 Good morning everybody, thanks for joining me today. It's rainy and it's a Sunday and if you're like me, you stayed out entirely too late last night. But it was worth it, thanks. So this is actually my first time at word campalanta. I haven't been to this one yet and I have to tell you, it's really fantastic. Everyone's just done an amazing job. They've been very welcoming to the volunteers. Thank you to the organizers. Thank you. I know that it is not an easy task to organize a word camp and so I really appreciate your efforts and thanks for having me. So we're going to be talking today about selling to enterprise clients but really we're going to be talking about communication in general. We'll talk about what those clients are and how we do it and all that fun stuff. But I wanted to start by just telling you a little bit about who I am. So I work for a company called Web Dev Studios. It's an agency. We're a fully remote based agency. I'm from Philadelphia myself, but our team is scattered all throughout the U.S. and I work in the client strategy department, which I will tell you more about what that is. So basically, who am I? I studied music and interpersonal communications in college. This job that I'm doing today did not exist when I was in college. I actually had a university professor, my freshman year, come to me and say, have you guys heard about this thing called the World Wide Web yet? And we said no. And now it's crazy that my career is kind of based in this tool that did not even really exist when I was in college. I met my husband on MySpace, which I think is just a funny little antidote and I love to tell everybody. And we met many, many moons ago. And we started a small business helping local musicians and artists in Philadelphia. And one day he came to me and said, we're going to need some websites for our clients. So I downloaded you some tutorials and found some YouTube videos. There's this thing called WordPress. Do you think you can figure it out? This was like on a Saturday morning. So I was up for the challenge and I built my very first site, which I wish I could show you because it is a disaster. And so that's how I learned. And this then was slowly my transition into the tech space at this point. This was probably circa 2005. So who I am not, which is sometimes more important, I'm a terrible speller. Listen, I'm 41 years old. I recognize this about myself. I know it. I'm working on it. It's probably not going to get much better. If you see a misspelling in the slide presentation, I'm sorry. I certainly don't have all the answers. I wish that I did. There's a lot that I don't know, but that's really one of the great things about coming to a WordCamp, because we can really learn off of one another. I'm not a developer. I pretend to be sometimes. I'm certainly not a designer. I can never do that. And I used to say at this point when I would talk about myself that I'm not technical and I'm a more non-technical person. And I took that out. I stopped saying that because it's not the truth. In my position, in what I do, I have to understand tech on a very high level in order to work with my clients. So although I may not implement it every day in what I do, I definitely consider myself to be technical now. I'm a terrible slide maker, which will also be evident. Okay, so I have a quick story for you. This is a story that happened to me when I was a child, actually. It's probably one of the things that has impacted me most in my life up until this point. It's a story that I often reflect back to and think about. Yeah, and to be quite honest, it's probably the most embarrassing thing that ever happened to me. And I'm going to share it with all of you. I was in fourth grade, and even then I was a little type A and often had a lot of responsibility. So one of my jobs was when somebody had a birthday, their parents would bring in cakes or cupcakes or something like that, and I would have to bring it out to the class and we would all sing happy birthday. So on this day it was a surprise. I had a very simple job. The teacher was going to nod. I was going to get up from my desk, walk to the back of the room, get the cake, bring it out. Everybody would sing happy birthday. Everybody remember those really old closet doors in elementary school? They were wooden. They folded. They creaked. They made a lot of noise. Well, I couldn't get it open. It was jammed. So I yanked it, which startled the class, which startled me, which caused me to trip and fall into the cake. This is a true story. I was in fourth grade. It was traumatic. All I could do was like stand up and run out of the room. I mean, because what do you do at this point? You have cake. You're covered in icing. The cake is destroyed. The kid doesn't have a birthday anymore. So I tell you this to say that I believe when it comes to sales. One of the things that holds us back is fear. So for me, right, by sharing this story, no matter what happens today when I'm communicating with all of you, there's not cake. It will never be that bad. And cake is interchangeable. We all have a cake. We all have that one thing. As long as it's not that, you'll be okay. And I think that this is one way where we really start to face that fear when we're communicating with people. And now you know my deepest, darkest secret. So at this point, we're best friends. All right. So sales often gets a bad rap, right? It's a dirty word. Daniel Pink, he's a best-selling author, wrote a book about sales, and I have all these resources available at the end, too, where he surveyed people and asked them, when you hear the word sales, what do you think of? What do you think was the number one term that people said? Any guesses? Car salesman. Car salesman, close, yeah? Rejection. Somebody said sleazy. Trashy. Trashy, yeah. It was pushy. It was number one. But all those words you used were also in that list, to be fair. It's pushy. And it's also