 All right, we'll go and get started here. How's everyone doing today? Pretty good, pretty good. But I enjoy in the, I guess actually this is the second day with the workshops of our camp. Awesome, awesome. All right. Well, just going to start out here. Just give you an idea of what the talk is going to be. It's going to be about overcoming your fear of sales and networking. It's going to be driven more towards people who are introverted. People who are not big fans of large crowds or can't walk into a crowd and just walk into a crowd and be social. It's always a little harder. The reason I was just real quick, the reason I wrote this talk was I was a freelancer. I had to learn. I was one of those people who walked in and went and found the corner, found one person I knew and stood over there the whole time and never talked to anybody. Well, wasn't going to grow my business that way. So I had to learn how to talk to people and how to do sales when frankly I didn't want to be near anybody and talk to people. It scared me. So that's what this talk's going to be about. So first off, I'm Chris Edwards. I am from Orlando, Florida. I've been a website developer for 19 years, WordPress developer for seven, SEO, 12 years. Then I started out freelance. Now I'm on an agency with my wife. We've got a couple of employees out of Orlando called DataGerman Labs where we do WordPress analytics things such as that in digital marketing. I'm also a GoDaddy Pro ambassador for the GoDaddy Pro product as well, which is something we use in our business. If you want to follow me on Twitter, you can follow me at chris-edwards-ce. I tweet out marketing stuff mostly. So feel free to follow me. I don't tweet that much, but every once in a while when I find something really cool that I want to share with people, I do send it out there. Okay, so for today's talk, kind of give you a little bit of an outline of what we're going to be talking about. So we're going to kind of go through, first off, the mentality that you need to have. Then followed by what we're going to talk about, knowing your limits, how to start the conversation, and then how to turn that conversation into a sales conversation to sell a product, and even how to close that deal. And then at the end, we're going to kind of go through, and we're going to talk about sales tools and such. If you can hold questions to the end, that'd be great. If you do have a really big question you want to try to ask, feel free, raise your hand, and we'll try to answer it. Okay, so let's start off first with the mindset, right? Everybody when you say a sale, you're like, oh, well, let's talk about a sales person, or you're going to talk to sales. Everyone starts to kind of think of that car salesman like kind of person, it's like that. He doesn't care about you, he just wants to walk in, it's going to sell you a car, whatever it takes, it's going to pressure you into it and everything. And what we want to do is we want to keep that mindset, because if you have that mindset, especially if you're introvert, a lot of times as an introvert, you're kind of a little bit more about you don't want to chase people off, you don't want to scare people, you want to please people. And so the idea is instantly you're turned away from sales because you're like, I'm not that kind of person, I don't want to get involved, I don't want to walk up and be like, take this, buy this, do this, you're just not that kind of person. And so when you start to think of sales, you start to think of that car salesman type of attitude. And that's actually not the mindset that you need to have going into this. Instead what you've got to do is you're going to look at it as you're consulting, right? So instead of focusing on selling, you want to focus kind of more on consulting. You're there to help them, not sell a product. So this is the first big thing to come in because naturally if you go in with a sales mentality of just push, push, push, push, you're going to be able to be scared of having those conversations. You're not going to want to have that conversation with people and it's going to really make you uncomfortable which then it's going to make it very hard to make a sale, right? So one of the biggest things I always like to say is go in there and just be yourself, help them. You're an expert in what you do. That's why you do it for a living. So go up and just talk to them and just be helpful and don't think about selling them a product. That's something that can come later. We can talk about that later with them. Just find out and just be there to help. And if you have that mentality that you're just helping people, that you're not trying to sell things, you're not trying to do any of that, it's going to make it a lot easier to go in there because you're not going to be nervous. You're not going to be thinking, oh am I going to, am I not going to sell something? Which is kind of where we go to our next point, right? Rejection, it happens, right? It's real, you don't need to worry about it. I often look at it as a way to learn from it, right? People aren't always going to want what you're selling, right? So if you come in with a mentality to help them, you're not sitting here worried about, oh do they want to buy what I'm selling? And you're not worried about that rejection because you're just there to help. You're there to help them out with what they need. It's going to really help you build that relationship and get closer, right? So just kind of remember, I'd say remember, I heard this from, I'll forget which, it was another word camp, someone said, remember every rejection is one step closer to a yes. And so, and I enjoyed that quote because it was really, it kind of told me, you know, that's true. When you're talking to somebody and they say, I'm not interested, I don't want that, it really kind of helps you understand, okay well they didn't want it, let's me get moved on to the next person who may want that product, or it helps you understand what they may really want and then maybe you can talk to them about a service you have for that. And then, just kind of remember, this is a relationship building thing, right? You're not going to just walk in, this isn't a, okay I got five minutes to make a sale and I got to move on. This is going to, you want to focus on building that relationship with somebody, it's, you're not going to close every single sale on the first encounter, it may take multiple encounters, but instead you want to just work on building a relationship and it's going to be a little bit easier if you walk in to a conversation with somebody and you are in that mindset that I'm going to help them, you're not worried about that rejection, right? And then you're not sitting here just instantly like, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's great, that's great, great. Hey, buy my stuff, right? They're not going to be like, whoa, moving a little too quick there. So instead, just sit there and just talk to them, build a solid relationship with those people and just really get to know what they're looking for and understand and just focus on the relationship aspect, not the sales aspect. And then know your limit, don't overwhelm