energy working at someone who has already decided not to work with you.

With that being said, sales are all about helping someone make a decision.

If you are looking for someone to do something that they don't really want to do (and that's to spend money), you need to find a legit reason that is big enough for them to do so.

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Get someone to do something they don't want to

This means you have to understand what the motivation is of that person. In my experience businesses are motivated really on the basis of 2 big reasons. Both are related.

They want to get more money. Or they want to save time (which translates into getting more money eventually through profits).

The tricky part of this comes in when you want to discern if someone is basing their decision off of emotion or logic.

The reason it's tricky is that their buying decision will be because it's both emotional and logical.

I'm always talking about how you should learn to trust your "gut" and tha if something doesn't feel right, than steer clear right? Well that's even more true with someone buying from you.

They need to feel that the purchase is the right decision before anything else, even if it's the logical choice to make.

For example, ever have an argument with your brother or sister or good friend where you know you are right. Facts of a night out or story growing up. You both start arguing back and forth it's so heated that all logic goes out the window. It doesn't even matter if you are saying that the sky is blue because they feel that it's red.

You can't convince them otherwise, because their emotions are dictating their thinking at this point.

So you have to start by getting their emotional side of the brain to buy-in before all else.

Get their emotions on your side

You can do this through empathizing with them.

You can do this by sharing a similar experience another client of yours had where you helped them.

Another way to do this is by asking a question. In the book by Phil M. Jones, Exactly What to Say he offers to use "How would you feel if...?" as a prefix to a future scenario.

"How would you feel if you got 100 more customers?"

"How would you feel if your website was 2 seconds faster?"

"How would you feel if your competitor outranked you and you lost a good portion of your organic traffic?"

That last one is one that I actually asked an existing client of mine a few months ago because that was a trend that was happening with them. They signed on a new engagement to perform a site performance and overhaul.

When I read *Exactly What to Say* a couple of weeks ago and saw this example in the book, a light bulb went off in my head because it's something that I've seen work time and time again in my own sales conversations.

When you understand the motivation and emotion that a client has around the problem they are faced with and can create that scenario for them, the more likely you are going to get someone to sign.

They are convinced that it will work for whatever you are trying to accomplish, but you have some doubts.

Your doubts come from 2 places. The first is your experience and the second is from your ego.

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Your ego may be in the way

Let me tackle the ego part first. By ego, I mean that little voice inside you that is telling you that you, not the client, knows best.

Paying attention to your ego is a practice in becoming more self-aware. Self-awareness is critical to being professional and being a respected freelancer.

Now you may be saying that you have doubts because you don't know enough about the request to get it done.

Or that you are resistant because it's taking your focus away from what you need to be doing that's already agreed upon.

Either way, you want to recognize, you want to be self-aware, that your bias is playing a small part in the reason you are skeptical. It's not wrong to have this happen, but you want to realize that this exists so that you can best address the request with the client.

Your experience is often correct

The first part of that skepticism comes from your experience. You are hired because of your skills, but more so because you have an expertise.

The client's request may be something that is warranted for the project. It could also be scope creep as well.

It's your job to suss this out properly and professionally.

All of these responses, or any in the same vein, will show the client that you have their best interests and the success of the project in mind.

When you give this little bit of pushback, you'll not only show that you are a professional, but you are standing out from the countless number of other hands-for-hire out there.

The surprising thing here is that by doing so, the next time instead of the client stating that something needs to happen, it'll come in the form of a question because you've represented yourself as a consultant on top of the skillset you have.

To be perfectly honest, knowing how to sell the productized service really should come before you make it, and here's why.

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When you have a productized service, it's super focused and solves a big enough pain that someone has.

That someone has already raised their hand and shared why it's important enough to solve their problem.

When you are working on custom projects and then finding out that you happen to be doing a similar thing on almost every project that gets your clients an immediate win they want. Well, the service essentially has been sold because it's in demand.

I think it'll help to illustrate by example. I have a productized service that migrates people from Drip to ConvertKit.

How I came to create that was a need from my own clients who wanted to reduce their monthly costs as their list grew but weren't using all the advanced features that Drip offers.

So like how I explained in A233 - How do I make a productized server? people already were hiring me for that service and other services like on-site personalization based on email subscriber data because I'm listed in both expert directories.

I had built out this process and it was something to leverage for new clients and gave them a quick win. A big bonus that the quick win helps their bottom line costs.

Yes, it's not something that is going to have someone come back to me to do, but it created a simple way to start to work with me for my larger services at a lower risk.

They see how it is working with me and it's at a much lower risk to get a result than to start with my monthly service.

Why would someone buy it?

Understanding the reasons why someone would want the service is ultimately how you sell it.

What is the pain or frustration that the buyer is looking to solve?

What is the quickest and most simple path to getting that pain or frustration turned around?

Keying in on those elements is how you sell it.

You don't even need to go about advertising it like crazy either. Send out a tweet, a post, or at most set up a landing page.

In that share you put in the frustration point and a call-to-action.

In my case recently, Drip increased its prices pretty dramatically and so I tweeted out "Frustrated with Drip's price increase and looking to lower costs by going to ConvertKit? DM me and let's chat"

I did that maybe a few times in a 2 or 3 week period and it got retweeted. I had about 50 people DM me about it. Of those 50, 10 become legit leads, and 4 took me up on the service.

For something that took me a few seconds to write as a tweet, not a bad return.

All because I already knew why the buyer would make the purchase.

Asking yourself "Why would someone buy this?" doesn't mean that they will.

What you want is someone to say "Can I buy this because I have this problem?"

Are you still focused on them or has the reality of 2019 and life, in general, pushed them aside and you are no longer as focused as you were 4 weeks ago, now that it's Feb 1?

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Before I share with you some ways to make your business habits stick, I want to share with you something that happened to me the other day that rarely happens when I read a book and that's an immediate impact.

One of my big things for 2019 is to become a reader. As someone who much rather watch the movie than read the book, this isn't easy. As someone who's read the Cliff Notes and Monarch Notes all through high school and college, this isn't easy.

As a father though, I want to read more so that my kids see me reading and not sitting in front of a screen all the time.

As a husband, my wife loves to read and it would be cool to read the same book and have a discussion about it.

As a business owner, reading and learning from others and being able to form my own ideas from things that I read will help me grow and help the business grow.

The first book I read this year was Atomic Habits by James Clear. Outstanding book for so many reasons which I'll explain 2 here in a minute. The reason I read this book first was because I actually wanted to read it to help understand the why and how of better habits not just for myself, but so that I could help create better habits for my children too.

What I didn't expect to happen was exactly what happened on Sunday, January 27th.

I went downstairs around 6:30 am put on the kettle to boil water for my coffee, check my Twitter feed from the night before, then made my cup of coffee and pulled out my wife's Kindle and started reading.

I was up at 6:30am on a Sunday because I was sick and my sinuses were hurting so bad that I couldn't lay down anymore and quite honestly, it hurt to even move my eyes. I even said to myself coming down the stairs that I'm going to skip reading this morning.

So what gives? Why did I read?

Create a habit for the type of person or business you want to be

What James talks about in the book is to relate your habits to the type of person you want to be. Notice earlier that I said that I want to become a reader. Not that I want to read more.

Well, I created a system of habits in the morning that stack upon each other that form identity-based habits.

Once I pour my cup of coffee in the morning, it's become automatic in a sense that I sit and read my book until that first cup is done.

I've created this environment in the morning that sets up and leads me to the act of reading.

I read in the morning, because for me, any other time and reading tends to put me to sleep.

I use the cup of coffee as a timer of sorts so that I don't feel obligated to read a chapter or number of pages or some other thing that could vary.

It's a set of cues and pieces of the environment that have allowed me to become a reader because each and every day since January 1, I've read.

Habit stacking

Surprising to me also is this idea of habit stacking. The cup of coffee, morning time, and even what I do after I read are all tiny elements, tiny habits that I've created that surround the idea of me becoming a reader that's allowed me to become one.

What I do each and every day after I read is go make another cup of coffee and then mark it down in my bullet journal that I read today.

The simple act of accountability of tracking that progress allows me to have the small win, the satisfaction of another day that put me on track to becoming a reader.

I'm floored simply because of the small changes I've made to my habits. So much so that I'm beginning to look at my business in the very same way. In fact, as I look at my business with these eyes, I've already done a few things over the years to be the business I want.

What do you want your business to be?

What do you want your identity to be?

What sort of small, impactful habits can you create to become that identity?

How can you create an environment so that it guides your good habits and forces you to avoid the bad ones?

Want clients to respect you?

Are you looking for your clients to respect your time away from business hours?

Your cue or environment factor: Then shut off your email notifications after business hours. Don't look at email first thing in the morning. Give it 2 hours before you look at it.

Quick win: Go ahead and mark it off on your calendar that you did that.

Want clients to pay you what you want?

Set the price and don't waiver from it.

Your cue or environment factor: If you start to have a conversation with someone that budget is going to be an issue, then change the conversation from you being their vendor into a referral for someone else.

Quick win: Celebrate passing on that project because it's not what is right for you. Go ahead and mark it off on your calendar.

Do you want to get out from sub-contracting and managing your own clients?

Your cue or environment factor: Immediately after lunch, go have a conversation today, whether that's email or a phone call, with potential clients

Quick win: Go ahead and mark it off on your calendar.

I'm not wrong. And I don't say that because I'm arrogant. I say that be it is a fact.

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Not everyone wants to create a product, I don't. I'm not looking to build a software product. I'm not looking to create some physical thing to sell.

What I enjoy is creating a solution, building services, publishing content that help others solve a problem.

To me, what I want is a productized service.

Creating a productized service is creating a menu for potential clients to order off of.

It doesn't even have to be something that's complex and automated. But it needs to be profitable for you.

## What does everyone hire you for?

Simply start with what people hire you for in the first place. If you are a designer, what is the one thing that you do for each and every single client. Same goes for developers.

Do you perform audits? Do you do brand identities? Do you setup coding environments?

What do repeat customers hire you for?

This is what I call "chronic pain points". Are your clients seasonal and always come back to you for something at the same time each year? Do you have to design social media assets for new content? Are you building iterations of software for new features?

After you work through these things, look at the lists. Pick out ones that have a similar theme.

You want these things to be small enough to achieve quick wins for your clients.

They also need be delivered quickly and profitably.

Since they are small and you may be doing a number of them, make sure that you can enjoy doing them as well.

How have you helped brand new clients get over nervousness and apprehension?

This is key, because ultimately the goal of a productize service is to make it simple and easy to work with you. By reducing the number of choices a lead has and creating an easy option, you make the decision for them.

Building a website or designing a brand that has an investment of $20,000 and 3 months of time is scary for some businesses who have never been down that road before.

However, delivering brand style guide that may take you a few weeks and $5,000 to do is easier to digest.

Then once they see that deliverable and how the relationship was successful with this engagement, the client is now more comfortable with you to move forward with the much larger project.

Yes, productizing a service is not easy. But if you think of it like creating a menu for your business so that leads can order from, it'll create that diversity you are looking for.

A little bonus tip...you don't even need to tell anyone that you do this either. Especially when starting out. Use is as a tool in your sales conversations. If budget or time is an issue for the lead, then offer your productize service to them.

If they seem like someone you may not want to work with but like what their business is about, offer them your productize service.

Use is as a tool to try them out, just as they would use it to try you out too.

Ever feel like you finished a project and felt like the weight of the world lifted up off your shoulders. Suddenly you have this sense of relief that is so strong you wonder how you got sucked into that mess in the first place?

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It's so easy to get sucked into the excitement of a brand new project. Being able to see an opportunity and hear about how you can solve someone else's problem simply from your skillset is the high we all get at the beginning.

Just like getting drunk though, this high clouds judgment. It also clouds your awareness of subtle signals that are indicators that maybe this project isn't a right fit for your business.

It actually hinders our instincts to "know better" especially from past experiences.

You want to hone those instincts and make them so strong that the high only happens after your instincts, your gut, tells you it's ok.

Questions to ask after a project is over

Once a project is over, you should sit down for 15-30 minutes and digest everything.

Ask yourself 5 questions.

1. How do I feel now that the project is completed?
2. Did this work help me reach my goals?
3. What problems did I face that I didn't anticipate?
4. How did my estimates (on budget, time, expectations) compare to the actuals?
5. Did something happen in the midst of the project that I should've seen coming but didn't?

Once you answered these questions, reflect on the answers and pull up your initial project brief/application that you had the client fill out and see if there are any correlations to be made.

This is the "Hindsight Exercise".

You now are standing in the future of what that application came to be. You know how well or bad the project went. Within the application, you want to look for indications in what that client filled out so that you can then go ahead and look for in your next lead.

Again whether it's good or bad. 

This is where you are honing your instincts, your gut. You are allowing time for you to pick up on indicators of both good and bad earlier on in your sales so that you can have more success with your projects.

We don’t have control over the decision-making process anyone has, but we can lead them to that decision.

We can create a path to that decision that makes it easy for them to make a choice.

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You do a great job of getting people interested in you, yet in the final moment of helping them decide, you fall down.

You fall down because you leave the decision making solely on their shoulders.

This final moment is the tough part. It’s the part where I struggled with too. But it’s the part that needs to be mastered in order for you to have a sustainable business.

## Remove choices and create easy options

In sales, it’s your job to put the lead on the path to solving their problem. This is the mindset you need to be in so that  [you overcome objections in sales](https://rezzz.com/ask/overcome-objections-in-sales/).

When you remove choices and create easy options for a lead, they are more likely to buy from you.

Your goal should be to create a statement that presents a choice to them.

I was on a FB Live talking about follow-up and I said “There are 2 types of businesses online, ones who become freebie folks and ones who actually sell and make money.”

And now I wasn’t selling anything, but in the midst of the conversation, it framed everyone there watching, including the host, where they sat.

It made perfect sense for them to go ahead and see what they needed to do or take action on based from this live stream at that time.

By removing all the choices on how to do a follow-up sequence, how many emails, what tools to use, when to send them, and so on, I positioned the simple action of just doing a follow-up sequence against making money or not.

As service-based businesses, you and I have so many things that we know we can do for a lead to help them out.

The leads know they need the help, they just aren’t sure of the right choice or the right decision to make.

By painting a picture of who they are today and where they want to be with a simple action for them to take, you remove all the choices and give them the easy option to choose.

Following up with someone after they’ve expressed interest in you is not being a nuisance or annoying or bothersome. Unless you are emailing them every day with “Just checking in.”

If you have an email that sounds like “Hey Pete, I was thinking about your project a little bit more and came across this article that talks specifically about that one thing. Here’s the link if you have a few minutes to check it out. If not, the big takeaways were…Hope you find it useful. Best, Jason”

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For whatever reason, most people, as service-based businesses, get all messed up in the head the closer someone gets to becoming a client.

Anytime they see an email address, they ask “can we add them to our email list?”

Yet, as it gets closer and closer to the sale, they start to shy away from it.

It’s very much a mindset that you put yourself into. One that in the beginning of starting my business, once I realized that it was just business and that if they thought me sending them an email that’s helpful is annoying, then we ultimately weren’t a good fit to work together.

Imagine you walk into a store, let’s say a car dealership. As you walk in you immediately go towards the car that you are interested in. You open the door, sit in the driver’s seat to see how it feels. You hop into the back to see how much legroom there is. And you come to the point where you want to get some more information.

So you seek out a salesperson. She comes over and you ask some questions about options, colors, if they have it in stock and she answers all of your questions and then takes you on a test drive.

As you walk back into the dealership you realize that you are completely alone. Even the salesperson, who was right behind you coming through the door is gone.

Now what? You’re ready to sit down and go over financing. 

You are literally standing there ready to buy and wondering what’s next.

Now I ask you “what’s annoying now?”

That’s what it can seem like for your leads. They opt-in to your lead magnet or fill out your contact form, maybe have a few back and forth emails with you, and even get on the phone with you and get to the proposal stage.

After you hang up on the call, it’s radio silence from you. The lead is wondering what happened? Seemed like things were working out, but they may be wondering what’s next. Even with the proposal in hand, they may have some questions still. In fact, there’s a good chance they do.

Here’s the thing, people, humans, are embarrassed to ask questions. They don’t want to look as if they don’t know something and even more so, during a negotiation period where they have your proposal in hand, they certainly don’t want to appear that they are at a disadvantage.

You can leave it up to them to reach out, that’s all well and fine. But what if they have a question, that your very next email in your follow-up sequence answers it?

How would that make the lead feel?

They probably feel like you fully understand them. That you can help them with their project and where they want to go.

What if they had some questions about your process, further than what you explained on your site?

Now your second follow-up email explains in further detail what it is like working with you?

Now they are feeling pretty great I would assume. They get their questions answered and you are exhibiting that you’ve been doing this for a while and understand, yet anticipate what the lead is thinking.

They are in your sales pipeline. They are on your list. If you are “annoying” them, they can click that link at the bottom of the emails and unsubscribe.

But I’ve never had that happen once because they’ve obviously taken some time to want to learn more about what I can do for them. If we had a call, then it’s even more apparent that they want more from me.

At that point, I’m really trying to add more value to help them make a better buying decision.

At the very least, if you feel that you are bugging someone, remember this. There’s the unsubscribe link at the bottom of every email going from your ConvertKit account, your MailChimp account, your Aweber account, whatever platform you use.

So if you have a sequence setup, you don’t even have to worry about the sending, it’s done for you.

Above all else, if a lead responds negatively to you providing them a follow-up sequence that’s helpful, answers questions, and positions you as an expert in your field, then are they going to respect your experience and expertise during the project? I’d bet not. Better to find that out now, rather than later.

If you are like me, you are tag happy, they want to track everything someone on their list does and so they tag everything.

This is great, but if you don’t do anything with the information, it’s just clutter in your CRM or email marketing platform.

There really are 2 things to focus in on when you are segmenting your email list.

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Intent

The first is intent.

Why do people buy from you? What problems are they trying to solve?

Intent is essentially the buyer’s goal. It’s what they want to achieve when they buy from you.

Someone’s intent is all the benefits that are important to them that they will get from you, your solution or product.

It’s their motivation behind the purchase decision.

For example, you want to buy a big screen TV because the big game is on and you are having a party.

The intent here is you want everyone to see the game, and maybe impress your friends a little too.

That’s the motivation behind the purchase of a big screen TV.

Another example, and maybe a bit more relevant is a non-profit wants to redesign their website so that they get more signups for their fundraiser.

The intent here is that the non-profit needs signups to get more donations so that they can fuel their mission.

The motivation behind the purchase of a redesign is that it will result in more signups.

How you obtain this intent is either through asking them and recording that as a tag.

Or the more efficient way of getting that intent is by asking someone who just bought from you what they hope to achieve from their purchase.

Then you can take that information and turn that around into headlines on your website, maybe even case studies or articles too.

Interest

The second segment to focus on is interest.

This is harder to do, but when carefully planned out is powerful. Because interests is where you are able to really hone in on the language so that you can craft a proper buying journey for them.

Interest is a big area to cover because it has a wide range of possibilities. It’s actually where most get stuck in the weeds about, which in a minute I’ll share how you can avoid that.

For the sake of choosing the easy road first, demographics is a part of interests.

In the case above with the TV, the one making the decision obviously likes sports, has expendable income, and even has a time crunch to make a purchase.