a noun, right? So it's the exchange of a commodity for money, the action of selling something. I like to think of sales as a verb, although that's not grammatically correct. My definition is really about providing solutions to challenges a client may be having while being respectful of their budget. Think about it. When you have a problem, when you're faced with a challenge and somebody offers you a solution, are they not usually praised? Don't you feel grateful that somebody helped you with a problem that you were having? That is sales. The difference is, is when we have exchanged something like money for that transaction. It takes it to a different level. But if you just start to have a mental shift from it being something that you're afraid of, being pushy, to it's communicating with somebody and solving their problem, I promise you that's really where the magic starts to happen in sales. So what is an enterprise client then? An enterprise client, it's just a really big business. They typically have employees from hundreds into the thousands. These are some of my enterprise clients that I get to work with on a daily basis. Viacom, Campbell's, Microsoft. I literally interact with all of these companies every day solving their challenges when it comes to the web. So I mentioned my job is in client strategy. I talk with clients all day long finding out what their problems are, what challenges they're having, and I write their development plans. So I come up with their solutions that they're going to be using, that our team is going to be implementing for their web projects. So these are very different types of clients. These are not your small business clients. They have to be treated very differently. You have to handle them very differently. Let's talk a little bit about the basics, right? What are the basics of working with an enterprise client? So if this is not your client yet, it is a long sales cycle. And you really need to be patient. These could be six months. It could be two years. I've had clients that I've entertained for literally five years to try to get their business, and that is normal. However, the truth be told is once they become your client, they will be throwing your projects and need to be done in 24 hours. So there is that other side of it. So be prepared for that. But the initial contact, that initial sale, the initial contract, it is going to take a lot of time. So prepare yourself for that. You're going to be working with multiple people, multiple departments. And I understand that we face this in a lot of the projects that we do, right? We are working with, you know, two, three, five people sometimes, even if you're working with a non-profit, you're going to find that you're working with multiple people. The difference is when we get to that enterprise level, it starts at a department level. You have marketing. You have IT. You have branding. You have the each individual brands. And then within all of those are multiple people. You will become an expert at facilitating meetings because that's what you do a lot of. You are trying to get all of these people to align and make decisions, which is very complicated. So there's a really great book. Again, I'm going to have all these resources at the end. It's called Game Storming. If you haven't ever read it, I highly recommend you getting it. It will teach you how to do mind mapping or exercises with people in groups. So there's like post-it note exercises, all kind of ways that you could take these meetings and add a gamification element to them to make them more productive. So I highly recommend checking out that book. I use it all the time. It's not a one-off project. This is not like, I'm hiring you to do a website and we're done. This is, I'm hiring you to fix a thousand things. Then we need to get an event website up really quick. Then we're going to need a one-pager. Then we're going to need a retainer for a couple of years. So when you start to working with these clients, understand that this is a long game. There's going to be multiple things, which really leads me to my next point about it being not one estimate. One thing I want to encourage people to do when they're working with clients of this size, and honestly I think that you can probably apply this to any project you're working on, to start thinking of these projects as monthly retainers and not one flat fee. Estimating is the hardest thing that we can do in this business. I, sincerely, I've been doing this for ten years. To me, it's still one of those things that I haven't crafted yet. I haven't perfected it. I'm constantly going back and making revisions. It's very difficult for one thing. Clients don't always know what they want. There's a ton of unknowns, and you, you know, sometimes with the project, you don't know what will happen. This concept of doing a monthly retainer is really beautiful. There's a finite number of hours that you're dedicating to the client every month. You can prioritize tasks. You can work through them. And if there is unexpected, you have the availability to cover that. So Chris Lemma, if I don't know if you're familiar with Chris, he's definitely an influential person in the WordPress community. He works for a company called Liquid Web. He has this brilliant video. I'm going to give you all the link. This brilliant video on doing a three-point estimating process when you're trying to come up with estimates for a project. To take that one step further, Mario Pezchev, who, his is devwp.eu, his blog, it's a brilliant blog, wrote about why giving a finite estimate is a bad idea, and why he only does retainers now. And again, we can probably spend two weeks talking about how to estimate for a project, because it really is that complicated. But I'm going to share these resources with you. I highly recommend you checking them out. Get away from this kind of like, your project's going to be 20,000 or 25,000 or