yourself. This is a big one for me, it's actually kind of funny because you'll see this, if you know me you'll see this happen all the time, but we'll kind of dive into what I mean by that. So first, group size. This is one of those I would say, it could be one or the other, right? For different, depending on what kind of personality type you are, you may be somebody who's more comfortable talking to just one-on-one with people or you may be some and you get intimidated if there's like five or six people right there, you might start to get a little more intimidated like me speaking to like 35, 40 of you. But it might be a little intimidating, right? Or you might thrive on that. It might be easier for you to talk to a larger group or insert yourself if you see a group of like three or four people at a networking event, right? You see three or four people standing over here to just join in with that because then you don't have to completely lead on the conversation. Don't over, if you know that a certain one intimidates you more than the other, don't put yourself in that position because once you get intimidated, once you start to feel uncomfortable, it's really, really hard to go back and come back from that. It's gonna be, you're gonna become overwhelmed, you're not, your mind's not gonna be clear, you're not gonna be able to sell your product, you're not gonna be able to show that you're an expert in your field because you're gonna be too busy thinking about just being intimidated by the whole situation, right? So what I like to do is focus on a one-on-one conversation with somebody, or if you are the group person, focus on having that group and then learn about the different people to that group and then focus on a one-on-one conversation to start that conversation for sales. So this is the big one. If you know me, if you see me at WordCamps, you'll see there'll be a point where you just don't see me for a little while. Take breaks, right? When you need to take a break, you'll know it, you're gonna be overwhelmed, you're gonna hit a point where you can't really think what's going on, you're just way overwhelmed with everything going on. Go take a break. I know last year, WordCamp US, this happened to me with the large room with everybody there. I was running around, I was talking to everybody and everything and then my wife was there as well with me. She's an extrovert. We'll actually talk about that in a little bit here and how that can work for your advantage. But she's loving it. She's loving all these people. She's like, this is awesome and she's getting me into all these conversations for talking to everybody. And then I come up to her and say, I'm gonna disappear for about an hour, I'll be back. And so I went back to the hotel, went down, sat down just by the window, worked on a few things on my computer and just silenced the silent place. Maybe you can't go back to the hotel. Maybe it's just finding a nice, quiet place here, for example, tons. Oh, I love this place. There's so many different seats. There's another level you can seat down to and hide if you want to. You can just kind of find a place just to kind of get away, even if it's in a large networking event, finding a room that you can step out to or just going outside and just walking around for a second. If you need to collect your mind, do that. Because if you don't do that, you're gonna have a very unclear mind. You're gonna be going into this super nervous and you're gonna, people are gonna see that and you're not gonna be able to show that you're an expert in that field. You're not gonna be able to show, hey, I know what I'm talking about. If in your mind you've got 20 other thoughts running through your head while you're trying to have that conversation with people. So just find a quiet place, recharge, take a minute, grab some water or something and just sit back and just take a rest. Speaking of water, I gotta grab a little bit here. So kind of along the same lines. I also wanna talk about pacing yourself, right? So similar to taking a break. When you have a conversation with somebody, you don't wanna just, now like my wife, she'll be still talking to this person and starting her second conversation with another person. I don't know, but take a break between people. Figure out how much time you need between to reset between each conversation that you've had with people, right? So what I like to do is, after I talk to one person, I like to go ahead and take a step back, think about what I just talked to them about, maybe write some notes down about them and make sure that I just kind of take a minute to fully understand what I just had a conversation about and then I move over to the next person, right? And then I go ahead and start that conversation with that person. And I make sure I have a little bit of time in between. I know where I'm, I know, and that's where I can assess do I need a break? Do I need to take a break? You know, who am I gonna talk to next? You know, just take a minute to really clear your mind before jumping into that next conversation. And it's gonna make it a lot easier. Another one, this is a big one I like to use. Split the room. And this is an interesting, because I've told this to a few people that are extrovert salespeople. I'm like, what do you mean split the room? I see the room and I just go. And I'm like, yeah, not me. I see the room and I go, whoa, no, no, no, let's not do this. So what I like to do is kind of take the room and go, all right, let's divide this room into force. And I'm really gonna just pretend, I'm just gonna look over and focus on this section of the room for now. I'm not gonna even pay attention to what's going on around here because there's too many people here and it's gonna be very intimidating to just walk in and be like, oh, wow, and just try to, oh, where'd I go? Who do I try and talk to? What's going on? I just like to kind of go over and figure out, this is the only area I'm focusing on. It makes it a little easier. And that can also be the area that only has a couple of people in it if you want. Make sure there's no, if you go to the section that has no people then you're not really doing it right there. So you need to at least make sure there's some people in that section, right? All right. So this is where we're gonna kind of get more into, that's kind of the mentality, I think, and kind of how I like to make sure that I don't get overwhelmed when I'm in those situations. Now, how I start those conversations. So I told you we're gonna talk about my wife here. It's good things, don't, I'll tell her something bad, right? First, get a wingman or a wingwoman, right? Get somebody who can help you. The easiest way to start a conversation is actually to have somebody else do it for you, right? Finding good leads, sending them over to your way. We do this, my wife, she goes around and she talks, like I said, to everyone in the room. And she goes and finds all the people. She qualifies them and then she brings them over and says, let me introduce you to Chris. Chris works with us as well. Let me, he can tell you a little bit more on the technical side about what he does. And so she's kind of pre-talked to everybody, found out