 All right, it's keynote time But before that we're gonna have a quick little spiel from OB Fernandez from hash rocket one of our awesome sponsors that we're really glad to have involved with us so Give me your time and attention and right after that. We'll have Chris wants dressed up to give us a Sweet keynote. I'm sure it'll be brain melting and also awesomely entertaining and other large words All right, can everyone hear me Okay, so I gave this talk at Ruby fringe and it was a big hit and various people here said hey You know if you can do it quick enough Maybe you should just give it here And I thought you guys would think it was cool and I did figure out a way to turn this talk into a very short talk Basically, it's about sales and client management and I think it's pretty straightforward There's four steps one is do great work for at least few years like I did thought works write a best-selling book start a consultancy and profit so Any questions? Seriously, I'm gonna go through it real quickly, but I named the talk hustle I feel like I've always done some measure of hustling in my life Not in the negative connotation of hustle, but in the connotation of jumping on opportunities When they came around, you know, not not as a con not talking about cons and basically talking about Obtaining what you want by a forceful action or persuasion and I think that basically Forceful is an adjective that you need to you know consider when you think about how much competition there is in this space Hash rockets a consultancy is competing with you know literally hundreds of other consultancies for the same client base So yes forcefully the reason I feel like I have the Experience actually talk about this is that a lot of people might not realize they did a lot of sales at thought works in my last two Years there basically once the rails business started taking off They started pulling me in more and more to sell rails business and until we turned it into like 50% of the revenues last year So for a company that has a thousand people worldwide. Just think about that. It's a lot of rails work that was going on So anyway, this talk about is about the sales cycle and I talk about marketing So first step in marketing looking good is a must and yes, I do use a professional photographer from time to time I've gotten ribbed for that. But yeah, that's me and your face online is not necessarily as pretty as mine So it's going to be your website or your blog Get a good designer is what I'm trying to say the It's one I really like from that phase throw up a sex symbol if you you know if you need to pretty girl At least takes you far Terralian good-looking website sir Use your brand identity if you can to stand in the crowd, you know, you'll see hash rocketers throwing the gang sign here But you know, there's this Important lesson to learn here pay well if you need to so basically we had the idea for a hash rocket late last year And this was our first effort at the logo. That's a significantly Worse than what we have now Basically, we paid engine works, which is a design firm that we work with in Jacksonville $15,000 for doing brand identity and stuff and that was actually a deal because they're friends of ours You can expect to pay anywhere from 2025 K to get this done successfully Practical concerns Make sure your new leads can reach you easily. So one important consideration is your phone number People still use the phone to contact you I pick up the phone with a new lead probably three to four times a week and We didn't have a phone number on our website at first for at least two or three months and Those were probably leads that were just you know going unheard someone actually sent me an email and said hey You got to get a phone number out there Encourage word of mouth. I want to recommend this book called never eat alone and And Keith for Ozzie never eat alone just noted down get that book It's a really really good book that has I think has helped me succeed a lot. So Once you move out of marketing into qualifying One of the best things you can do is to narrow down your offerings by defining products in our case We have three to one launch and rescue mission Which I guess satisfies the spiel as a sponsor this conference But basically three to one launch is a four week forty thousand dollar process where we get a start-ups idea off the ground To a 1.0 polished Releasable to the public product rescue mission is if your projects indeed do do and you know You're tearing your hair out or you just fired a contractor who ripped you off to the tune of $50,000 And now you're out of grant money, and you're gonna lose your job, and you're about to kill yourself We do those sorts of things my guys probably don't like the fact that we do these sorts of things, but We do do them from time to time Still talking about qualifying give yourself constraints So I'll give you a real quickly here the hash rocket client profile You must be working with a design firm, or we won't work with you You must have at least $50,000 or we won't work with you. You must be willing to travel to us not vice versa I don't want to repeat the same mistakes of thought works You must not need more than four rocketeers at a time basically at the size that we're at if we devote more than Four people to a project. It's too risky And anyway four people is about the max that I see as as far as productivity until you get the ministry returns Prefer start-ups of small divisions of larger firms Prefer to interface with individuals who themselves have a track record of being the best the The whole point of this is not for you to use this criteria But the lesson here is for you to define this criteria for yourself or your firm If you're an independent contractor or running a consultant, so you want to have a list like this actually right now Another great constraint is a minimal minimum billable rate So if you say to yourself and you write down you commit with everyone that you work with that you're only going to accept a minimum rate You know of say a hundred dollars an hour a hundred twenty five dollars an hour and you never deviate from that That's going to reduce the number of clients that you work with to the people that can afford to pay Another important lesson still in practical advice about qualifying keep good track of your leads You know the the effort that you put into marketing and talking to people and word of mouth Goes to waste if you don't follow up on the leads that you actually get so we use high-rise and we religiously Forward things to have you know to our drop box and high-rise and have all our leads You know kind of categorizes cases and follow up on them religiously in fact I'm not even the person that follows up on leads. I have been Well among other things is the person that qualifies having a separate person qualify Is very important if it's not the ultimate decision maker since it's not me that has to make decisions about budget And I'm worried about cash flow and things like that I can't be as objective with qualifying leads as Ben can who just sees all of them day to day And then once those leads are qualified you got to ask yourself will this be a successful project? Defining success relates directly to your core values and you should have core values written down There's a good link there I'll I'll share it by a Twitter or something but Andy Rutledge wrote a lot about defining success