whatever it is, because that inevitably is what's going to get into trouble. You're going to invest more time up front preparing for these clients than you would any other client. It may take a couple of weeks to put together a proper proposal, have all your meetings, do all of that. It's worth it. But you have to understand that that investment up front is part of your overhead. And so when you are factoring in the cost of a project, you still need to make sure that your profit is covering that time that you invested in preparing for the project. That is not free work. That is work that will balance out at the end of the year with the projects that you did get versus those that you didn't. You're going to have to travel, right? You're going to have to go visit these people. You're going to have to get in front of their faces. Understand that that is a commitment you will need to make. I don't care how much the tech world evolves, and we all love tech. That's why we're here. Nothing will ever take place, take the place of a face-to-face meeting. That's why we have these word camps. We're able to come face-to-face with one another and communicate and talk. So Zoom is awesome. Slack is amazing. Email is fantastic. Well, it's not totally true. But you really need to get in front of people because that is where you can really understand them and make things happen. I am an advocate for face-to-face meetings. I will fly to Microsoft. I was just there. I will sit with them even if it's for an hour. I will go to Seattle because it is worth it to me to have time with them. This is not a one-person job. So there's about 40 of us at Web Dev Studios, and they will tell you I call on all of them on a regular basis to help with proposals, with estimates. They're so brilliant, and they're really the ones that are doing all the work. I'm just data-gathering it and putting in something that a client could read, and I know that. We have brilliant developers, project managers, and I recognize that my job would be impossible without the help and support of that team. And you know, even if you maybe have a small business and you're just one person, there are ways to merge with other companies and build relationships that you can go in looking stronger than maybe you think you are. So I highly recommend gathering people. All right, the needs. So enterprise clients have very different needs. Some of them that I have grown accustomed to and that I kind of expect when I'm working with these clients, they need solutions that are scalable. These are not solutions that you would have to redo every year or every two years or every six months. They need something that's going to grow with them that you can build onto. This is important because when you're coming up with a development plan, you have to think about the infrastructure. What's your framework? How are you building this and will I be able to build on this later on? I think about it as a house, right? I write the blueprint for the house. The development team builds it, but they need to know exactly what that house is going to be like 10 years from now. So they put in the right foundation and it's really the same comparison here. Security. Oh, God. This is such an issue right now. I know you're all feeling it. I know everybody's talking about it. This is where I say make friends with your hosting companies. Pantheon's here. Pressable's here. There's a whole bunch of other hosting companies that are in the building. Meet them. Make friends with them. Become partners with them because they will be your lifeline when it comes to this part. Performance, security, things of that nature. And I know I value my relationships with the hosting companies because it's super important. If you're making a recommendation on where you're going to host a website, that they can help you with the security piece. Integrates with all the things. And when I say that, I mean like everything. They have membership databases. They have e-commerce. They have newsletters. They have marketing. They have analytics. They have more third party services than you can possibly imagine. Video hosting. Social media. All these different ones. So when you're building something, we need to make sure that these integrations work seamlessly. In the case of unenterprised clients, they will even have global headers and global footers that you need to access into your theme with an API. So it's not really the same idea of what you're thinking about with a regular website so just be prepared to make it expandable and integrate with everything. They're often multilingual. It's a global world, right? So somebody who's coming to you, especially at an enterprise level, they have clients, customers, everywhere, they're going to need multiple languages. Who here is all caught up on GDPR and knows what it is? Yeah, right. I feel like this too, right? So if you don't know Google it, I'm not going to go into a session on GDPR. It's happening on May 25th, the EU passed new regulations about privacy notices for websites. If you are an EU resident or you do business in the EU. So basically if your site can be accessed from the EU, it's something to talk to your legal counsel about or Google just read up on it, get comfortable with it. But these are the things that are happening at an enterprise level that are happening fast. When it was said that this legislation was going to come out, all of our clients started scrambling, figuring out how are we going to approach this. This kind of ties into that multi-lingual thing. These needs are a little bit deeper. Complex user roles and varied workflows. One of the things that astonishes me about working with these clients is they are more concerned about the back end of the website. And by back end, I mean the dashboard. Then they are sometimes the front end. And this is really something to think about. If you're working with a client, take the time to ask them, how