people who may be interested in having more of a conversation and then she brings them over to me and then at that point it's a little easier because they were brought to me. I didn't have to try to find that conversation. And this doesn't have to be a significant other. This could be a friend, business partner. Another one that we found recently that worked out really well for us was complimentary business connections. That's a word I made up because I couldn't really figure out what to call them, right? So we did a lot of stuff with our local chamber and going to a lot of local chamber events. And that one was a really interesting one because people not only, being an introvert, was it a little difficult but everyone's very close-circled there too. Like everyone's like, no, no, no, you can't come talk to us yet. You haven't been here long enough. And so what we found was we actually ended up talking with a print marketing company. They didn't do digital marketing. And so what it ended up being is we are very, and I don't do print marketing, but we do digital marketing, but both are needed for a successful marketing campaign for a business. And so instead what they would do is they'd bring us in on conversations and be like, well, let's talk about your marketing in general. And then they would introduce and say, this is data in labs. They do digital marketing as well as we help you with your print marketing sign and together we can come up with a whole marketing plan. And they were able to help bring us in. So that's kind of what I mean by complementary business connections. Find other people that may do stuff that can complement your service or your product and work with them to help start those conversations and bring those conversations in. Those are my other parts. Oh yeah, and then anyone else who's willing just to do it for you. You may actually just find, meet somebody who's like, you know, after talking to somebody and they're like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. You know what? There are five people that were asking me earlier that I talked to, you know, this is that extrovert that's running around, meeting everybody, right? My wife does this for people. She'll go to different booths out at a word camp, talk to all these people and then bring people back to all these different booths. I'm like, you need to figure out how to get commission from these people. But she goes out and she starts selling everybody's product, right? Because she starts talking to people and she's like, well, I don't, I know somebody. So just find anybody who's, you know, if you, that's part of that going out and talking and networking with people. You're gonna meet people that are going to help bring business to you just to help you out because they may say, I don't do that. Oh, you're looking for analytics services. I don't do analytics services, but I know somebody who does. So that's kind of the really cool, that's kind of the whole idea with like, say the wingman, you know, using somebody to help you bring that in. Now, you're not always gonna have that available. So there's a couple of different things I like to do. First, make them come to you. So this is another really easy one. Well, it's a little hard, but a little easy, right? So one of the cool things you can do is instead of trying to go walk up to somebody, become that, how do I write it in here? The thing you're good at, guy or girl, right? So one of the things I do, I give a lot of talks on analytics. I'm an analytics nerd. A lot of times when I go to different camps, I actually have people come up to me and go, hey, you're that analytics guy, right? And I'm like, sure. I guess so, right? And so how do you get to there? There's different ways. One of the things is kind of doing what I'm doing right now, giving talks. Bruce's gonna follow me. Giving talks about the subjects that you know, right? So everybody here, like I said again, you're an expert in your field. You really know what you're doing, right? So why not stand up and just talk about it? It's really easy to talk about something you know in depth. You can get me on to an analytics talk. And I've had to be, I've had what I said, oh, you got an extra hour and a half. I'm an hour and a half in and I've got the moderator telling me, you gotta end it, you gotta end it. Because it's something I know. It's something I really, really love to do. I'm passionate about it. And so it's one of those talks that because I know it's something I can easily talk about and I can answer questions all day long on it. Well by doing that, once you walk out in the hallway and you're walking around the event, you're gonna have people coming up to you and going, hey, I want you to talk. I've actually had people come up to me who were like, hey, I was in your talk and I'm like, I didn't give a talk at this event. They're like, no, no, it was like a year and a half ago. Oh, okay, that's cool. I have no idea when that was, but that's awesome, right? And so once you start to give some of those talks, people start to know you. Another way, which is a really easy way, and I do this a lot when I do like a networking event or I go to like a chamber event on my name tag, instead of just writing my name, I write ask me about, and I put in like so when we're doing like one with the small business chamber, I'll say ask me about digital marketing. And then you get a lot of people, because what a lot of people do is they just write their name on their name tag. But by adding to ask me about, now when people just see you, they go, oh yeah, I was thinking about doing something with that. I'm gonna go talk to this guy, right? And then mention it in your introduction. If you have a, a lot of times you get to introduce yourself at different networking events or they give you a quick little time just to say who you are. Rather than just going, hi, my name is Chris. I work at day-driven labs. That means nothing to people, right? Instead, you don't have to even give them your job title. Say what you do at that job, right? So instead of coming in, I can say, hi, I'm Chris. You know, I'm co-owner of day-driven labs. That doesn't really tell you anything, but instead I can come in and go, hi, I'm Chris. I do analytics and digital marketing for day-driven labs. So yes, I didn't give you my title, but now you know exactly what I do because I put the service in there. I told you what I do in that introduction. And I get a lot of places that don't allow you to say much more than that. If it's like one of those places that don't want a lot of introductions. And so that way you kind of get that out there. Same thing, you can do that even with your name tag. If you're not allowed to ask me about, but you can write your title, just write that on there. And then the other thing I like to do, and you'll see this at different camps, is wear something unique. We've seen people who've done, they've had different color hair. They've done really funky hats. They have something that makes them stand out, that makes people want to come up to have a conversation. One of the things I do is I go to a lot of camps and I collect these little guys, they're the Wapus. I think there's a couple of