In the case of the non-profit, well, that’s the first demographic. The age of their existing site and the number of signups they have for their fundraiser are also demographic data points.

Simply because they need a redesign doesn’t mean that they will convert into signups. You are the professional understand all the parameters that go into that conversion. Traffic, word-of-mouth, social, etc are all factors they don’t know about. If those are all good then moving a signup button around on the site make work. However, if there isn’t enough of that, a redesign may not even help. Maybe a paid ad campaign would be better for them.

The more difficult but intentional road to travel is creating opportunities for a potential buyer to engage with you that illustrate interest.

For example, if you’re like me, then you prefer video and audio content on the web over reading a 15,000-word article.

You can find this out by having various types of content that talk about the same thing. One type is video, another is a podcast and the other is the long form article.

This is an interest segment that allows you to give specific content types to them, but also know that if you are selling a book, they may be more interested in the audio book rather than the hard cover book.

How to start finding a subscriber’s interest

This segment is where most get into the weeds a bit because figuring out all the specific data points of interest is hard to do. So instead you tag everything and everyone.

If you are tagging everyone, then I suggest that you look at all those tags. See how many of your customers are in a particular tag.

Are you seeing a pattern of particular articles, videos, resources, lead magnets? If so, that’s where you start.

Those tags are telling you the story of your customers, that you’ll want to tell leads the same story.

Maybe you say to yourself “I’m not confident in my selling skills.”

Are you feeling like you are doing all the things in sales that the best salespeople are telling you to do?

LinkedIn outreach, using tools for followup, even your [business coach](https://rezzz.com/coach/) aren’t 100%.

You have the mechanics of everything in place, but still feel like you aren’t able to hit the stride or get enough clients to fill that pipeline.

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I have just one question for you.

## Are you reviewing your sales process?

Do you listen to the recorded sales calls?

Are you listening more than talking?

Who’s asking more questions, you or the lead?

Are you reading between the lines of what the lead is telling you?

Do you have a spot on your calendar every single month to review your sales process?

It’s so important to be able to listen back on a sales call to hear how you sound to the lead.

Get over the fact of hearing your own voice and put yourself in the shoes of the lead. Ask yourself, as the lead, if you would buy from this person.

Listening to, reading transcriptions of the calls if you need to, is so important to be doing, especially early on or if you are trying something new.

Here’s why this is important.

## You think you sound good

When you are in conversation with someone, your brain in processing feedback and forming your next words as the words are coming out of your mouth.

When you listen back, you’ll hear all the “ums” and “ahs” and “you knows”. You’ll hear things that you don’t hear during the midst of the conversation.

You also hear spots in where you may stumble or misheard the question and wonder to yourself “what was I thinking?!?”

Once you hear these things, you can’t un-hear them and so you’ll be a little more conscious of them in the next one. Which in turn improves your sales communication.

## It’s not always all about you

If you don’t get a lead to close, ask why.

There’s a good chance they will never tell you. Or tell you something that really isn’t all that helpful.

But understanding the reason behind why someone chose not to move forward allows for you to adjust your process and sales conversation.

For example, if you keep hearing pushback on pricing, ask for the budget early on. If it’s timeline based, ask for the lead when they would like this done by earlier.

Another could be that they don’t like something about the process of working with you. Which then you may want to think about putting a nice write up about that on your website.

All these objections aren’t saying that you are wrong in any way. It’s simply saying that their expectations and needs differ. That’s all.

Putting in place a way to allow them to tell you a reason for not moving forward, saves you and future leads time. 

But it’s important because it creates space so that those leads that are a better fit have your attention, time, and focus.

I have no qualms about saying that Twitter is my home away from home.

Without Twitter, I’m not sure where I’d be right now to be honest.

I can attribute the growth of my business, my network of friends and colleagues, my clients, and you listening to this episode right now to the effort and engagement of my Twitter account.

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But Twitter is never the first place that I go to thinking about sales.

Engage

This is the very first tip here. Engage on Twitter!

Twitter is the biggest cocktail party on the planet. People making small talk, making introductions, complaining, connecting with people with would’ve never done so 15 years ago.

There’s really no place online like it.

I’ve been down the rabbit hold of blasting my followers with links, resources, and a plethora of other tweets fully automated and guess what happened?

Nothing.

Absolutely nothing. Sure I would get a like or a new follower here and there. Aside from that, the actual natural engagement there is where the magic happens.

I shut off all my automation back in October of 2017 and everything, and I mean everything got better.

People started seeing my tweets more, the natural occurrence of thoughts and helpful shares became liked and retweeted more and more.

If someone likes or retweets or just mentions you on Twitter, you better thank them.

Don’t worry about getting the likes, worry about how you can reply to those that likes.

Sales Bot

You’ve heard me talk before about my Sales Bot. It’s what I’ve built my business on when first starting out and still use to this very day.

Here’s the deal and why this is important.

There are [about 8300 tweets every single second](http://www.internetlivestats.com/one-second/#tweets-band). That’s fast!

A tweet has an average lifespan of [18 minutes](https://moz.com/blog/when-is-my-tweets-prime-of-life), which means that you have to be on top of things when they happen.

People complain all the time on Twitter with mentions of brands and/or people.

If you work with a certain platform, company, brand, or even person, and know that you can help solve problems that their customers have, it’s best to set up an alert for yourself than to spend your whole day on Twitter.

You’ve got work to do.

If you want my walk-through on setting up your own Sales Bot, jump onto my mailing list.

Patience

Be in it for the long game. Take it from me, I’ve tried experiments on all sorts of platforms including Periscope, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Beme, Blab, and so many others.

Nothing works quick, you have to be patient and play the long game.

Relationships, that’s what it’s about. The success of a relationship isn’t what happens in the first week or month.

It’s the years that are built up from the ground of that relationship that defines the success.

Twitter is about relationships first and foremost and if you aren’t in it for that, then no tips or tricks or strategies on Twitter will work for you.

As the professional, you need to close this gap through education and focus.

The education is on the potential of the return on investment. That return on investment is focused on the success of the project.

Focus on the success of the project

The first thing you need to do is ask your client “what does success look like 6 or 12 months time?”

Here’s why this is important.

It takes the focus away from you and what you are charging the client for the work and onto what they are looking to get from the project.

Because that’s why they are talking to you in the first place, right? They didn’t come to you because they want to spend money with someone. They want their own problem solved.

So if they answer with something like “we want to have 1000 new signups to our email list” or “we would like to have 100 new customers” or “we want to show up on the first page of Google for a specific keyword”, all these things translate to the bottom line, the value they are putting on the project.

That bottom line is now out in the open for you to either follow up with another question that asks them what that value of a customer is, or if you can go ahead and do some quick math based on your knowledge of the business and how much they make from their customers, you can position the project price to that value.

A client needs to be educated by you before they buy from you

The education piece comes into play during the follow-up.

When you talk budget, you should be talking about very early on in the process. If you are doing so and still getting this objection, that means the client hasn’t had the proper education on the value of their problem.

This is where most freelancers and consultants fail. They fail at delivering a followup sequence that is valuable and defaults to waiting a few days and then sending an email that says “just wanted to check in and see if you have any questions.”

The reason this is the default is the fear that you don’t want to bug or bother them. The only way you will bother them is with that lame followup email. Because that followup has no value to them at all!

If you were to fire off some links or resources that pertain to their problem and the solution you are proposing to them, then how could that be bothering to them.

You are simply sending them what they want.

In fact, 80% of sales require 5 follow-ups after the first meeting. How many are you doing?

When you follow-up, you need to provide value. There’s no reason to ask them for questions, if they have them, they will ask, don’t worry about that.

During your own education and surfing online, when you find something that betters your business in any way. Or come across an interesting article on the industry. Save it, write some quick bullet items as takeaways and fire it off in a follow up to a client.

It’s that simple really.

This is something that you can do manually or as you mature the process, build out an email sequence.

Ideally, you want to the followups to be relevant and take the client on a journey that leads to you at the end.

If you’d like more details on exactly what goes into each email or the automated sequence, Stop The Cycle is a course that Curtis McHale and myself that teaches the finer details.

So if you are getting push back on your pricing, then I hope this was helpful to you. You just may have to start reframing the focus which is the hard part that needs practice. The easy part is following up.

How do you do the work and push past the fear of getting it out there.

Things like podcasting and “going live” and just the general action of putting something into the world is scary. I won’t ignore that.

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As someone who has introverted tendencies, if I were to look back when I was in school, I certainly wouldn’t have stood in the middle of campus and started answering questions from people. Or stand at the back of the bus and give lessons on how to do the homework from the night before.

That, in fact, sounds absurd. So it got me thinking about why now? What changed?

Because I’m still very much that introverted guy. In fact, for my wedding, I had to prepare days in advance for being the center of attention for family and friends. (Let’s be honest, my beautiful bride was the center, but I would get some collateral attention).

Yet, I have stood up and spoken at meetups and WordCamp NYC, where all eyeballs were on me.

You are listening to episode 225 of my third podcast.

My wife thinks I’m nuts for preferring to spend 60-minutes answering questions from people rather than presenting a scripted slideshow.

So what changed?

There are 2 things that I can nail down that make a difference in young Jason and me today.

Mindset

The first is the mindset. And before you turn this off, I’m not going to go into the woo-woo, rah-rah stuff.

When I say mindset here, I mean that this is something I genuinely enjoy doing.

I like helping people, I mean who doesn’t.

But what I can help people with is specific things that I have done myself and have experience with.

I also enjoy being around people such as yourself.

And the final point of mindset is that I have a long game, a life’s mission of sorts for time freedom and flexibility not only for myself but for anyone else who wants that.

So when I feel nervous, or apprehension about pushing publish, I think about those things and the rest becomes mechanical.

I get out of my own way.

Smaller steps get you farther

The second item is doing things in small iterations. Break things down into smaller chunks so that the action isn’t overwhelming.

You no doubt have heard this before, so let me share a concrete example for you.

When I did my first podcast, it was with other developers and it was called WP Dev Table.

By today’s standard, it was a very unprofessional podcast. We would set on a date to record, invite another developer onto the show, and open up Google Hangouts and record. That’s it. That’s all the podcast was.

We didn’t even have a set time and date for release, in fact, in the beginning, we didn’t even have a website or show notes.

But the simple action of pressing record would put it into the world.

Then over the years with this and Live In The Feast I’ve gotten incrementally better with show notes, music, production, promotion, and so on.

The point I want you to take away from this is pretty simple.

Anytime you start to feel that self-doubt or imposter syndrome or overwhelm creep in, ask yourself…

What is the smallest action I can make right now with this piece of knowledge I know about out into the world and in front of people I like?

Then just do it.

Simply because I’m one who studies business trends and not in that analytical type of position.

With that being said though, I’d like to share an aspect of the business that I’ve seen grow and produce amazing results, not just in my business, but other businesses as well.

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On Live In The Feast Season 4 and as I’m recording Season 5, the co-hosts who have come on the show and shared their experiences and insight have all talked about sales and marketing at a personal level.

When I say personal level, I mean that they are doing things that are unscalable like high-touch sales, like personalized videos, like one-on-one sessions.

They are doing things like creating welcome packages like what Andrew Askins, co-founder of Krit, spoke about in Episode 10.

I’ve found in my own business indications from prospects that they want a more customized, a more personalized experience.

When I think about my own buying habits, more often than not I lean in the direction towards getting a great experience more than anything else.

For example Podcast Royale, who edits and does all the production work for Live In The Feast. Can I get what they do for a lower cost, maybe?

But the experience I have when working with them. The feeling of knowing that all I need to do is record and put the files in Dropbox and the episode will cross the finish line and be published.

The back and forth conversations, feedback and advice is an experience that I’m happy to pay for.

If you are wondering why you aren’t closing more deals or maybe not getting repeat projects from a client, are you doing anything to better their experience?

I’m not saying that you need to send them away on an all expense paid vacation, but is there anything that you are doing to stand out and create a memorable moment in their minds.

This could be sending them a small gift for signing a contract with you. Maybe a wooden coaster with their logo on it. (Thank you, Agency Highway podcast).

Maybe it’s a hard copy of your onboarding sequence that you normally send via email.

Something that’s unique enough that allows you to stand out from all those just going through the motions.

I’m not going to say that it won’t cost you a small investment. Maybe even a bit of time to do. But that gesture is something that will delight them and make you memorable.

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How do I know Jonathan Stark?

Jonathan Stark, author of Hourly Billing is Nuts and host of Ditching Hourly podcast invited me onto his show.

We are a part of a Slack group together and as we were talking about Jonathan's platform migration from Drip to ConvertKit, he invited me onto the show to talk about how I productized my services as a platform specialist.

In this episode, I had a chance to talk about how I went from a burnt out generalist developer to an in-demand specialist.

How to become a platform specialist

In case you don’t want to read the rest of this, you can check out the full episode for all the details.

There is a lot that goes into specializing your business, you can choose a vertical specialty, a horizontal specialty, or a platform specialty.

In this conversation with Jonathan, we dive into many of the pivot points, thoughts, fears, and strategy behind how I built my business.

In the episode, I shared a variety of things including:

- How I put myself on the radar of specific platforms?
- How building relationships and being helpful in the community can create trust
- How I still choose those who I work with even if I’ve already helped them in the past

Specifically, I talk about how I became a trusted partner of both Drip and ConvertKit.

The main takeaways from this show are:

- How to identify pieces of your existing services and creating products to sell
- By being helpful first, your business will grow
- There are pros and cons to being a platform specialist, which both are that you are tied to that platform.

Definitely go [check it out](https://www.ditchinghourly.com/b87a8b24).

If you have a chance too, check out a few of the other episodes as well.

I’d like to thank Jonathan for being a part of it and including me along with amazing folks like Liston Witherill, Jane Portman, and Blair Enns

I get asked how to get more clients and I often say that it’s not about “more clients”, it’s about “right clients.”

I stress that it’s about getting the right quality clients.

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What you need to think about is how high-quality is that client that you are working with right now and how much are you charging them.

If you are looking to increase the budget, it comes from not just leveling up your skills, not just your experience, but also that you are doing more for them in your solution.

Which means that if you are including more, that, in turn, requires more time spent on the solution and obviously a bigger budget.

What is it in those budgets that allow you to charge more?

This could be strategy and consultation. Could be a weekly phone call. This could even be an add-on service like marketing on social media.

Maybe you are thinking that you don’t know how to do marketing. Or that you aren’t experienced enough yet to give a valuable strategy.

That’s ok.

Figuring out what you can add into the mix to increase those budgets isn’t about you.

It has to be about your client and what they want.

As a developer, I take pride in proper coding practices such as environments, coding standards, and efficient deployment scripts. My clients, not so much.

What my clients' value is communication. This comes in 2 forms.

The first is how we handle everyday communication. I tried Basecamp, Asana, and others for project management with clients. All too often though they would forget their password, forget the URL to go to.

It made working with me in their eyes, difficult.

So instead of forcing them into something that would frustrate them, I stuck to something that I know they know. Email.

They send me an email and then I do what I need to on the backend to file it accordingly.

The second form is a weekly call.

I asked my clients “how can I be more awesome?”

What I was told was that communication is great through the email, but having a regular phone call would be awesome.

So I added in a weekly phone call to my services.

Now I rather spend the time doing work than talking about it, but that’s me, not the client.

In order to make that phone call reality and provide more to the solution in that way, that would require time carved out of the week, and require prep and post time.

You may be thinking how can you charge more for something like a call when those seemingly are needed anyway.

Are you charged more for consultations with a lawyer or accountant?

Since my main form of communication is through email and the one-off scheduled calls, a weekly call isn’t something that is necessary to get the work done, in fact, it pulls me away from getting that work done.

However, the client deems it important enough for them to do business. If that’s the case, then I can charge for that added time for that level of communication.

To charge more is to get into the head of the client.

Don’t charge more for the sake of yourself, charge more because you are adding the value to your package that the client sees as valuable.

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Where is the money

First is to know where the money is coming from.

I love music, I love listening, playing and exploring new bands.

I also like the design, the aesthetic of metal and hard rock music.

Though new bands often don’t have the budget to spend on their marketing or website development.

That’s often left for beer.

So I wouldn’t want to go after them as an ideal client.

However since I enjoy the creative arts, folks who sell services, sell products (both digitally and physical), makers of all shapes and sizes who already build their businesses online.

Well, those are folks could be potential clients.

Go get them

Once you’ve established where the money is, it’s time to go out and get the work.

They won’t automatically find you and come knocking on the door. You will need to prospect.

This means having to find people to have conversations with, sending emails to, and have Skype calls with.

Once you’ve established yourself with some sort of track record, which I talk about in episode 140 - How can I start freelancing as a web developer?, the prospecting becomes easier to do.

You’ll start to see that more clients come to you. But that does take time and that’s why prospecting is so important.

Put up the velvet rope

Sure clients with bigger budgets want their solution delivered to them with great success, but they also want to feel like they are spending wisely.

This means, putting up a velvet rope, or as I call it a Project Brief.

Even if you initiated the conversation, have them fill out an application. This velvet-rope not only shows that you have been down the road before, but it also gives the perception that you don’t just let anyone be a client of yours.

There is a bit of psychology here where if there’s a gated community, us humans want to be in it.

Then as that client progresses through working with you, delight them in unexpected ways.

Send a welcome packet. Send them personalized notes and cards. Send them unexpected gifts that relate to their business.

These tiny gestures go a long way in the good feeling of spending a lot of money.

Walk the walk

The final tip here is a bonus one, but it’s important.

You want to walk the walk. Meaning, have your energy and your language reflect that of what’s attractive to those higher budget clients.

For example: if you are going after large corporate brands in the finance industry, you best dust of that suit and tie and not show up for a face to face meeting, or even a video call in a t-shirt.

In episode 135, I shared 11 ways to stand out as a freelancer. And while that’s a great list and got awesome feedback, the one thing that is most often attached to that is the word “the most.”

I get asked “How to stand out as a freelancer the most?” so often that it’s astonishing.

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Yet, what I asked on Twitter how many of you have a formal follow up for leads with the choices of “yes”, “no”, and “just send ‘just wanted to check-in’”, shockingly only 19% said that they have a formal follow up sequence.

Let me say that a different way, more than 80% of freelancers do not have a formal follow up sequence with leads.

Yet, you ask how do you stand out in a crowded freelancer market.

Education and add value

When I first started doing follow up sequences, it was more manual than anything. Mainly because I was a generalist developer serving customers of all shapes and sizes.

But for me it made sense that if a lead contacted me, even if we hadn’t talked yet, to send them valuable pieces of content that were relevant to their project, business objectives, and maybe a fun joke to show that I’m a human too.

I would have a library of related links to articles or videos or podcasts that spoke to a number of stats, key metrics, case studies, and even how-tos.

I read the articles and got value from them to better my business, so why not share what I’m consuming with those who may work with me.

I would set a reminder in my calendar to send off an email that was quick, simple, and had a link with a few key points that I wanted that lead to walk away with.

I put those key points in there just in case they never clicked the link.

I’ve since automated this process a bit more and if you want to know how I do that check out Stop The Cycle.

How often do you email?

How many emails should I send to a lead? is the next logical question I’m sure you have right now.

