 Cool. I will get started. Thanks all for coming and welcome to my fellow WordPress enthusiasts and freelancers and developers and comrades. My name is Ben. And today I want to talk about sales strategies for your freelance business or small digital agency. I'll kick it off with a bit of background about my professional experiences and how they culminated in some of the topics that I covered today. And then I want to go through how to engage a client in a way that you're defining business objectives so that you can sort of satisfy and enable a client's success and really focus on the value of your unique differentiators as an agency rather than focusing on just the price in a sale, which I think is a challenge we've all dealt with. From there I'll go through some sales basics like a sales funnel and then move on to specific engagement steps called qualification and discovery that I've found really useful in my day today and really successful for small freelance businesses. Also want to talk about how and when to say no to business and why. Originally this was titled sales and pricing strategies. I think 20 minutes is not enough scope for everything that would detail sales and pricing. So I really want to focus on best practices that I found in sales. And up next is Georgina who's going to be talking about ideas for recurring revenue. So I think that will tie in really well to the whole pricing strategy aspect of this. Oh yeah before I move on to my background experience at Pantheon I want to begin with a quote from ancient Greek philosopher Jay Z who in. I believe 900 BC said I'm not a businessman. I'm a businessman. I'm not a businessman. I'm a businessman. And I think that's a central point and focus of this talk is that we all have this idea of the archetypal businessman this you know finance savvy and outgoing personality. But I think that to be successful freelancing you also have to be a business you have to really be reflective and introspective and know what makes your services unique and be realistic about that. You know why do why do clients come to you. Why do they come back to you. What do they say about you to their friends and to their colleagues. And I think understanding those points and really being a business is is central in selling the value that you're providing to clients. Yeah I think this will lead to more sanity and hopefully dollars. So background experience. I'm a partner manager at Pantheon meaning my job is to identify key strategic partners and also qualify enterprise deals and then move them through a sales funnel which I'll talk about in a second here. But it's giving me a pretty unique juxtaposition of our business our professional business of you know 100 plus people compared to that of the small digital agencies that I work with. Or freelance businesses and primarily I see a lot of disparities between growth goals of these freelance businesses and then their realistic sales processes and historical conversion rates. There's often a big parody in between those two and I think it's really interesting. Often being goal oriented is not enough. I think again you have to be a business. You have to really be introspective and understand what it is that makes you unique. What your services are comparative to others in the market. And then be able to tie those to specific buyer needs. And that's what this presentation is going to cover. But to be clear when I think of like the self described sales guru or sales aficionado I kind of hate that person. I think that person is really frustrating to deal with. When we think of salespeople we think of like cold callers who are just annoying and intrusive and obtuse and aggressive and they're just like interrupting your day. It's like hey this is sales bro that you've never heard of. I'm here to talk to you about ABC today and it's like yo I've never heard you man like click goodbye get out of my face. I think salespeople are also they're bad at listening. I remember trying to buy my first car in high school probably sometime in high school and I remember walking on the lot. Guys like oh you have five thousand dollars to spend like let me show you this year's escalate and I was like homey I told you I work at McDonald's man like I need to see the 1995 McShevy Malibu with fries not your new escalate. It's like are you even listening to me. And furthermore I think that salespeople are sort of cocky. Again the self defined sales expert is like you just have to be like me and then you'd be good at sales. And I don't think that's right. I think that like you can be your own personality and still have success. You can still make money and keep your soul. The point of this presentation is not to say you have to be the certain personality type or you have to do things a certain way. Again I think you can make money and still keep your soul. Yes. So the point is sales is about taking on projects which are a good fit for your organization and for your goals and finding customers who actually value the differentiators that you bring to the table. So we've done a number of profiles of all the thousands of agencies that we work with. This one is looking at like projects that are new versus retainer based or maintenance fees coming from existing clients. We found that like ninety three percent of people to some extent are looking for recurring stream of revenue because it's more predictable. And that's what they rely on on their business. The point of the slide is not to say that you should be chasing any type of revenue or any size of client. You should know what you're chasing and you should do that. And you should only do that. The point again is to really know your position in the market and to know the value that you're providing clients and just be true to only that thing. So moving to a couple of sales basics here the first and foremost being like this sales funnel that I've mentioned before. It's a pretty basic concept where you're working towards a specific growth goal which is usually dollars or it could be percent retainer clients or it could be a number of new employees that you want to hire by the end of the year. But whatever it is you're working towards a specific simple growth goal and that would be defined as like the blue piece at the bottom of the funnel. The basic idea of sales funnels is that you work your way backwards from blue up to green up to orange up to however many steps you have. I think pantheon has like eleven well defined sales steps. I would suggest keeping it simple three to five is probably more than enough. I put forward pretty standard ones up here leads qualified leads proposals growth goal. The basic idea of this funnel is that you're working backwards from blue in a sort of reverse waterfall to understand. How many bite sized day to day activities you need to be sprinkling in the top of that funnel to then convert down to your goal. So for instance if your goal was a million dollars in revenue by the end of the year. You would want to understand your historic win rate as well as the average size deal that you usually take on and that would help you understand what the green piece of the funnel is or proposals in this case. So if you win one out of every two proposals and each project is a million dollars then you need to proposals in that