them out here that you can find, but a lot of camps make these little Wapus. And I've got one from Japan on here. I've got one from all different word camps all over. And I've got about three times this in my backpack or at home. And so I have all these different ones. My wife actually has gone to the route that she actually has like a triple lanyard. And she swears all these, but I have back problems. I'm not gonna wear that much weight on my neck, right? But it gives people to come up. I can tell you already at this camp, there may be a few of you in this room that actually have come up to me and asked me about some of these that are on my lanyard. That's actually a tactic that I use to get people to come in here and talk with me. Because by that, you've started that conversation with me. I didn't have to go and try and start that conversation. And it's an easy conversation for me to have. I'm like, oh yeah, I got this one. This is from Word Camp Orlando in 2015. And I can start kind of talking about that and then it can transition into, so what do you do? And then it turns into a conversation. And then that's how we've got our conversation started. All right, so this one, this one's a little creepy. So I was like, not sure how to put it in here. It sounds really bad, but it does work, right? Eve's drop. And I don't mean like, how do I mean this, right? There's conversations happening all around you. And so when you're at an event, kind of keep your ears open and see what people are talking about. Cause every once in a while, you'll overhear people having a conversation about something that you may actually know and you may overhear them going, yeah, I don't know how that works. And I've actually heard like two people going, yeah, I have no idea. And if you feel, make sure it's right, let's walk in on someone's conversation. But you can go, actually, I can help you with that. I actually know a little bit about that and you can walk in and kind of get into the conversation. That's worked a lot. And it's one of those things in a networking event, it's okay. There are certain places maybe you shouldn't ease drop on people, but most places like in a networking event, it's usually okay to kind of hear or it could even be that you hear a conversation happening over here. You can listen and kind of get an idea of what certain people are talking about. And then later on go and find that person and have that conversation with that person because you know, that was something that they were having a talk about earlier with somebody else. And you can say, hey, I wanna go back to that person and have a conversation. So that's one that I like to use as well to get things started. And then the basic one, just approach somebody. They're not gonna bite you, at least I hope not. I haven't been to an event yet, this one's bit me. It happens at this camp. Well, might be a little weird, but nobody's gonna bite your head off. Nobody's gonna yell at you. It's natural for people to just come up and talk at one of these events. It's why they call them networking events, right? And every event you go to, even a work camp, right? This is a networking. Everybody's here talking to each other, learning from each other. It's natural for someone to just come up and talk to you, who doesn't know you, right? So find a way to just go up, have a conversation with people, and just start talking with them, right? And just start finding out, you know, you know, just start that relationship building process, right? Because the thing that's the key is with the conversation piece, before you start selling, you want to just really build that relationship. And then, that's when we kind of start selling. So how do we do that, right? Biggest way, and this is the biggest thing. Let's say it actually makes the difference between a car salesperson and anyone else, right? You need to listen. Hear what they have to say. Instead of talking to them and telling them what you want them to do, because remember, you're there to help, right? You're not there to just sell a product. You're there to help. So you want to hear what their problem is. Hear what's going on with them. Listen for like different key points that you can use later that you might be able to help them with. And don't immediately jump into trying to sell something to them. Hear what they have. Ask more questions to dive deeper and to dig a little bit deeper into what they're asking. And then you want to identify some pain points. So this is where, when you're talking to them, you're going to hear, usually what I have found when you're talking to someone, when there's a pain point, they go back to that pain point two or three times. They pass it and they come back to it. And so you'll start to hear those if you listen long enough to what they have to say. You'll start to really understand where they're having issues. This is kind of going back to buying any product. If you walk in and you're looking to buy, you walk into a store and you're looking to buy a soda and someone's trying to sell you a sandwich. You're like, I was here to buy a soda. I'm not really sure I want that. This is kind of where the pain points come. You want to make sure that you can identify what they're looking for first. And then with that, that's where you can then offer them a real solution. And notice, I didn't say a product here. I said, do you want to offer them a solution? And this is where we come in and we say, you know what, based off your pain points, this is where you're having the most issues that I can see. This is what I would tell you that you should do. If I were you, this is how I would fix those problems. And then you kind of go through those and those can be your products, but you're presenting it in a solutions type of form to them. You're not just coming straight off and saying, okay, cool, so your biggest problem is that you just don't have time to get in and update your website. That's great. Here, I have a maintenance package you should buy. Instead of doing that and go, hey, I understand, so you're telling me your issues going into your website, you're having a lot of, you're not able to get all the updates in there. What if you had a, what if there was somebody who could do that for you? What if you have some, is there somebody else you know who could go in and make those updates for you? Or have you worked with anybody who can make those kind of updates? And so that way it doesn't come off very salesy. You're showing them, hey, listen, I have a solution for you and I'm not trying to sell you my product, I'm just offering you a solution. There's tons of people who can do this for you. I just want to say maybe you should look into maybe using a service. Okay, yeah. And then with that, you also want to sell the value, right? So you need to focus on that value of why they're trying to, why they should, because this is where you start transition and talk a little bit about your product, right? So this is where you talk about your maintenance for an example we gave. And you're talking about your maintenance packages or whatnot. And so you want to give them the value of why it makes more sense to pay for somebody to do that for them. And this is