You’ll have to play with this yourself to find the sweet spot, but I did some research on the topic to get a good idea of a ballpark to start with.

• Decision makers consume 5 pieces of content before they are even ready to speak to a sales rep
• Half of all leads that enter a sales pipeline are not ready to buy in near term.
• 80% of sales require 5 follow ups after the first meeting
• 44% of sales reps give up after one

That last stat I threw in there just to reinforce my answer to standing out.

If you look at the other 3 though, 5 seems to be the magic number.

If even talking to someone requires on seeing 5 pieces of content and 80% of sales require 5 follow ups, the bare minimum you should send should be 5.

Obviously you want to throttle this based on how fast they are moving with you through sales. But if someone is dragging their feet or that they set up a call with you 7 days from today, that’s plenty of time to send an email a day with a valuable piece of content.

It’s that simple. No need to overcomplicate it.

The great thing about this is standing out happens early on in the game. 

If your lead is shopping around and has a short list of 5 vendors to go with and you are the only one who’s providing valuable information on a consistent basis without them even paying you yet, guess who they are going to want to talk with and go with?

Quick, small, yet powerful tweaks you can make to your sales process that you can put into practice today.

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Find out how to close those who are sitting on the fence

This is something that is normally best done over a call or face-to-face. It’s much harder over email.

But when done a few times, you’ll know exactly what you are missing in your sales.

If someone says to you “I need to think about this” or any of the variations of that.

Respectfully respond with empathy on the decision and then follow up with asking them what it will take.

You do this by simply asking them, on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being we’ll never start this project together, and 10 being let’s do this right now, where do are you right now?

If they answer 6 or 7, which is probably where most will sit, follow up by asking “what do I have to do to make that a 10 for you?”

Add in a tactic to get more leads to your business with your current clients

I’ll be honest, I haven’t tried this tactic myself, but I’ve heard others do it pretty successfully.

When you get a brand new client, before you present your proposal to them, ask if they want to get $X off of the project.

When they say “yes”, then explain to them at the end of the project, if they can refer to you names of 5 other people who could use your services, they’ll get that discount.

I’m not a fan of discounting, but I can see this being a pretty successful campaign because if you landed 10% of the referrals, that would totally cover your costs on the discount.

Add in a strategy that involves you reaching out to new people

For example, every single day, reach out a business or to someone who could be your target client on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or your platform of choice.

By using a quick DM to say very quickly that you admire something that they are doing, something that you do and how you can add value to what they are already doing, it’ll go a long way.

If you do that every single day for a quarter and only close 5% of those leads, you’ll have 4 new clients. If you continue to do that over the course of a year, that’ll be 18 brand new clients this year.

I think you’ll agree that these 3 things aren’t hard at all to put in place today, right?

If you do all 3, then you’ll be improving aspects to bring more business opportunities in with leads, hot leads, and clients. Can’t beat that!

Which one are you going to try first?

In fact, let’s do this. Tweet me @rezzz on Twitter with a 1, 2, 3, or multiple of them and hashtag #askrezzz. So if you are doing the 1-10 rating, put 1. If you are doing the referral discount, put 2. If you are doing the DM per day, put 3.

Can’t wait to see how successful you are.

If you got some value from this episode and the show over the past year, how about starting the new year off by providing an honest review in iTunes.

I do read each and every single one and it helps to hear your voice to know that what I’m doing is helpful to you.

This is true if you are a developer, a designer, a marketer, or even a photographer.

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Before I jump into the must-haves when you think about these questions to ask, think about the end, what you are delivering and work backward from there.

It’s so easy to get caught up in the emotions and excitement of a new project and want to jump in. If you want the project to be as successful as possible, just like the client does, make sure you are on the same page from the start.

The key thing to remember is to not assume anything. Cover all your bases so that you both earn trust with each other and have a firm foothold on the project.

So if you are a developer and you need to work on an existing codebase, don’t assume that they have a code repository and different environments for testing things.

For any type of business that you are, don’t assume that you are the only one working on the project. Make sure that you know who else is so that it can be collaborative.

Which now leads me to the X questions to ask.

What are you looking to achieve?

This can also be “why is this important right now for the business?”

Aside from any technology, there’s a reason that the business has chosen this project right now and it is important to understanding why.

The reason could be sales based, could be philosophy based, could be they are looking to get investors, and so on.

The underlying reason will set the path for the success.

What does success look like in 6, 10, 12 months from now?

This is important even on the smallest of projects that may only last a couple of weeks.

Understanding the vision the client has for the work that’s about to be done is the measuring stick of happiness for them with you.

If they expect 1000 new users to sign up in 6 months, it’s better to know that than doing the work and you thinking that they would be happy with 500.

What does failure look like?

This is important especially when it comes to working with a client that’s had a bad experience previously.

Failure for you will be different than the client. That I’m sure of.

So best to understand what that is so that you can steer clear of that at all costs.

Oddly enough, failure for the client has to do with communication more often than not. Which makes it easy for you since you can always take 5 minutes at the end of the day to let them know what’s going with their project.

Why have you come to me?

This is also “what is it that I do that interests you for us to work together?”

Even though I don’t ask this explicitly, I can often tell by the way they got in touch with me.

Having this information is important because it’s often that there are cheaper and more expensive options out there. There are also options that can provide a similar solution to you.

How they respond to this is telling of your uniqueness. It says a lot about you as a business and what you do differently.

These are the Sales 101 questions you have to ask. Asking them as early on in the process will help you filter the tire kickers especially.

So put these questions on your forms or applications to do work.

If the lead cannot answer each of these with some level of conviction and thought behind them, then they are tire kickers.

Tire kickers are those that have an idea and looking for validation of the idea and scoping a budget.

Tire kickers are the fool’s gold of the client services world.

This isn’t truth. There’s nothing about this that is valid. If a magic wand exists, then I haven’t found one.

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I get asked plenty every single week for a “quick win” or “what’s the best way to get clients” or “how long will it take before I get results.”

I always say that these questions are the wrong questions to be asking. If you are asking these questions then stop talking to me, and everyone else, and only talk to those that will pay you.

Get out there, ask your network of friends and family, even previous employers and see if there is something that you can help with.

If you want to build a business, you can’t do it without revenue bottom line.

You may fall into one of these

If you have zero clients right now and looking for them, spend the next day, 8-10 hours, making calls and reaching out to potential paying customers.

If you have one client right now and looking for more, then spend 6 hours today looking for clients by reaching out to potential customers.

If you have clients and need money to pay bills that are piling up, spend 4 hours today reaching out and looking for clients.

This is the hustle part of the business.

The first 2 are scenarios where you are most likely starting out or in a downturn in your business. The 3rd is often a matter of your expenses outpacing your revenue. In that case, you need to raise rates and get that higher paying and higher value clients.

Now don’t get me wrong, I get that this is all easier said than done. And seeking out on Google and putting into the search “how to get clients” is much easier, but that won’t get you anywhere fast.

In fact, you may find yourself back inside a cube.

That was only the first step…

I applaud you though for looking to better your business through education and coaching, but these are foundational lessons in business. They won’t land you a client today. I turn folks away from Feast when I get a sense that they should be cutting expenses and focusing on the hustle part.

Some still subscribe and buy-in, but they soon realize it’s not what they need right now, which is what I told them in the first place.

Searching Google and investing in your business as I said is the easier thing to do. It’s also the part that you have control over. Therefore, it may seem like you are doing what’s needed to get clients, when in reality the act of getting a client you honestly don’t have any control over.

You have control over all the possible actions leading up the decision a potential client has to either go with you or not. That’s what your focus should be on.

Early on, it’s about reaching out one-on-one and asking if you can help.

As you land those, then start the building blocks back from that to help you with all the things leading up to the close of the deal.

That’s where courses and coaching comes into play. These are the long games of building a business. If anyone is telling you otherwise, they are lying to you.

Here’s how this all works together

If you have no clients and need work today, spend 8-10 hours calling and talking with potential customers. Then spend 30-60 minutes thinking about and outlining a piece of content about a question a potential customer will ask you and you can answer.

If you have a client right now and looking for more, spend 6 hours talking to and reaching out to potential clients and then spend an hour a piece of content about a question a potential customer will ask you and you can answer.

If you have clients but need to pay bills, spend 4 hours looking for clients. But every potential client that moves forward in conversation, give them a rate that’s at least 1.5X what your current rate is.

Then spend an hour looking at your sales process and pinpoint spots where you can ask questions earlier on in the process to filter out clients that wouldn’t pay your new rate.

Benefits to increasing your rate when you have clients and need work

Increasing your new rate will do a number of things for you.

Bottom line, if you need work, go get it, stop distracting yourself from the thing that you know you need to do.

If someone gave me 8-10 hours in a day to find work, I’d find work.

But then after putting that hustle in, take some time and build those building blocks of the business so that in the future you don’t find yourself in this scenario again.

To me, it’s a bit funny that they ask this because I’ve been in business since 2010 and often times this person I’m talking to has had multiple jobs with multiple companies over the same period of time.

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The best analogy of my point of view came by way of Troy Dean when he joined me as a co-host on Live In The Feast.

He said that he’s a terrible passenger. If he’s on the bus, he wants to his hands on the wheel. I love this because I feel the very same way. I want to be in control of my life. I wasn’t someone who enjoyed school very much and being shuffled from class to class by a ringing bell. I felt like I was one of Pavlov’s dogs where they ring the bell and I come running for the treat.

With that though comes great responsibility. When it was just me, I had bills and rent to pay but that was about it. Now with a family, I have other mouths to feed and other lives to support and nurture.

It requires some sacrifice for sure. Sometimes it’s an early morning wake up call, or a late night launch. But that’s the nature of the business.

So when someone asks me “how’s business” and then proceeds to look at me like a poor soul who’s struggling to make it, I often think to myself.

I feel for this person who’s been put in a box, whether by their own parents, society, schooling, whatever happened that they are trying to put me in a box.

I think about how grateful I am to have the ability to generate my own income and how empowering that is for myself, my family, and our future.

I usually smile and I certainly don’t diminish what I do.

What I mean by that is when I first started my business, I used to internalize this view that they were in better position than I. I would then vocalize something to diminish my accomplishments by saying something like “it’s tough, but it is what it is” or “business is good but could be better of course.”

Now when I think about how their situation is when they ask me about mine, I smile and think about how they’ve switched jobs 3 times in the last 9 years, commute to the city on the train or drive 45 minutes one-way to get to work, and I think about how they are lucky to get a 3% raise every year.

I’m in control of all those things that I hate about those boxes.

After I share how awesome things are, I often will ask the same question back to them which is the fun part.

Whereas many of my conversations with my friends and colleagues who run businesses love to chat about shop, those working full-time will often complain. I’ll hear about how their commute sucks, that they switched jobs because the company merged, that they are dealing with an idiot boss, and so on.

The next time someone asks you “how business is going?” smile and think about how you are driving the bus to your own destination and how many stops they have to hit before they get to theirs.

Embrace your accomplishments, not everyone in the world is built like you. Don’t let family, friends, a random person at a party put you in a box they have made for you. Who knows, they may be someone you hire some day.

If you got some value from this episode and the show over the past year, how about starting the new year off by providing an honest review in iTunes.

I do read each and every single one and it helps to hear your voice to know that what I’m doing is helpful to you.

Kim Doyal is all about content. I’ve known her from the WordPress space for years but she’s since pivoted her business to focus more on helping business with their content and the Content Creators Community.

She’s coined the phrase “Everything is Content” and since I know that you struggle with finding the time to and figuring out what to write about, I thought no better person to answer this than Kim.

Just like you plan your projects, plan for your business, you want to also plan for your content and Kim has the strategies to help you.

She’s going to share with you 2 strategies for making the time and then 2 easy strategies to get your content rolling.

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When encountering a “price buyer” there’s often nothing you can do to have them come up and see the value from a cost perspective.

I don’t want to beat a dead horse on what to say when this happens because I dive into what you should be doing and how to direct them down the path of a referral in that episode.

In Episode 156-What do I say when a potential client says I'm too expensive? -- yes, I get asked this question quite often -- you learn 3 strategies and how to tell if it's a negotiation tactic or not.

What I’d like to share with you though is that if you are getting this often in your sales conversations, put your prices on your website, Facebook page, or wherever you get your leads from.

If you get this objection more than a third of the time, then you aren’t clearly attracting the right kind of clients. You are also not setting the expectations early enough in the process.

Your leads will go down, there’s no question about that.

You lead quality though will skyrocket. 

You’ll get folks coming to you with an expectation of the kinds of budgets they need to work with you.

You’ll also gain back time in your schedule too. I don’t know about you, but when I take a sales call, it’s not just the 30 minutes for the call. 

It’s the prep time, looking into their business, looking around online to see if there are any red flags from them, maybe seeing if I can find past vendors they’ve worked with, looking at their customers, and so on. 

Plus all that time that pulls me away from other client work or my own business.

All this could easily be a couple of hours on top of the time for the call.

Lower quality of leads will result in no-shows for the call, wasted time for yourself and them, and your profits flying right out the window because you are not getting paid for doing sales. 

The payment for sales should be baked into your project costs. So just like any part of your business, your profits will increase if you are able to reduce the time spent on a task and increase the conversions through those points.

Setting the budget expectation as early as possible is a key component and major objection clients have.

A lead really has 3 things they focus on when deciding to sign on with you.

• Price
• Timeline
• If you can actually do the work

Addressing all these 3 before you even hop on a call with a lead will be beneficial to you improving your close rate on new clients.

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Over the past decade, I’ve run into many leads and clients that have had terrible experiences from flakey freelancers who have either disappeared, communicated poorly, didn’t deliver a project, or just didn’t set the expectations the client had.

If you are a freelancer in business, please, please, do right by your clients. Be honest and don’t get in over your head.

If you find yourself in a sticky spot, there’s nothing that communicating to the client can’t fix.

If you are a freelancer and asking questions like “how come clients don’t respect my value?” or “how do I charge more than bottom dollar hourly rates?” The big reason is that of these flakey freelancers who don’t do right by their clients and then those clients are jaded and don’t want to be burned again.

If nothing else is taken from this, please communicate clearly and often with your clients so that it raises the bar for all of us in the services based industry.

Rant over!

This is actually an easier answer than you may think.

Be empathetic

Tell them that you are very sorry and can appreciate their apprehension based on their past experience. I’m sure you’ve had bad experiences in the past with either a product or service, right?

Put yourself in their shoes for a minute and support them. Don’t be confrontational.

Don’t throw anyone under the bus.

You only know one side of that story and you have no knowledge of the situation. However, you can call upon your own experiences of bad service in the past and how that made you feel.

You have your guard up and don’t want to be burned again, and that is exactly how they feel too.

Reflect the conversation back to how they found you

Once you are able to put your arm around them, next reference back to how they found you.

If it’s a referral, that’s great, because referencing the person’s name you pull that trust factor back into the conversation.

If it’s by some other means, say an article or podcast you were in, mention that big takeaway. No doubt it’s the reason why they wanted to get you to work with them in the first place.

Give them confidence

Tying in that takeaway, ensure them that they won’t find themselves in a similar place again because of how you run your business.

Share with them some behind the scenes workflows and processes if you need to.

But what you want to do is instill confidence quickly that you’ve got things under control.

By talking through these 3 points, you’ll find that most of that initial baggage the lead has, will be put aside. What you want to keep in mind though as you work together is that baggage is not gone.

They will be on the watch for the signals of getting burned again, so you need to be as well so that the trust you’ve developed and earned doesn’t chip away.

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Radio silence from the client.

You’ve sent a few emails that have gone unanswered. Maybe even a few calls have gone unreturned.

What do you do next?

There are a few things, but first, keep in mind that no matter how good the relationship is remember that you really don’t know the full story of your client.

So before your brain starts jumping to conclusions, be empathetic first and foremost.

## Are you ok?

First, you want to make contact, probably via email with a simple “Are you ok?” type of email.

Something simple, like:

> I haven’t heard from you in a while. I called X times and sent emails on A, B, and C but haven’t heard back. I just wanted to make sure everything is ok? Please let me know so I know everything is good or if there’s anything that I can help with.

## A nudge to move forward

After having sent that and then a couple of days go by and you still haven’t heard back.

> I know things come up unexpectedly. I just wanted to see what your thoughts were about X so that we can move forward with Y. If priorities have shifted, that’s ok too. We are at a standstill and the project is in jeopardy of missing the scheduled date of completion.

## Final call

If there still is no response, there’s a good chance it’s been a month or more since you last heard from them at this point.

It’s time to close the project and move forward.

> I haven’t heard from you since X. I’ve sent Y emails and called Z times. As per our agreement, I’ll be putting your project on hold. When you are ready, I can re-schedule your project. Re-scheduling the project involves 1, 2, and 3. Please pay your remaining balance by <DATE>.

Sending an invoice will certainly awaken a sleeping client one way or another. You may not get the payment, but you’ll certainly get some sort of response good, bad, or otherwise.

Item of note here is that if you don’t have a “ghosting clause” in your agreement, here’s the time to put one in.

You don’t want projects to linger on for months, maybe years even.

This is a simple paragraph in your contract that states what happens if they are unresponsive. Put strict parameters around what "unresponsive" means and the consequences of this. State what has to happen for the project to be re-scheduled to be worked on and any penalty fees that may or may not apply.

Clients aren’t bad. They don’t go into projects with the intention of ghosting, but when it does happen, you’ll be happy that you have that clause in place.

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Andrew asked this great question and I thought I’d share it here since one the episode won’t be released for another few weeks. And two, after last week’s series on being better at sales, this fits in perfectly.

For a little bit of context to how Andrew asked me this, we were talking about crafting our messaging around the company by who we serve, why they should care, and how they benefit from it.

As we were chatting we both agreed that the messaging is marketing. It’s who we target because it’s who we know we can serve n the most successful way.

But shockingly, that isn’t always who we work with.

When you specialize your business, you may be afraid of “the money being left on the table” when in actuality, you repel the bad clients and attract those people that can resonate with who you are.

So as a lead comes to the business, and maybe they aren’t the WooCommerce business, or they aren’t using Drip for them email marketing platform. Maybe they are using Teachable and ConvertKit, but all the other signals I have for taking on a project align.

We gel from a personality perspective. I can totally support their business and what they stand for. They respect my expertise and value my input.

Well, I’m going to try and close them. I may put some constraints around the project, but I’m going to close them.

There isn’t any reason not to. It’s these types of clients that have allowed me to grow my business over the past decade.

I work with non-profits, e-commerce, service-based, coaches, memberships, and digital product based businesses.

If I took a hard line approach with everyone coming in and didn’t expand my horizons as a business, I wouldn’t be in business today.

How I determine they are a fit

This is the time though I really have learned to listen to my gut on things. I also lean heavily on being able to read that person and making sure that we can work together well.

If anything my gut tells me or something is off, then I don’t push them towards the proposal stage.

I try and help them the best way possible and more often than not, will refer them to someone who can help them.

I go into every sales call with the intention of having that other person leave with value and in a better place than before we started it.

Letting go of the notion that every sales call needs to be closed is freeing and confidence building.

No one on the planet has a 100% close rate.

I’d much rather accept that, then be helpful and honest with the other person so that we both leave the conversation feeling good.

