 Good morning, good afternoon everyone. Can you hear me okay? Okay, cool. Well thanks for coming. I didn't think anyone would be here. I thought everyone would be over with Chris Lema. So, what's that? Yeah, all right. That's a good point, actually a good point. Yeah, a good point. So yeah, thanks for coming today. The talk is gonna be on getting good clients and avoiding crappy clients. And the theme of the title is Conjuring Up Good Clients and How to Avoid Evil Clients. I tried to title the presentation to align with the theme of the word camp. Seems like I was the only one to do that when I looked at the schedule. So hopefully you understood what it meant. So, Chris Ford, increase your dexterity. Okay, cool. Cool, all right, I'm not the only one. So Conjuring Up Good Clients, when I was putting together the presentation, I was thinking the word conjuring. Conjuring means to make something happen magically. And when I focus on business development, the very first thing in getting clients and getting good in clients and growing the business, I always start with intentions. I don't know if anybody's ever worked with intentions which kind of proceed goals. Intentions are actually pretty powerful and actually magical. Intentions ultimately turn into action steps. They turn into projections. They turn into processes. So we always start with our intentions. As a marketing team, we're continually kind of rehoning our intentions based on what's happening in reality. So the word conjuring is kind of a very applicable word. And alluding evil clients, it's probably the most important thing to not only grow a business, but to keep a business afloat. When I look at the darkest times in the history of my business, it's almost always related to a bad client or a bad project or many bad projects. Those times when I really wanted to quit or those times when I wanted to shut down the company. And so it's really encouraged me and motivated me to continually focus on not only getting good clients, but avoiding bad clients. It's actually relatively, it's fairly relative. So someone's trash is another person's treasure. So a good client for me might be a bad client for someone else. And a bad client for someone else might be a good client for me. So it's really important. Hey, it's not working, Mike. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, good point. Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. That's what I'm gonna get into for sure. Yeah, right on. Okay. So I really identifying those good clients. I call it identifying your sweet spot is really what's a good client for you and what's a bad client for you. So I've actually have a couple of categories I wanna focus on. The first one is geographic, which seems like it's not really a big deal. But we're based in San Diego, so most of our clients are in San Diego just because of logistics and a lot of our targeted marketing is focused on San Diego. When I'm working with a potential client in San Diego or trying to get a potential client in San Diego, I really play up the fact that we're a local company. And it doesn't really make that much of a difference because most of the work is done virtually and remotely, but it really makes a big difference during the sales process. And I always try to meet with prospective clients during the, versus doing it over the phone. And a couple of other things about geographics. We typically only work with clients in the United States. We've done overseas projects, but what we typically find is simple things like the time zones, the currency, the language, all those things make the project that much more difficult. So as a rule of thumb, we don't work with clients who are overseas. We'll take on clients in Canada, but then again, just the currency exchange makes our websites and our projects that much more expensive, so we don't get that much work in Canada. Well again, we're trying to make things as easy as possible. Second thing is types and sizes of the companies. Our sweet spot is a rule of thumb is companies that are growing with two to $20 million in revenues. We definitely do projects that are small and we'll definitely work with companies that are bigger, but that's kind of our sweet spot. And in terms of the types of companies, they're usually service-based companies we do e-commerce sites. Third thing, and this is the most important thing in the entire presentation is the type of personality or the personality of the person we're potentially gonna work with. We have two or three people who qualify leads when they come in. And we have one main thing we're asking ourselves, was it a nice person? I know again, it's fairly subjective to the person's qualifying them, but if someone's an asshole, everybody can tell pretty quickly. And we get plenty of those types of, those products coming in. They're either impatient or they're rude or they're pushy. In that case, even if it seems like it's a perfect project, if they're an asshole in any way, shape, or form, we'll avoid that project. And then again, if it's a project that may not be a good fit, if they're really, really nice, we'll actually give the project some consideration. So that's like the most important thing. We made the decision like two or three years ago, because I used to have this philosophy is, I'll take on any project for any client, and then I'd end up getting bit in the ass because the person who I knew was gonna be a pain ended up being a pain. And it's difficult sometimes, especially if you're trying to grow your business to turn away a prospective client just based on their personality, but it's probably the most important thing you can do early on and it's just really a habit. Once you establish that habit of saying, I'm not gonna work with those types of clients because for some reason I didn't have a connection with