where you can use things like ROI. Help them understand what their ROI, their return on investment can be for using a service or using your product to help them with this type of service or with what you're working on. Don't talk pricing, though. I think that's going a little too far right then. You just really want to just kind of just talk about the value of using that. A good example is going back with the maintenance stuff. I've had people tell me that, well, I could just go in, log in, update my own websites. And it's like, okay, well, that's great. Are you updating them on a daily basis? I've had people tell me, well, I've got multiple websites and why can't I just update them? I mean, there's tools out there you can do that. Go to the pros one, right? You can actually just, they can sign up for that and they can update all their stuff. And they're like, well, why would I just use one of those tools? As a matter of fact, we even use that tool to update our sites. Why couldn't I use that tool to run all my updates? And my thing is I come back and say, well, here's the difference. Yes, you gotta log in daily and you gotta do that. But what happens when it breaks? What happens when an update doesn't take? Do you know how to troubleshoot that? Have you worked on that? Are you actually logging in on a daily basis to do that or do you forget? And then realize four months down the row and a big security vulnerability comes out and posts it on CNN and you're like, oh, yeah, I haven't updated my site in four months. I forgot to log in and do that. Are you actually making sure all that happens? Because that's what our service does. And our service has this value. We come in and we have somebody who logs in daily and they take care of you and they make sure all this is happening. If something's not right, they'll reach out to you. What you're doing is you're selling the value of the product now. You're saying, yes, you can do this on your own and there's tools to do this. And those tools will work, they will help you. But what we're telling you is you're hiring not just a tool, but you're hiring a person. There's a value to using our service. And you can do this with any product. Even if you're a hosting product or you are a website developer, this is where you can come in and say, look, with our websites, we do this, this and this. And this is what makes us stand out from our competitor and this is why there's value in working with us. And this is the kind of return on your investment. You can see one of the things we do. All websites that you build with us, I've been doing conversion rate optimization, AB testing, analytics. So when your site comes up, it's gonna have full-blown analytics in it. It's gonna be conversion rate optimized. It's gonna be built to best practices based off of lots of AB tests that we have done over many years. And this is why I come to them and say, so here's the value. You're not just getting a website from us, but you're getting a website that's gonna increase your conversions. It's gonna increase your sales. It's gonna increase your leads and hopefully increase your revenue. And so there's a value to buying our service. And I still haven't, at this point, talked price. I haven't even said what we charge because that's a whole different discussion that we wanna have down the road. I just want them to at least be interested in working with me. And then, yeah, we're back to it again. It's time to listen again. Because once you've talked about all this, they're gonna come back and then they're gonna restate their issues and they're gonna talk about what you just talked about. And you may find out that some of the stuff that you just offered isn't what they actually wanted. And this is where you need to listen again because they're gonna really help refine what they need. The biggest thing I say when you go into sales, don't sell people something that they don't want. If you're gonna sell somebody something that an item they don't want, they're not going to convert. They're going to run away. Instead, hear what they have to say, know what they want, and come in with a, I wanna help you. And not saying just tell them you wanna help them, but actually have that as your actual attitude. Make sure you're coming in to help people and that you're just there to take care of them and make a little money along the way, but that you're going to be there just to take care of them. And I think that's the biggest key that we've found and it's about that relationship. All of our clients trust us. We have a lot of clients that've actually told us, you know what, just tell us what we need because we know that you're not going to just throw things in there. And then we don't. We've actually had clients afford it. We've gone to them and said, look, this strategy's not working. We wanna switch to this strategy. And they're like, well, that means you're getting less money a month. And I'm like, yes, but I don't want you throwing your money away on this thing that doesn't work. And it helped to build that trust. That client stayed with us for a very long time because they're still with us, but they stayed with us because they trusted us. They knew that, hey, we're looking out for them. We're looking out for their bottom dollar. I tell people, I'm gonna treat your company as if it's my own company with the marketing. I'm not gonna just waste your money. And if you build that trust in that relationship and you can do that through these conversations, they're going to trust you a whole lot more and they're gonna wanna do business with you. All right, so then get their contact info. And I don't mean hand them your business card. A lot of people will ask, hey, do you have a business card or do you have any, anyway, I can contact you. And they'll say, well, just give me, they'll say, I don't have any business cards printed up or I don't have them on me, can you just give me your business card? If they tell you that, see if you can write down, see if you can get their information to write it down. This is one of those biggest things that I like to really focus on because what we have found is if you hand a business card to somebody, the likelihood that they're ever gonna call you is very low because they're gonna forget about it. It's not gonna go through the wash. They're gonna forget about who you were. Instead, if you get their card, you can go back and you can follow up with them, which we'll talk about in a little bit. And then the other thing I do, is I don't just collect their contact info, I take notes on them, right onto their business card. So I'll carry a pen and I'll turn around and after, either while I'm talking to them, but usually it's right after I talk to them when I turn around and I'm talking about that little break you take between going from person to person, I'll turn around and write a couple key words down that I know is gonna help me later that night when I go put them into my CRM, which we'll talk about as well, it's gonna help me put some notes in so that when I actually have that call or I follow up with that person, I'm not just going, hi, I don't really remember who you are but I met you at this last event or this one event. You