You may approach sales differently, maybe you want to close every deal. Maybe you feel you have to just to keep the lights on.

Well, that’s where the desperation comes into play, that’s where you lose your position as the expert and that’s where you become awkward around questions of budget and timelines.

When you let go of the thinking of having to close every deal, you’ll find yourself able to more productive sales calls and land more clients because you aren’t any of the things I just mentioned.

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For the context of this episode, this is for those that are just starting out, maybe still full-time and looking to go freelance.

This could also be for those trying a new service or piece to their business. Maybe even niching down or specializing your business to where you haven’t had any experience in before.

So many of you in this area find yourself in a chicken or the egg scenario, where you talk about how you have no case studies or portfolio pieces. You don’t have experience because you haven’t done this type of work before.

You find yourself paralyzed because of it. You don’t move forward with anything because you get stuck.

I want to share with you 3 tips that don’t require anything other than a conversation with a client or lead when you don’t have the experience.

Find out why they are talking to you

Unless they are a friend of yours or existing client, there’s some reason for why you are talking with them.

Maybe it was a bad previous engagement.

Maybe someone referred you.

Maybe they found you online and liked what you do, but they are unsure if you can help them because of the business they have.

Whatever it is, find out. Because that will give you a quick insight into what is attractive about you to them.

Simply ask “How did you find out about me?” before starting in on the conversation. Or if during the course of the conversation they seem unsure if you can help, ask “There are a lot of choices out there, and I respect that, may I ask you why you are talking with me about your project?”

Set up the clarity for the lead, make sure they are clear of the problem

Making sure that the lead is fully engaged and clear on what problem they want solving.

Echo back what they are asking you for. State everything that you hear back to them to make sure that there is clarity on what’s being asked for and the goals they want to achieve.

If there’s some level of contention about the project based on a previously bad engagement, be empathetic but state how you work and the benefits to the client of the  way you work.

After briefly giving them insight, ask them if that process makes sense to them. Ask them if it aligns with their thinking and the goals that why are looking to achieve.

Get them focused back onto your conversation with them, not thinking about the bad experience they had.

Empathize with them and offer a lower risk opportunity to work together

If there’s still some level of skepticism due to lack of experience, offer them a lower risk opportunity to work together on.

I’m not suggesting discounting your services!

I’m suggesting offering them a phased project, where the initial engagement is a smaller win, lower cost, and quicker timeline.

Then when that engagement is a success (notice I didn’t say “if it’s a success) you talk again about moving forward with a larger piece of the project.

Most of your leads and clients come from word of mouth. Especially when starting out. If you are engaged in conversation, often times they haven’t even looked at a portfolio yet.

There’s a trust factor by proxy since they came to you from someone else that they trust.

You don’t need those portfolio pieces or full website with all the logos and badges.

You simply need to have a conversation that’s focused and has the objective of solving the problem the lead or client has.

That will prove to them that you are thinking strategically and pragmatically about solving their problem when others are stumbling or just trying to close the sale.

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Leaning in, or being empathetic during a sales process is really about giving the lead what they want.

Whether they want the lowest cost, the best value, to comparison shop, etc, it’s in your best interest to give them what they want.

When you think about sales, instead of thinking about closing every deal, think about how to have them leave your conversation in a better place.

You aren’t going to convince anyone they need you. They have to realize that themselves.

If they feel they need something that you don’t have or do, the best thing to do is to put them on the path to getting that.

One of my favorite quotes is from Pippin Williamson founder of Sandhills Development.

If it’s hard to have a conversation with someone and suggest a course of action, how do you think a project will be working together?

Ever have a lead say “I don’t need the strategy, can you just write the code” or “Can you just design the logo without the full brand?”

The answer is simple.

“I will design you a logo, but how will you know it’ll be effective for the brand.”

“I can certainly write the code, but how will that code fit with the rest of the application and do what you need it to do.”

“Is that what you want?”

Lean in to what they want.

Explain that the strategy and process is all a part of the code or design. Without it, it’s just a visual element.

Without your process, you have no way of knowing with confidence that the solution you are providing will be successful.

This lead is often a price buyer, maybe a touch of the “know-it-all” buyer as well.

Explain that the price is the same with or without the strategy. Encourage them that there are other low cost options out there for them to use.

It’s like building a house without a blueprint. It may stand, be a 3 bedroom house. But you were expecting it to withstand a hurricane and be 5 bedroom house.

What they are looking for is your value, but for cheap and that just isn’t possible.

Let them go and come back.

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In the previous two episodes you learned to protect your sales process, and ultimately your business, by only pushing value buyers and those that give you a firm “yes” at the end of the sales call to the proposal stage.

RFPs are the complete opposite of this.

In short, responding to an RFP, have you reading through a document explaining the project from the perspective of the company and then drafting up a proposal with your time estimates, milestones, due dates, company history, and questions you have to bid on the project.

Then that company shows all the responses and selects what they feel is the best option.

If you are responding to RFPs, this is the epitome of the proposal writing business.

If a buyer presents to you an RFP, full stop. Protect your time! Protect your profits!

Simply say “Before we get into this - It’s not your policy to do speculative work.”

Because that’s what an RFP is, speculative.

You are speculating on the project based on what is in that document. You have no customer input, surveys, data or your own research to help you build a proper solution to the problem.

How to speak with a lead that insists on responding to an RFP?

Ask them if they are a gambler?

“How important is this project to you?”

“What is it worth to you to solve the problem?”

These are appropriate questions to ask the lead that insists on the RFP process.

The lead has to be a gambler, otherwise, they wouldn’t be hanging themselves out there asking companies to build and present solutions without any conversations and research into the problem, for free.

These 2 questions, refocuses the conversation you are having for the lead to get clarity around the project and what they are asking you to do.

You can further pursue it by elegantly and tactfully asking if the other companies pitching: 

• Have these companies interviewed customers
• Have these companies interviewed sales to see what the challenges are

“Chances are that you are going to say no. And since you are asking people for free work, they are just going to come up with answers on their own. They might hit it, but they might not. That’s why I asked if you are a gambler or not.”

Explain why you do what you do

Take some time and explain why your process is important to them and solving their specific problem.

This is where that clarity can hit them like a ton of bricks. Because here you can emphasize that you can give them a cookie cutter solution, but what happens when that doesn’t work.

They will have to then go back to whoever approved the bid and backtrack.

Explain to them that without your process, what they are asking is for companies to answer from a 1000 miles away, not an inch close and from all angles.

The best thing that they are going to come up with is superficial because that’s how deep they are able to go. There are no reference points to what is going to be the most effective solution to help them get sales, build a brand, code an application, etc.

The lead and committee are making a decision purely on a gut feeling without a true understanding of what’s going to work.

This is where you share the things you need to understand what the key metrics and goals for success are.

What are the trigger points for the customers to buy-in?

That the only way to know is to talk with you, your team, and potential customers.

Then it’s a matter of summing up and echoing back everything the lead said to you and leave them thinking about their process.

“So as much as you would like to work with them on this $X project, I can’t from this point of view. I can’t tell you with confidence it would work.”

Then sit in that silence.

In this short statement, you echo back what they say it’s worth it to them to solve this problem.

You are also planting the seed that if the other companies are not asking these things, then maybe they aren’t as good as they say they are.

Keep in mind, you are not in the business to write proposals. You are in the business to solve problems successfully for your clients and in turn make money and profits from that.

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If you haven’t already done so, go back and listen to How to get better at sales?, where you will learn the first 2 steps to getting better at sales.

• Learn from every sales call
• Identify the type of buyer you are talking with

By the end of this episode, you will learn the most important piece of sales. That is how to overcome any objection to the 5 buyer types we identified in the last episode.

Once you key in on identifying which type you are speaking to, you want to embrace them.

Lean in to what they want and give them exactly what they ask for.

STEP 3 - Put the buyer on the right path

With any of them, you don't want to waste your time in writing a proposal unless you get a firm "yes" from the at the end of the call. 

You aren't in business to write proposals. If they balk at the time and cost investment and still ask for a proposal, tell them that "this is the proposal, nothing will be different in the document."

You aren't in the proposal writing business. 

There's no reason to waste time on writing up an in-depth proposal on something that's never going to happen. 

Explain to them that the proposal is a formality to get the ball rolling on the project together. If what they hear on this call doesn't make sense to them to move forward, nothing will change in the document.

When you identify the type of buyer, there's a different path you want to direct them to.

• Price buyer --> referral
• Value buyer --> a firm "yes" to move forward
• "Know-it-all" buyer --> empathy first, with a path of clarity for why they are talking with you
• "Wishy-washy" buyer --> add value and let them go and come back
• "Go between" buyer --> explain the process, but then full stop until ALL decision makers on the call

STEP 4 - Overcome Objections

To help you identify which buyer a lead depends on the objections they have. 

As you have your next sales call, or if you've recorded the calls in the past, listen very closely. 

Break out a piece of paper and write down any of the objections you hear from the lead.

Statements like:

• "that seems like I a lot of money for this"
• "this should be simple"
• “This sounds great, but I have to talk with so-and-so first"
• "I'm not sure"
• "I had this other person and it didn't work out"
• "I'm talking with a few other vendors"
• "I have someone else who can do this work but wanted to see what else is out there"

I can go on, but I think you get the point. Not every objection is in the form of confrontation or conflict, like “you are too much money.” Statements like “I’m not sure” or “this should be simple” are objections that are telling of who they are.

Write them all down and work through them where next to each objection, you put the type of buyer you think they are. Practice this on each call you have and you'll start getting better at identifying the type of buyer.

Once you can identify the type of lead, you can then use that as a trigger to push that buyer towards the appropriate path.

Only pushing value buyers and those that give you a firm “yes” to move forward, to the proposal writing stage. 

Two things happen immediately with this. 

1. The feeling of not closing enough deals starts to go away. 
2. You start to identify the buyer type earlier in the process so that you don't even get on the phone with them.

Do this on your very next sales call. As you push the various types down the appropriate path, you’ll maintain your position as the expert and that feeling of getting lots of people on the phone but not closing enough will go away.

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"I get a lot of folks on the phone, but think I should be closing more." 

This is something that I hear quite often and it’s the wrong statement to be making.

You want your sales process to eliminate leads from becoming clients. 

You want each stage of your sales to be a locked gate. Keeping out the leads that shouldn’t be your clients and only letting through those leads that you really should be working with.

Getting better at sales is difficult, but not impossible.

It requires practice.

It requires close attention to details.

It also requires you to accept that this is the most business-y part of your business. Which means, you have to build up a bit of a thick skin here. Don’t take rejection personally, instead learn from it and adjust.

There are 2 things that helped me get better at sales.

• Knowing the type of buyer I'm talking with
• Being able to answer objections

STEP 1 - Learn from every sales call

Being present during a sales call is a must. You have to be in the moment, listen to everything being said and concentrate on closing the deal, not learning about the interaction.

Though, that’s the only way to learn and get better at sales. Is to be able to listen to and see patterns in your process to improve.

The ideal thing to do is to record the call so that you can listen back to it later with your learning ears on.

If you can't, or the lead objects to it for some reason, then be in the moment, but as you take notes, be mindful of objections being said and write them down among your sales notes.

The most important thing to sales is being able to answer objections, so take note of them.

STEP 2 - What type of buyer are you talking with?

Understand the type of buyer you are talking with. In the services business, there are 5 types of buyers:

• Are they a price buyer and want to just get the lowest price they can?
• Are the a value buyer and want quality and price isn't a concern?
• Are they the "know-it-all" buyer that feel they know how to do your job?
• Are they the "wishy-washy" buyer that really doesn't know what they want?
• Are they the "go-between" buyer that say they are a decision maker, but not really?

One lead can be a mix of these but identifying which one they are as early as possible will help you in figuring out how to handle them and where to lead them.

Tomorrow we’ll go into how to overcome objections in sales.

Each of the different types will have different objections. The fun part is that objections don’t always come in the form of conflict or trying to corner you to do something you don’t.

We’ll dive deep on this important piece to the puzzle tomorrow so that in the next sales call you have, you’ll be better prepared to not just overcome them, but maintain your position as the expert in the conversation.

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I say that in jest because this has been the biggest anticipated release since Star Wars Phantom Menace.

WordPress 5.0 is what I’m referencing here, and before you tune out because you aren’t in the WordPress space, I encourage you to stay tuned because this is not about that as much as it’s about technology and your clients.

When Apple released the iPhone back in 2007, most people with a Motorola Razor said “that is huge and what would I even do with that?”

When Amazon released the Echo in 2015 and I bought it, my wife said, “what’s the point of this thing? There’s no way I’m ever going to talk to this.” Now she’s using it all day and much more than I ever have.

In case you aren’t in the WordPress space, 5.0 is the release of Gutenberg. It’s the brand new default editor for WordPress, which has the whole place in an uproar. It’s been this way for a couple of years to be honest.

Some people hate it, some people love it - both have very valid reasons. When asked, I usually respond with indifference.

I truly am indifferent of an opinion to any change in technology, especially when it comes to my business, mainly because it’s nothing I have control over. 

Whether or not I like the change that’s coming, it’s coming. So no use distracting myself with the drama surrounding it. It’s a matter of figuring out if the change in that technology still aligns with the need of my clients.

See I’ve always lived by the rule, business should drive the technology and not the other way around.

Does change affect business, sure, I’m not denying that at all. But I’m saying that when using technology for our clients, we ultimately have little to no say in the direction of that technology.

Companies have their own agenda and purpose. We have to serve our clients the best way we know how. We have to solve our clients’ problems. 

Our clients come to us for our experience and expertise on how to solve their problems.

That’s what we should worry about most.

Not whether there’s a UI change. 

Not whether there’s a leadership change.

I’ve been a web developer since 1998. During that time, I’ve developed in Frontpage, Homesite, Java, PHP, TCL, VB, COM, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Javascript, and countless platforms like Magento,  BigCommerce, WordPress and others.

These are all tools to solve a particular problem at the time. 

I encourage you to look at technology as a tool in your tool belt. If that tool no longer serves it’s purpose in solving the problem the best way and there is a better one, time to move on.

If you resist any change for the sake of staying put, you aren’t serving anyone, your client or yourself in a good way.

In this episode we discuss the reasons why finding your freelance niche can increase your revenue, strengthen your relationships with clients and create a smoother funnel for recurring business.

We connected on Instagram and when she told me the name of her podcast and invited me to come on, I had no choice. It was a no brainer. If anything, I had to be a part of anything named Beyond the Status Quo.

In this episode, I had a chance to talk about the how to find your niche.

In case you don’t want to read the rest of this, you can check out the full episode for all the details.

In the episode, I shared a variety of things including:

• Strategies for finding your freelance niche and methods for developing your specialty 
• How to introduce your niche to your network and the price tag that comes along with it
• Best practices for circumventing negative emotions attached to client and revenue ‘FOMO’

Specifically I talk about tips for gracefully declining work that does not fall under your scope of work.

I think that this is an important part of the process. Once you figure out what niche to go for, it’s a matter of not falling back into bad habits.

Once you draw that line in the sand for your business, anyone that’s defined as not a great client should be referred elsewhere.

Definitely go check it out.

If you have a chance too, check out a few of the other episodes as well.

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Making word of mouth more predictable though is key here. You want to create opportunities that make word of mouth easy for those spreading the word.

Even though this was a question that came from my newsletter, I wanted to share it here, because I’m sure that word of mouth is your #1 lead generator.

I’m going to share with you 2 specific strategies to help you make your word of mouth more predictable.

Follow up sequence

When you are getting word of mouth, you are building your trust by proxy. That’s the warmest of leads because they are getting a personal recommendation from someone they already trust. 

The next step for you is to get them sold by presenting your solution.

In order to access that trust by proxy, then once someone becomes a past client, put them into a queue for a follow-up sequence.

This can be super simple and not complicated at all.

• 30 days after offboarding
• 60 days after offboarding
• 90 days after offboarding
• 120 days after offboarding

Each time you send them an email you are sharing with them something else they could be doing with what you gave them. Share with them how much you enjoyed the project and ultimately asking for that referral.

They should also be in your evergreen newsletter sequence as well, so that’s plenty of touchpoints.

Create a memorable experience

Do something special to create a memorable moment that’s remarkable.

Remarkable is key here. You want to this is as simple as possible but something someone talks about.

Laura Elizabeth, a designer who was on Live In The Feast back in Season 1, shared that she would send her clients a gift card for Starbucks right from the start.

She did this with a note saying, “grab a coffee on me so that you can go ahead and put together the content for the website.”

Chris Bintliff, owner of Not Really Rocket Science, shared that once he has a sales call with a lead, he’s gathered up enough data on a lead to send them a link to a custom built landing page of resources.

Both of these are brilliant ideas.

Think about what you can do that is remarkable and creates a great experience for your customers.

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What’s great about this question is that it’s smart. Smart because a “contracting resource” is someone who’s hired out by presumably another business to fill the gaps in their own business.

For example, development shops hiring a developer to help with their overflow work.

Whereas a “solo business owner” is someone who has a specific customer that they go after and serve a specific solution towards. They may be a developer who can write PHP, but they stay to a specific kind of customer because of the service they provide.

For example, they only work with SaaS companies providing onboarding development within their application.

I had this exact question back in 2011. I had most of my client work coming by way of other agencies. I purposefully did this due to me working in agencies for close to a decade. So I understood their pain, but also knew that I didn’t have to do the sales end, which at that time I was not very comfortable doing.

In 2011 I realized that I was running a business where I had no control over the work, timelines, budgets, rates, and had left a full-time job of 1 boss, for a job that had 8.

The first thing I did was stop taking any new sub-contracting work. Sure I did work for existing clients, but any new agencies that came my way, I said no to.

I started seeking out through my network for projects that I knew I could do, which were specifically focused on ecommerce.

No longer did I want to work on employee directories, back-end applications, custom database applications on the front-end. Had no interest in doing those types of things.

So I focused solely on ecommerce, put up a simple landing page talking about it, and then had an online form to fill out.

This was the first time I started my own sales pipeline.

The second thing, and key to the success I had, was to network.

Business is all about the people, this was the time I really started to double-down on Twitter and jump into the conversations that I could help people answer some questions.

I had [Bridget Willard](https://rezzz.com/podcast/bridget-willard-on-wordpress-why-twitter-is-the-best-and-relationship-marketing/) on Live In The Feast. She’s a Twitter guru and helps her clients build their businesses using relationship marketing on Twitter. She unpacked a ton of tactics, which one of them is about creating lists and watching out for specific questions that you can answer.

I didn’t realize it then, but that’s exactly what I was doing. I  would spend about 30 minutes a day on Twitter just jumping in and helping out.

It’s not fancy, but it’s the reality of business today. If it were 1950, I would’ve have been flipping through lead call lists and dialing. Except this day in age, people on social are there, complaining, telling you specifically what they are struggling with.

As a someone who is providing services, that’s a gold mine.

These 2 initial stepping stones were the genesis of my business today. Stop taking on new clients that I no longer wanted to work with. Then make a conscious effort to seek out those that I  do want to work for.

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This person admits that SEO works well, and is in their words “very targeted” but they are often leads with low budgets.

Here's the thing, the tire-kickers aren't good leads and that don't pan out to become clients are a complete drain on the business.

It’s critical to have the leads understand the full picture before you push them into your pipeline. That means budget needs to be addressed further up the chain.