green area because you're probably going to lose one as historic show and that's going to get you to your growth goal. From there you can work backwards again to see okay well based on historical data of how many. What percent of my qualified leads turn into proposals then you can extrapolate that data from green out to orange and say this is how many qualified leads I need to be sprinkling in this funnel to work down to proposals to work down towards my growth goal. So on and so forth again you can keep it super simple it can be three to five steps but just know what that growth goal is and keep measuring it. So very obvious statement people spend money on things they value people spend money on things they value and as such people value different things you're going to encounter one person one day who values ABC and the next person who values D. F. and it's going to be changing a lot. Also your agency provides value that point actually doesn't change all that much I would imagine again you should know what that value is but the challenge in sales I think is in these sales engagements not blabbering on and on about how cool your value is or like how awesome. A is like if my agency provides ABC I don't need to be talking on and on about how I revolutionized B or how C is better than D. The point is the different things that people are valuing is going to change and it's your job to understand and discover what those values are so that you can tie the value that your agency provides to the things that those people value. So for example let's take like a website if I'm a developer at an agency I probably I probably value tools that make coding a lot easier if I'm a marketer I value SEO specific plug ins and. Sparkly templates etc if I'm an agency I might be I might do design and development and even hosting for all of these websites but you also might have a developer who is really savvy with SEO or you might have a. Like a designer who's really gifted with iterating on a client's like dealing with clients. Or maybe your agency's won a number of awards in some sort of field for some excellent projects that you've produced. Again everyone's values different and people value different things. Another point I make is and I was just talking to someone before this presentation about engagements where it feels like a race to the bottom where the client is just like I just want the cheapest project ever I want to pay zero dollars it's like alright goodbye sir it was nice to talk to you. And think about value on the reverse side of that if you needed brain surgery it's not like you're going to group on to go find a brain surgeon like if there's a high value that you have in a service or product. You're going to be willing to spend money on those things. So I think sales is a much more productive conversation when you're asking questions about value rather than just what the budget is and also let's be honest clients usually lie about budget I think we all do. Move back to this basic sales funnel idea again working towards a growth goal. There's two specific clients engagement processes that I want to talk about which are discovery and qualification and these are specific actual meetings that I lead that the basic goal of both of them is to move someone from a higher field in that funnel to a lower field in that funnel. The first one is qualification there's a number of ways to look at this band is the most common so budget authority need and timeline is am I talking to someone who has budget that's commensurate with my services am I talking to the person who can sign the check. Does this person actually need or wants the things that I provide and is their timeline in line with my my typical project timelines. I think I'd note here is disqualifying is just as important as qualifying in fact it's likely that you're winning less than 50% of the time I found and as such you should know when it's time to walk away from a client. I think we've all got bogged down with these engagement processes where it's like I met with all the VPs and I met with the marketing head and I met with the technology head and I took the interns out for lunch so that they could go tell their boss how awesome I am to work with. And then you end up losing the deal because a competitor moves in with a smaller price or a better service. And when you in hindsight 2020 vision you were not realistically lined up to win that RFP or that complex process in the first place. And I hear a lot of agencies who are kicking themselves for having spent so much time in cycles spinning on something that probably wasn't going to happen. And honestly band is like it's very basic but often it's not enough again people are lying about budgets often people are lying about being the one who signs the check or pushing it off and saying oh yeah the decisions on someone else. It's the purpose of banter qualification basics is more about like understanding someone's goals and understanding their challenges and understanding their timeline and really understanding what they're looking for. And if it sounds like a good fit then let's move forward let's keep engaging with each other and if it doesn't sound like something that my agency is really going to win or my business is really going to win then it's time to walk away. So that's the first of two specific engagement processes that I go through in a sales cycle and I'll be really upfront about these meetings. It's like hey the goal of this 10 minute meeting is just for me to qualify out the project at hand. I'm going to ask you a couple questions about your needs about your challenges about your timeline to make sure that this is a good fit and that this is a conversation that both of us should be having and it's a good use of both our time. To my point the worst thing isn't failing it's taking a long time to fail again taking that anecdote of a really long sales engagement that just doesn't pan out and that you were probably over optimistic about in the first place. It's better to fail fast and I think Steven made a similar point. Also so after you have vetted out this conversation and you find that it is qualified than the second of two specific engagements that I would lead is called discovery and to be clear I've this is. This isn't like a paid discovery process this isn't a big long engagement this is a specific like our long meeting where I'm talking about. You know main points and I'm fleshing out this qualified opportunity. The basics that you want to uncover like what pain is this person experiencing what challenges have you had why are you talking to me in the first place why are you considering spending all of these dollars on something. What what caused this scenario to happen and then from there moved to like the future states like where do you want things to go how do you want things to change. What would your life look like look like if you did work with me if you did purchase my services or products and then during this conversation really extracting. What specific business outcomes they're looking for so that could be metrics it could be performance speed for example it could be. Let one less full time employee it could be anything but really pulling out a specific thing that this person wants to accomplish is the whole point of this