gotta remember, you may not be talking to these people again for a month later. You're not gonna remember everybody as much as you think you are. You're not gonna remember every detail about them. But if you do remember the stuff that's really important, put it down. So I always put down kind of what they're looking for so I don't call them and start selling on the website when they were looking for in the Alex package. I don't start selling them SEO when they were asking for PPC. I make sure that I write down what they were looking for and so that way I can come back and go, hey, we talked about a month ago about PPC and I'll be like, oh, yeah, okay, yeah, that's right. And I've actually had a lot of people and they're like, I don't remember what I talked to you about and then I have to remind them. So always take notes and I take them right onto the card. If you wanna have a notebook, you can actually write their name and take the information down to a notebook. It's however you wanna do it that's easiest for you. Like I said, for me, I always write it right onto the card and then if they don't have that, I write down their information so I have it for later to contact them. I usually ask for just their name, email address and phone number and usually then I take my own notes from that. So speaking of that, I don't wanna talk about following up, right? This is a big step with any of those, with any leads. You need to make sure that you do follow up and I'm not talking about just sending an email and this is where the introvert side of me comes out, right? For me, I like to send an email and go, oh, let it reply, all right, whatever, right, and walk away. I found that doesn't work. I found sometimes it takes multiple emails, they lose your email or whatever, they forget to reply, but also make calls and I mean that plural. Make phone calls until you connect with them and don't stop and the reason I say phone calls is you're initially talked to this person in person. So having a conversation with them on the phone is gonna be a lot easier and just a lot more formal than just sending an email to them. So that's one of the things I'm like, you can send an email and now if you send an email and they reply right away, then you can go that route. They may be someone who likes to email back and forth, but make sure you try to make some calls as well to try to follow up and do your best to try and get a hold of them if you can. If you don't follow, yeah, so like with the following up, I don't immediately jump in to try and sell it as well. That's where I try to build the relationship. I don't jump in in my first initial email to them and say, hey, you were at this camp. Here's my pricing, let's talk. I still come back to the, hey, we talked about some of your, we mentioned some of their pain points and say, and we talked about how we could use this particular service, PPC. We can use PPC to help you build your business and get past that and kind of reach out to them more as, hey, I still just wanna help you. And so you can get that call and that conversation going and then move on to actually presenting your pricing, presenting your proposal to them, which we'll actually talk about some proposal tools here in a minute as well. And then don't walk away from a no. And this is one that is more of a recent lesson for me. We actually just, we're fortunate enough to be able to hire a business development guy to do all of our sales for us. So once we get a lead, we give him over to him. He goes ahead and has those initial conversations, relationship building, and then gets us on the line for the final piece to talk to them and put together a proposal. One of the things I learned from him was the walking away from a no. What we often did is when someone said no, or they said, I'm not interested this time or anything like that, we took it as a rejection and we said, oh well, throw it out, moved on. And we recently had this with a very large client who was looking for PPC for a bunch of different stores nationwide and they came back and they said, we had a meeting set up, we were trying to set up a meeting with their headquarters, we were really excited about it, it was a good opportunity. And then they came back and just said that they didn't want to focus right now on brand awareness and they didn't want to spend money on brand awareness. Well, I was like, wow, that stinks. And I was like, well, we lost that lead and maybe they'll call us back one day, I don't know. And my sales guy said, I'm not done. And he turns around, he calls them back up and he actually offered them and says, I understand that you're not looking for brand awareness but we would love to still educate you on how PPC just educate you on how PPC can help you in other areas beyond brand awareness and then that way you can still present to you some numbers so you can have those numbers ready for when you are ready to make the decision. And then turned around and said, can we still set a meeting? And we ended up getting a meeting with the top executives when we weren't speaking with the top executive at that time. We actually have a meeting, actually Monday morning with the top executives to go over and present all this information to them even though they said that they weren't interested and this is gonna allow us another opportunity to still try and sell them what they need because now we understand and that's that part of listening, we understand they don't want the brand recognition, they want to get people into the stores with their campaign so that's gonna be our focus of our entire presentation is not just let's build your brands so people know who you are but we know when we walk in there we're gonna go ahead and sell the idea of how do we get people to show up at their store. And so that just changes the way I do my PPC strategy. I'm gonna pull out any kind of brand pieces and just focus on the pieces that generate the direct conversions. And so I thought that was really interesting and so from that to kind of a way you can offer education, so yes. Oh, sorry, PPC is pay-per-click, so Google ads, Facebook ads, any kind of advertising that you'll click on to get to your site. So you can offer education. That's the biggest way to do it so when they say no, say, well, that's awesome, can we still at least educate you on it? Because that allows them to learn a little bit more about it because sometimes people say no because they're scared and they don't know what it is and so educating them on it may make them a little bit more open up to it. You can go the route of talking to somebody else, be very careful with this because if they know that you know, they assign someone a talk and you go over their head it could turn out bad but if you're talking to one person and you know somebody else there maybe talk to them as well. Ask them when a better time is. This is really, for me, this works out because we get a lot of people who just say yeah, it's not the time and so when I ask them what's a better time it kind of puts them on a commitment to set a time and they're like, well, I mean it's a summer, the kids are out of school. Can we set something for maybe September? Can you call me back in