Optimization of the top of funnel

Assuming that SEO is working for inbound, and you are collecting names and emails as a request for your services, put a few more fields on that form. Budget being one of them.

Obviously SEO is working to bring folks in. So for your business  inbound strategy works. Next is to optimize your content accordingly to bring in the better, non-tire kicker leads.

[Josh Doody on Live In The Feast](https://rezzz.com/podcast/josh-doody-on-why-when-and-how-to-niche-your-business/) does an amazing job in regards to optimization of his content. He talks a lot on listening and adjusting his content based on the feedback he gets.

Now you need to plug the leak that's causing other leads to fall through the cracks. If it’s just budget related, aside from adding in the field to the contact form, a sentence or 2 within the content around budget may do the trick.

Another option is to write an article on why you are not the best option for them. It may sound a bit counter-intuitive, but best to share that information in black and white, rather than during a call or follow-up email.

Have them disqualify themselves

If it's any consolation, this isn't the first time I've heard this.

Getting any leads is a false positive for your business. In fact, it's a drain on the business.

It’s awesome to be able to notice why leads aren’t a fit, budget and timeline is often the easiest. Other aspects come later and through experience.

As soon as you realize how a lead isn’t a fit, and then it happens again, then it’s time to plug up that leak and move that criteria up the chain. Get it in front of the lead sooner so that they can disqualify themselves.

They don’t want to waste time either. So if you don’t take projects for anything less than $5,000, put that in front of those that only have $1500 so that they can then adjust their expectations if they really want to work with you, or move on to someone else.

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But I was thinking about giving this question some thought, especially with regards to Day 1 of being a freelancer.

I want to go ahead and preface this with that I’m not going to be giving you a long list of sites to create profiles on away you go.

Sites like Upwork and 99designs and alike are all races to the bottom. Some other sites like Codeable and Toptal are hand-curated and at least have some sort of bar for you to hit before getting in.

I’m a firm believer in that no matter what you do, these sites will always put a ceiling on your income and clients. People posting gigs want bottom dollar and the site itself takes a piece of that, leaving you as a commodity and not in any sort of control of your own business.

With that being said, Fiverr to me seems like a good place to start, especially if you are just starting out.

Here are 3 reasons why I say this.

Your service is a product

When people look at Fiverr it is with a very specific task in mind.

They’ll look to hire someone who can make social media images, a piece of code, edit a video, create a video intro, and so on.

All these are literally products within a bigger service that you may be providing.

When you start out, you may think I can code a website or I can do brand design. These are large, often times, custom projects that are difficult to scope and price when starting out.

Creating a profile on Fiverr forces you to think small right away. You may even be able to know that creating a social media pack of images takes you 1 hour to do and you can charge $100  for and be profitable. Because you’ve done this already in the past.

It takes a lot of the guesswork that most freelancers have when starting out.

It also puts you into the mindset of looking at your services as products with profits in mindset, straight away. Something that most freelancers struggle with later on as their business matures.

Scope of work is clear-cut and well defined

Recurring revenue comes with a repeatable service within your business that has a defined scope, clear goal, and most of all profitable.

Smaller projects are easier to scope, market, optimize, and deliver.

Let’s take that example above.

Let’s say that you land 10 clients looking for social media images and charge $100 a piece for. That’s $1000 in 10 hours.

These clients are easier to market to and sell because they already know they need it.

If you sell one client on building a website for, that could be $5000 and take 4-6 weeks.

Sure it would be more revenue, but it would take you much longer to deliver the product, harder to sell, and market to.

At the end, you may have one client that’s happy and willing to give you a referral and testimonial.

Whereas with the social media images, you may have 10 after just a week willing to spread your good work.

You can learn how to run a profitable business with smaller projects

When starting out, I struggled with all the other things of running a business that wasn’t my development skills.

Having a service product that Fiverr forces you to think about allows you to figure out all the other moving pieces like client management, delivery, marketing, sales, and most importantly finances.

Revenue is not profit.

If you are spending 1 hour for $100 and then you can shave that time back to 30 minutes, you just doubled your effective hourly rate and increased your profits.

It’s much easier to adjust your internal processes and optimize them the more times you do it. Smaller projects afford this opportunity.

For these 3 reasons, I feel that Fiverr gives you the best opportunity to get your mindset right when you start freelancing. Eventually you’ll have to break away from it, but in doing so, you’ll have products to sell straight away and much faster than your counterparts who are still trying to figure out how to rank in the search over on Upwork.

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Why is follow-up vital

80% of sales require 5 follow-ups after the first meeting or conversation.

44% of sales reps give up after 1 follow-up and the average give up after 2.

50% of leads that enter a sales pipeline are not ready to buy in the near term.

On average, decision makers consume 5 pieces of content before being ready to speak to a sales rep.

Do you see a trend yet?

At a bare minimum you need 5.

For me, I keep following up until I get a “No.”

Standing out

I’ve heard stories from sales people who have landed their White Whale with 50+ follow-ups. It’s about persistence and making yourself stand out that often times wins the project.

Why re-marketing ads work so well? No doubt you’ve been followed around the internet like myself a few times and then gone ahead and bought that product or service.

In episode 188 - What do you do to position yourself as an expert to leads I shared the results of a Twitter poll that I ran which revealed that over half answered that they did not have a formal follow-up process and 29% had a process that was the “just checking in to see if you got my last email?” follow-up.

In Stop the Cycle, a course that Curtis McHale and I run, you can learn the exact sequence of follow-up, the content within those emails, and how to progress your follow-up sequence so that signing on the dotted line makes perfect sense to your lead as the next step.

A simple follow-up can answer your most asked questions

Here’s the interesting part of all this.

You want to stand out from the crowd, you want to position yourself as an expert to command higher rates, you want to close more deals, and you wonder how many times to “bug” a lead to sign that proposal.

You can kill 4 birds with one stone just by having a simple 5-part follow-up sequence.

Just by having a follow-up sequence you are standing out in a much smaller percentage of service providers.

Having a follow-up sequence that provides the lead with resources and content give you the ability to close that education gap that decision makers need to do prior to signing on the dotted line.

This also positions you as the expert in the space to that lead.

And if 80% of sales close after 5 touch points and decision makers need 5 pieces of content before making that decision, well, send off 5 follow-up emails.

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January 1 is a great time to also create deadlines and launching pads for yourself and clients as well.

Inside of the Sustainable Freelancer FB group, Meg asked this questions.

I can only presume that she’s done what so many of us business owners do this time of year.

Because it was such an awesome question, I thought that I’d share it with you in today’s episode, in case you have thought about this too.

I'll answer the latter first. Double it! Especially if you are sub-100 per hour.

Chances are that you are under charging and under calling your work.

Years ago when I was told to double it I thought "no way" but I trusted them since they were where I wanted to be and did so. Best decision I made.

If you get push back from all clients you can back away without too much issue saying "since you are a great customer, I can do 1.5X and then next year the 2X rate will go into effect."

To answer the first part of the question, give your existing clients a period of time to either come on board or move on.

If they decide to move on, that's fine because your rate is higher and need less to make the same.

Any potential new clients coming on board get your new rate today.

No need to wait or anything, they get the new rate today.

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Some freelancers I’ve spoken with grow agencies, others stay solo.

Some have aspirations of hiring a large team or scaling a product.

It’s very different and that’s why when someone asks me “why don’t you grow your business?” I often respond with “why?”

See I like being comfortable in my own lane. Having a few select clients on the roster that supports my family and allows us to live the life we want is perfect.

It also allows me to do things like this podcast, coaching, and build products.

I left the world of managing teams of developers when I quit the 9-to-5.

As my business matured though, I dabbled in the hiring process and bringing on people. I quickly realized that it wasn’t something I wanted to do.

Took a few failed attempts at growing a team on my part to realize that staying solo and being responsible for consistent income for my own family to live off of was what I wanted.

There is a pretty big focus in various communities that you need growth to be successful.

Someone who I have respected for quite a long time since I went freelance is Paul Jarvis.

Recently this year, I was lucky to have him come on Live In The Feast and then chat with him off-the-record too.

I’ve admired him from afar for the reason that he’s been able to run a very successful and lucrative business being a one-man show.

He’s coming out with a book called Company of One in January. He did not ask me to talk to you about this book. But you can goto ofone.co and pre-order it. When you do you’ll get the first chapter of the book.

I have to say as a non-reader, I’m excited for this book to come out.

He and a few others that I follow, really speak to the idea of “staying in your lane” and maybe going a few degrees left and right, but growing and scaling a business isn’t the goal of everyone.

If you are feeling pressure from others, or from comparing yourself to others on growing your business, stop and ask “why?”

You don’t have to be the next agency in SF or NY. Be the business that you want. Help the clients you want to work with.

Obviously be profitable in the process, but stay in your lane if that’s what you want and don’t let pressure or comparisons force you to a place that you don’t want to be.

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Don’t you love those folks who find out that you are a designer or developer and automatically want you to solve their home Wifi issues or their printer problems?

Well let’s solve that by coming to the table with something that helps them understand what specifically you do.

In episode 146 - Should I call myself a “freelancer”? I shared my thoughts on this topic (or debate really) and that it’s really about how you conduct yourself that matters.

This though is how you present yourself to the industry and market, not while holding a drink with holiday music in the background.

This is often called the elevator pitch.

I have a template for this that is:

“I help <ideal client description> get <big result>. So they can <benefit of big result>.”

Here’s the thing, when you ask someone what it is that they do and they respond with “I’m a divorce attorney” you don’t ask them to look over your contract do you?

If they say “I’m a contractor” do you ask them to come hang some frames on the wall.

Of course not, you know that they don’t do that.

When you share these 2 sentences, there’s no question who you help and what you do.

To be honest, they may not even understand you. Only recently when I say “I help established online businesses increase revenue through repeat buyers and decreasing the time to the first purchase. So that they can focus on what they are great at and not get stuck in the weeds of technology” have I been getting any sort of followup.

When I said “I’m a web developer” I would get half of the people asking some followup about their own site or own computer problems. Or some crazy idea of a new website they had.

There are 3 key aspects to this 2 sentence reply:

1. By stating who you work for, they immediately know whether it’s them or not.
2. They identify (or don’t) with the last bit which is the pain point that you are solving.
3. When you state the results of what you do, that sticks in their minds as you being referable.

Point 3 is the interesting point here.

As a web developer, the next time this person hears someone, anyone, who needs work on their site, they will mention you and hand over a bad lead.

Now as someone who increases repeat buyers for the online business, or increases appointments to the practice, or creates a batter client onboarding for SaaS products, when that person hears any of these, then they will refer to you and give you a more qualified lead.

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Steve Folland is a creative video and audio freelancer and host of Being Freelance podcast.

This was an awesome experience chatting with Steve because I’ve been a listener of his podcast for quite a long time. So I felt a bit like “long time listener, first time caller” at first. Which for me is a bit strange because I don’t normally feel that way.

I was having a chat with him through the comments of one of Steve’s vlogs on YouTube and asked him if he had any room for a guest and he graciously invited me on.

In this episode, I had a chance to talk about the following:

“I’ve reached my goal, what’s next?”

In case you don’t want to read the rest of this, you can check out the [full episode](https://www.beingfreelance.com/season-6/freelance-web-developer-jason-resnick) for all the details.

In the episode, I shared a variety of things including:

• The number one reason for me to freelance in the first place
• How I learned HTML back in the 90s that I don’t recommend any one ever doing
• 3 stories of my life, 2 of which are true and one is a lie

Specifically I talk about my biggest hurdle when starting my own business. It was a scary time for sure, but with some self-awareness and support, I came through it.

The main takeaways from this show are:

• Setting up processes with the goal of sustainability in mind
• How I can help

Definitely go check it out.

If you have a chance too, check out a few of the other episodes as well.

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My family and I are spending some time together and eating way too much.

I want to take this opportunity to thank you for listening to the show.

There are a ton of podcasts out there that you could be listening to today, but you chose mine and for that I’m grateful and very appreciative.

I’m humbled by you continually supporting the show by asking your questions, listening, and sharing.

So I thank you so much for that. 

I do have some plans for the show in the future to make it even better for you, but more on that at as it gets closer.

So before I sign off today, take a minute, even if you aren’t in the US where it’s Thanksgiving, to think about someone you are grateful for and let them know.

But that’s where the pitfall happens. We consume and consume and consume. If we applied half of the actionable information that we consume, we would have zero time in the next 10 years for anything else. (And yes, that figure is statistically backed by science ;) ).

Seriously though, like myself, I would assume that you have had periods where you are reading, watching, listening to amazing and valuable information, taking notes and making countless todos for days on end.

Especially around the end of the year when all the sales and marketing kicks into overdrive we get teased with all these shiny objects that seem to be the answer to all our questions.

Financial Aspect to think about

If you haven’t already listened to A184 - How to budget as a freelancer? where you will learn that if you are buying something for $100 and you bring in 20% profit, you need to bring in $500 of revenue, not get another $100.

Marketing tactics messing with us

Let’s evaluate another thing here for a second.

Most products and apps serve a purpose, not all purposes.

Most of the marketing around these products, if you look, market to a specific audience with a specific problem.

It’s us that say “Oh I need that!” or “This has to be better than what I’m using right now.”

This goes for courses and education as well.

I want to share with you, 5 questions to ask yourself when evaluating an educational product.

1. Has the person/company selling the information done it in the past? Are they still doing it?

Not everyone does what they say to do. They preach things that they’ve never tried.

The business world moves fast. Sales, marketing, and client management are the fastest movers.

The specific strategies and tactics that worked last year, 5 years, and 10 years ago, especially in client services, most likely will not work today.

Sure the methodology may apply still in some capacity, but collecting leads via a popup on your homepage saying “Join for updates” worked 8 years ago, but not today.

If the person no longer does what they are teaching, then for me, they aren’t up-to-date. I want to have the best possible information and strategies that are going to keep me out in front.

2. Am I getting the team or the individual and are they engaged?

I’ve purchased programs before thinking that I was getting the individual, but then didn’t even once see the individual. You know, the one that actually knows the thing being taught and sold me on buying.

Don’t get me wrong, there isn’t anything wrong with working with the team. It’s just that if that’s not conveyed up front, I feel a bit duped.

My thought too is that if the teacher is the one I’m looking to sign up with that has that “thing” I want, working with someone else, I may only get 80% of the “thing”.

3. What is available for free?

Do the research! Read some of the other content, listen to podcasts, watch videos of the instructor. Make sure that you can see yourself hanging out with that person.

If there’s just not a fit from a personality perspective, how likely are you to learn something from them.

Think back on the teachers in school that you didn’t like at all vs those that you still remember how awesome they were.

The other side of this is does their free content deliver value? Or is everything they put out lead you to buy something?

Their teaching ability can be explored here as well. If they don’t explain the steps or answer objections in an insightful way, maybe they aren’t the best teacher.

4. Where does this fit in with me?

Am I buying this for the “someday list” or is it something that will help me accomplish something today?

The “someday list” is great, but my experience with buying products that go in with this is that they collect that digital dust. It also falls into that trap of point 1.

By the time I get around to it, has a year passed?

If I’m working on something today or in the very near future and the program can help me accelerate learning and get to implementation faster, then I’m more likely to buy.

5. Can I find out about the course from someone who’s been there?

No doubt there are all sorts of testimonials and social proof being displayed about how awesome the program is.

Find those people on Twitter, FB, wherever and ask them what they liked and didn’t like about the program. That will help you in the evaluation department. Chances are that they bought it for a different reason than you would.

After evaluating the purchase for 24 hours and it still makes sense to go ahead and buy, then do it. But if not then don’t. If it’s good and worth it, it’ll be there when you are ready to buy.

If it’s not there, then you saved yourself a lot of wasted time and money.

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TLDR;

If you need to keep the lights on, then offer the services you know that you can deliver.

Then after you are settled in, take a look at what you've done and for who. From that see if you can then start to specialize you business somehow.

Do what you know first

Keep things simple. When starting out, you need to give yourself the best chance of success. The only way to do that is by providing services you know you can fulfill.

When starting out, there is so much that you don’t know about. Billing, client management, delivery, onboarding, support, marketing, sales, that you will need to learn about and get better at. Don’t complicate it any more.

Specializing is really just marketing

Once you have a few projects under your belt, then reflect back on what you’ve done and who you’ve done it for.

Are there any similarities? Anything common in the clients? Anything common in the solution you are providing?

Then on the other side, are there clients and projects that you didn’t like and not want to do again.

In episode 174 How to demand higher rates and on my other podcast, Live In The Feast, Episode 8 in Season 2, I share with you my step by step guide to specialization.

In episode 182 How do you go about breaking into a niche you’ll learn about how specializing is really just a marketing strategy, especially at first.

You don’t have to go all-in on a niche. In fact, why would you? You need to land a few of those projects first just so that you can understand the language and problems in such a way so that you can position yourself as the goto person in that market.

If you can’t even articulate the problem as your client would, the marketing won’t go very far. You’ll be restricting your business from the start.

Specialization is all about putting an effective process around a solution for clients. Once the process has been ironed out, a system around those processes can be built to increase your profits and elevate you and your business.

Building custom content and marketing campaigns around your specialty will give you signals on if the niche is viable. It could be that it’s viable enough as another revenue stream into the business and nothing more.

Meaning that there is a ceiling on how far you can take it.

Then in other terms it could show you that it’s something that you need to dive all-in on or even stay away from. This can’t be known when you first start freelancing.

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A few people who have registered, jumped in and shared some feedback they had, well because we asked them what is it that they hope to get out of the course. What sparked you in deciding to join us. We want to make sure whoever joins us, gets the most value from it.

This came by way of some feedback from one of those people.

So with anything in business, it comes down to who you are, who you work with, and most importantly what’s working right now.

The great thing about the Stop the Cycle course is that you will get 2 people’s point of view on running a business that is quite similar.

What’s worked for me hasn’t for Curtis and vice versa.

We are going to give you our best strategies and techniques that has landed us great work over the past decade, and still does to this very day.

What I want you to do right now is to think about what’s working for you today.

Also I want you to think about what is it about that lead generation strategy that you want to get away from? And why?

Podcasting

See for me, podcasting has been a great lead generation strategy for me. Ever since I started my business I found podcasting to be beneficial to me in a variety of different ways including widening my network and positioning myself in the market.

Writing

Curtis is a writer of several books and does a ton of writing very well. He gets paid to write for other companies and it also brings in clients to him as well. He does a lot of content marketing, writing specifically, well to be honest, hasn’t worked as well for me.

Seeking out specific conversations

Another tactic that I will dive deep on is jumping into highly specific conversations on Twitter and Facebook. By targeting certain keywords, I built a system to look for those keywords and then ping me in Slack when a tweet contained that keyword.

This way it allowed me to be mindful of my time so that I can not be distracted for 20, 30, or 60 minutes down the social media rabbit hole.

If my sales bot pings me in Slack, I can look at it in realtime or later even, and if it’s relevant, jump into that conversation and then get back to work.

Time Management

Curtis will dive into the time management since he’s much better at this than I. He has literally written the book on Analog Productivity. Curtis has built his business to work around his schedule and he’ll show you how to do this so that you actually have the time to market yourself.

