 So, it's 2.14, I feel like I should wait one more minute. But so, everyone knows I am not Tony, unfortunately he could not make it so I am here to talk about establishing a sales process for your agency or your freelance business. My talk is called Coffee's for Closers. I gave this talk at a word camp up in New England and I want to take a really quick poll because I asked this question and like one guy raised his hand. How many people here know the term Coffee's for Closers? Can I get a show, okay, so a few of you. So to give you a little background, Glen Gary Glen Ross is a movie depicting the lives of real estate salesmen. Coffee's for Closers, it's an iconic scene in that movie. Where Blake, played by Alec Baldwin, comes down, he's the top salesman, he wants to motivate the other sellers. One of those salesmen is pouring coffee. Blake says put that coffee down. Coffee's for Closers only. And is that true? Should Coffee be for Closers? It basically means if you're in a sales capacity and you're not closing business for your company, don't drink our coffee, let alone make the base salary that you're making. And is that true? Should Coffee be for Closers? Yes, it absolutely should be. But only if you have an established sales process. Because if you don't have an established sales process, you can't expect your sales people to close business on a continual basis. So guys, you can tweet at me, and you can always follow along on SlideShare, it's got a kind of a text heavy version. But I want to introduce myself real quick. I'm Adam Lamania, sounds like lasagna, super easy to remember. So way back in 1999 when I graduated high school, I went from Connecticut to Hollywood to become a rock star. That dream was short-lived. So I got into sales, right, because it was the only thing I could do that didn't require a college education. I've done everything from cold calling to door-to-door sales, inside sales, high-pressured sales, you have to buy on this phone call. I got into that about five years ago. Started dabbling with Codecademy courses, CodeSchool classes, blended.com tutorials. And then I finally went into the biz-dev side of things. And I've sold web projects for a little over two and a half years now, mostly WordPress. I now work for Security. I've been at Security for about a month now. And I help agencies basically pick the right plans to secure their websites. I am a salesman at heart. I love sales. And I want to kind of go over the history of sales to show you some key moments. So at the beginning of time, there was the bartering system, right? You give me this. I give you that. I still have it to this day. When money came in, it changed the bartering system into markets. And I want to fast forward to the industrial revolution and in comes in the modern-day salesman, right? The exaggerated salesman. The guy who would sell you snake oil that really wouldn't do anything. And in the 1940s and 50s, we had the gentleman salesman or the fast-talking salesman. He was the guy that would sell you a Kirby vacuum cleaner, right? And I bet your parents probably still have it to this day. But it's really important to note that up until this time, all the information was held by the seller. If a consumer wanted to know something about a product or a service, they had to go to the seller to get that information. So in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, we see a shift to strategic selling and solution selling and spin selling, variations of themselves. It was basically a way to bring the customer into the fold and make them a part of the process. When 2000 hit, that rocked the very foundation of the selling world because information was readily accessible. People had the information. They didn't have to go to a seller to get it. So I'm very curious to see where sales is going. But I think sales is a noble profession. I know people hate talking to salesmen. So if you are a salesman in this room and you sell projects on a continual basis or anything for that matter, I applaud you. It is a hard job. So what is a sales process? In its simplest form, it is your view of your customer's buying journey with all the tasks, all the procedures, all the steps, all the resources that it takes to effectively manage that buying journey. I separate the sales process into three areas. Post sales. Post sales is getting a good foundation, right? Doing the thing, knowing your buyer's marketing materials. Engagement is actively talking to your prospect. I'm sorry, pre-sales, my fault, is getting a good foundation. Engagement, actively talking to your prospect and post sales is becoming a client advocate once you are finished closing business. So let's get started in a pre-sales. How many people here do pre-sales activities like figuring out who your buyers are, using technology like CRMs, having marketing materials? Okay, fantastic. So you need to know who your buyers are. You need to ask certain questions, right? How many freelancers are in the room real quick? I just want to show a hands. Okay, a lot. And how many of you, keep your hands raised up. How many freelancers follow an established sales process here? All right, so a lot of them go down. All right, well, so what you want to do is you want to start with your buyers, right? We need to know who your buyers are. You can't be all things to all people that just won't work for you. So if you have an established client list, go back over it and see who your buyers are. Are they, what roles are they playing? Are they managers? Are they VPs? Are they interns? What industries are they working in? Are they working in things like healthcare, nonprofit, media and publishing? And then finally, what do they care about? And