discovery process. Again it's contrasting the pain in the past and what is happening today against the bright future that your freelance business can provide. These are just some basic rules of discovery I think the most important is listening more than you're talking I mentioned this before but I think we tend to blabber on and on about how cool my agency is and how good we are at ABC. But it's really about uncovering what this person wants to accomplish and the values that they have so that you can tie your unique agency this to what this person needs. Ask open-ended questions yes or no tend to fall flat but if you say what would your life look like or you know tell me about this particular experience. How how would you like things to operate in the future open-ended questions tend to be more it's almost like the psychiatrist chair people will really open up if you're asking open-ended questions. And again just resisting talking on and on about your products and services until you have enough information to actually tie their needs to your unique value. A couple takeaway points so the sales funnel is a really basic idea where you're working backwards in a reverse waterfall from a growth goal that you have as an agency. To really simple bite size day to day activities it could be at the top of the funnel it could be leads or emails that you send out or. Networking meetings that you go to whatever it is like just make them really simple and quantifiable and easy to understand. Second point only pay attention to qualified opportunities the budget authority need timeline or what are your goals and challenges and timeline. The worst thing isn't failing it's taking a really long time to fail so your time is valuable don't waste it on lengthy rfp processes or people who don't seem engaged with you in the first place. Focus on the places where you could probably actually win. And last just be a businessman and a businessman like be good at all of the businessy stuff that we all know is true about professional sales people but also be a business like know your value know what you're bringing to the table. Don't lie about those things and focus only on those things focus on the value that you're bringing to these clients and not just the price tag on your service. Questions yep it's a good question so and just to summarize he was asking about talking about value and not just price where one of the first questions people ask are what does your service costs. The point I was trying to make is like to not hold like hide the ball on pricing and not try to like beat around the bush about it but just to be up front and oftentimes when I get the price question. I won't answer directly I mean there is obviously like some sort of project scope that you need to understand but I will say something like. You know the last three deals at an agency of your size that I closed were fifty three thousand thirty seven thousand and forty two thousand dollars and so don't hide the ball just open up that conversation. And maybe that sticker shock forum and they're like whoa that's expensive and you're like yeah man it's expensive you ready to talk or do you want to go away. Is this qualified do you want to keep talking or do you want to go away I just want to understand that. Yeah does that answer your question. Yeah he was adding like by focusing on value it's not a race to the bottom but you can often times actually raise someone's budget by focusing on value. And the more questions you ask the more value they realize that you're bringing to the table so asking questions like. Oh how much did that outage cost you. Oh how many dollars and cents did that cost you how many full time employees are you going to have to hire to tackle this problem. How much are you going to pay them. Oh that sounds like a lot of money. It sounds like I could be bringing you a lot of value. And by focusing the conversation on those points. I think you can kind of get away from just focusing on the price tag. In my experience is it better to have a fixed rate or to change based on the client's rate. I based on the client's budget and need. I think understanding the valley first is really important in working towards a price tag that said like there's always some flex room. I don't think anyone has a fixed price. There's always the friend discounts the I've spent too much time with you already discounts. There's the I really want to win this logo discount. So I mean I think we're all kind of flexing on price in some regards. That said I think you should know what your goals are for you know margins and growth goals as you have those conversations. Yep. Is it better to keep it secret. We many don't like publish a specific project price because again the scope is there's a myriad of different variables in each project. And I wouldn't hide the ball on price. I would just be up front and say you know typically my services are perhaps expensive for you and just get it out in the air. And if they wave you goodbye then that's great. You have more time to focus on better things. Yep. Yeah. He was saying there's a lot of times your prospects get caught in a specific part of this funnel. I would have two responses one first identifying where they came in from. So did you meet them at an event. Is it a recurring client. Was it a referral. Is it a specific type of engagement that you think is getting stuck because oftentimes I found that it is. It's like oh yeah all of the I paid a couple thousand dollars for Google AdWords or some online advertising service. However all of the leads like they don't seem to want to actually engage with me. It seems like they were just looking at clickbait online. So really identifying where these people came from in the first place. I think we'll help you identify where you should be spending more time and why those people are getting stuck at a certain point in the funnel. The second being I mean we're all working towards not having to spray and pray a zillion emails out and hope that you get one response in the dark but being really thoughtful about your outreach and who you're talking to. I think we'll also lead to better leads or whatever you want to call that first step in the engagement process. I do have probably just one more question and then I can take I'll be at the happiness bar to answer questions. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. She's asking about tire kickers which is a huge problem for me and for every sales professional. Oftentimes like I will leave not an ultimatum but a you know hey my services cost this or or more basically to continue this conversation with me to continue to use my time and yours which I realize is valuable. I need to make sure that you're on the same page with me. I need to make sure that you have this budget or that you have the authority to sign this or that you are dealing with these challenges and that you agree that. The value that I'm bringing is in line with the things that you need. So kind of setting up I guess almost an ultimatum for the next point in the conversation is helpful. I have some more ideas actually that we could chat about. I do. I want to be conscious of the next speaker who's up. So I'll be at the happiness bar talking. I saw a couple of hands raised and we can chat there. Thank you.