September? And so that at least now gets you a reason when you call back in September and say hey, I'm giving you a call back, you asked me to call you back in September and talk to you about this and so that kind of forces them to give you a timeline so you're not overly annoying them because if they don't tell you what a better time is you don't want to call them in a month and it's actually a worse time than just say stop calling me. So it's a great way to set a future time and then in your CRM, which again, we'll talk about that in a second, that's gonna allow you to put a note to make sure you do reach back out to them. Contact them back at a later time, I think that's a duplicate of what I just said and then add them to a drip campaign. So what we actually will do sometimes is we'll take certain clients that we'll put them in our nurturing campaign which is where every once in a while we'll send out a couple marketing tips and everything through email to them. That's a very simple, we actually have it above the fold, says unsubscribe so if they don't want those they can get out of there. Make sure that's the key, do not overly annoy them, right? But we have it where just every couple weeks it still drops something over to them. They just talks to them and tells them a little bit about some marketing stuff and ways they can digitally market their business and that way they still keep remembering who we are and they don't forget who we are down the road so that if they do end up needing something down the road, hopefully they remember who we are. And then, simply, you may not be the person for them. In that case, you still wanna try to build that relationship. Don't push a product on them that they don't need so if you look at them and go really, I don't have anything that's gonna help what you need. I had a guy who actually thought he needed digital marketing but when we talked to him, he wanted us to completely rebuild, he had a warehouse solution and he needed some kind of, I even forgot what the name of the system, the type of system is, but it was a very complex software system to track and it plugged in literally to the manufacturing machines in the warehouse to track the performance of the machines on them. And I'm like, this is software development, this isn't web development, this is not what we do. And rather than try to push one of our products on him, I made sure he understood what kind of work that we did and then I actually gave him a couple references of people I knew who were in the software development business and said, these people might be able to help you with what you're looking for. And then sent them on his way. And by doing that, the guy has stayed in touch, he has reached out to me before and had us do a couple small things for him because we didn't try to push products on him at the time that he didn't need because his pain point at that time was this custom software solution that we couldn't do for him. And then the sales tools, right? This isn't a digital one, this is still print. And a lot of people go, but you're all about digital, why would you say this? Business cards, business cards are still a big thing. I carry them with me everywhere I go sometimes, I always kind of forget as well, but usually they're in my pocket, I'm ready to hand them out. These are great to have to hand out to people at all times. Most of them are gonna probably throw them away, but you will get a few people who do contact you from them still. So having those, because you can then quickly hand them out because the other thing I find at networking events and events like this is somebody's on their way to something else. They gotta run to something and so they run up to you and say, hey, I don't have time to talk, do you have a business card, you can throw me real quick. And they run off with your business card. And you have no idea what they even wanted, but they run off your business card and they usually contact you a little bit later. So make sure you always have that on you and you have something printed up that has your information on it. And then we wanna talk about CRMs, right? So the biggest thing you wanna do is you wanna track everything with the CRM. This is extremely important to log all notes, all information on every single lead that you have. While you think that your brain is a sealed trap, you will forget things, especially as you get older, I'm starting to learn that, happens a lot. So what we do is we actually use Zoho CRM. They do have a free version and then they have a paid version. I think all of these, I don't know if Close.io, I don't think Close.io has a free version, but all their other ones have a free version. And they have paid upgrades and stuff like that. We use these to track everything with everybody. And so when I talked about earlier, you write down the notes on those cards, get back to your hotel room or go back home or wherever, when you get back, make sure that whenever you schedule any kind of networking event, that you've scheduled time when you get back home to sit down for 20, 30 minutes and log all of these people into your CRM because you have fresh knowledge of talking to them. And so those little keywords you put on that card, you will hopefully still be able to remember what you just had a conversation with them about and you can put that in the notes and fill out the whole notes field because I've gone to make calls before and having all of those notes from that initial conversation is amazing. And having every single note from every single other call is great. And then the other cool thing is our system actually automatically tracks emails and most of them you can actually have a BCC line that you can put in there. And so all emails you send with that client are tracked. Our system actually does, the Zoho CRM system integrates with our Gmail and I think HubSpot may as well, I don't know about Betricks, but it actually pulls not every email that I sent, but every email that anybody in our organization has sent. And I can see every email that everybody in our organization has sent back and forth to that client. So I can also see if somebody else is having a conversation with him at the same time be like, oh, okay, well, Sandy's already handling this so I'm not gonna bother. Or I can pick up where she left off. And so it's nice to know other conversations that were had and what they talked about. So just make sure all those are getting logged into a CRM. And these are some of the ones I recommend that they all have free versions. Like I said, I don't know about closed.io if it has a free version, but these are all really good tools. With these, sign up for the trials. Well, they're free to start. Sign up, play around with them, see if they do what you need. And if they don't, move on to the next one. These tools are a little bit different and you wanna find the best one for you. And then the last tool I wanna talk about is writing good proposals. So once you've had all these conversations, you want to send them everything written out in a nice scope of work with a price on it. There's a couple of really great tools to do this. We use Proposify. Pandadox is like almost an exact copy or maybe Proposify