them or I didn't get a good feeling for them, I would always go with your gut with that. And as a result of that, our business has really grown in a really good way. Not only that, but I'm not the one who has to deal with them. Our project managers, our designers, our strategists, our developers, they're the people who have to deal with them and if they're not happy, they make my life miserable. So it's really important to me to bring good clients in. Types of services, so we, as a rule of thumb, we have a really good development team, we have good designers, but we typically do marketing websites and we do smaller e-commerce websites. Even though we can do bigger complicated websites, even though we can do like graphic projects and branding projects, we typically stay away from those. We have a relatively tight kind of wheelhouse that we focus on and as a result of kind of having that intention of saying this is the type of project that we're focusing on, plenty of leads kind of magically come in that way and we turn away the ones that aren't a good fit and especially the ones that are complicated. So one of the things I ask my developers when they're speaking to, if we bring them in to talk about a project that seems a little bit more complicated, we ask how much customization is involved in that project? If there's over minimal customization, even though they say we could do this, I will pretty much turn it away because if you tie up your resources in a project like that, especially if it involves customization, you never know, you could go down a rabbit hole on something that's really small, really easy and eat up a lot of time. We're actually, we're in a project like this right now, we have 200 hours into a project that we quoted for 50 hours. So, and this is something we didn't think would be a big deal and we're able to get another 50 hours, paying for 50, get them to pay for another 50 hours, but essentially we're not only gonna lose money, but we have two of our developers tied into a project for weeks and weeks. So it's just not, it's just not worth it. Gotta get rid of something here. The last thing is RFPs. We typically avoid RFPs. The only reason we'll deal with consider an RFP, it's happening again, Mike. The only reason we'll consider an RFP is if I know the person who's sending the RFP out if they're a client or if I know them pretty well. And then, I request for proposal. And then even if it is someone I know, I ask one question, how many companies are they inviting? If they're inviting over four companies, we'll bow out. Because you put some, you know, those requests require you to do things that are much more than a typical proposal. So you could put 10 hours into a project and have a 5% chance of getting it, it's just not worth it, for us. No, no. Do you know how many times I could ask that? No, I mean, I'm not berating for asking, but I get asked that all the time. The answer is, the answer is not really. I basically wanted to have a name that people wouldn't forget that was the first thing. The second thing, I wanted an animal that people liked. No, that would be, I wish that was the case. No, that wasn't. Yeah, yeah. So I actually had one, I have this thing like everyone loves frogs. And I got this client in Bermuda that broke my rule actually, not working with clients locally. And I said everyone loves frogs and her sister got bit by a poisonous frog from Bermuda and she almost died. So she said, I hate frogs. I still got the project, but now I kind of have a story. Well, this is a poisonous frog. You wouldn't want to just hang out with the frog. Okay, so once you've decided what your sweet spot is, and it's always adjusting depending on your skills, your resources, your availability. The main point with that is just don't get desperate. Try to determine and discern what you're willing to do and try to be, have the will to not do those things you know are in a good fit for you, if that makes sense. So I want to talk a little bit about establishing effective lead channels. I mean leads are critical. You could be an amazing, you could have an amazing design or an amazing developer. You could be an amazing sales person. You could have everything perfect, but if you're not getting the leads or the potential clients coming in, you're pretty much not going to go anywhere. So just establishing effective lead channels is really important. I'm very fortunate to have a small marketing department. I have someone, Jessica, are you here, Jessica? She's our marketing director in the back. And she's really, really incredible. Best decision I ever made. And you're welcome. And she has a couple people who kind of work under her to one degree or another, but so marketing is a huge focus for us. My background was sales. I had spent 10 years in corporate sales and I started this business in 2003. So I had very little experience with marketing. Plus I'm not a very patient person and plus I'm not a very detailed person, which does not make a really good marketing person, which she's both of those things quite a bit. But what we've done, we probably get on an average week about 20 to 40 leads depending on a number of different things. And most of those projects, we end up turning away because of the fact that we have that sweet spot that I mentioned. But the things that we do to bring leads in, and most of these are kind of like long tail strategies. First thing is content marketing. We're always developing really good content. We have a couple good writers who come in as contractors to write ideas. We're always brainstorming about ideas for topics. Once we have a good piece, we'll do one of three things with it, we'll either put it on our website. We'll try to get, we have connections with some bigger websites and editors in bigger websites and we submit those. And the more you