Ask Rezzz

First let me say that if you are still working your full-time job or have less than 2 years under your belt as a business owner, this may not be the ideal opportunity for you to try and sell strategy.

Simply because you don't have that experience yet. No doubt you have the skills, but to differentiate yourself as a consultant rather than a developer or designer comes with a proven track record of success.

I'm not saying that you can't sell strategy, in fact, I would suggest selling discovery phases which are strategy sessions of a different sort.

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What I'm saying is that if you want to be a consultant selling strategy to a client, you have to be positioned as an expert in a particular space, understand the hurdles on the track and how to get over them, and most importantly, you have to be sure of certain outcomes of the project.

With that caveat out of the way, let's dive into how to sell strategy

1. Understand the problem

An absolute must to selling strategy is a full understanding of the problem. This means that you have to be able to notice a lead that has this particular problem and then have the solution to that problem.

The most important piece of this is to then connect all the dots in between. You do this by walking through the problem, then the process with milestones attached and then what the dream is on the other side.

2. Your process

The process you use here is important. It needs to illustrate progress to the end goal. The dream of what the client has at the end of the project.

Imagine building a house and as the days and months go by and you don't see the blueprints, plans, permits, foundation being poured, walls going up and so on, you'd no doubt be disappointed.

By explaining during the sales process what the process of getting to the solution will be, you help the client visualize their journey through the strategy and then getting to that implementation.

Illustrating your process will establish that you've been down this road before. Allowing your client to feel that they made the right decision.

3. What's next?

Whether or not you are doing the implementation, that's what will come from your strategy sessions.

To be honest, doing the implementation yourself will further establish you as an expert. You'll simply be able to speak to obstacles that may come up, and you'll be able to fully understand what the next steps in the dream are.

This is the best opportunity to hand off the deliverable as a proposal/contract to your client. Obviously, you've gone through and walked them on every step of the process of the service that is to be implemented, what better person for the job than you, right?

If the strategy and deliverable were outstanding, you should have no problem in closing the deal for the next phase of that project which is the implementation.

Are you providing a solution that allows a potential client to work with you at a lower risk?

Custom work is often times a big ask. It's a big investment for someone to not just pay, but also to spend time on.

Here's why I like having a smaller, more productized option.

• Reduces the risk for the lead
• Reduces the risk for you
• Allows both you and the client to get quick results

This especially works nicely if you are just starting out.
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Are you thinking...

What this solution could be, starts by listening and observing opportunities.

During a sales conversation simply ask the lead "What would be a quick win for you?"

As you start to hear answers, watch for a pattern. What sort of quick wins are you hearing?

Write them down.

In Ask Rezzz A233 I share with you 3 other questions that you can explore in order to start building out a productized service

In this episode: 

• Who will buy my productized service?
• How to do market research for a productized service
• Land that first client
• Are you going to give this a try

There are many more steps in this process, but I wanted to spark some inspiration and direction for you to take if this is something you are considering.

I want to thank Sara Dunn for asking this question. In her video, she on her YouTube Channel she talks about how she's setting goals for the year over 12-week periods based on the 12-Week Year.

This year, I created themes for myself and the business. The reasoning behind this is simple. If I have a project, decision, or question where I'm suddenly faced with the option to go one way or another, the theme will highlight the right choice.

I've created each theme based on who I want to be and the purpose and value of the business.

I've created 3 themes for the year and they are "intentional community", "commitment to my marriage," and "ship new products".

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Let me address the middle one since that is the easiest.

There is nothing wrong with our marriage at all, in fact we have our second child on the way at the time of this recording in Feb.

When I say commitment to my marriage I mean doing the little things and enjoying time with my wife as a couple. Any parent knows that with a little one, or even 2 little ones, time together just the two of us becomes harder and harder to come by.

I don't want to lose that identity and what made us, "us".

Doing some of the little things together. Like grabbing an hour here and there whether that's going out on a date night, staying in and watching a movie, or grabbing a quick cup of tea together in the morning.

Intentional community is about creating a close-knit community of like-minded business owners who are real, genuine, and want to create a business that's designed around their lives.

There are so many products and programs out there that are a bit dime-a-dozen. Where they promote to you over and over and over again and then when you buy, you are left wondering where everyone went. I've been subject to them and I know you have too.

I don't want that for anyone that comes across me or my business. If you download something free like the client onboarding sequence or get 1-on-1 business coaching you will get an experience that is a bit unique and I will genuinely care about your results.

The final one, ship new products, is pretty self-explanatory. Though it aligns with "intentional community" theme. By learning a bit about everyone that comes into my world and listening to their wants, needs, and desires, I want to be able to easily create products to help you succeed.