If you are wondering what else you are going to get out of this course is that you’ll get lead generation strategies. A huge benefit of this course is that you will get both of us and hear our takes on various strategies, how we approached them, and hear how different things worked for us.

We both have families that we enjoy spending time with, businesses that are stable that support our families and afford us to enjoy the kind of lives we want.

Stop the Cycle is the foundation of our businesses.

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Positioning is simply marketing

What if you only talked with high-quality leads that viewed you as an expert?

You want people to respect you, right? You want to be valued as the expert in the conversation, right?

What are you as the expert doing to facilitate that?

Experts ask the right questions, they try to ask the right questions early on in the process. So that they identify who they can help as well as those they can’t.

Respect is earned, it’s not given. If you aren’t asking the proper questions and the lead or client doesn’t recognize them as questions that lead them to their transformation with you, they won’t respect you.

Are you talking budget? Are you talking timeline? Are you setting expectations? Are you asking questions about their business not just technology? Are you talking the same language as your leads and clients?

Are you helpful and serving?

Being empathetic and showing humility goes a long way in getting answers to all these questions.

The awesome thing about asking questions like these, is that you are showing your expertise, but also vetting leads.

You want to work with clients of a certain budget.

You don’t want to work with clients who have unrealistic timelines.

You don’t want to work with clients that look at you as labor or someone they can just pluck from Upwork at the lowest bid.

If they are open about their business goals because you asked them about some specifics, that’s a good sign they see you as an expert who knows what you can do for them.

Stop the Cycle

If knowing what the right questions to ask is something you have been trying to figure out, you aren’t alone. Which is why Curtis McHale and myself have built a workshop called Stop The Cycle.

During the workshop, Curtis and I pull back what we’ve done in our sales processes that have let us build 6 figure businesses without 60 hour work weeks.

If you haven’t already done so, head to [Stop the Cycle](https://rezzz.com/stop-the-cycle/) to learn about the details of the workshop and all the resources for you and how you will stop the feast and famine from killing your freelance business.

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Make the time, don’t wait to find it

What if you had the time to keep marketing while doing great work for your clients?

When I started my business, I sat on my couch every single Tuesday night doing lead generation tactics and then again every Thursday night filling up my queue to share relevant and valuable resources.

This is what I had to do in order to get this one-man show off the ground. Why Tuesday? Why Thursday? Because that’s what I choose to do.

If you aren’t going to market yourself, no one will. How I got referrals was because I was sharing colleagues content and resources. By doing that, I put myself on their radar which then started building the relationships I have today.

Don’t overwhelm yourself with what it means to do marketing. Simply carve out one hour in the next week dedicated to getting your name out there.

Don’t write or record something that you don’t publish.

Take action and do something that literally puts your name into the feed of someone else.

Over the years I’ve tried so many different time management strategies. Some worked, some didn’t. However, when it comes to being structured with your time and focus, Curtis McHale has been my Yoda.

“You can’t find time. You won’t find it in the couch cushions. You make the time for the things that are important.”

This is a phrase Curtis has said time and time again that I constantly remind myself with.

Stop the Cycle

Curtis will walk you through his process for time management in our workshop called Stop The Cycle.

During the workshop, Curtis and I pull back what we’ve done in our sales processes that have let us build 6 figure businesses without 60 hour work weeks.

If you haven’t already done so, head to Stop the Cycle to learn about the details of the workshop and all the resources for you and how you will stop the feast and famine from killing your freelance business.

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Level up the experience you provide to your leads

What if you could give your leads an experience that positions you as an expert?

I ran a highly scientific and analytical poll on Twitter and the results can back with an overwhelming 79% of people do not have a follow-up process in their sales.

This is a shame, because it’s so simple, and powerful when done right.

I’m going to paint a picture for you and tell me if this is you?

When you get a new lead, you have a call, and then send a proposal. A few days go by and they you send another email saying “Just wanted to check in and see if you had any questions about the proposal?”

Is this you? If so, you did exactly what everyone else does. Proven simply by the stats.

You want to be respected as an expert, right? By writing this email, you’ve completely put yourself right in the bucket of all the flakey, desperate, and laborer freelancers.

Instead, I want you to replace your lame email with one that shares a link to a useful article and send it to your lead.

I have no doubt that you are reading industry articles, watching videos, listening to podcasts and then using that information as a part of your conversations to talk with leads during your sales process to sign with you.

Send them those links!

It positions you as a someone who is an expert, keeps up-to-date on your expertise, and someone who isn’t desperate for work.

It shows your prospect that you are providing value even when you aren’t getting paid.

It sparks interest in you to want to work with you even more.

No one wants to work with someone who’s desperate. They can smell it a mile away.

If you want to stand out from among the crowd, from among the 80% of other freelancers out there, provide value in your follow up. It will define you as an expert leads will want to work with.

Stop the Cycle

Over the years I’ve built a proven follow up sequence for various stages of the sales process, that continuously adds value and growing education for the leads. Join Curtis McHale and myself in a workshop called Stop The Cycle and I’ll walk you through it completely.

During the workshop, Curtis and I pull back what we’ve done in our sales processes that have let us build 6 figure businesses without 60 hour work weeks.

If you haven’t already done so, head to Stop the Cycle to learn about the details of the workshop and all the resources for you and how you will stop the feast and famine from killing your freelance business.

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Always be selling

What if you could have your sales process running 24/7 scouring the web for opportunities?

Yesterday we talked about a simple share as being a part of your marketing and awareness to the world. That was about being out there when someone is looking for you.

The second part of that equation though is that you need to have a process in place for you to jump on opportunities when they happen.

This is a much more proactive approach.

Still, to this very day, I have my very own sales bot that scours Twitter for certain keywords and then pings me in my Slack when a tweet with that word comes up.

I don’t need to be on Twitter all day long, but when something interesting happens, an opportunity arises, I can jump into the conversation first.

When I first started my freelance business, I landed clients like Canon, PGA, and Adobe using this.

Then in 2016, I built a new service in my business in 5 months solely by using this method. That service is now 50% of my revenue.

By using Zapier, you can create your own sales bot to do just this.

Stop the Cycle

If this social media is a distraction for you and you find yourself using sales as an excuse to be on it you aren’t alone.

If you’ve always wanted to leverage automation, but don’t know where to start with it.

Curtis McHale and myself have built a workshop called Stop The Cycle.

During the workshop, Curtis and I pull back what we’ve done in our sales processes that have let us build 6 figure businesses without 60 hour work weeks.

If you haven’t already done so, head to Stop the Cycle to learn about the details of the workshop and all the resources for you and how you will stop the feast and famine from killing your freelance business.

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This is part 1 in a 5-part series called Stop The Cycle where you’ll get an actionable item to take away with you at the end of the show to help your sales and marketing so that you are on the way to stop having the feast and famine killing your business.

Don't let the client work always trump your own

When you are deep in project work, it’s so easy to let your marketing slide. We’ve done it, those client problems you’re solving mean money right now.

You need to have something in place at all times to have your marketing going.

It’s not today or tomorrow that will hurt when you are heads down on a project and not marketing your business. It’s next month or 3 months from now.

See when you don’t market yourself today or tomorrow or the day after that, you fall behind quickly. The fall you take is much further than if on the fourth day you do market yourself.

Consistency above all else matters.

It’s not just because of an algorithm, it’s the human nature.

Don’t you see successful people doing the small things every single day. People like Chris Ducker, Ryan Carson, and others.

Not saying you need to create a daily post or podcast or highly produced video, I get it. But no doubt you are scrolling through your feed and find inspiration, value and useful posts that you can then go ahead and re-share to your audience.

That’s marketing, that’s creating awareness of you and that’s how you stay top of mind.

You have no idea where that next potential client will learn about you for the very first time. At least not yet anyway.

Consistently putting your name, your business out into the world will give your potential leads and clients an opportunity to find you.

Stop the Cycle

If this is something you are finding difficult, you aren’t alone. Which is why Curtis McHale and myself have built a workshop called Stop The Cycle.

During the workshop, Curtis and I pull back what we’ve done in our sales processes that have let us build 6 figure businesses without 60 hour work weeks.

If you haven’t already done so, head to Stop the Cycle to learn about the details of the workshop and all the resources for you and how you will stop the feast and famine from killing your freelance business.

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But one thing I found myself to be beneficial is to hear how others do it. Especially others that I feel may not be too much further down the road than me. Which is why for me it’s important to always be in the freelance services side of things so that I can provide you with the best content possible that works for today’s market.

If you are interested in hearing stories about someone else’s journey, head on over to [Live In The Feast](https://rezzz.com/podcast).

Season 4 is such an amazing season for some many reasons.

If you aren’t a listener to Live In The Feast podcast, it’s a seasonal show. Each season has a theme, Season 1 is Getting Clients, Season 2 is Marketing, Season 3 is Origin Stories, and Season 4 is Niching Down.

Then in each episode, there will be a deep dive into a specific strategy, question, tip, or storyline for about 30-40 minutes. At the end of the show, you’ll be able to walk away from it with an actionable takeaway to implement into your business right then.

I’m all about taking the action. Consumption of information only works when action is taken on that information.

I’m so excited to bring some amazing and brilliant people who run very successful businesses. And their success is defined by themselves and how they run their business.

Each episode will go into a bit of their story and then myself and the co-host will discuss a specific topic based around specializing your business.

Questions like “how do you test the waters while still doing existing client work?”

“How to fill-in the gaps in a niche that’s already occupied?”

“How to build a proper value proposition to explain what you do?”

“How to position yourself as the go-to person in your niche”

“How to get and use the language of your client?”

Each co-host has niched down and has a very specific business model that serves a particular client extremely well.

The episode they come on will be focused on what they’ve been more successful in.

Head on over to Live In The Feast to listen to amazing folks like Josh Doody, Sara Dunn, Matt Medeiros, Chris Blintiff, John Locke, Elliot Murphy, Troy Dean, Lianna Patch and more.

While your there if you enjoy what you hear, then why not subscribe so that you get notified each and every week when a new episode comes out.

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To budget means that you need to know (or at least be relatively sure) when your clients pay you.

You obviously can’t reach into their pocket and pull out the money they owe you, so there’s some trust there you need to have, but there are systems that you can use and put into place that will help you nudge and remind clients.

Don’t be afraid of doing this. No business can run without money so if you are doing work, make sure you get paid.

Track your expenses

You have to stay on top of your expenses. Taxes being your biggest. Remember it’s not your money, but here in the U.S. you will need to take a percentage of what you bring and put that away. Pretend it doesn’t even exist because it’s not yours anyway.

Aside from that, you have to be mindful of the phrase “it’s for the business and I’ll just get more revenue in to cover this.” It’s a deadly phrase and here’s why.

If you have a 20% profit margin on your services and you buy something for $100, that means you need to bring in $500 in revenue, not $100. Make sense?

You really want your expenses to fight for their worth in your business.

Keep your business and personal separate

This is something that’s extremely important and helpful at the same time. This will make your accountant happy. If you don’t have one, and you do you own tax filings, well this will make your life so much easier.

As a part of this, you’ll want to build up that business account too. Make sure that you have a buffer in there. You need to maintain a certain level of cash in the business.

How much cash should you have really depends on what your plans are. This is an inception moment, because you need to really understand your budget to figure out what this number is.

Pay yourself

You need to pay yourself. There are so many different philosophies around this, but try and pay yourself as soon as you get revenue into the business.

This will be your lifeline of sustainability. If you need $5k in personal monthly expenses, food, shopping, and living your life, then don’t think that all you need is $5k in revenue.

Remember you have expenses to pay, the business to invest into, profits, and spending cash for the business. This is overly simplified but you get the idea here.

Save for your future

This sounds like what an old man would say, but it’s important. Especially when you are young. You don’t want to work forever. So you want to capitalize on the flexibility you have to build a nice nest egg for yourself.

Put a percentage away of your salary into some sort of long-term savings account, like and IRA.

Automate your plan

Whether you have an accountant or not, leverage automation to move the money around.

Most payment systems and banks these days allow you to set up rules to transfer money around.

Whatever your percentages are for your salary, retirement, expenses, and business accounts, consider using tools like Freshbooks, Quickbooks, or whatever your choice is, to setup these rules.

While you are in there, set up reminders to check in on your budget and numbers. Make sure you are on top of your budget so that you can adjust accordingly.

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On this page it’s important to put 4 sections:

• Who the service is for?
• What problem you are solving for them?
• How you solve that problem?
• Social proof of the problem and solution

Keep it simple and make a call-to-action to reach out with their request. This can even be to your email address if you want.

The idea is to test the market, not build something complex that you don’t even know will work.

Making funnels and ad campaigns and email automations will come much later on. The time here is best spent talking with potential customers and gauging your new market.

Second, review your existing footprint online, and if your niche market is essentially a re-vamp of your pricing and such, you may want to consider removing your pricing from your website if it’s there.

Just so that there isn’t confusion for your new lead should they find your old pricing.

Keep in mind that you are running your own business, there are no rules to say that you need to have or not have your pricing on your website. If pulling the old pricing down for a month or 2 allows you to freely talk about your new pricing without worry, do it.

Lastly, get those conversations going. In order to see if this niche is viable, it’s not about building out funnels and marketing campaigns. Not yet anyway.

It’s about 2 things:

• Is the problem of the niche painful enough for you to build a business around?
• Can you fully understand and grasp the language of that market?

You can only get the answer to these questions through market research.

Think about your early days in building the business you have now. Did you set up marketing funnels and campaigns? No. You spoke with someone, drew up a contract in Word, got a payment via a PayPal link and did the work.

Those roots are where you need to go to when breaking into a niche.

If the answer is “Yes” to the above questions then you can start building the business bit by bit from there.

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Sara has embarked on her journey to publicly share her journey on specializing her agency’s business. As you can see, everyone is trying to figure out the answer.

It’s important to put some context around this question. Your journey is your own. I can’t answer this question with a foolproof plan for you. This is something that you need to be able to go on yourself.

## Your fears of niching down

I understand that it is scary because you may be feeling like it’s an all or nothing deal. What happens if you go all in and it doesn’t work. Then you are left sitting there wondering what happened and how can I recover from this.

There’s another fear here that is the real reason you may not want to jump in. You’ve built up a reputation in the market, have great clients and are getting referrals for new work. Losing all that hard work and effort you’ve already put in the business would be devastating.

Am I right?

You want to niche down because you fully understand the benefits to the business and becoming an expert. You get that once you learn who it is and what you are selling, everything else tends to become easier, you can command higher rates, and get back some of your time to explore other things.

Maybe the biggest reason I see most folks like yourself looking to niche down is because of sales and marketing. Once you specialize, sales and marketing becomes so much easier and that’s what you want to get better at.

Your niching down strategy

What I tell my coaching clients and those inside the Feast community is this.

You are working with existing clients and may even have leads with proposals in hand. There’s no way you are going to drop them, so let that go right away. You have to finish up what you said you would.

If you are working on specializing your business, you aren’t going to flip the business around overnight.

Bottom line is that this is a transition. This transition needs to be as simple as possible. No reason to overbuild, overcomplicate, and put a ton of time into something if it doesn’t work out, right?

Niching Down is Marketing

No doubt you’ve either seen, heard or read from people who say to use FB ads, point to a video or post, build a lead magnet, create emails to market to those people and then give them something to buy.

This is known as a marketing funnel. Yes, you’ve heard me say these sorts of things too. But when breaking in, this is the worst thing you can do.

You suck at marketing. Ok, maybe that’s a bit harsh. Maybe it’s more that you want to be better at it.

To be better at marketing, you need to understand who will buy. See this vicious cycle here?

How is going out and trying to market to someone who you’ve never marketed to in the first place going to end up?

Probably be a waste of money to be perfectly honest with you.

I’ve even seen some gurus talking about adding niches to your existing generalist services like it’s a simple process.

And while this makes sense to me, right now all you want to do is to break into one niche, not many, right?

My experience of niching down is that it is marketing. Positioning your business is about selling a particular part of your business to the customer that needs it.

Look at your specialty like it’s another revenue channel into your business. Car makers don’t just have one type of car they sell right? SUVs are targeted more to families, and sport cars are targeted to individuals. Yet, Chevrolet sells both of them.

Have conversations and learn as much as you can, just like any other marketing research campaign. Then on the back-end of that, decide if the niche is viable.

And before I wrap this up, I want to mention something important. Just because you specialize, doesn’t mean that you can’t do other things.

You run your own business, you can do what you want, work with who you want. If you enjoy some of the generalist projects, continue doing them. No one is saying not to.

In order to build a sustainable freelance business and avoid the feast or famine cycle, niching down will allow you to break through that glass ceiling of your rate. It will also allow you to gain more time freedom as well.

Before the next episode where you will learn the 3-step process to break into your niche, I’ll leave you with this.

Looking to niche because you need help with your marketing is smart.

Looking to niche because you want to stand out is smart.

Looking to niche because you want a more predictable revenue stream and profits is smart.

Don’t think that the answer to breaking into a niche is is by doubling down on your problems in the first place.

Go back to your roots. Go back to when you first started your business. How did you get work then?

Learn as much as you can through conversations with the market you want to get into. Then you’ll be breaking into your new market in no time.

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• Look back
• Look ahead
• Execute

When I found that this framework worked for me, I started applying it to all reviews I did, including weekly, monthly and yearly.

I’d like to replace the monthly with a quarterly review. Also sprinkle in a daily review as well, but those I’m still working out.

1. Look back on the month.

Very much like the weekly review, I look back on the revenue, only this time, it’s the first thing I do. I’ve got a few different revenue streams into the business and I have certain goals for each.

Looking back on which stream brought in what revenue is important for the business to understand if I’m meeting the goals I have.

I’ve started only recently taking a review on the expenses during the month. Only just so that I’m not overly surprised at the end of the year and it allows me to curb and keep those $10 per month services under wraps.

Then I take a look back on the projects. It’s a quick look just to make sure that everything is moving forward. Really only because I tend to do these reviews the same day I’m doing my weekly review.

I have a monthly spreadsheet that I record the KPIs of the business to make sure the business is healthy and trending in the right direction.

2. Look ahead.

Similar to the weekly review, I look at the calendar month as a whole. I look for personal vacations or events, holidays, and anything that may throw priorities or projects off track that I need to be aware of.

This is when I review the longer term projects and the “some day” projects too. If the past month ended with finishing up one, or one is close to wrapping up, I’ll line up the next one.

I also review them at a high level to see if they are still important and/or needed. This is how I curb my distractions. If I have an idea, I put it in as a long-term project, and then let it bubble up later to make sure that it’s still relevant and important.

3. Execute

This is the hardest part because I really just go back to work.

Since I do my monthly review at the top of my weekly review, not at the first of every month. I allow the natural course of monthly review flow into my weekly review.

So once I’ve done my monthly review, made sure that all the ducks are in a row there, I dive right into my weekly review.

I put a recurring task in my task management tool, Todoist for the first Sunday of every month to do the monthly review prior to the weekly review, and that’s it.

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He shared a story on his daily, weekly, quarterly and yearly reviews and was open about which ones he’s still working on getting better at and that sparked the conversation.

I thought that since I’ve spoken about how important and what I do in my weekly reviews, I’d share with you today the exact structure, the framework if you will, of all my reviews.