what do they need to make a decision to buy something? How many people have buyer personas? A few, okay, cool. So we're going to go through a buyer persona. I used to work for an enterprise company up in Boston. And we have buyer personas, one of which was the marketing buyer. And we went back over our client list over the last two years, and we saw some patterns emerge. For one, we looked at their demographics. What ages are they? We found that our marketing buyer, their ages were about 30 to 40. Their gender was about 50% male, 50% female, usually married with kids. And they're on a director level at the lowest, a VP at the highest. So right off the bat, what does this tell me? It tells me a few things. It tells me where they're hanging out online. So they're probably not on Snapchat, right? They're probably on Twitter, LinkedIn. It also tells me two other critical things too. A, they care about their careers, right? Because they're at a somewhat high level. And B, they also want to get home and see their kids so they don't want to work more than an eight, nine hour work day. So marketers usually care about a few things, right? Lead generation, they want to get more sales for their towers, more leads for their sales team. They also care about increased awareness and results. They're pain points, usually hitting deadlines, managing vendors. They have a huge vendor list from analytics to ad serving companies. And they usually have a lack of internal resources. So if we know these things about them, what we want to do is we want to engage them properly, right? We know that if they submit something on our website for contact and they want to do a redesign, we can't get back to them in two days. We need to get back to them in two hours or less, preferably. You want to make data-driven recommendations. And then if you can be a liaison to all their different vendors, that'll take a huge weight off their shoulder. Now, I have a lot of links on here, guys. But HubSpot offers a free template to do your buyer personas. It's actually really cool, and I strongly suggest you do it. So marketing, I don't want to touch on marketing too much, because this is a separate discipline than sales. And you could actually change this one slide into dozens of talks. But it's important to note for freelancers that if you don't have any marketing materials, you need something in your sales tool bag to whip out when your clients ask for it. If you're a freelancer, you want your marketing to do two different things, right? One is, you want to showcase your talents. You can do this with case studies that are in-depth or portfolio pieces that aren't necessarily in-depth, but they show the breadth of your work. And then you also want to answer your buyer's questions. You can do this with blog posts. Another great idea is to go to the giants in the world, like WPEngine and WordPress.com, see what white papers they have. Because the resources don't necessarily have to be yours, but they have to be something, right? And then technology, and again, I don't want to spend much time on technology because if you're in this room, you know technology, you're savvy with it, but you need to be using a CRM. How many freelancers use a CRM like HubSpot or Zoho? Okay, cool, awesome. You need a place where you can manage your clients or manage your prospects, manage your deals, manage the opportunities that are coming in, the tasks that you need to do, logging activity, things like that. And then obviously use things like Dropbox, use things like Google Drive. You're going to be getting RFPs, you're going to be giving proposals, you want to organize that stuff. Social media, if you want to find out where people are and events, what are they tweeting about, what are they talking about, obviously that's good too. And then I also read business blogs too. I have a routine in the morning where I get on, spend about half an hour to an hour reading things like Moz and Mashable, Verge, AMEX Open Forum is a great one too. So that's pre-sales. Once we finish with pre-sales, we're ready to engage with our customers. How many people have heard of the sales funnel? Yeah, it's a representation of the different stages a buyer will go through to make a decision. So engagement is pretty interesting. All these different stages need to be gridded out and there are four essentials to each stage of engagement. And if you know the four essentials, you don't have to worry about what's coming next, you just know. The essentials are what's the requirement for the stage? So what does it take for a prospect to be in this stage? The purpose of the stage, what are we trying to accomplish in this stage? Who's the team member that I use for this stage? And what are my resources? So let's walk through prospecting. Does anyone know what the requirement for prospecting is? Shout it right out if you know it. No one? It's pretty much someone who has to be breathing, you know? That's really what you want. Now, the prospect has a need that you think you can solve. What's the purpose of prospecting? The purpose of prospecting, it's to schedule a meeting or schedule a call to qualify them. Who's the team member in prospecting? It's either going to be sales or marketing, right? Your front-facing team. If you are a freelancer, you need to be wearing that sales cap instead of that developer cap. And what are the resources? You use your website, you use your portfolio, emails, marketing collateral, and then you want to grid in all of these answers or all of these essentials for the stage. I would take a snapshot of this because once you know what's coming next, you're not worried about it, right? And these will be up online, too, guys. Write down