submit, eventually you'll get them in and it seems to be really helpful for us in terms of not only getting traffic back to our site but getting the link back to our site and also just helps our organic ranking in general. We'll do PR submissions as well, which seems to be really helpful. And it's really difficult to kind of associate these content pieces with specific leads. But in general, the amount of leads that we have coming in is growing significantly and we know this has played an important role. We do a lot of video content. We have a lot of video, on a weekly basis we post a video on our website, basically kind of a tips and advice video. Takes a lot of work to do it but it really pays off in a number of different ways. I have potential clients who'll come to me and they say I've been watching your videos for weeks or months or whatever. So when they were ready to make a decision to look for a web company, we were instantly one of their first choices because we had to develop trust and credibility with them even though we had never actually talked to them. We do stuff with social media. We're really focusing on paid social media now. Does anyone know Gary Vander? Vander Chuck? He talks about that all the time, Gary Vee. And I've only recently been introduced to him but he talks about social media. It's like buying property in Malibu in 1963. It's so cheap. It's like Google AdWords back in 2002. The cost per acquisition and getting that kind of exposure is really cost effective. You have to know what you're doing and that's what we're learning right now but that's our next really big, really big push. Directory sites and reviews. Is anybody posting stuff to directory sites at all? Or building profiles in directory sites? The two ones that we use and get a lot of traffic from our up city and clutch. Getting a good profile and getting a lot of reviews on those makes a huge, huge difference. Not only that but we use, I'm actually gonna talk about how we use the reviews in other ways as well. Just organic and paid search. We have an organic SEO company and a paid search company that we use but we use them for strategy and consulting. For them, they help a little bit with the campaigns but mainly we strategize with them because nobody has your interests, the best interests like you do. So what we're doing is we're learning from them. We're kind of adapting our strategies based on the results and getting their feedback. And Jessica and anybody who's involved in the campaigns, they'll learn, plus we're learning how to do it on our own. We keep our costs down, we have control of our messaging, we're learning about how to do it. So I think learning this stuff, trying to learn all that stuff just by watching YouTube videos and going to blogs can be limiting. If you can find companies you can hire on a strategy basis you can get a much better deal than actually having them do the work. And I know a lot of SEO companies and when they work for their clients, the work they do is okay but I think if the company was more involved, the work would get much better. Networking and we don't do too much networking now compared to when I started the business but as a result of all the networking I did early on, I've established a lot of referral partners and I have five or six companies who give us probably about 25% of our leads and they're really good leads because they already have a connection with the clients. So in terms of networking, I'm not a big fan of going out and trying to find a website project from networking. My networking, when I used to do more networking, it was more focused on finding a company that had clients that could refer to us and as a result of that, does anyone ever have the term power partners? Yeah, that's what I would focus on. Power, yeah companies that are in not direct competitors that are in industries, we have three or four SEO companies who refer us work for example and those are really good power partners for us. We don't do digital marketing so we're not competition but they may or may not do what we do but they oftentimes will need help in those areas. And then client referrals, obviously that's kind of like the low hanging fruit. They're just saying you can't get if you don't ask. So we're continually asking our clients for referrals and just again staying on top of mine, we put out a monthly newsletter that obviously all of our clients have access to. When we have the time, we do client follow up and the more you stay in front of them, when they have someone say hey, I love your website, I'm looking for a website or if they're anywhere and someone talks about websites, if they had a good experience with us and we're staying on top of mine, there's a very good chance to refer us and we get good handful of referrals every week from our existing clients. Is anyone using live chat on their website? No? Couple. We started using live chat, how long ago was that Jessica, maybe six, eight months ago? Yeah, six months ago. Since we started using live chat, our leads have gone up dramatically. It was the best single thing we did to increase our leads because people who were already on our website who potentially wouldn't have reached out to us if we didn't have live chat on our website. So we went through a process of kind of evaluating different live chat options. We ended up going with I think live chat and we figured out over a period of time how to use it most effectively. So the way we use live chat is to get someone on the phone so that we ask them like one or two questions to kind of understand what they're looking for and then we'll say something like, or whoever, we have three people who do the chat, they'll say something like that's a really good question. Why don't we jump on a call real quick? And 80% of the time they will jump on a call and then all