• Look back
• Look ahead
• Execute

It’s a simple framework to remember and stems a bit from the GTD methodology. But see what works for you.

Look back on the week.

Review the sales pipeline. Clients and cash is lifeblood of your business. You have to be ridiculously involved in it even when you are heads down in a project.

Supplemental to this is looking back on the revenue. This is essential to see how much came in to the business.

You know when you are doing well and when you aren’t. Even if it’s a week where $0 come in, if you do this look back every week, you’ll see patterns and trends in your business.

If those normal patterns of income change, that’s when maybe you could adjust what you do based on your activity based selling.

I run through my email with the Inbox Zero methodology. This is something I try to do the times I check my email during the day, but there are times when by the weekend I haven’t fully cleaned it out.

Look back on the calls and meetings I had as well to refresh my memory on what was done, talked about, and see if any priorities came up that need to be accounted for.

This also means gathering up all the stickies, notes, and things sitting in my Inbox in Todoist. Seeing if I need to file anything if I haven’t already.

Look ahead on the week

I pull up my calendar, which I use Google Calendar to see what’s planned for the week. Every single appointment, personal and professional goes in there.

Then take all those and write them down into my weekly desk planner. This allows me to visually see what the overall day and week look like. It forces me to not over schedule and be mindful of the energy I have on any given day.

Then I go into my project management tool and schedule any tasks on the dedicated days if needed. Most of the time they are planned already, but if adjustments need to be made, this is when that happens.

Finally I look at the long-term projects and if they are already started, I make sure that at some level, the needle on them is moving forward. If it’s a busy week, then I fit in some smaller tasks in between everything else to keep the momentum going.

Execute on the week

I take a final review of what the week looks like to make sure I didn’t overload any of the days. I try to make sure that I don’t work on more than 3 high energy tasks per day.

Before I get up from my weekly review, I plan out what Monday morning will look like. This way when I get up Monday, I’m not looking around for something to do. I’m sitting down ready to tackle something.

It’s a simple framework to remember, especially for any review that you do. In the next episode I’ll share with you my monthly review.

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Matt is an account representative at Pagely, a managed WordPress hosting company. In his prior life, he co-founded a successful digital agency. He is the host of a number of podcasts, one of which he invited me on.

I’ve known Matt for a number of years in and around the WordPress space. I’ve met Matt on a couple of occasions as well and when he asked me to be a part of a panel of other niche business owners for his podcast, Matt Report, I easily accepted.

Matt and I have an east coast bond together where I guess for lack of a better term, we are all about figuring things out, just putting it out there and not messing around about it.

In this episode, I had a chance to talk about the following:

How to adapt and change to the WordPress climate?

In case you don’t want to read the rest of this, you can check out the full episode for all the details.

In the episode, I shared a variety of things including

• How WordPress isn’t my business, but a tool I use to solve a problem
• Ask the hard questions of your business  
• What my work goal of the year is

Specifically I talk about the benefits of specializing. Where I share how I will experiment, but always do so with the goal in mind of benefitting my clients and my own business.

With regards to specializing, you can leverage your expertise by simply answering questions. There is no shortage of emotion and complaining online, especially when it comes to business and companies. If you can jump into those conversations and be a voice of solution, you immediately position yourself as an authority.

I learned a ton from Sara Dunn and Nathan Allotey as they shared their thoughts and opinions on the ever-changing landscape.

The biggest reason I was excited to be a part of this panel was because Matt doesn’t shy away from asking the hard questions. WordPress is a large community and in recent years it certainly has taken its lumps.

Many businesses that WordPress was a core of have either gone under or been acquired or completely pivoted direction.

The 4 of us share a common bond in that we solve problems for our clients. And if WordPress, Frontpage, Adobe Photoshop or whatever the technology of the “day” is doesn’t help us in doing that, well time to adapt and change.

Definitely go check it out.

If you have a chance too, check out a few of the other episodes as well.

I’d like to thank Matt for being a part of it and including me along amazing folks like Sara Dunn and Nathan Allotey.

Yikes!


Sad thing is that prior to this episode, I took a look at the lists in the first page to see if my list had any overlap.

There are a ton of mistakes any freelancer can make. But what I think you want to hear are the mistakes that another freelancer has made.

So that’s what I want to share with you today. The 15 mistakes that I made throughout my career of nearly a decade. And how to avoid them!

1. Not positioning yourself within the market
2. Taking on a partner that doesn’t align with your goals
3. Jumping into every client request immediately
4. Reacting right away to a potential lead
5. Client work always winning
6. Discounting
7. Not always doing some sales and marketing
8. Not following up with everyone
9. Not respecting your time
10. Not building your own personal brand
11. Not trusting your gut
12. Time management
13. Thinking like an employee
14. Settling
15. Not keeping your goal in mind

We all mistakes. But those mistakes don’t have to be failures. A failure is something that happens that you don’t learn from. Making these mistakes isn’t the end of the world, but if you can understand the mistake, how it’s happening and then address it, you’ll grow your freelancing business.

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I love you, Joanna

Before I jump into it I want thank my wife for everything that she does each and every day. She is absolutely the rock of this household and family. Without her, I know you wouldn’t be reading this right now.

The goal I had at an early age on why I wanted to have my own business was so that I could have the time freedom to spend it with my family and friends when I want to.

I wanted to be around for first steps and first words. I want to go out on a random Tuesday afternoon just because it is nice out and not have to ask someone for permission to do so.

The day it all changed

When my wife and I had our son TJ, our first, it was a very different scenario than what it is now.

My wife worked full-time and after her maternity leave was up, she went back to work. Which meant that I was home with TJ. This was both very rewarding and stressful.

See before TJ, I had my schedule fully booked up with work and some days would wake up at 5 AM and work until 9 PM. Having a strict work schedule suddenly meant that every single day there was a lot left undone at the end of the day.

No nap, no regular time to take calls, crying in the background, crankiness all add up to not getting much work done. Maybe even lost a client or 2 in the process.

In case you aren’t a parent, babies under 8 months in age don’t care what’s on your schedule, the day is run by them.

I started to really think about how my business would be. I would need more flexibility than I currently had. I may have needed a different type of business altogether. Then the opportunity came when my wife would leave her job.

Tough decisions

I won’t bore you with all the details of the conversation, but when the opportunity presented itself, it was something that she really desired so that she could be around TJ and not sitting in traffic.

We had probably our most candid conversations ever over the next few days. She was half our income. She was the carrier of our family health insurance as well. She was the one contributing to our retirement. There was a lot that went into the decision.

This also was the time at which we realized that TJ didn’t like serious conversations. Every time my wife and I would talk about the leap, he would do anything and everything to grab our attention.

We decided that she would stay home and become the primary care taker during the day of TJ and I would continue the business and grow it in various other ways to eventually make up for the loss in salary.

My routine

Now, I wake up anywhere between 5 and 6 AM to get the day started. I end the day usually the latest 5 PM, most days it’s closer to 4. In between I try my best to take breaks and spend time, especially when there are days we take him to the Little Gym and other things.

Be better by 1%

I certainly can be better at this but I am trying to be better 1% every day through scheduling my time, guarding my time, and focus.

It’s that focus that sometimes can be my best friend and worst enemy. There are days where I feel like I’m super focused and others where I can’t focus if my life depended on it.

I’ve learned to leverage my energy levels in ways that I never did before. If I need to do some real deep work and know it’ll take time, I wake up even earlier because that’s when my brain works best.

Having the business I have allows me to take those random days off. Move things around so that we can take a long weekend and drive someplace fun. The time freedom is there, not fully, but close.

The business overall still isn’t where I would like it to be, but it’s getting closer. The time that I want to spend with my wife and son still isn’t where I would like it to be, but it’s getting closer. I know that all this takes time.

Lessons I’ve learned

The biggest change is me as a person. I’ve learned to be patient much more than I ever was. I’ve also learned that procrastination is your worst enemy. If something can be done right now in the time you have available, do it.

If I save it for later, there’s a good chance something will come up that will block it. Whether that’s TJ being sick, not sleeping, or some other client project will pop up unexpectedly.

I learned that I tend to take on too much and still working to be better at not doing that.

All these things are improving me not just as a business owner, but as a husband and father. The honest truth is that I am still working to improve all these things.

More than anything else though, I’ve reached a new level of happiness that I never imagined.

The balance is tough, in fact, I don’t even like calling it a balance. To me it’s more a mesh than anything, even if you are working full-time in a cube.

I wouldn’t give any of it up though for having TJ come in to the office and play with his trains for a little while.

Being around to watch my kids grows, smile, laugh, cry, pee and poop was my goal and it is my happy place.

I can’t imagine my life any other way. No matter what happened during the day with work, no matter how crappy or awesome it was, I know that I want to be present once away from that screen. My family doesn’t care too much about the work, they just want me for me. And I’m trying to be the best me possible.

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If you are running a business of any kind, there’s a good chance that you are not an expert in every single part of that business. Maybe you are exceptional at sales but not so great at the implementation. Maybe you are technical, but suck at marketing.

The great thing is that you could learn all these things. Just about anything you lack as far as a skill you can read countless articles, listen to tons of podcasts, and even watch thousands of videos on that topic.

All for free too!

The downside is that you’ll be spending all your free time doing so.

There’s a good likelihood too that you’ll be completely overwhelmed with varying point of views and opinions on what is “right.”

This overwhelm will leave you scattered and stretched thin.

I know this because I’ve been there.

Hiring a coach has a number of benefits.

• Accountability
• Efficiency
• One-on-One Attention
• Habit forming
• Trust

Trust

When you hire a coach, you undoubtedly trust this person, otherwise why hire them, right?

You trust them because they are a bit further down the road than you and you can see the results they have had with past clients that you are looking for.

Accountability

Because of that trust you have, there is this inherent accountability of not letting the coach down.

The accountability also comes in the form of scheduled meeting times. As well as some exercises and actions to take before a meeting.

The reason accountability works is because you don’t want to disappoint that other person.

One-on-One Attention

The trust you have in the expert will save you having to figure out what’s “right” because based on what your goals are the information the coach provides you with will be relevant to your specific situation.

An example of this is when you were a kid, did you take piano, dance, maybe even karate lessons.

Maybe you were into sports instead.

Whatever lessons you took, didn’t the teacher or coach meet you where you were? If you were a beginner learning the piano, they showed you how to sit properly and what the keys were. Not how to play Mozart. If you were a baseball player and couldn’t hit but fielded well, didn’t you get extra time in the batting cage to work on your swing?

Efficiency

Same goes for a business coach. It’s the most efficient way to ramp up the skills that you are lacking and smooth out the edges of your existing skillset.

Hiring a coach is an investment of money without a doubt. Sometimes a very big investment. I would argue though that no matter what the investment is it’s something that you will reap the benefits from for the rest of your career.

In the wise words of Ferris Bueller “Life moves pretty fast.”
Hiring a coach is about valuing your time and what an expert can  bring to you and your business.

It may seem like a big investment, but you only get from it what you put into it. So if you want to accelerate your business growth and get further down the road quicker, then hiring a coach is without question the best way to do that.

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The context of this question was that this person wanted to reach out to specific people in larger organizations in order to  simply have a phone conversation with them, not necessarily to sell to them, but for research.

This is cold outreach and let’s be honest with ourselves here and just call it like it is, it’s spam. It’s unsolicited communication, even if it can add value to the recipient by making it you focused.

In the post-GDPR and Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation era we live in we, as businesses we have to adjust and be respectful of a recipient’s privacy that a lot of businesses hadn’t in the past.

With that in mind, nothing really has changed other than shortcuts that businesses used to essentially carpet bomb an email list with a broadcast are now closed off.

By now, you’ve heard that when performing outreach of any kind, you should be doing it in a way that makes the recipient feel like it is a direct email to them specifically, even if it’s not.

Avichal Garg, Managing Partner at Electrical Capital and an Expert at Y Combinator, posted a thread on Twitter on this very topic.

As someone who essentially gets asked many many many times a day for things, it’s refreshing to see his input on how to do it.

I wanted to share a couple of points from his 10 that I find interesting.

Offering Context

Letting the recipient know who you are and if there are any contacts you share in common. If you met some where, jog that person’s memory. Doing this quickly before anything works best. If they recognize the connection, they’ll more likely continue reading.

Be Precise

Get to the point quickly, but be as specific about what you are asking for. Don’t make it vague. In Avichal’s tweet he gives a perfect example, one that I know you can relate to. “Can we get on a call?” is bad. No one will want to jump on a call with someone who they’ve never heard from before.

But “I am performing research in your industry. Here are 2 questions about your website and how it helps your business.” is good. Avichal offers up these 2 examples as “great.” “Do you know person X and could you forward the following blurb to them?” and “I am applying to YC. Does our application make it clear what we build?”

Be Gracious

Remember that whole respectful thing I mentioned early, well be gracious too. If they don’t respond, don’t bombard them every day for a week. That’s only going to make them annoyed and ignore you more, maybe block you or report you as spam.

Follow up a week later, then maybe a month after that. If you haven’t heard anything, stop emailing.

Chances are good that if they can help and/or have the time to help, they will immediately upon reading the email.

One final thought

“If you talk, or you do something, you have something to bring.” is something that Gary Vaynerchuk said in a recent video of his.

Say what you will about Gary, this statement aligns directly with asking for any sort of help or sale.

We know Gary is a talker and he loves nothing more than to hear himself talk. He said this specific quote when sharing a story about a meeting he had at Google with the president of Cuba and Twitter and other major players in the tech space.

He had it in his mind to share a story going into the meeting, but then thought better of it in the context of the meeting because it didn’t add anything to the meeting. He walked away from that meeting without ever saying a word.

Asking someone for something, who you don’t know and they have no clue you even exist is a fine art. There’s no one formula that works. The only thing that I can say is to think about you as the recipient and how you would feel about getting your outreach.

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James owns a company called [Content Snare](https://contentsnare.com/) that helps freelancers and agencies get content from clients.

This was a really fun episode because James and I are in the same circles around the web, we just haven’t had an opportunity to meet yet in person being on opposite sides of the planet and all. We both have a fondness for automation that, well can border on the line of obsession.

So when James DM’d me and invited to me come onto his podcast, [Agency Highway](https://agencyhighway.com/podcast/), it was a no-brainer. I knew that we’d be unpacking so much together.

In this episode, I had a chance to talk about the following:

## Demand higher rates by following this specialization framework

In case you don’t want to read the rest of this post, you can check out the [full episode](https://agencyhighway.com/podcast/016-demand-higher-rates-by-following-this-framework/) for all the details.

And for the second podcast we did together on [Lead Generation](https://agencyhighway.com/podcast/017-an-epic-lead-generation-strategy/)

In the episode, which was jammed pack with laughs, I shared a variety of things including:

- What was the best thing that happened to me this year
- How taking time out to reflect on your business can help in so many ways
- How niching helps you raise your rates, and not niching leads to burnout

Specifically I talk about the 4 quadrants of niching down. Which is the process I teach my [coaching clients](https://rezzz.com/coach) and those inside of [Feast](https://rezzz.com/feast) on.

The main takeaways from this show are:

- Fears are just excuses
- You will leave money on the table when specializing, but the opportunity to deliver better solutions to fewer clients, positions you as an expert that commands higher prices.
 - Get a list of red flags to filter clients through when going through your sales process so you don’t end up working with bad clients.
- Put everyone through your vetting process, especially referrals from previous clients. Good chance if they are from your “generalist” days, they won’t be ideal for you now.

Definitely go [check it out](https://agencyhighway.com/podcast/016-demand-higher-rates-by-following-this-framework/).

If you have a chance too, check out a few of the other episodes as well.

I’d like to thank James for being a part of it and included along amazing folks like [Troy Dean](https://agencyhighway.com/podcast/011-building-recurring-revenue-with-troy-dean/), [Jennifer Bourn](https://agencyhighway.com/podcast/009-client-management-system-jennifer-bourn/), and [James Schramko](https://agencyhighway.com/podcast/003-work-less-make-more-james-schramko/)

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Yet there are times when hourly billing is good and I wanted to share the other side of the coin from yesterday’s show titled, Why hourly billing is bad? with you today.

Quick / One-off task

If you are a designer or developer and have bandwidth or time in your schedule where someone presents you with an opportunity to do some quick task. Something you know you can bang out in a few hours, or maybe have even done it in the past for a previous client.

Or if you are a developer and another developer needs you to write some code. Or a designer and another designer asks you to design some simple elements.

Hourly billing may be an option for you.

To be honest, this is even a stretch, because I would argue that you would know what the outcome is and be able to put a price on it.

However if it truly is something that only takes an hour or 2 and both you and the client know that, it’s going to be hard to say “$1000 for that Facebook share image.”

You are terrible at estimates / Inexperienced

I get it, I’m a realist and if you are just starting out, your estimates are going to suck. You won’t know what you don’t know until you get into it.

Which means, you may have to take on hourly work at the very beginning by way of sub-contract work or just because you can’t define how long it will take for the scope of work.

What I would suggest though is that when you do take on the hourly work, track any and all time on the project. Be as detailed as you can so that you learn and get better at estimating and scoping out work.

Expanding services

As you grow your business, you’ll want to expand your services. Sometimes this means expanding into areas of unfamiliar territory.

Depending on what sort of services and market you are expanding into, your research may tell you that there’s a certain expected price. Especially as you are trying to break into that market, you’ll want to pay close attention to your own cost, as much as the client’s.

Therefore you may have to charge an hourly rate to the client just so that you get a better understanding of the value of your service to the client and cost to you.

Please note here that expansion of services doesn’t mean that this is the majority of your business. Chances are that if you are a solo shop, you’ll expand with one or two clients in this new market at any given time.

It should be in a very controlled environment. This is a part of business development and should be closely monitored to see if it’s a viable option for you and your business.

To wrap up

You’ve heard me before say that I’m a realist. If someone told the young Jason to start value pricing, I wouldn’t even know where to start. Back then I just needed to get some clients in the door and the easiest way was to set an hourly rate and go with it.

As I said though in yesterday’s show, I put myself into the feast or famine cycle as soon as I did that. Twice in fact, one resulting in me having to go back and sit at someone else’s desk for a few years.

Hourly billing should be thought of as either supplemental or experimental income for your business.

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Hourly billing puts the 2 parties in the service agreement at odds. The financial incentives are misaligned from the start. From your perspective you want to take as long as possible so you get paid as much as you can and your client wants you to finish as quickly as possible to keep the costs down.

This puts the goal, the motivation of the project, regardless of what that project is, on the number of hours to completion. Not on the business objective of that project.

There’s a laundry list of reasons why hourly billing is bad. So I don’t want this to become a two hour long podcast of me spouting out a list.

What I’d like to focus on are 3 reasons.

Clients prefer fixed price (certainty) vs hourly billing (uncertainty)

You are doing client service work and you can’t have your motivations different from your clients. “Serve first”, “Help”, “Put your customers first” are all things that you hear and see as inspirational and motivation phrases because of the archaic hourly billing model.

Clients want the lowest risk possible when hiring someone. They want to know exactly what they are getting and for how much. This means, understanding when the outcomes and deliverables will happen within that cost.

Clients will always invest in something that they can see the positive ROI.

The reason clients want the hourly rate as low as possible is because they (along with the freelancer) don’t exactly know how long it will be until the outcome is realized.