so you know what requirement it is, what purpose it is, who am I using, and what am I using? So I want to talk about resources real quick. When people get on to qualify someone, do you guys have set questions that you're asking people? You do. Okay, good. I always use a screener questionnaire. This is obviously a very short one, but you want to ask questions like, where are you located, right? What are your major goals? What timeline and budget do you have? How did you hear about us? So Mike Montero, he is a designer. I think he's the creative director for Mule Design. He actually has his screener questionnaire online that goes into a lot of depth. And you need to ask tough questions. Obviously, those questions will change once you get answers from your prospects, but make sure you have something that's set that you're asking people to qualify them. And then I also, I used to use lead scoring. It's basically attaching a numeric value to your prospect. Freelancers who are dealing with one or two prospects at a time probably don't need lead scoring. Agencies who are dealing with five, 10, 15 prospects at a time, it's a great way to see which prospects to go after, right? And these parameters are gonna be different for everybody. If anyone needs help setting up lead scoring, just come see me, I'm at the security booth. I will be more than happy to set up a lead scoring sheet for you in Google Sheets or Excel or whatever. Of course, your ultimate goal is to get someone who's 100, right? Which never happens, so. And then people ask me about closing. How do you close business consistently? And I don't, I do not have a good answer for this. I wish I did. And I know, so it revolves around value to me. I'm not gonna say value proposition because I hate the term value proposition. I think it's wildly overused, I think it's misused, but it does revolve around value. And when I look at value, I look at three different things. One is value relevancy. Is their challenge relevant to what I do? So if we do WordPress and someone comes to you and they say, hey, I have a magento project that I need done, are we chasing that lead? Absolutely not, it's not relevant. I also look at perception too. And value perception comes down to what they perceive your value to be. How many times has someone heard, well, I need this done, but I mean that should only take you about 15 minutes, right? Too many times. Look at value perception, make sure they match up, and you do that through education. And then I look at value diagnosis. And value diagnosis stems from diagnostic selling. It's basically making your prospect a collaborative partner, having mutual self-respect, having mutual self-esteem for each other. You need to know that they are the master of their domain, but they need to know that you are the master of yours. If no one knows what diagnostic selling is, I implore you to look it up. It's pretty cool. Once we close business, our job is not finished. If you're a freelancer, your job has just begun. You need to transition and hand off your prospect or your new client to the project team, which means you don't just say, I mean, these are people who come to you, you've been dealing with them throughout the life, oh, the life of the sales cycle. You don't just say, hey, PM, you need to take this guy from here and go with the project. Sit down with your client and sit down with the PM and go over roles and responsibilities. If you're a freelancer, put on the PM cap. Tell them what's gonna be taking place over the course of the next two months while you do the project. It builds client continuity. It builds client intimacy. It builds trust. And then after the project is in full swing, you need to go back and check in with the client. Make sure that they're happy. Make sure that the project team is happy. And if things are good, look for new business because people love referring people when they're doing a great job. If they're not doing a great job, go back and look over the process. See what problems there were and fix it from there. So where does WordPress fit into all of this? I think if we're in this room, we probably know that out of the top 100,000 websites on the internet today, 50% are powered by WordPress. The internet, I think was what, 25% of WordPress is powering the internet, 24? Those are staggering numbers. And why is that the case? Because it's got all these really awesome features. These are features that you need to sell to people. So I have a platform, it's on cold fusion. It's hard for me to use, what do I do? Well, if you can use a word, use WordPress. It's expandable, it's good for SEO. The community is extremely helpful, they're open. There's no vendor lock in with WordPress. These are all things that you can learn and sell people. And oftentimes when someone has a problem, it can fit one of these features, learning. So I always like to give good tips, right? Because when you're a salesman, there's only a few things that are within your control. One of which is listening. Now, most people will say, if you're a good salesman, you're listening 70% of the time and you're only talking 30. That's usually not my style. I wish I could talk less, but I can't. I don't care how much you're talking, as long as when you're listening, you're listening to what they are saying. And then you're responding with really good feedback and really good answers. Time, if you're not a wealthy man, time is your next greatest commodity. Learn time management. And then your attitude. The great salesmen out there are the ones who can dust themselves off from a loss and go after the next project or deal with the same gusto and the same rigor that they went after the first project they