do you currently add, edit, delete your content? What's your flow like? How do you do it? How would you like to do it? Do you have any challenges when you're doing blog posts? Is there a way that we can make this easier? I think that this is one of the most important things that we can do as developers is not only think about how pretty a site is going to be, we need to think about how our clients can use that site internally to help solve their operational issues. And this is a really big piece when you get to an enterprise level. This is something that they want to talk about. You know, they don't want to edit blog posts in Google Docs anymore. They want a full, track-changed editing system in WordPress ready to go. And this, again, has nothing to do with how the site is going to look or how the site is going to feel. This is simply about how they're using it. When it comes to user roles, we literally have to create a user matrix which lists out every possible user role that we could have for that website and every single thing that can be done on the website and then start checking, well, this user can do A, B, C, D. And they need to be built into that system because a lot of times we're dealing with confidential, proprietary information. The wrong people can't get access to the wrong thing. If it's a big nonprofit and they have a board portal where there are financial information like that, you can't have an intern get access to something like that. So user roles become very complex. It is super important. But I promise you if you take some time to understand how your client uses the site internally, it will make your job much easier in the long run. Flexibility of your team, like be Gumby, because when I'm telling you when they call you and say, can you turn a website around in 24 hours, you need to be prepared to do that with limitations, of course. But you will have clients who are dependent on you that will need things in a hurry. Or my favorite is when you do a whole development plan and you build an entire website and then the brand looks at it and says, you never approved any of this and you can't ever use it and you have to build a whole other one and that happens a lot. Right? So you have the amount of work that you're going to be doing is different. It's a lot. And you also have to be rock solid. Understand when they say they don't like something or they turn something down, it's 60 people talking behind them and it's not really a personal criticism. It's just something that they need to say to align with their values of the company. Project management to wrangle stakeholders. One of the biggest challenges, as I said earlier or I alluded to earlier is getting everybody to agree. Like how do you do one thing, especially when you have 60 people, that is very challenging. Project management is where you're going to win here. Scheduling, timetables, creating milestones, having a project management system. There's great ones out there. I know people have talked about them here today or this weekend Basecamp is the one that we use personally. I love it but you have to use it. It's only going to be as effective as the time correctly. But project management will be your lifeline because your client holds you accountable based on the information that you give them for milestones and timelines but you can also hold your client accountable for the same exact things. Structure and timelines we kind of just covered that a little bit. It's really this is what's going to carry you through those projects and then the one that nobody wants to talk about but I need to say it flexibility and invoicing and billing. Every client's got a net 60, some are net 90, some want a PO open, some want you to invoice them directly, some want to pay half and half, some want to pay in smaller increments. It's different for every client. You need to come to terms with that and make sure that you can handle it, that your business can handle it. I certainly wouldn't want to suggest to anyone to do work without payment if you think that's going to hurt your overall bottom line. However, understand that this is not one of the situations of payment back. You will have to jump through hoops and that is and then there's a lot. There's a lot of hoops. All right, researching and planning. When I say understand the client, I do all kinds of things for myself to really, if I talk to a client or I want to build a relationship with a client or nurture a client relationship, I'll do things like set up Google alerts for their businesses, I'll do things in-page, are they on a board? I'll set up Google alerts for that. I'll learn about the organizations that are important to them. You know, are they a NASCAR fan or a football fan or whatever? And I'll start kind of making mental notes of all of these. Actually, I use a CRM, which we're going to talk about, and write all this stuff down so that as I'm working with the client, I could bring something up like, hey, last time you mentioned that you were going to do something like, hey, the Philadelphia Eagles won the Super Bowl too. Just a little side note, we were very excited, right? And the Flyers and the Sixers are on their way to a good season. So finally, Philadelphia's having a good year. Sorry to deviate from the conversation, but that needed to be said. So yeah, you want to just gather all of this information and really start to understand your client and also need to understand their project, right? So you need to kind of figure out what they're telling you, what that actually means, because I promise you, they are two different things. Really quick, on the count of three, I want everybody to say hello. One, two, three. See, you guys are so good, you listen so well. But why did we all say hello on the three? It could, right? But our predisposition, what we've learned throughout our life, is that you wait for that count to be over before you say it. But