copied Pandadox. They're both very similar the way they work. They have eSign, they have abilities for templates and all that. Google Docs is a little bit, is a free method. These other ones do not have a free version. Pandadox Proposify, and I don't think Quiller does either. Google Docs is a free version, but you will need an eSign component. And usually, I think there's HelloSign is one that's out there, DocuSign. So there's a couple of those you can look up as well. And those allow you to do eSignatures to get them to sign off on a quote. But you can do those as well through Google Docs if you want for a cheaper option. Send everything as a PDF. They'll never send it as a document that they can edit. Send it over as a PDF and have the digital signatures on it so that you can have a copy and you can make it very easy for them to sign. The key is to make it so they can accept the proposal as easily as possible and don't make a lot of steps to it. What we often do is we'll send over to Proposal. We'll wait a couple days. If they haven't, actually with Proposify, I can actually see, and same with Pandadox, you can actually see exactly what they've read and how much time they've spent on individual pages within the proposal, which is kind of cool. So you can see how many times they've opened it, where they're getting stuck. Sadly, most of the people that we send proposals to just skip over the scope of work, go straight to the price section, and then go down to the contract section, which is really bad because that means they didn't actually look at the scope of work. So they're gonna maybe be a client later that says, oh, I didn't know that wasn't in the scope of work. So you can see and sometimes know where to have a conversation with them from that as well. But yeah, I would say you wanna make sure your proposal's well written. Our proposals are about normally about 16 pages long, and they include information about our team, it has our contract in it, and then it also has the pricing and the scope of work well defined, which is a whole different talk. But you wanna make sure that that's all defined in that proposal so that they can see it. Don't just email them over, oh, that's gonna cost five grand to build that, and that's all you send them. Make sure everything's detailed out and looks professional, even as a freelancer, it's gonna really help you close those deals. So for this talk, that's all I have. If you have any questions, you can email me. There's our website, it's got a lot of blog articles related to this on it, and now we'll take questions now. Yes. What happened? Oh yeah, no, I haven't read that book. What's the book called? Win Without Pitching. Win Without Pitching, who's it by? Blair Ns. Blair Ns? Okay, so I haven't read it, but it sounds like a good book, so. Yeah, yeah, I'll have to pick it up and read it. Yes, sir. To the wedge? Yes, yes, I'll be there. Huh? Yeah. I'm scared the whole time I'm in a camp, but I go to enough of them, I figured it out. Yes, ma'am. He's the extrovert, yes. Awesome. In the back first. I think more beyond resources is just more just kind of, what I like to do is, so the reason I give talks, I've given now probably over 50 different talks at different camps and stuff, and the reason I started giving talks is because it scared me to death. It still makes me nervous, like I don't know if you can tell, I'm sweating a little bit. It still makes me nervous, getting up in front of a big group of people even now, but nothing like, I mean, when I first did it, I was shivering, I had to hold onto the podium when I gave my first talk, and I did it because it scared me, and I think that's really the thing is just find it, but make sure you do it on something that you absolutely love and you're passionate about, because if you try to do it on something that you don't know that you just, you read something else and you're trying to copy their presentation or copy what they did, you're gonna mess up, but if you do it on something that you know and love and you're passionate about, it's something that you're gonna be able, because it's second nature to you, you're gonna be able to go back to it, and then there's different things, look over the heads if you want. It took me a while to get to the point now, I actually have points, I actually have points set in this room right now when I was talking of people I keep looking around to, so I keep looking around, but when I first started, I couldn't look at faces, so if I looked at faces, I would freeze up and I wouldn't know what to do, so I would just kind of like look like this and never actually look anybody in the eye in the room, so that's kind of my suggestion, it's just really just find a place, word camps are amazing, maybe if a word camp's too big, your local meetup, start there, and just find something to get up in front of people and just talk about, and I think that it helps you along the way get a little bit easier, it gets a little easier to sell the things. We had a question over here. So I bring them up pretty much right away. I come back and I kind of give them a summary, because a lot of times I find, when you meet them in a networking event, they're like four drinks in, they're gonna tell you everything, and so I bring back up the pain points of their business, they go into pain points of other things that we're not gonna bring that up, but I go into those right away and I kind of give them a recap of what we talked about at that event, and I say hey, we were there, you were telling me that you were having a lot of, you were having a lot of issues with this and this, and we talked about some different solutions in ways that we can help, and I kind of wanted to get you on the call, and so we can kind of go over this as well again, just see how we can go ahead and make this happen for you so that we can help you get into it, and I always use the word help, I never say sell, so we can help you get into a better position and help your business grow. Make it about them and not about you. Yes, sir? Yes, it was one of those I was like, I don't wanna put these things, it's a little creepy, but at the same time, it works really well, and I haven't had anyone yet kind of go, get away from me weirdo, you know, like so, yes. Yeah, and like I said, when they're receptive, because they're at a networking event, that's what they're there to do, so they don't normally have a major issue. Now, if you're out to dinner with, you know, you're sniffing another, and there's a table over here, having a private conversation, and you're listening, and you will walk up and pull up a chair and sit down at their table, that's gonna get a little weird, and they may tell you to leave at that point, but they're a networking event, they're normally pretty open, they're pretty much like, yeah, sure, let's talk about it, so. Are there any other questions? All right, well, I'll be here the rest of today and tomorrow, mostly hanging around the GoDaddy Pro booth, so if you've got any questions, you'll find me usually in that area, or you'll find me hiding in some corner somewhere. So, if you've got any questions, come find me, and I would love to talk to you and see how we can help you.