Some of the examples of success criteria he gives is basically is the client prepared to begin a lot of times They'll come to you with an idea that they're not necessarily ready to implement at that point You may not be ready to help them. They may not be ready for them for you to help them Are they prepared to engage so maybe they are to the next step where they actually have requirements and things like that But their stakeholders don't actually have the time to invest in it Does the client trust my team and his ideas that one's kind of self-explanatory will we be able to do our best work? How do you determine that? Well, it's you know, it depends on you or your team But basically, you know, how busy are they how ready are they to take on a new project? How much do they understand the requirements and determining success criteria involves getting to know your customers before you Even necessarily engage with them. So we're big believers in using Skype We use Skype to video conference or phone conference every client that we take on that face-to-face contact You know, even if it's over a video channel is really really important Your own success criteria should stay Constant in other words write them down. It's okay to refine them over time But if you just kind of loosely define these and apply them in your mind every time you get a new lead You're not going to do a good job of sticking to those You're going to let your success criteria be affected by the current weather of how much do you need that business? Finally, well next step is closing. So you call we did the marketing qualifying closing the number one rule of closing is anyone Always be closing So here's a tip very good practical tip To help you with closing use master service agreements raise your hand if you know what a master services agreement is Okay, at least some of you do basically this is an agreement That says hash rocket agrees to perform services for the client as described in one or more statements of work This particular document the master services agreement does not specifically commit Your client to paying nor does it commit you to doing any specific work? The work is defined in statements of work, which are added as appendices The fact that you get them to sign this Means that they're your client But there's little barriers to getting them to sign it because basically there's there's no firm commitment there yet However, the psychology of them being your client actually facilitates the negotiation of work later on There's other important things to go through and this presentation is going to be available In in its full version on info queue sometime soon, so I'll just flip through these real quick Or you can talk to me about it later But basically things like non-exclusivity warranty of services and software The way that you're going to invoice them and importantly intellectual property So some some people like to some people will willingly do works for hire other people Specifically do not do works for hire for instance the OG guys You know specifically as a principal do not do works for hire problem is that a lot of clients will not work that way They want the copyright. They want it to be a work for hire They want everything that you do to belong to them. Well, if Tim for instance from hash rock is working on the project and does unbillable time Vim plug-in. I Don't want that to be owned by the client You have to establish a boundary. You know if we write a patch for rails We don't that want that to be owned by the client There's cases where things that we do in open source the license would prevent us from assigning ownership to the client So a way to get around that which I won't go into any more detail other than to say you define type a deliverables Which are all the domain specific things like models controllers and such that are specific to your clients business You put a definition of what your clients business is in the contract And then you say type be deliverables or things like technical frameworks tools methodologies know how object code source code Data models you're basically covering your ass so that anything that's generic that you want to reuse that doesn't have anything to do Specifically with your clients business you can own Publicity and references another thing you can put a master services agreement make sure that you know you can blog about things Statement of work document basically as a summary high-level feature descriptions pre-requisites. I'll go through this quickly Some sort of common sense things that a lot of you don't take the time to actually invest in learn how to negotiate It's not something that you naturally know how to do It's something that a lot of the business people that you'll be working with have studied You know either in school over time so Don't put yourself at a disadvantage by not knowing how to negotiate effectively and finally the slide that caused the most sort of discussion At Ruby fringe was that I say you should be billing on average at least $150 per hour. I Say that to the guys here like you know that are working directly with the end client That are the cream of the crop, you know that you if you really know what you're doing if you've been working with rails for you know a couple of years You deliver, you know Consistently you're good at what you do. You should be charging for that now I want to clarify here if you're if you're working in a subcontractor kind of role This is not going to apply the economics are of it aren't are such that it's just not going to work Because there's risks that the person that's subcontracting you actually takes on and they're going to be the ones billing $150 an hour The importance of rates and how they're perceived and perceived value you can read a lot about that and you can in this book Is actually really good for just your day-to-day life Predictably irrational the hidden forces that shape our decisions by Dan Ariely is a must read for everyone in this room Absolutely just shows you a lot of things about human nature that will give you a lot of power and insight in your life Finally client management, I'm just going to give you a very common sense of advice here do remarkable work The best solution for effective client management is to always focus on doing remarkable work If you do crappy work, you're going to have client management problems Doing remarkable work is a concept that of course, you know DHH talks about it all sorts of people talk about it Seth Godin kind of popularized The idea of being remarkable in his book the purple cow Getting past that You you guys know who these guys are right? You know The lesson here is not to fear your clients basically make them fear you you want to be I Don't actually have my notes here I purposely took out my notes so that we go through these slides quickly But yeah, basically hopefully you can take some of this knowledge of stuff that I've learned over the years Just you know in doing business and apply them to your own business that you do for clients and it helps you out Thanks, by the way party with hash rockets and our RV starting about nine o'clock. They'll be free booze and in There may be dancing on top towards the end of the party if you know what I mean Eight o'clock all right in the Marriott parking lot. Yeah, if you get the right phone number We may come around and pick you up so The party may come to you Thanks guys