Now when I'm faced with any sort of difficult decision, I can't go wrong if the choice aligns with any of the themes.

I'm trying this for the first time this year, because like Sara mentioned in her video. Often when setting goals for the year, by June some of those goals are not relevant anymore.

No matter what happens, these themes will be relevant because these are things I value.

The features of what the application has are exactly what I need for myself and clients.

Yes, I have some [e-commerce clients](https://rezzz.com/services) who may fit better with Drip as their platform, but I have other clients who are non-profits, service-based businesses, coach, and other individuals who are selling only a handful of products that ConvertKit is a perfect fit for.

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I can easily geek out about many things that I like about ConvertKit and some of the ideas that I have, which I dive in head first in this episode

Most certainly I'll be diving into more discoveries and how I'm solving interesting problems as I continue to flex the ConvertKit muscle and boundaries.

If you have any specific questions about my move, ConvertKit, or your business and how ConvertKit may or may not work for you, I'd be happy to chat.

I'll share with you some of what I like and what I'd love to see:

• UI Features
• API + Support
• Feel valued as a customer
• Cleaning up the house
• Handling various integrations
• How I think about and categorize integrations
• ConvertKit excels at
• Sequences and managing those emails within
• Segments
• THE #1 thing...folks get the emails

Over the years, I've been known to specialize in a few different platforms, Ruby on Rails, PHP, WordPress, WooCommerce (and a few other plugins), and Drip. Anytime I switch from one to the next, I get asked a lot of questions.

"Why did you switch?"

"What happened with X that made the decision for you?"

"Did you switch because of Y?"

For myself and my clients, I try and look at platforms as a tool.

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This is part 1 where I share with you:

• Why I started with Drip
• My reaction when Drip sold to Leadpages
• My thoughts at a personal level
• My thoughts at a professional level
• What the tipping point was

In the next episode, I'll share with you why ConvertKit was the easy choice, what I like about it, what I'd love to see, and some things to be aware of.

I was talking with my new neighbor over the summer about cutting the grass since he saw me out there cutting the grass with my brand new battery powered mower. He shared this with me.

Now whether that's the fault of my neighbor or the landscaper, in the end, the landscaper is sending the wrong message here.

Before it gets to 14 months, let's see if we can nip this in the bud as quickly as possible, shall we?

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Benefit of the doubt

This is obvious for some, yet not so much for others. When a client is late once it's often not malicious or with bad intentions. It's often more like they saw the notification and it slipped their minds.

Or if you are taking recurring payments through a credit card and the card fails, it's often due to the card being expired.

The point I'm trying to convey is that you want to remove your emotion from the equation when it happens for the first time. Come at it with the perspective that it is likely a mistake and can easily be remedied with a simple email asking them for the payment.

What to do when a late payment is more than a mistake

If the same client happens to do it again or more than usual, then a more in-depth conversation needs to happen.

Paul Jarvis, author of Company of One, when he was on [Live In The Feast](https://rezzz.com/podcast/paul-jarvis-on-keeping-things-simple-freelancing-and-being-a-business-owner/) shared a time when he had a client stiff him of close to $30,000.

The mistake was that he continued to do the work, thinking that he would get paid eventually.

He shared a great point on the show when he said, "what I was saying to my client was that it's ok to not pay me because the work gets done anyway."

You want to have your clients respect the payment structure of your business and the contract of the project.

If they miss a payment, work stops. End of story.

Simply tell your client either in a phone conversation or email that since payment has not been received, the work will be suspended.

Also in that conversation, you want to share the consequences of this. Could mean a missed launch date, marketing plans, or something else.

If time continues to pass without resolution, say for a couple of weeks, the conversation should transition from a payment conversation to an end of project conversation.

Explain what that would look like and how if/when the project became a priority again how they could ramp the project back up with you.

Over the decade of being in business myself, I've never had it go this far, but have heard of cases where this happens so you'll want to cover your bases.

A client relationship is two-sided. You agreed to provide a service in exchange for being compensated. Don't let time slip away on being compensated because that is sending your client the wrong message.

Bottom line is that you don't. You can't convince anyone of anything if they don't have an open mind about it.

To be honest, it's actually better for you to refer the project off than to spend the energy working at someone who has already decided not to work with you.

With that being said, sales are all about helping someone make a decision.

If you are looking for someone to do something that they don't really want to do (and that's to spend money), you need to find a legit reason that is big enough for them to do so.

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Get someone to do something they don't want to

This means you have to understand what the motivation is of that person. In my experience businesses are motivated really on the basis of 2 big reasons. Both are related.