guess what? You will have clients that really mean say hello on the three. And you need to let go of your predispositions what you know to dig deep enough to get to what they're saying. And that's just a really simple example, what happens all the time when we're trying to understand what clients want. Research their competitors. There's great tools out there where you can run analytics or keyword research on a client's competitors. Find out who they are and find out what is working for the competitors. Use that information. Learn their current environment. By that I mean are they hosting internally? How many deployments do they use something like Git to deploy? You have to ask all of these questions. How is their DNS set up? Who controls that? How often do they back up their sites? Who does the WordPress updates? Is that internally? Do they rely on a hosting company? Do they need that as part of their package? These are all questions that you need to be asking and understanding and learning. This is before we've written a proposal by the way. We haven't even studied their RFP documentation or anything else that they give you. Does anyone here answer RFPs as part of your business model? You do? You do? Do you want to claw your eyes out usually when you're doing them? Yeah? Yeah. It's brutal, right? You're given like we need a website. It should probably have these colors but we aren't sure and it needs to be done in two weeks and we won't tell you our budget. Like that's pretty much every day out there, right? Yeah. So it's very challenging. You have limited information but I have found the good companies will give you an Easter egg in that RFP and you need to read it thoroughly and you need to find it because that is how they are starting to weed people out of the proposal process. By Easter egg they may say we want page three of your proposal to have a purple line. This is a true story. I've had to like do things like this because they're trying to see who is actually paying attention and really reading something like that and you don't want to miss those key elements. I had one time an RFP where they said get ten envelopes ten hard copies of the proposal printed a USB drive with the proposal ten of them ten separate envelopes put it in one envelope and hand deliver it to the office. These were the steps that they made me go through but it was a big project and I was like at Staples buying ten USB drives loading them up I didn't mind I put that extra time in. Gather examples so here's the thing and this kind of goes hand in hand with the next one which is take the time to do mockups or wireframes or site maps if you're going after a high level client they are working with a lot of agencies at minimum they probably have to get three bids that's pretty much the standard right at minimum but we know that they're probably getting more than that it's not saying that you build in WordPress or that you have a great team although that is part of it it's going to be the ideas that you're bringing to the table that they didn't think about things that they didn't really ask specifically for but that you through your research and planning were able to you know zero in on and give them something back in the proposal this is really crucial wireframe site maps quick mockups these are great in front of everybody else that is submitting to this client again it's invested time up front with a return if you work to get the project and that's how you need to look at it I just did an RFP recently for a very fun company and this particular company and I can't say you know this I don't know what I can say and what I can actually but the company had profile pages and I knew some of our developers had profiles with this company so I screen-shotted all of their profile pages and worked them into the proposal so that they could see that we were very familiar with their company with their organization and we had team members that were already using it were already invested and we knew what we were doing that's the kind of thing that helps to set you above the rest of everybody else be very clear that put no really be very clear and again that one, two, three example that I used is really a perfect way to illustrate where communication can go bad when you're working with a client when somebody says to you something I'll actually give you another real-life example that happened we have a client who we needed to implement a new search feature on their website right so he had done a screen cast of what he wanted this search to look like and it had suggestive search meaning it was going to pull up results in typing so we built he had to express concern that this wasn't actually what we're proposing was not going to do what he needed it to do and I said okay cool let's install this plug-in do the dev that we needed to do 10 minutes 20 okay let's do the dev that we need to do let's test it out see if it works correctly so we did that and was working beautifully and we showed it to him and he said we got on the phone and we had a conversation turns out his biggest concern was speed it wasn't fast enough but he never said the word speed he never said fast and quite frankly I didn't ask if speed was what he was most concerned about and it got totally missed and it was just maybe a few more questions that I could have asked if I just dug a little bit deeper we would have found out that it wasn't actually the search results he was concerned about it was just how fast they were populating clarity will be your best friend this is my favorite quote when it comes to sales the biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place and I cannot tell you how often that happens how many times we've all done it admittedly myself too you've been on the phone with a client your slat goes off your Facebook dings and for a split second you're just not hearing what's happening on the phone call because you were distracted