of a sudden it turns it from something a nominal lead into a potentially really good lead. And you have to have, obviously you have to have people command live chat but if you're not around just turn it up. If you can manage, if you have it on your website and you can manage it for an hour a day that's better than nothing. If you can manage it for a couple hours a day it's better than nothing. We have a lot of clients I'll say you should consider using live chat and they'll say I just don't, we don't have the resources of the time to be able to manage it. You don't have to have it on all the time. If you could, obviously the more the better but something is better than nothing. So it's probably the second thing in terms of avoiding clients who are jerks, this is probably the second most important thing I could probably convey over the course of this presentation. And then email marketing, we have regular emails that go out to our clients but to anybody who contacts us in any way, shape, or form they go on to our email list. And I'll get, again I'll have companies who will contact us and they'll say I've been getting a newsletter now for years and we're finally in a position to be able to do something so they contact us because we had been continually educating and being an ongoing resource for them. Bummer. I'm glad you're not back there. Is it because it's a MacBook Air? How about I just do a manual? I don't mind. Can I just do a manual? Take that out? Yeah, if we take that out I can do a manual. Okay. Oh. Is it working manual? Okay, cool. Yeah, got it. Thank you. Okay, I'm gonna talk about tracking leads. Obviously if you're getting leads come in it's probably a really good thing to track where those leads are coming from and how effective those leads are. So we do a pretty good job at tracking leads or at least she does a pretty good job at tracking leads. So we're always focusing on conversion so we're driving leads to certain pages in our websites. We're continually building landing pages, driving leads to the landing pages and we're continually modifying our website to optimize the conversion rates and it's made a huge difference. We probably, we kind of have this joke about how often we're changing our website and adding pages to our website and adding landing pages but it takes time and it takes energy and it's difficult if you're one person shop to be able to do those types of things but if you're spending time and money and resources and energy towards getting leads to your website it certainly makes, it would make a big difference to do spend that little bit of extra time to make sure you're doing whatever you can to make sure those leads that are coming in tracking how they're coming in and we obviously use analytics and analytics but we're always looking at the channels in terms of the way the leads are coming in. It's interesting how certain channels will direct certain leads to our website like Yelp, we get leads from Yelp because we have a pretty big profile on there. Most of the leads that come from Yelp are really small companies and they're too small and not all the time, every once in a while we'll get a really good lead from Yelp. That's why we continue to use it as a kind of a directory and invest in that but most of the leads that come in from there and if we weren't tracking that we wouldn't be able to kind of discern or ascertain that. And then if a marketing channel is effective because of the fact that we're tracking we'll put more energy into it Google AdWords is a good example. We're continually running Google AdWords campaigns and tweaking our ads and tweaking the landing pages they're going to and adding more keywords and because of the fact that we're tracking the leads and we're looking at the analytics and we're looking at the results that really helps us to get the most of our money because every company, big or small has a certain marketing budget they can work with and you really have to get the most out of that budget. Your budget may be $500 a month, your budget might be $500,000 a month, whatever it is you have to get the most out of that budget that's why especially for a smaller company it's really important to look at where those leads are coming and what you can do to either make those channels more effective or get rid of them and you have to really give it time you have to wait for a marketing channel to mature. You have to wait to see if it, you have to make those in moderations and adjustments and revisions to make sure it is actually a channel that's worth pursuing. Sometimes it's interesting to make one minor tweak to something all of a sudden in terms of ineffective marketing channel into a really good marketing channel. And the best case scenario is to have leads coming in from as many, we probably have eight or nine different kind of sources whether it be client referrals or power partners or Google AdWords or Organic or directories or content marketing or social media, whatever. So we have eight or nine channels which marketing leads are flowing to our business. So if one channel were to go south or whatever it would have a minimal impact on everything. If you have one source, let's say you have one car partner that's giving you all your business and that person dies, you're gonna be SOL. So it's really important to have as many different marketing channels as possible. Absolutely. If you really help us understand in terms of your budget for marketing what is your overall spend and in terms of price and do you think your client can make this? Well there's direct costs and then there's a fixed cost like we have a marketing department which has employees. So that's our biggest expense by far. Beyond that, it's actually relatively minimal because of the fact that we have good people in our marketing department who are working on keeping the cost down doing a lot of the work on their own. And I think that's a better way to go. I know companies out there, they'll pay higher SEO, social media, PR and they'll pay $25,000 a month when they could have like three really good employees and they could probably spend $2,000 a month or minimize that. Really good limo. Yeah, exactly. Be kind enough. Back slides up. Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, so I found it's best to do as much as you can on your own and keeping your marketing spend down. We spend, it's pretty nominal actually, maybe $2,500 a month, which is not a lot for... So you're saying, I agree with that, you're saying it's really... The personnel and people actually in your own company doing the marketing is what makes the spend the most of the time. Absolutely. Because if you don't have anyone looking at that and doing some work and working with and actually doing some of the legwork, I mean, you're gonna have to... It's either you're gonna do it or you're gonna pay someone to do it or you're not gonna do it. One of the three things. I could do it so often, I don't... That's a problem. That's why you have to find more time probably. Right, yeah. Or you can do little things like hire someone to do some of the minimal work. Anything, I mean, you only have so many hours in a day. So yeah, it's definitely a quandary. I mean, I remember when I started my company, it was me and a developer. That was it. I did all the project management. We used to do templates so we had to design or create a bunch of templates but I was doing everything. So a lot of companies are kind of starting off but you just have to figure out a way to do it. So what I did, I just worked a lot. There's Gary V, Gary Vaynerchuk says, in order for a business to succeed, they should work their asses off and don't buy stupid shit. That's what he says. So in terms of how it was having been like... In terms of growing the company, who did you feel you needed? I started with the project manager. Yeah, first person I... Because I was working a lot. I was doing all the sales, all the project management. So the first thing, it was funny. I hired a project manager. I said, I'm gonna hire for 10 hours a week because I couldn't afford much more than that at the time. This was a long time ago. And she came in, she took 10 hours off my plate. I had her up to 40 hours a week in like three months. And then another three months later I hired another project manager. Now I have six project managers. So it just kind of grows. You have to learn to delicate the low hanging through the stuff that you're not my best, I'm my strength is sales. That's what I should only be doing sales. And that's pretty much all I do right now. Absolutely. Okay, so let's talk about once you actually get a lead, what's the next step? For us, the very next step is qualifying. I talked about that. So we have a handful of people who qualify leads as they come in. And it's kind of a part-time job for those people because of the fact that we have a fair amount of leads coming in. So we have to spend as little time as possible on qualifying those leads. So we have a list of questions they ask them. When I'm qualifying a lead, I ask like two or three questions and I get to budget. As long as they're not a jerk. If they're a jerk, I just say, hey, we're too busy. And if they're cool, the next thing is I ask a couple of questions so they can see some value in what we're doing. And then I really get to what's their budget. And they'll say, I can't tell you my budget. And then I'll say, you know, we can't, you know, we need to see if we're gonna be a good fit. We have a certain minimum. And I try to get them to see that it's versus, you know, versus just kind of scaring away with that. Sometimes they may have the budget or it might be have close to the budget. And I can get them to see enough value to be willing to jump their budget up a little bit more to get within, you know, what our budget would be. So qualifying is really important. Not only qualifying on budget, but again, if you went back to that slide ahead and establishing the sweet spot, everything on that list we're considering. Is it, you know, geographically, are they a good fit? Are they, you know, within our services, the type of company, blah, blah, blah. So all of those things are really, really important. Has anyone ever heard the term getting client buy-in? Yeah. So essentially what that means in every phase of the sales process, you could be initial call, needs analysis, could be presenting, doing an actual call to figure out, you know, ask certain questions. You could actually be presenting a proposal. What we like to do is we tell them what the objective is of that call. And if at the end of the call, you know, we're still in alignment, what would be the next step? And we'll say, is that okay for you? And they always say yes. Once they say yes, they're psychologically on the hook for that next step, if everything went well. So you don't have to, you ever have that experience to do a really good call with someone and then you're like into the next step with them and it's a little bit awkward because you want to do this, this or that. So you have to kind of set it up in a certain way. It kind of really eliminates that. Plus it gets them psychologically thinking that I'm going to be taking the next step with this company. And then bring in the right team members. Typically what that means is developers. So we have, if there's any, if it's not a marketing side, a straight marketing side, I'll bring a developer in almost every call. Even though I could probably handle it. The reason I do that is because the developer is very disarming for them and they're speaking to someone who's asking questions who's not a salesperson, they know it's not a salesperson and