They want to get more money. Or they want to save time (which translates into getting more money eventually through profits).

The tricky part of this comes in when you want to discern if someone is basing their decision off of emotion or logic.

The reason it's tricky is that their buying decision will be because it's both emotional and logical.

I'm always talking about how you should learn to trust your "gut" and tha if something doesn't feel right, than steer clear right? Well that's even more true with someone buying from you.

They need to feel that the purchase is the right decision before anything else, even if it's the logical choice to make.

For example, ever have an argument with your brother or sister or good friend where you know you are right. Facts of a night out or story growing up. You both start arguing back and forth it's so heated that all logic goes out the window. It doesn't even matter if you are saying that the sky is blue because they feel that it's red.

You can't convince them otherwise, because their emotions are dictating their thinking at this point.

So you have to start by getting their emotional side of the brain to buy-in before all else.

Get their emotions on your side

You can do this through empathizing with them.

You can do this by sharing a similar experience another client of yours had where you helped them.

Another way to do this is by asking a question. In the book by Phil M. Jones, Exactly What to Say he offers to use "How would you feel if...?" as a prefix to a future scenario.

"How would you feel if you got 100 more customers?"

"How would you feel if your website was 2 seconds faster?"

"How would you feel if your competitor outranked you and you lost a good portion of your organic traffic?"

That last one is one that I actually asked an existing client of mine a few months ago because that was a trend that was happening with them. They signed on a new engagement to perform a site performance and overhaul.

When I read *Exactly What to Say* a couple of weeks ago and saw this example in the book, a light bulb went off in my head because it's something that I've seen work time and time again in my own sales conversations.

When you understand the motivation and emotion that a client has around the problem they are faced with and can create that scenario for them, the more likely you are going to get someone to sign.

All too often a client will ask you for something that you are skeptical about.

They are convinced that it will work for whatever you are trying to accomplish, but you have some doubts.

Your doubts come from 2 places. The first is your experience and the second is from your ego.

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Your ego may be in the way

Let me tackle the ego part first. By ego, I mean that little voice inside you that is telling you that you, not the client, knows best.

Paying attention to your ego is a practice in becoming more self-aware. Self-awareness is critical to being professional and being a respected freelancer.

Now you may be saying that you have doubts because you don't know enough about the request to get it done.

Or that you are resistant because it's taking your focus away from what you need to be doing that's already agreed upon.

Either way, you want to recognize, you want to be self-aware, that your bias is playing a small part in the reason you are skeptical. It's not wrong to have this happen, but you want to realize that this exists so that you can best address the request with the client.

Your experience is often correct

The first part of that skepticism comes from your experience. You are hired because of your skills, but more so because you have an expertise.

The client's request may be something that is warranted for the project. It could also be scope creep as well.

It's your job to suss this out properly and professionally.

All of these responses, or any in the same vein, will show the client that you have their best interests and the success of the project in mind.

When you give this little bit of pushback, you'll not only show that you are a professional, but you are standing out from the countless number of other hands-for-hire out there.

The surprising thing here is that by doing so, the next time instead of the client stating that something needs to happen, it'll come in the form of a question because you've represented yourself as a consultant on top of the skillset you have.

In episode 233 you learned about how to make a productized service. It makes sense that the next question is how do you sell it.

To be perfectly honest, knowing how to sell the productized service really should come before you make it, and here's why.

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When you have a productized service, it's super focused and solves a big enough pain that someone has.

That someone has already raised their hand and shared why it's important enough to solve their problem.

When you are working on custom projects and then finding out that you happen to be doing a similar thing on almost every project that gets your clients an immediate win they want. Well, the service essentially has been sold because it's in demand.

I think it'll help to illustrate by example. I have a productized service that migrates people from Drip to ConvertKit.

How I came to create that was a need from my own clients who wanted to reduce their monthly costs as their list grew but weren't using all the advanced features that Drip offers.

So like how I explained in A233 - How do I make a productized server? people already were hiring me for that service and other services like on-site personalization based on email subscriber data because I'm listed in both expert directories.

I had built out this process and it was something to leverage for new clients and gave them a quick win. A big bonus that the quick win helps their bottom line costs.

Yes, it's not something that is going to have someone come back to me to do, but it created a simple way to start to work with me for my larger services at a lower risk.

They see how it is working with me and it's at a much lower risk to get a result than to start with my monthly service.

Why would someone buy it?

Understanding the reasons why someone would want the service is ultimately how you sell it.

What is the pain or frustration that the buyer is looking to solve?

What is the quickest and most simple path to getting that pain or frustration turned around?

Keying in on those elements is how you sell it.