by my dog barks whatever you hear something and you realize that you're just kind of like guessing like uh-huh uh-huh uh-huh but did you truly hear what that client was saying I personally in my life had to make a conscious effort to shut everything down when I'm on the phone with a client I need to close my door I need to turn off my slack I need to shut down my phone I need to be fully present on every call and quite honestly I'll tell you what I've been doing aside from being present I always ask can I tape this conversation to refer back to if they're comfortable with it I will record it and after every phone call I will send an email saying thank you for the call these are the top five things that we discussed on the call just as a recap email and I do that for every single phone call that I have in an effort just to provide clarity for what we're doing and then everything is also documented for future reference if needed alright now we're at the proposal stage yeah we're finally there so probably all the research and everything that we're doing we've already invested two three weeks in that that's quite normal now we're at the proposal stage we want to set expectations right oftentimes clients will come to you with a budget I have a hundred thousand dollars right and so the initial reaction would be let's see if we could fit everything into this because that's a lot of money right let's just see if we could do everything the answer needs to be this is what we can do for that amount of money so you're setting your expectations up front and you should do this I even you know I make sure our clients know our hourly rate I make sure that they know exactly what we're proposing but more than that I tell them what I left out from their original scope I said you know what I didn't include was X, Y, Z because that didn't fit in this budget but if you wanted to move that to a phase two I would be happy to do that for you you know or perhaps as we're working on the project we'll discover other things that we want to work on together so maybe we should just do a retainer so we can keep this relationship steady for the next couple months and that's how I would approach it write a personalized and thoughtful proposal I've given you an example about screen-shotting the profile pages and including them if you have a proposal template great that's amazing and that's awesome but take that extra hour or two to write a really beautiful cover letter that's personalized to your client change up you know make sure their logo is in there maybe screen shots of their current site you need to take the time to personalize that because I will tell you they will know if you didn't if you're just filling in the blanks on a template they will know I actually got called out on it once back in the day when I did it and I didn't know any better they were like why did you just send me a generic boiler template I don't need that tell me what you're going to do for me and they're right and I changed my whole thought process and how I would approach a proposal unless specifically asked for don't sell WordPress sell the best tool which happens to be WordPress this is a very important point right somebody comes to you with some specific web development challenges you're telling them hey I know how we're going to solve this one two three XYZ you know what and I think WordPress is probably the best solution for this because it's going to accomplish all of those things that you need for your web development project so I don't go in saying I want to sell you a WordPress website I go in saying I want to sell you a solution for the challenges that you're having for your web infrastructure and oh by the way I think we can use WordPress for some of it and that's how you should be approaching it that's how you should be thinking about it because they don't care ultimately at the end of the day what tool you're using I mean they might but that's again the exception we're generalizing here a little bit they just need the job to be done well there's huge added benefits to WordPress of course and you should certainly bring those up but the idea here is that you have the answer to their problem and it involves WordPress WordPress is not the answer you are that's the important piece focus on the ongoing relationship not a price right so we talked about this in a few different ways but I believe that even if you lose a project the relationship with that person is the most valuable thing that you can walk away for walk away with the relationships with your clients I promise you will be everything so let's say for example you're working with a client you send a proposal and they say no two months later they change jobs they go to another company they really liked the time that you took for that last proposal they contact you again we had clients that every time they changed a job the first thing they did was wanted to redo the website at their new company and got back in touch with us it's the relationship that is the most valuable thing to you they will tell other people so focus on that focus on relationship building you must demonstrate value so again kind of with the price piece here you are not saying that $100,000 is going to get you this you are saying that I am going to do all of these things and fit it into your budget what value can you offer this particular client what can you do that no one else is doing and will it justify that bottom line that you are quoting not the other way around it's not a price and this is what we can do it's like this is everything that we can do and we are going to do it better than anyone else and we are the best at what we do and it just so happens to equate to this so we need to kind of demonstrate how good we are what we can bring to the table before we can even start to talk about money pay discovery guys I am a big fan if you have a big client and it's a big web project and it