they automatically give up so much more information than they would than if it was just me. Plus the developers are really good at asking questions that make them see, feel like we know what we're doing. So I almost always bring a developer into a call where there's, even if it's a basic shopping cart, again, if I was, even if I was able to get that information on my own, I find it's really super, super helpful to have someone who's not a salesperson in that situation. Yeah, I mean, there's, yeah, there's. Second party, well. Yeah. And then the point is I do that as much as I can because the deal is is that you don't want to have to do everything twice. So you talk to the client, now you got to go tell the developer and maybe he says, well, that's not right, now you got to go to the client again. Absolutely. If you could just save so much time if they can answer a few of the client's questions that are tech questions on spot. Yeah, we try to really limit as much as possible. We bring our website just in for a lot of calls too because they're able to really educate them on our process which is focusing on the user experience and focusing on the conversion optimization as well. Yeah, so. Because it's you, the customer, and then the designer kind of comes in and closes it. And then the expert is sort of speaking that. Oh, you're the expert. Oh, no, I can't do anything. Keep your clothes. Yeah. And then this is, this is focusing on paint once. You really want to get them really frustrated with their current situation. So we'll ask a couple of questions, find out what the problem is, and then we dig in. It's almost like if someone has a wound, you keep poking it. And it gets them really, really frustrated with whether it be their current vendor or their current CMS or their current designer. Get them really frustrated with it. And it's really important for us to uncover on the deepest level possible what the problems are because our sales presentation is essentially focusing on how we address each of those real needs. So uncovering pain points is a critical part of that initial call. And then, I don't have my glasses, I have to look here by the way. Specifications of the project, find we have a pretty, a couple of pretty good depth questionnaires and finding out exactly what they want. The worst, worst thing is to find out when we actually, after we're based on a contract, sending our questionnaire and they tell us they want all the stuff that wasn't mentioned during the sales process. And then, as you all know, their expectations are, hey, you didn't say you couldn't do it, just I assume you could. So we ask a lot of questions at this phase in the process. And almost every client really, really appreciates it. That we're going as deep as possible and understanding and asserting what their needs are as early as possible. That goes back to your buying point. Absolutely, absolutely. And then, this is important. So the next step, after we do our data analysis is presenting the proposal. And it's really important for us that we have all the decision makers on that call. Otherwise, let's say you're speaking to a marketing assistant or something like that. Who's going to bring it to the marketing director? Who's going to bring it to the CEO? It's a total waste of time. Not to say we don't do it, but we ask them. A question I ask, you may have heard this. In addition to yourself, who else is involved in the decision? And they'll say, my boss or blah, blah, blah. And then, so we'll say it's going to take kind of an assumption of close with this. We really need your boss or whomever to be on the call. And in some cases, if they say they can't be, we'll actually say, sorry, we can't go to the next step. We're that adamant about it because our time is valuable. And if we're spending an extra hour putting together a proposal and presenting to someone that has very, very, if any, influence other than passing it to the next person, it's a waste of time. So what I say if they say something I don't think he'll be here, I'll say it's really difficult. Our process is fairly unique, and there's a lot of value to what we offer. But it's almost impossible for anyone who's not us to convey it to someone else. And it usually works. So it's worth asking. And you have to look at the project. You have to look at the experience you've had with them in the past. You have to look at what level they are to make a determination if it's still worth presenting to that person if they can't bring the decision maker in. But usually, it's amazing to me how many times I ask. At the beginning, they'll say, I'll be the one who would be gathering information. And then I ask. I'll say, I really need the decision maker there. And in eight out of 10 cases, they'll just do it. If I hadn't asked, they wouldn't have done it. So it's definitely worth asking. So next thing is what we do is we actually break up the next proposal into two documents. We have just a regular PowerPoint deck we use on a kind of a high level to present what were our proposals. So we have this, and we actually send them a more formal proposal. It makes it a lot easier in a conversation, whether it be remotely or face-to-face, to actually present in a very simple, simple way on a deck. So the first thing we do is, on the previous call, if they say to us, just send us our proposal. I mean, has anyone ever had that happen to you? Yeah. What do you guys say? No. We don't do that. Sorry. We absolutely will not do that. If they say, just send us a proposal, say our policy is that it's fairly difficult to understand our process and our deliverables and our scope without having gone through a presentation. And again, nine out of 10 cases, they'll say, yeah, I understand. Every once in a while, you'll get someone who's kind of a stickler that says, we're not going to