You don't even need to go about advertising it like crazy either. Send out a tweet, a post, or at most set up a landing page.

In that share you put in the frustration point and a call-to-action.

In my case recently, Drip increased its prices pretty dramatically and so I tweeted out "Frustrated with Drip's price increase and looking to lower costs by going to ConvertKit? DM me and let's chat"

I did that maybe a few times in a 2 or 3 week period and it got retweeted. I had about 50 people DM me about it. Of those 50, 10 become legit leads, and 4 took me up on the service.

For something that took me a few seconds to write as a tweet, not a bad return.

All because I already knew why the buyer would make the purchase.

Asking yourself "Why would someone buy this?" doesn't mean that they will.

What you want is someone to say "Can I buy this because I have this problem?"

How are those goals, those habits for your business working out for 2019?

Are you still focused on them or has the reality of 2019 and life, in general, pushed them aside and you are no longer as focused as you were 4 weeks ago, now that it's Feb 1?

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Before I share with you some ways to make your business habits stick, I want to share with you something that happened to me the other day that rarely happens when I read a book and that's an immediate impact.

One of my big things for 2019 is to become a reader. As someone who much rather watch the movie than read the book, this isn't easy. As someone who's read the Cliff Notes and Monarch Notes all through high school and college, this isn't easy.

As a father though, I want to read more so that my kids see me reading and not sitting in front of a screen all the time.

As a husband, my wife loves to read and it would be cool to read the same book and have a discussion about it.

As a business owner, reading and learning from others and being able to form my own ideas from things that I read will help me grow and help the business grow.

The first book I read this year was Atomic Habits by James Clear. Outstanding book for so many reasons which I'll explain 2 here in a minute. The reason I read this book first was because I actually wanted to read it to help understand the why and how of better habits not just for myself, but so that I could help create better habits for my children too.

What I didn't expect to happen was exactly what happened on Sunday, January 27th.

I went downstairs around 6:30 am put on the kettle to boil water for my coffee, check my Twitter feed from the night before, then made my cup of coffee and pulled out my wife's Kindle and started reading.

I was up at 6:30am on a Sunday because I was sick and my sinuses were hurting so bad that I couldn't lay down anymore and quite honestly, it hurt to even move my eyes. I even said to myself coming down the stairs that I'm going to skip reading this morning.

So what gives? Why did I read?

Create a habit for the type of person or business you want to be

What James talks about in the book is to relate your habits to the type of person you want to be. Notice earlier that I said that I want to become a reader. Not that I want to read more.

Well, I created a system of habits in the morning that stack upon each other that form identity-based habits.

Once I pour my cup of coffee in the morning, it's become automatic in a sense that I sit and read my book until that first cup is done.

I've created this environment in the morning that sets up and leads me to the act of reading.

I read in the morning, because for me, any other time and reading tends to put me to sleep.

I use the cup of coffee as a timer of sorts so that I don't feel obligated to read a chapter or number of pages or some other thing that could vary.

It's a set of cues and pieces of the environment that have allowed me to become a reader because each and every day since January 1, I've read.

Habit stacking

Surprising to me also is this idea of habit stacking. The cup of coffee, morning time, and even what I do after I read are all tiny elements, tiny habits that I've created that surround the idea of me becoming a reader that's allowed me to become one.

What I do each and every day after I read is go make another cup of coffee and then mark it down in my bullet journal that I read today.

The simple act of accountability of tracking that progress allows me to have the small win, the satisfaction of another day that put me on track to becoming a reader.

I'm floored simply because of the small changes I've made to my habits. So much so that I'm beginning to look at my business in the very same way. In fact, as I look at my business with these eyes, I've already done a few things over the years to be the business I want.

What do you want your business to be?

What do you want your identity to be?

What sort of small, impactful habits can you create to become that identity?

How can you create an environment so that it guides your good habits and forces you to avoid the bad ones?

Want clients to respect you?

Are you looking for your clients to respect your time away from business hours?

Your cue or environment factor: Then shut off your email notifications after business hours. Don't look at email first thing in the morning. Give it 2 hours before you look at it.

Quick win: Go ahead and mark it off on your calendar that you did that.

Want clients to pay you what you want?

Set the price and don't waiver from it.

Your cue or environment factor: If you start to have a conversation with someone that budget is going to be an issue, then change the conversation from you being their vendor into a referral for someone else.

Quick win: Celebrate passing on that project because it's not what is right for you. Go ahead and mark it off on your calendar.

Do you want to get out from sub-contracting and managing your own clients?

Your cue or environment factor: Immediately after lunch, go have a conversation today, whether that's email or a phone call, with potential clients

Quick win: Go ahead and mark it off on your calendar.