ever did. So some key takeaways for you guys. Pre-sales is uber important. You need to know your buyers. You need to have some sort of collateral. And you need to use the technology available. Know the stages of engagement. So know what the requirement is for engagement. Know what the purpose is for engagement. Know who you're using in engagement, what team member or what hat you're wearing if you're a freelancer. And also know what resources are available to you. Being a client advocate will lead to more business. It absolutely will. Understand the value on both sides, yours and theirs. Control your attitude. And WordPress keeps on growing. So don't be afraid to grow with it. I'm an avid reader so I always like to put a couple of cool books on my slides. Good to Great is about how good companies became great ones. It's a great read. It's very popular. Weekend Language, which I don't think is as well known as Good to Great is all about getting rid of the presentations and the power points. It really is about telling a story because stories stick. When you're selling someone, you know, don't talk to them like we leverage this solution. Talk to them like you're talking to them on the weekend, right? Like they're your friend almost. Design is a job, is a great book by Mike Montero. If you're a freelancer, you have to read this book. It is phenomenal. And then exceptional selling. How the best connected win in high-stakes sales. I know that sounds a little corny, but it's really good. If you're selling complex technical projects, check this out, it goes over diagnostic selling. So a couple of, just a recap. So the marketing team and the sales team, they're gonna work together. They're separate disciplines, but they work together. The process is pre-sales, engagement, and post-sales, which will lead to more business and more coffee. So yeah, I know, I think that was a little short, guys, on my part, about 20 minutes. Check out my blog, Being Agile, AJL, Adam James Lemania. And you can always reach out to me at those email addresses, or find me on LinkedIn and Twitter. But if anyone's got questions about selling web projects, I would love to try and answer them. A 25,000, what, what's, I'm sorry? $2,500. $2,500. $15,000. $15,000. So, oh yes, so she's asking, what's the difference between a $2,500 website and a $15,000 website? $25,000. I would say that too. Yep. It's just, no, no, no, please take it. That's a great question, right? Because, I mean, I worked for a company where we would literally, I've worked for two agencies. One was a small one where we would do 2,000 to $7,000 projects. The other one was a much bigger one where we would do $50,000 to $250,000 projects. So, I'm gonna have a good answer for you, because it's like, it's like, I mean, I guess you could say it's kind of like a car, right? But it really is a crapshoot. You know, I mean, you could buy a Hyundai Accent for very cheap or a used car for very cheap and you could buy a Lamborghini for $250,000. Are you getting better quality when it comes to web services? That's the unknown part, you know? Do you have your own agency? Right. That's usually the case actually. Yep. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, no, I, so, you know, I can tell people that when I used to price out web projects that I had some rhyme or reason to it and I kind of did. I mean, I would look back over past web projects, but it really was kind of a crapshoot to a certain degree because sometimes things happen that you don't foresee, right? And I'd like to say that I catch all that stuff in the sales process, but you don't, you know? And I really do not have a great answer for you. I think the right answer is 12.5. Go ahead. Awesome, I like that. Which is good. Right, no race to the bottom. Right, you don't want to do business with me? I want to do business with you. No, I agree. I would, I mean, if, you know, if you're feeling courageous, charge more money. You know what I mean? That's what I would say. Yeah, go ahead. They're giving you the budget and the amount of features are within that budget. I would press it up for sure. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I mean, that's right. Yeah, I would be very, the value. I think that's great. Yeah, because you're adding something to the pot, right? Yeah, I think, and it's there, I don't think there's any harm in giving them options either. You know what I mean? I mean, I've bid projects where I've had people tell me that it's wildly overbid and I've had projects where I've actually had people say, hey, can you raise the price on this, you know? And I have to raise the price. So I would say, you know, do what you feel comfortable doing, but actually, Brett gives a great talk on charging more money and it will work, you know? And if you value your services at those prices, then you're well worth it, you know? I mean, it's always tough, it's always tough. No, I agree with you. I agree with you. Some of it is ethics, but if you, do you feel you're worth that value or you're just saying that it's not gonna take that more business and that's great. And you should do that, yeah. Right, right. If there's more opportunity for more business, absolutely. Yeah. Go ahead, I'm sorry, go ahead. A CRM, yeah. So for a small team of five people, I think, so I would probably recommend, or for one person? One to five. One to five. Yeah, so I mean, HubSpot, and I know I've plugged them before, but they have an awesome CRM that they're actually plugging is free forever, I believe is the tagline. But there's a couple of different features that you wanna have in your CRM, right? So obviously you wanna log contacts and all their contact information. HubSpot will actually