Businesses want certainty and in an uncertain world, the only way to limit risk is to have the investment as low as possible.

It’s your job to provide an outcome, a deliverable that’s the solution to your clients’ problems. If you know what that outcome is and have a proven track record for that outcome, you should be able to put a price on it.

When you focus on the goals, the outcome, rather than the time spent, you and your client are in alignment and as such there’s a value (from your client’s perspective) and price (from your perspective) that is placed on that outcome.

Get into the vicious feast or famine cycle

It’s the quickest way to become a commodity. If you feel like you are on a hamster wheel, then I’d be willing to bet you are billing hourly.

You started freelancing because you wanted to travel or spend time with your family. Yet, those things seem so far removed now because if you take your eyeballs off the screen, your income stops.

You can’t even schedule or book ahead either because you aren’t completely sure of when your current project will end.

The feast or famine cycle is a real thing and the reason why so many freelancers fall into it is because they start with hourly billing. It’s easy math to do and it’s something that they are asked for right from the start.

You are looked at as labor and a pair of hands on a keyboard once you answer that question with an hourly rate. Your clients will always tell you how to do your job.

Because of that you’ll be held down not just from your competitors, but also by your clients, and yourself.

You limit your growth

If your main source of income is hourly billing, then it is arguably, a lack of professionalism on your part.

You can’t prepare or predict when that next payment will come in if you don’t know when your current project will end.

If you don’t know when your current project will end, then you aren’t sure of what the outcome or goal of that project is.

Is that being a professional?

There are only so many hours in the day and that’s the most you can bill.

There is only so high of a rate you can charge for the work you do too.

It’s extremely hard to build in profits when there’s a ceiling placed on them.

If you have started freelancing with the idea of not having a restriction on your income and then charge hourly, let me save you some time and I’d suggest that you need to stay working your full-time job. Maybe freelancing isn’t for you.

The idea of hourly billing at its very core puts a restriction on income and scale.

I’m going to quote Jonathan on this “You need to sell your head, not your hands. Your expertise, not your labor. Outcomes, not activities. Benefits, not deliverables.”

You didn’t start freelancing because you wanted to work more, right? So why are you charing hourly?

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A mantra that I’ve always lived by for my business is “Let the business drive the technology, not the other way around.”

The simple truth is that technology changes much faster than a business can. So if the technology were to go away tomorrow, would the business still be viable and run or would it be out of business?

Last week YouTube went down and the internet lost it’s mind! There are a great deal of people who build their business on YouTube. And if you don’t listen to those smarter YouTubers like Roberto Blake, Sunny Lenarduzzi, and Amy Landino who always talk about building a business on YouTube, but then say that it’s an absolute must to get customers onto your mailing list. It’s for that exact reason.

To answer today’s question though, you want to listen to your client extremely closely and objectively.

Be overly objective

My wheelhouse is WooCommerce, Subscriptions for WooCommerce, Drip, and ConvertKit. That is the technology that I work with and on for clients.

If I hear from my clients that they need a different ecommerce platform such as Shopify. Or an email marketing platform such as Mailchimp, then I don’t hesitate to share that with them.

There is any number of reasons why technology may fit or not fit for someone. Price, features, existing knowledge, existing business software, and timeline.

As a professional, you will want to give your clients the expertise that you have in order to provide them with the best possible solution, even if it isn’t your own.

If you don’t, you and your client will find out later in a much more painful way. If you don’t like having hard conversations then best to over-communicate early on.

Listen closely

Not every client project is a fit for you. What happens when you take on projects that are not is that your profits and time go right out the window.

What I mean by this is that if you provide a solution that your client is looking for and you shoehorn the technology that you know into it, there will be a high likelihood that further down the road your client will ask for something that the technology may not do, or do well.

When describing the requirements for the project, your client is coming from their perspective and knowledge of what they need.

That knowledge comes from their experience with the problem so far. There is no way that you’ll know every detail of the problem within a 30 or 60-minute conversation.

Rest assured though, you’ll find out the hard way when it arises.

It’s hard for me to cite exactly what to watch and listen for here. Every case is different. However keep in mind the phrase “If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, then it’s a duck.”

If you’ve got some gut feeling or the dots connect to form a specific technology that fits perfect, then that’s the answer. Don’t try and make shoehorn the business into some other piece of technology.

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Second, an episode of Build Your SaaS is part inspiration for this episode in fact. Couple that with a couple of conversations I had in a forum last week is where this question comes from.

Since they are two sides of the same coin, I thought that I’d share some thoughts around it.

How long does it take to become successful

So inside the forum thread was a person who was curious how long it takes to become successful in freelancing. Which obviously varies from person to person and business to business. Some may never get there in fact.

I responded to the question with another question “What does success mean to you?” And whatever that meant is what will dictate how long it could take.

Then in another thread we were taking about specific sales strategies and why it works and doesn’t work for similar businesses. It went on for quite a number of back and forth posts.

What came of the conversation was a needed level of patience and trial and error. In marketing and sales, you do things that you can get results quickly on and other things that take time. For example, Ads are quick, whereas Content Marketing is long term.

This particular strategy fell more on the side of longer term but this person wanted a quick win. So in this person’s eyes, the sales strategy didn’t work because not enough time was given.

What does success mean to you?

Before I dive into the answer to today’s question, I want to share with you what Justin and Jon unpack in their podcast episode. Justin has been championing a bootstrappers mindset campaign recently. Where the idea is that business is hard and everyone’s journey is different.

What they talk about in this episode is how MailChimp took 6 years to hit 10,000 users. That’s the point at which the owners became full-time to MailChimp instead of running their consultancy firm.

The flip side to this was that DHH said in a comment thread that Justin had been a part of “If it takes 5 years to get to the point where the business can pay two salaries, it’s possible that the business isn’t destined for that long-term.”

Which is interesting and fair to say. But everyone’s journey is different. Everyone’s situation is different. There’s no formulaic answer to this question.

I’ve been working on my business full-time since 2010, so that’s 8 years. I’m in it for the long-haul. In business, if you are freelancing, chances are that your goals are some sort of lifestyle goals.

You aren’t looking to exit, you aren’t looking to get acquired. You should have the mindset for the long term.

What do these numbers actually represent?

People throw around outrageous numbers that are 6, 7, 8 figures like it’s as easy to get as stepping outside you front door to get the mail.

I want to share with you some comparisons to put context around these numbers.

• 100 Senators in the United States Congress
• 3400 people to build the Empire State Building
• 20,789 seats in Madison Square Garden
• 114,000 seats in May Day Stadium in North Korea
• Dallas, TX has a population of 1,300,092
• NYC has a population of 8,623,000 

2 phrases come to mind here.

“Patience is a virtue.” and “Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

The advent of the internet has made it super easy to shout from the hilltops. When folks are shouting, they want to be heard. So the larger, more astronomical that number and the shortest amount of time to that number is what’s heard most and seems attainable. Where they are really the 1% cases.

Point to keep in mind that success in business is all based you and your actions of today to move the needle of the business. It’s what you do today that you control. You don’t control the person who has to put their hand in their pocket, take out their wallet and pay you.

Ryan Carson said to me on [Live In The Feast](https://rezzz.com/podcast/ryan-carson-on-relationships-motivation-and-mastering-sales/), that it’s the discipline of the day-to-day mundane tasks that you need to learn to love in order to realize your long-term goals.

There’s no such thing in business as a quick win. Especially in the freelance world. If you aren’t in it for the long-haul, then maybe freelancing isn’t for you.

If you are in it for the long haul, then do things today to move the needle of the business. Do what you can control, keep in mind your goals and your journey are your own and no one else’s. If you want those big numbers, you need to do the work to get them. It won’t be overnight.

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David Shriner-Cahn is the founder of Tend Strategic Partners and co-founder of the BestNetwork, which guides expertise-driven business owners to build recurring revenue.

David and I know each other from the NY entrepreneurial space. We met a few years ago in an online community called Youpreneur. Then we continued to keep in touch, meet up and continue spreading the word for building sustainable businesses.

David invited me on his podcast since we are both NYers and share in our love for podcasts. No I’m kidding (sorta), but he did invite me on because I’ve been doing client services work for so long and thought that I could bring value to his audience.

In this episode, I had a chance to talk about the following:

How to stop the feast or famine cycle

In case you don’t want to read the rest of this, you can check out the full episode for all the details.

In the episode, I shared a variety of things including:

• Origin of the word “freelancer”
• Why freelancers don’t need more clients
• The mindset and discipline are key to building recurring revenue

Specifically I talk about building recurring revenue and how you can dive into the heart of any project or business owner and figure out what is most important to them.

Then once you understand what that is, how to work backwards and start to filter for that throughout all aspects of your sales process, starting with your project brief.

The main takeaways from this show are:

• How by using a project brief or application you can weed out the bad leads immediately. 
• By getting to the underlying cause of the need for the project, you can start to build your business around those you serve and the value you provide.
• How to become the expert in your field.

Definitely go check it out.

If you have a chance too, check out a few of the other episodes as well.

I’d like to thank David for being a part of it and included along amazing folks like Jessica Yarbrough, Gabriel Neuman, and Ben Walker

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A customer relationship management tool keeps all your contacts and the relationships with that contact in place.

This is used for managing customers, leads, colleagues, network contacts and so forth.

For a long time I didn’t use one, because I basically used my email inbox to manage my contacts. But that quickly became cumbersome and not ideal especially the more mature my business became.

I then shifted from my inbox to my email marketing provider, Drip, to manage my contacts through tagging and segmentation.

But then I had to switch from that as well.

Focus on the contact

The reason I had to switch was really based on the need to keep in touch with a single contact.

Drip and even my inbox was easy enough for leads and clients, but not for my colleagues and those that I wanted to be sure to keep in touch with over the year.

Due to the fact that my relationship with leads and clients are mostly a linear relationship, but colleagues and other contacts can become complex and evolve, I needed a system that is flexible enough to evolve with those relationships.

I use Pipedrive as my CRM.

Growing relationships

It allows for the growth of the relationships of leads and customers.

You’ve heard me so many times talk about the sales process and buyer’s journey on this podcast. Having a proper CRM allows for you to nurture the individual through each of the stages of the process.

By keeping tracking of emails, calls, and even in some cases social media posts, a CRM tool will retain all the information of that relationship you have without you having to keep those things in mind.

Opportunities

A CRM allows you to be to identify opportunities for your business and your clients as well.

What I mean by this is you can see a certain pattern of questions, objections, or reasons why a lead doesn’t sign on the dotted line. Performing a report on these can spark ideas and even opportunities for you that you wouldn’t have otherwise seen.

Pipedrive’s core is activity based selling. Which means that deals and contacts alike are all based around activities. When you create an email with a client, Pipedrive will then prompt you for the next activity and when.

At that point, you don’t have to worry remembering what that is until it’s that time again. It removes the clutter in your head.

Helps you with your numbers

Numbers don’t lie. Your cashflow is key to your business and if you don’t know how many people you need to talk to today in order to hit your revenue goals for the quarter or year, you’ll no doubt be reactionary and looking at lagging indicators of your business which is no way to run a successful business.

Pipedrive is so customizable, that you can set up the stages of your sales process and put goals on each of them. Then you can see how many deals come through to each stage and get that conversion rate for the next stage.

These conversion rates give you a much more precise insight into your business and an understanding of what you need to do to reach those revenue goals and profits.

I highly recommend you start using a CRM, whether it’s a spreadsheet and you move contacts around in cells or a proper CRM like Pipedrive.

By the way, this link above is an affiliate link, which means that I earn a commission if you do end up purchasing this product. It’s at no extra cost to you, and please if you have any questions related to this product, please let me know and I’d be happy to answer them for you.

If you’d like a quick demo about how this product can help you and share what it’s like, click here for a demo on YouTube.

As Chris Ducker, founder of Youprenuer and 2-time best selling author says “Business is about the P-2-P relationships; the people to people relationships you build.”

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Can I be completely candid with you right now? This is a funny question to me because about 2 weeks ago…talking with a friend…when I start looking…I’m just distracting myself.

I’m going to share with you X strategies to have a productive week, without question, but you need to really figure out what works best for you. The tools, strategies, methods that make me productive may not be right for you and that’s ok. Just like maybe you are a night person and I’m a morning person. It’s just how we are wired.

So let’s dive in.

Plan ahead

You need to plan your week before it starts. Whether that means you take Friday afternoon before you shut down for the weekend or are like me and plan on Sunday, you have to hit the ground running Monday morning knowing what you are working on.

Not planning ahead already sets you up for a slow start to the week.

Use a calendar and put the important stuff on it first

There’s only so much time in a day. So the very first thing you is to use a calendar. Post-its are great for ideas and thoughts, not for time based planning.

Use your calendar as a constraint and for accountability.

Put all the important things like date night, workouts, Dr appointments, vacations, time with the family down on the week first. If it’s not already on there.

Next put your marketing and sales activities on your calendar. This is the [blood of your business](A165) and needs to be something you prioritize doing in each and every week.

Use booking application

You are having sales calls, client calls, and networking calls with friends and colleagues. They all take a different type of energy level to do and different amount of time as well.

By using a tool like [Calendly](https://calendly.com) or Acuity(https://acquity.com) it allows you to create events based around your calendar and the availability you set within the application.

Then you get a link to send off where the other person can pick a time slot that works best for them based around what you have available.

Theme your days

Whether it’s a full day dedicated to a piece of your business or a part of your day, I’ll leave that to you.

But make sure that if Monday is meant for Client A and Tuesday is meant for sales and marketing and Wednesday is Client B and Thursday is content and so on, keep to that.

Switching around is scientifically proven to be a detriment to productivity. If you can batch a single bunch of hours to a specific activity, your brain will easily move through those tasks.

When I started out, I allowed calls and emails to run my week. I would take calls instead of scheduling and have my email open all day. I found myself consistently behind the 8-ball on projects and things like the business were always pushed aside.

That put me right into the feast or famine cycle. When I started guarding my time, prioritizing what is important, figuring out how to do that, and then just going ahead to do it, my stress levels and anxiety began to wane.

Peace of mind for myself and my clients became a reality.

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In the book Traction by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares, which is a book written for startups who want to grow and build a customer base. It dives into 19 or so different channels to do this.

At the heart of the book though is traction. It’s not a book that tells you to try all the 19 different marketing channels. It’s a book that tells you to completely exhaust the one channel that’s working for you. To the point at which you start to almost see a decline.

Yes, this book is mainly designed and written for startup Saas companies, but much of the methods and strategies can be used for consultants as well.

Why WOM is bad

I know right now that 50+% of your new business and sales comes by way of word-of-mouth. And you are no doubt falling victim to the thoughts and pressures that your marketing is based off of someone else’s words.

Perfectly understandable and definitely something to consider.

Instead of thinking about diving head first into ads, or social, or some other form of marketing, have you thought about why 50+% of your business is word-of-mouth?

Maybe it’s due to:

• Price
• Quality
• Knowledge
• Availability

To be honest with you, it’s probably a combination of several things.

Can I share with you what the reason for why word-of-mouth is such a big portion of my business?

It’s because I make the technical aspects of what I do easy to digest and understand.

I know this because I asked. I asked clients what they liked and I asked those that were referred to me what was it that they heard about me.

Why WOM is great

People are 4x more likely to buywhen referred by friends.

Word-of-mouth generates 2x more sales than paid ads.

Think about your own buying habits. Do you look at reviews? Do you ask your friends and family for recommendations? Or do you eagerly wait for those 2:20 breaks in between your favorite tv shows?

If word-of-mouth is 50% of your business today, and your best customers are coming out of those referrals, then I ask, how much effort are you putting into word-of-mouth marketing?

My guess is the bare minimum.

Here are 7 things you should be putting into your marketing right now to help promote yourself by allowing your existing and past clients to refer you.

1. Ask for referrals during and after your project. Every milestone you have with clients, you should be asking your clients if there’s someone that they know that has a similar problem that you just solved because it was awesome working together to resolve it.
2. Ask for reviews.
3. Create a referral program. These are easy to do nowadays with services like Rewardful and AffiliateWP.
4. Create an incentive
5. Create a podcast and invite your industry leaders, influencers, and other individuals with strong ties to the market on your show.
6. Create a memorable experience for your clients and customers.
7. Share your reviews, testimonials, and other nice things that folks say about you on your website, social platforms, and even in your email signature.

If you are doing all these things, then awesome. Well done. Move on and test the next channel, as the guys in Traction suggest. But if not, why not double down on what’s working for you now, dominate all that so that the word-of-mouth stops becoming happenstance and becomes predictable.

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I’m going to share with you 4 strategies and biggest tip on this but I want to ask you to be open to hearing me out for the next few minutes here

It all starts with your mindset. The reason you ask this is because you are stuck in hamster wheel that is the feast or famine cycle.

Clients are the blood of your business, yes, but you are the brain of the business and need to control it so that the success of it is driven by the actions you do.

You may be working on projects that are one-off and not recurring based and that’s ok. But often times when you ask this, you haven’t put in the effort, the time to properly set yourself up for consistent work.

Prioritize the money

This includes dedicated sales and marketing time on your calendar every single week. When I first start, I blocked out time every single Tuesday between 7 PM and 8 PM to do lead generation. Now I dedicate mornings to sales activities. Things like writing emails, performing outreach, and even having sales calls.

The consistent work you do for sales means that you will always have a pipeline of leads and clients coming into your business.

Guard your time

Another reason you ask this is that you aren’t protecting yourself and your business. Chances are good that are reacting to your clients instead of making your time a priority. What I mean by this are things like:

• You answer your client emails off-hours or as soon as they come in.
• You allow your clients to text you or call you anytime instead of scheduling a call.
• You stop everything you are doing to address your client requests most of the time.

I get that you have a client services business, and these things happen from time to time, but they can’t be the norm.

A client thinks about their business and you should think about yours. You hopefully have multiple clients and you have your own business to run as well.

If you react, rather than plan ahead for client requests, you’ll be continually chasing down requests. Dedicate a day of the week or multiple days if needed, where your focus is on a specific client. Share that with them if you have to.

You’ll be surprised how receptive they will be when you tell them that you’ll look at this on Wednesday when you are working on their project.

Talking with your clients increases your value

This leads me to the next thought and that it create boundaries and expectations. This may surprise you, but clients often will see the communication as a value. Simply by sharing with them your plan for the week when it comes to their work or sharing with them an inside look at the very beginning of working together how it will be goes a long way in creating a sense of a higher value for your services.

It shows a level of professionalism that they don’t get from someone else. Communication is what business owners want more than anything else. If you have clients asking you a status on something, then start re-thinking about how you are communicating with them.

Raise your rates

And finally my biggest tip when it comes to this that you are more likely undercharging what your worth.

If you land a project and halfway through that project you are already looking to get that next sale because you need the money, then something is wrong somewhere.

Either your expenses are too high, or that you aren’t charging enough for the time and experience you are putting into the project.

If you are asking for 50% up front and then find yourself eating ramen three-quarters of the way through the project, then you haven’t charged enough. That 50% should last you through the entirety of the project, so that the final payment is profit in your business.

Building profit in your business is a must. That profit should be re-invested in your business as a tool for growth and opportunity. Having a buffer, or profits, in your business allows you breathing room so there isn’t a need to constant need to always get that next project.