 Hi guys, Daniel Rosal here. Welcome back to my YouTube channel. I want to today put out a thought into the ether into YouTube and wherever else I post this video talking about I think one of the most common dilemmas for people who are in self employment, whether you present yourself, consider yourself to be a freelancer or a consultant is really immaterial for this quandary. And the quantities as follows, if you get good at inbound marketing, you're going to be getting generating a number of inbound leads. Now, inbound marketing is something I'm personally a huge proponent of. It's what I've dedicated a lot of my career so far to helping clients with to creating effective thought leadership marketing that's going to bring open up conversations. But ultimately that's really just a better known form of inbound marketing than content marketing. But nevertheless, if you're going to do that and you're going to do that well, you are going to guess a trickle, a least of inbound leads of people coming to you. And the problems as follows, if you've been doing this for any length of time, you're probably already figured out that you can waste a boatload of time talking to every single inbound lead. You might get very excited at the start that, wow, people are coming to me now so much easier than I have to do cold pitching and whatnot. It's great. It is great, but you can't just bank on inbound leads being leads that are going to convert. That's what I've found. They're ultimately just leads and leads require a qualification process. Now, the most basic qualification I found helpful is talking about money at the very start. The more elaborate one is something called BANT B-A-N-T, a common qualifying acronym. That's the one I actually use, budget, authority, need, timing, going through those four variables to make sure if it's at least a potential runner. But the first letter in BANT you might notice is budget. It's B. It's that money conversation. Now, there's another problem here. And the problem is this. In today's marketplace, you really want to be a value-based seller. This is another thing I've talked about. Value-based selling is when you are quantifying or attempting to quantify the potential value you could bring to a client. And that's what you're selling. You're not selling your professional services like you're selling pizza. It's going to be 15 bucks for a pizza and two bucks for this topping. And that's how a lot of freelancers sell themselves. The problem with that strategy is that if you acquire your clients based upon price or they're choosing you because you're cheap, in other words, you're going to lose your clients based on price too. That's one of the best things I've ever learned from sales, from the sales literature. I can't remember, unfortunately, which book I read that in. But it's really, really stuck with me over the years. If you win your clients based on price, you're going to lose your clients based on price. And the problem is that in today's globalized freelance marketplace, it's both a curse and a blessing. The blessing aspect is that you can access opportunity no matter where you're sitting in the world. You can do work no matter where you're sitting in the world. But it's also allowing people with completely different costs of living to compete. So if you're going head to head on price, there's going to be someone almost guaranteed cheaper than you who's able to undercut your rates and score the business. So that's why it's crucial to sell today based on value. Now, there's a problem with what I'm talking about talking money early in the process. And that's that you're going to quickly anchor yourself. Now, I have a friend who works as a professional haggler for want of a better word is a professional negotiator. And he would tell me that if I mentioned a price, doing my current solution, which is to say my rates start here. So someone comes to me today and says I'm looking at, you know, I want to roll out a thought leadership marketing program. Could you do it? What you don't want to happen is for me and I've done this, jump on a call, put together a proposal, have two meetings, three meetings, you get to the very tail end and they say, Well, yeah, we had a budget of 100 bucks for this project. So you never want to get to that kind of a situation. So my strategy has been learning from those when they happened is to say my rates start here. Therefore, if you're able to meet those, if that's within your ballpark, I'll continue love would love to continue the conversation. Talk further about value. I'll go through the rest of my qualifying criteria. But if if that's not a runner, then there's no point having this conversation. Now, my negotiating friend would say that you've just anchored yourself to that figure. So if you say my rates start at $1,000 in that kind of a transaction, you as the service provider are going to want to maximize your rates. The potential customer as a buyer is going to want to minimize their expenditure. That's how the world works. So you're pulling in different directions. But the minute you could arrange I my rates start at x, x is what the business is going to hear. So they're going to say Daniel can do marketing for $1,000 per month. And then maybe try to try to work with you on scope to fit into that budget. But that's not necessarily what you want. So that's kind of the way I call it a quandary, because on the one hand, you want to do value based selling. Inbound marketing, I strongly strongly encourage anybody in self employment to start a blog or do a podcast or a video or just get content out somehow that's going to attract people ideally be strategic about it. But it does work. It does work. I can tell you that from first hand experience, as well as the work I've done as clients. But it creates it actually can can throw up what might sound like a good problem to have of now you've got these leads. What do I do with them? But that can actually be a real impediment to business. If all it does is create a kind of backlog of leads that are not really quality leads, they don't really have the budget. And you're going to wait potentially waste a ton of time. So what I found my solution has been to do starting from prices, and something I've gotten quite good at, and not my favorite skill to say I have but it's having quickly excluding people from my sales pipeline who just can't make those rates. Because there is not really a point in having those conversations. And those are conversations I may have had before that would have you know, taken up hours out of my week in terms of preparation, having the calls and I'm avoiding those now. So I don't know if there's a better way potentially there is a much better way. And that's why I said at the start of this video, if anyone has such a way, please feel free to tell me my methodology stupid or you know a better way in the comments. Thank you guys for watching. If you'd like to get more videos from me then feel free to subscribe to this YouTube channel.