is just completely overwhelming and there is no way that you can put a plan together for this simply suggest that they purchase a few hours or however you would structure it for your own business to do a discovery session with a guaranteed deliverable the guaranteed deliverable as at the end of that discovery session they will have a development plan and a full detailed estimate and proposal for the whole project and that discovery is already done so technically that's credited to the project it's a win-win for the client right and pay discoveries it is so worth your time to start entertaining those because it's just going to bring you so much more clarity on a project and I promise it will strengthen the relationship with the client and the client will see huge benefits from doing something like that so I usually like to say that two to three weeks depending on the project size is what I really need to do a thorough discovery session and I got to tell you I sell and pay discoveries as much as I can right now because I just love the focus, the clarity and the relationship building that they bring to a project before you jump into it deliver the proposal in person if that's an option but if it's not an option you know what I like to do instead of sending the proposal to the client I set a meeting or if it's a zoom call so be it and I walk them through the proposal for the first time instead of having them just get it in their email to read it and I'll tell you this is a huge help because you are right there to answer any objections that they may have you are right there to see their face when they see the price you're right there to see what they're thinking about and it's a really beautiful way to deliver a proposal you can dip so many things in the bud by doing it this way and then certainly after the call send them the proposal to review later but if you also need to make changes this is a good opportunity to get feedback from them if you need to make adjustments to the proposal as well gather your team so we talked about partnering with potential hosting companies but if there's an SEO expert that is here or in your locale make friends with them is there an analytics expert build your team through partnerships if you're not able to do it from a hiring level and use that when you're going in for these bigger projects give them an option for SEO give them an option for analytics give them an option for hosting make yourself appear to be larger than you are oh that's my dog he sneaks his way into every presentation I do you can follow him on Instagram that's Sir Frankie and that's obviously Wapu from the first word camp US in Philadelphia which I had the pleasure of being on that organizing team so this is not a sales book but also a book that I highly recommend called the Four Agreements it's by Don Miguel Ruiz these are the laws that I live by in my job right be impeccable with your word you are only as good as the things that you say sometimes and that is truly important don't take anything personally I had mentioned that before that we can't take it personally they will come back to you with criticisms you need to be stronger than that and understand in their world that is where it's coming from it's not your world you're not doing something wrong it's coming from them don't make assumptions guys be clear be very clear I can't say that enough ask as many questions as you need to until you feel comfortable and always do your best I mean really that's all that any of us can do right if we follow all these steps we're building relationships we're doing thorough research we're creating beautiful proposals even if that project doesn't become yours at the end of the day you can feel good about yourself that you did your best for that client so some of my tips for success don't multitask don't do it I know you all think you can do it you can't we are way more effective when we single stream tasks choose your words wisely we just talked a little bit about that invoke action you can never leave a client call or a client email without a question invoke action from your client be seen and be heard get out here get to word cam speak blog get on social media position yourself as the expert in your field use a CRM we can certainly have a whole presentation on this organize your information that's the bottom line there stay informed google alerts there's all different kinds of tools find out what's happening in your world in your community my favorite productivity role that I live and die by if it can be done in under two minutes do it now telling you that little tidbit changed my entire life and track and measure your results you will never know how good you're doing unless you track your data and you see what your results are so track and measure whatever you can I'm gonna actually skip this is the resources slide here guys I'm gonna share these slides with you so these are linked to sell as human by Daniel Pink I mentioned that one getting things done by David Allen that's the two minute role game storming a play book for innovators rule-breakers and changemakers by David Gray get it, read it, love it the four agreements if you're looking for just a little encouragement Don Miguel Ruiz is the best influence the psychology of persuasion we didn't really talk about that one but just a kind of short note I did a study on thank you notes and found that the percentage of repeat business from handwritten thank you notes was higher than you might expect the art of asking this is a brilliant head talk by Amanda Palmer who is a she's a musician essentially I really recommend watching that the two blog posts that I mentioned seven reasons why I avoid estimates my approach to estimating without requirements and then of course WebDevStudios.com that's where I work and isabeth.com where I try to blog and don't do it as much as I can but my mother says it's really good and that's it thank you guys