pull in, if you log a company, they'll pull in all the information off the internet to tell you how much that company is making, et cetera. Their Twitter handles, things like that. And then you also wanna have deals or opportunities so that you can log tasks on those opportunities and you can log activity on your contacts. So those are really the four things that I would look at. So make sure there's contact lists. There is a deal or opportunity list. There's a task list and an activity log. I'm from Norwich, where all the casinos are. Yeah. Yeah, oh, that's a tough one because that can vary, right? But so you guys are, you're a small team, but you're getting a little bigger and you wanna bring on a sales guy. Interesting. All right, so do you know what type of person you're looking for? I should tell you that actually. So all right, so you've got a couple of different ways to go. One is you can hire the, I would say, like the top sales guy from one of your competitors or a sales lead from your competitor. You can hire a director of sales or you could hire an entrepreneur who has tried to do everything. But I would honestly probably go with the entrepreneur, right? Because you want someone who, you want someone who's gonna wear many different hats because when you're starting off in a small agency and doing sales for the very first time, there are gonna be all sorts of things that person has to do. Cold calling, you're gonna have to try that. You're gonna have to try a mix of outbound sales and inbound sales. So you need someone with a go-to spirit and who can not necessarily work long hours, but just do what it's gonna take to get done. So your top sales guy from your competitor, he's probably gonna expect a couple of things, right? He's gonna expect a list of contacts and what's the material that you have to give him, right? So do you have marketing material and things like that set up? Yeah, you're gonna have to look into that. And then the, I would say like the VP of sales for another company and really any industry probably hasn't been on the phone in a long time, probably used to more like executive level meetings. So I would hire someone who is an entrepreneur and if he's failed at something, that's fine. Hire him because that's the spirit that it takes to start a sales team at a small agency. Someone who will do whatever it takes to get things done. Yeah, go ahead, I'm sorry. Go back to that budget question. Yep, all right, that's a good question. So he's asking how do you deal with people who don't wanna give you their budget? Is that correct? Yeah, so on the first call, I will get information. That's when I'll ask about budget. If someone doesn't, you know, I'll say, hey, what kind of budget range are you looking to spend? If they're like, you know what, I really don't know that. I'll come back with, well, usually projects of this nature cost between X amount of dollars and X amount of dollars. Does that sound like it would be within range of what you guys are looking to spend? And sometimes they say yes, sometimes not. If they balk at that price, then you know they don't have the budget to spend, right? But if they're like, yeah, that seems reasonable, then I would go with it, you know? And then on the next phone call, I would ask again, so did you speak to anybody about the budget? Do we know, you know, am I writing this proposal for you with a number in mind, or do you want me to write it? What, you know, whatever it's gonna take to get done, you know? That's what I would do. Talking budget is very difficult. Yeah, please. Right, that's what I said. Yeah, yeah. Oh, yes, and I totally agree. That's great advice. That's exactly what you say. Give them a range and ask them if, that's what they can spend. You gotta talk budget though, right? Because if you don't, you could be taking a shot in the dark and wasting 40 hours of your time putting together a proposal, right? How do I deal with RFPs very delicately? No, that's a really tough question. What kind of a company is it coming from? Is it coming from an enterprise-level company or is it coming from? Do they, and they don't have a budget in the RFP, putting together a proposal. RFPs are always tricky. I mean, they're always tricky. I've been on a lot of them, lost a lot of them, won a few of them. It would really depend on a number of different factors, right? If they have a budget, what are they asking for me in advance? Like, do they want me to answer 75 different questions to even get, you know, to be able to write a proposal? But I mean, for the most part, yeah, I would, if it's a company that's pretty well known, yeah, I would bid on the RFP, you know? If they have a budget. One more question, guys. One more question. Anybody, I saw your hand up there. One more product. That's, so he's asking how would you feel about giving them a set price for a set service, but kind of like a product? Is that? Yes. Okay. You know, honestly, I really, for a certain, did you say a certain vertical? Okay. I wouldn't feel great about it, right? Because it's, it really, I feel like it's feature-based, you know, if they, and it's gonna change for every client, but I really wouldn't give a set price. I always give ranges, you know? And I say we're a time and material shop, and it's gonna cost between, you know, it's, it could be 10,000, but you have to commit to 20,000, you know? And I definitely wouldn't be getting, I wouldn't like giving a set price because then it's held to that price and they're gonna be extremely upset if you go past that price, right? Or you're putting in a lot of hours. So I wouldn't feel good with the, you can stay with the range, stay with the range. Okay, so thanks, guys. Appreciate it.