waste the time or spend the time. That's what they're really saying. And I'm not going to waste the time, but they're not going to waste the time. So if they won't take the time to actually sit down to review the proposal with us, then it ends right there. The bigger problem. They could do that anyways. Yeah, but it's more of the chances of closing the deal go up 1,000% if you actually get to present it. And the next point is face to face. If I get a face to face meeting, I pretty much assume that my closing ratio doubles. That's right. So I almost always go for a face to face meeting. I try never to leave my house unless I'm going to meet with a client to make that presentation. So what about a 15 minute phone call? Turns into an hour meeting. You can develop rapport. You can answer questions. You can get all the visual cues. Usually, if I get a slap in the whole presentation, holy shit. OK, I'm just going to have to just read these things. Focusing on hot buttons, emphasizing on differentiators, and always be closing. So the next thing is our proposal. When you're sending your proposal over, it's really important if we don't really use case studies, but some people do. Sending case studies that are relevant for that project. We always send our links to our reviews versus testimonials. They're much less biased. So we probably have 100 really good reviews on a variety of sites. We're always sending reviews and links to reviews for our best clients and so forth and so on. And it makes a huge difference. So once you start to build, you wouldn't want to send one review over. We'll send a link to a site with 20 or 30 reviews. And then portfolio samples are really helpful. So samples especially that are relevant to what they're looking for are really helpful if you have a good portfolio. And finally, this actually helps a lot. If you have a company that's budget conscious, we work with a lot of funded startups. We'll offer installment plans, especially if we're hosting and maintaining their website, that they can't take the site away from us. I'll actually do 12 installments, which seems kind of ridiculous. My condition is that it has to be on a credit card. It has to bill monthly, does automatic. And I probably have, we have probably 20 projects right now that we're billing fairly extended plans. So let's say it's a $10,000 project they're doing, instead of paying $10,000 or $5,000 or even $3,000 upfront, companies really appreciate that. And I get a lot of deals that I wouldn't have gotten if I didn't offer installment plans. Following up is really critical. Obviously, they're the same in sales. It takes on average eight contacts to convert a prospect to a client. And it really is true. The follow could be a simple email. It could be a phone call or whatever, something really simple. But if you're not following up with your prospects, it's almost impossible to have a successful business. Does anybody have a, is anyone, are you guys all using a CRM? Yeah. It's really, really important to have a CRM to track. Let's say you're getting 10 leads a week and you got over the course of a month, that's 40 leads over the course of six months, that's hundreds of leads. If you're not tracking every single conversation, the next step, action items and so forth and so on, it's almost impossible to deal without a CRM. Timing your follow up is really important. And every time I follow up, I hold back a little bit of a few things during the sales process. And I have this kind of certain things that I'm adding value with every single follow up. Like by the way, your website's gonna be GDPR compliant or by the way, this, this or that. So I'm incrementally building value with every single follow up. So it's not just, hey Joe Blow, can you give me your business yet? It's a much more strategic approach in the follow up. And then obviously adding them to our existing email marketing campaign and following up with our existing clients is really important as well. And we, especially when we have time, we're able to do that. So I actually briefed through the last couple of slides. Do we have time for questions? Two minutes. Okay, anybody have any questions? I'm sorry, he's gonna give you a microphone and a ball. You were talking about that one project that went 150 hours over. When that happened, did you decide, did you find the error of why you guys went so far over and did you decide to keep that client or that that client was gonna continue to be a problem? We actually, we almost always keep our clients. If we're bidding on it, even if we have to eat it, we'll keep our clients. Plus they're a bigger company and we're gonna have a long term, we're maintaining their site. And I was able to get 50 more hours out of them. Our developer dropped the ball and he way underbid it. It was a WordPress conversion from another CMS to WordPress and it just turned out to be, and there was all these forums that had to be GDPR compliant which just went on and on. So we did end up, we're actually launching it. We're doing the migration on Monday. Thank God. Yeah, they are. Most of their business is in the EU. I don't need the microphone, I can talk. Well they're taping it so they want it. Okay, for that reason. So the clients that you do installment plans for, do you host that on your own server? WP Engine Servers. I mean, you have control over it at all times? Okay. Yeah, we have our business, well a third of our business is, we have like 550 sites we're maintaining on WP Engine Servers. What we really just do, the plugin updates. We did that at one point and the client ran away with our code before he finished paying for it because it was on his server. Yeah, we wouldn't do that. They have to pay in full before we turn it over. Yeah. Yeah. Any other questions? It's about time. Okay, we're done. Thanks everyone. Thank you.